The Single Biggest Marketing Mistake Real Estate Agents Make and What You Should be Doing Instead

As a real estate agent, you wear many hats. You not only have to stay on top of the market, real estate laws, sales strategies, and transaction procedures, but in order to be successful you must also be knowledgeable in effective real estate marketing strategies. In the modern real estate industry, this largely means internet marketing since more than 90% of all homebuyers and sellers utilize the internet in their search for a home or an agent.

Internet marketing is an ever-evolving practice with new tips, tricks, and strategies coming up over time. There is one huge error, however, that real estate agents make over and over again - one that is sure to have a massive impact on the success of a marketing campaign.

The single biggest marketing mistake that real estate agents make is sending traffic to your homepage instead of an optimized landing page.

Whether your marketing strategy relies on SEO or SEM - or both - you have undoubtedly invested a great deal of time, effort, and money into driving traffic to your website with the hope of converting traffic into leads. However, many agents underestimate the importance of carefully selecting where you are funneling this traffic. Naively, a large percentage of agents set up ad campaigns or distribute content for backlinks primarily with links back to their homepage - big mistake.

Why Do Agents Drive Traffic to their Homepage?

Several factors can lead to an agent choosing to send paid or organic traffic to their homepage. The most common is simple ignorance. They may believe that traffic is traffic, and a lead is a lead. But when it comes to internet marketing, this is not true.

Other agents view their homepage like a business card - which essentially, it is. Agents send visitors to their homepage because it usually is the most attractive page on a website system. It has visual appeal, the agent’s photo, and this is most likely where these agents have spent the bulk of their time in the design phase of website development. But remember, the most important aspect of internet marketing is functionality and value.

Internet marketing requires a different approach than traditional marketing strategies, and your real estate web design should be built for lead conversion.

In traditional marketing, you hand out a business card or put your picture and contact information on a mailer and a lead is generated if and when the person contacts you to begin the sales process. With internet marketing, however, this is not the case. Buyers and sellers have access to so much information online that they are likely to complete a large portion of the sales cycle on their own before they ever inquire or contact you. You need to reach them quickly with what is uniquely relevant to them, not make them click around for results to their search or query.

Your homepage is your online business card, not necessarily your online lead generator. Use your homepage to further your branding. Sending traffic to your homepage, however, is wasted lead potential. Research shows that marketing campaigns that send traffic to the homepage of a site have the highest bounce rates. You want visitors staying on your site as long as possible, not leaving right away. An average user expects to be able to find the information they searched for within 30 seconds of opening a page. The more relevant the landing page, the better the chance of capturing the lead.

What You Should be Doing Instead

Focus your marketing on specific landing pages - tailored to your marketing campaign - instead of your homepage to boost conversion. Landing pages are designed to give the most relevant information to specific buyers and sellers. 

Today’s internet users are used to instantaneous results. They do not want to search and click within your site to find the answers they are looking for. When a search is performed online, the user is looking for specific information. For example, if a user searches for “homes for sale in Doral Estates,” they are looking to see listings for sale in that particular neighborhood. If your ad, blog post, etc. sends them to the homepage of your website, they are gone. They will hit ‘back’ on their browser and look for another site that shows them listings that fulfill their query. If, however, your ad links to a Doral landing page where they can see actual listings of properties available that could meet their needs, you have maximized your conversion potential.

A site with the latest landing page technology can generate thousands of hyper-specific landing pages to boost relevancy and enhance your conversion ratio.

An Optimized Real Estate Landing Page Should Have:

• Easy navigation - make it easy for users to find the information they are looking for
• Hyper-Local IDX Listings - clickable general and specialty searches increase lead potential
• Persuasive calls to action - remind visitors of the next step
• Relevant content - reduce bounce rate and provide more value
• Buyer and seller tools - keep them on your site longer by offering tools like home valuation and market reports

When it comes to marketing, efficiency and effectiveness are key. Whatever your chosen strategy, marketing requires time and money to generate leads. Make every minute of your time and dollar of your budget count by driving traffic to unique landing pages for maximizing conversions.