Although I write about everything at Quatrefoil Content Creation, I’ve specialized in Real Estate digital marketing for quite a few years now. Our team has a dozen or more clients around the United States, and most of our agents are the top listing agents in their individual markets. To give you an idea, our average agent sells or refers about 4-12 million dollars in real estate revenue per month.
If you have nothing to do with Real Estate or you’re no longer interested in what I’m saying, no problem. You’ll find some other articles that you might find relevant if you’re an entrepreneur, a social media marketer, a blogger, or if you have a business that you’re trying to promote digitally. But if you’re a real estate agent, broker, trainer, coach, or perhaps even just do social media for real estate agents, like we do— you might be making some mistakes.
Because we’re all about helping you succeed in the digital realm, we wanted to let you know the Top 5 Mistakes you might be making with your Real Estate Social Media, and actual, concrete steps that you can take to fix them:
-
You don’t know who your audience is
— The first question I always get when getting a new agent as a client is “who is your ideal customer?” You would be surprised how many successful, trained, experienced real estate agents say “everyone is my ideal customer!” That is not a solid business model. A health food store targets health food customers, a high-end automobile dealer targets people with large budgets who want luxury cars, a real estate social media marketer targets real estate agents, and therefore a real estate agent must target people specifically looking to buy and sell real estate.
But, you’re probably saying — “what if people don’t want to buy real estate but they might have friends or family in the future who do?” — my answer to that is that they still aren’t your clients, their friends are, and their friends will find you independently of them if you do things the right way. Or, they’ll become your client one day and give you the referral and recommend you to their friends.
The other problem that I often see is that agents do not target a customer base that has a specific budget. I’m sorry, but not everyone can be a luxury, high end agent, specifically when they haven’t sold a single house yet. Most people who are rich have a lot of money and a lot of houses, and guess what– they already have a guy who sells to them. They probably even play golf together.
Maybe you’ll get lucky and find someone relocating into your area, but either his guy has a guy, or he’ll just call the most expensive and well placed brokerage within your area. I’m not saying you can’t be high end, just that you have to work up to that point. First time homebuyers are a great market to tap into because there are so many of them. Millennials are just becoming of age to buy homes, and they are so super easy to market to! They love digital marketing and are probably less fussy than some of your older clients who may want to spend hours talking to you on the phone, or want hard paper copies of everything in triplicate.
To remedy this problem: Sit down and look at the neighborhoods in your town, where there are hot beds of real estate activity, and the types of people who might be buying those homes. Are they hipsters? Investors? Young families? Young professionals? Snowbirds? When you have all the answers to those questions, you’ll know who your audience is, and what their budget is.
2. You aren’t marketing to your audience —
Let’s say you’ve done the above work and you know your audience are snowbirds looking to move to Florida to retire. If your marketing says “text me,” uses the color millennial pink, or slang like “snack,” “YOLO,” or “yeet,” you’re not going to appeal to this audience. Conversely, if you’re reaching out to millennials, and you’re using traditional office hours, snail mail, and a navy blue and white palette– well, you definitely lost them too. “I oop!”
To remedy this problem: Take your ideal audience / target market, and write a marketing plan for them. Do they work? Maybe it’s best to send out posts between 6-10pm. Are they retired? Maybe online won’t work, but if you try it, maybe 9 or 10am would be a good call. What colors are they attracted to? If luxury, are you using professional graphics or just slapping something together? Think about what they like and design your branding to appeal to them.
Which brings us to…
3. You don’t have branding in place —
Every company, regardless of whether you’re a 1 person operation or a 1500 person enterprise, needs branding. I’ll point out five major brands below and I want you to see if you can tell (without Googling) what their colors are, what their slogan is, and what their logo looks like. Ready?
Mc Donald’s
Nike
Burger King
Starbucks
Coca Cola
You may have stumbled on a few of the slogans, especially the ones that have changed over time, but I bet you nailed the colors and logos of all of them.
And although you aren’t a Fortune 500 company, you definitely want people to know who you are and recognize you. After all, you’ve spent a ton of money on your riders and signs, so why not have everything match?
To remedy this problem: Develop a logo and color story for yourself. It can be a color that appeals to your target audience, for example, millennial pink, one that conveys luxury like silver or gold, or something that reminds people of you. If your last name is Apple, I highly recommend that you use red/green, and have apples somewhere in your logo. You might not like it, but it’s what people remember. Apple Computer used apples, which have nothing to do with technology, but you see that apple with or without a bite out of it and you know it’s not referencing the Bible, but a shiny new phone.
Bonus points if your slogan rhymes with your name. There’s a local attorney in my town who has the last name Hall and you better believe that he has CALL HALL plastered all over everything. I doubt your name is Jeal Bestate, or something Mouse, but it doesn’t hurt to give people something to remember you by. My last name is Fox and you better believe I uses Foxes in many of my other companies and personal pages. You also want a slogan, something that people can sink their teeth into and remember, like “Bob sells the best houses” or “Really great Real Estate by René” or “The girl who sells houses and wears pearls” — whatever you need to have them associate real estate with your name.
4. Or you depend too heavily on your brokerage’s branding —
There’s nothing wrong with using your brokerage’s branding and marketing tools. For one, it’s easier, for two, you paid a lot of money to use them, and for three you chose your brokerage for a reason. Maybe you picked Keller Williams because you loved the BOLD educational model, or maybe you chose Latter & Blum because the person who got you into the business was there. Maybe you chose RE/MAX because you loved the name, Century 21 because you loved the colors, or Berkshire-Hathaway because you’re bougie AF. Whatever your reason, you chose your brokerage for a reason and it makes sense that you’d want to use their information and models that you pay good money for.
Not to mention, you’re required to use it by law.
Just don’t use it as a crutch.
Want to know the problem with using your brokerage’s branding? Every single other agent at your firm uses it too, and they’re your direct competition. Because if your broker really is the best, then your biggest competition are all of the other agents at the same broker, who, guess what, are also within your same selling and buying area.
You need a leg up.
To remedy this problem: There’s nothing wrong with using your company’s signage, business card template, agent website they assigned to you, etc– after all, you’re required to do some of this by law, but make it your own! Have your own URL perhaps, that your work web address redirects to with your own content and branding. Have your own logo (that apple we discussed earlier) and use your own slogan (that we discussed earlier) on everything, too.
You can coordinate your logo and colors with your broker’s colors, and can even ask if you can use their fonts and trademarked images (you may even be able to piggy back your logo onto theirs), but make it your own! And feel free to have the receptionist or in-house marketing person keep posting on your social media accounts, but make your own posts too so your posts don’t look like every single other person’s posts. Because when clients are looking for the best agent out there, they want someone who stands out from the pack, and someone who looks like they do a great job at marketing, not someone who does the bare minimum to get by and meet the status quo.
Which brings me to our final tip:
5. You don’t have enough content —
If someone is choosing between two prospective real estate agents, they’re going to choose the person who knows more. Every. single. time. It doesn’t matter how hot you are, or how well dressed you are, or how funny or personable you are. Real estate is big bucks, and no one’s going to choose someone cute over $20,000. It just doesn’t happen. They want the person who’s going to do the best job for them and make them the most money, bottom line, end of story. If money isn’t that much of a factor (said no one ever) they’re going to pick who they’re the most comfortable with.
The way that you establish yourself as someone competent is by making yourself an authority in your field. One way to do this is through references and recommendations, but another way to do this is by sharing valuable information.
If someone comes to your blog, or website, or social media pages over and over again for valuable information, they know that you’re someone who knows what she’s talking about. And, when it comes time for them to need to hire a professional, you’ll be first on their list of prospects. They probably won’t even interview you, because they’ve followed you and know that you know your stuff, but more importantly– they have a relationship established with you, and they’re comfortable. Authority + Comfort = Business Relationship.
To remedy this problem: Make more content. You can never, ever, ever have too much content. If it’s social media, you can post quick tips and tricks, pop quizzes, surveys, or even exciting events that are happening in your town or that make your city great.
Make content engaging so that people don’t just scroll by, they comment, answer, or share. If you get stuck on creating compelling social media content, we have our social media calendar, coming soon, as well as our Facebook group where you can download free posts to use on your own social media pages.
If it’s a blog, you can write something pretty quickly that’s 500-1000 words, and talks about a topic you know about. A lot of people are scared to write blogs, but truthfully, all you need to do is write about something that you know more about than at least one other person. If one person could read your blog and find a valuable idea, then you’re golden. Write whenever you can, even if it’s just a quick post. They’ll add up, trust me.
Or, if you aren’t the writing type, you can set up a YouTube channel and do quick videos with tips on things like getting funding, home inspections, or even explaining what escrow is. And if you’re camera shy, you can interview someone else, like a lender or title agency in your town. This may even bring their fans and followers over. No matter what it is, just make it relevant to your ideal customer.
If you’re ever stuck and need a blog, social media post, or a complete social media calendar, our full price list is available here.
Or you can shoot us a message and we’ll answer whatever questions you have!
If this post was great, or if you think it wasn’t, please leave us a comment or message below! We’d love if you followed us as well, either here on the page or on our social media channels @QuatrefoilContent. I’d also like to know if you think I missed any big social media mistakes within real estate!
To engaging and quality content,
Rebecca
Quatrefoil Content 