Effective marketing is a fast-paced, ever-evolving, and deeply creative career that requires experience, technology knowledge, and specific copywriting skills to effectively engage target audiences for your services or product.
These factors contribute to why marketing yourself, especially as a real estate agent, can be one of the most challenging yet necessary aspects of your success, if only in the practical sense.
While it may seem straightforward on the surface, it absolutely requires a unique set of skills, tools, and strategies that may feel uncomfortable or overwhelming to execute effectively while maintaining your industry knowledge and nurturing your leads.
The allure of saving money on marketing by doing it yourself may be enticing, but if you consider the amount of time it will cost you, you may lose more than you think. Let’s consider the downsides of marketing yourself and what you can do to overcome these hurdles.
Why It’s Difficult Marketing Yourself Across All Industries
Marketing is a skill and, for some, a profession that demands a blend of creativity, strategy, consistency, and an aptitude for technology. Across industries, individuals and businesses alike struggle with it because:
- It requires self-promotion. First, it’s often difficult to talk about our successes without coming across as a sales pitch. As an agent, this can be especially off-putting if your marketing does not exhibit genuine interest in sharing how your expertise can help potential buyers and sellers.
- It can also be difficult to have an outsider’s perspective on the benefits of your services when your knowledge is extensive. The craft of being able to narrow down your expertise into bite-size bullet points that are easy to digest is an art when trying to capture an audience’s attention quickly.
- It takes time to develop the balance between selling yourself authentically and sharing valuable information that will result in client retention.
- It’s time-consuming: Building a consistent marketing strategy, analyzing data, and then adjusting strategies takes valuable time away from focusing on business growth, customer service, and industry research.
- That doesn’t include time spent actually creating the deliverables, such as ads, posts, reels, flyers, newsletters, postcards, etc., which also take time to design and develop for your brand.
- It’s highly competitive: Standing out in a crowded marketplace is no small feat, especially in industries like real estate, where countless agents are vying for attention and trying to also establish themselves as experts.
- This is why consistency is imperative. If you’re marketing yourself and suddenly overwhelmed with clients and deals (congrats on effective marketing!), but suddenly your pipeline decreases because you haven’t had the time to build out your marketing plans, you’re inevitably back to square one.
- Constantly changing trends: Marketing tools and techniques evolve rapidly, very rapidly. Now, you have to keep up with AI tools, graphic design platforms, and integrations, to name a few, which will affect your ability to remain competitive if technology is not a strong suit of yours.
How Marketing Can Look Like an Easy Job
Almost everyone has some sort of social media platform and is growing their online presence. How hard can it be? That’s the pitfall of an agent who needs to spend time directly building relationships with clients for long-term success.
On the surface, marketing may seem simple:
- Post on social media
- Create a website
- Print some business cards
Right? Steps 1,2,3, and you’re done. However, the reality is far more complex. Effective marketing involves:
- Identifying and targeting your audience: If you have created a geographic farm, for example, you will want to know the demographics of your market, such as the average home price, hobbies, lifestyle, average family size, etc. Then, you will want to identify amenities that will be of particular interest to leads looking in your neighborhood of expertise.
- Once you’ve identified your target audience and what will appeal to them, you must create a targeted multi-channel marketing system to help build your familiarity and reputation with your audience.
- Understanding platform-specific nuances: Social media algorithms, SEO optimization, and email marketing tactics can change overnight and greatly impact your audience’s reach.
- Marketing companies invest money into platforms that help them automate, adjust, and identify shifts in keywords optimized for SEO, what social media platforms now use to help ads go viral, and aid in geographic targeting to align your marketing campaigns with your niche audience.
- Consistency and tracking: Success in marketing doesn’t happen overnight. It takes repeated effort and data analysis to refine what works and what doesn’t. Each post, ad, reel has its own set of data points that you can compare against your overall performance and growth to garner a comprehensive understanding of where to invest more resources, which takes time.
The Downsides of Marketing Yourself
As simple as it can seem, marketing yourself has some downsides. Ask any marketing expert, there is a reliable amount of stress and responsibility when launching any new marketing campaign. Which, over time, has a few effects that can weigh heavily on anyone:
- Emotional toll: Constantly promoting yourself can lead to burnout or imposter syndrome, especially if results are slow or you’re not quite seeing the reach you expected.
- Financial strain: Effective marketing often requires investment in tools, platforms, or ads, which can strain a budget that could be better spent on CRM platforms, IDX websites, sponsoring local events, hosting successful open houses, or investing in lead generation platforms.
- Opportunity cost: We mentioned this briefly above, but the cost of time could be detrimental. The time you spend learning and crafting effective marketing tools could be spent closing deals, networking, nurturing your leads, researching your market, hosting webinars, and other valuable core elements that build a sustainable real estate career.
- Inconsistent results: Despite your best efforts, marketing can sometimes feel like a gamble, with unpredictable returns… and it is. But you have to take the gamble, and with the right tools to predict returns, you can mitigate your losses and manage your expectations. Without the tools and knowledge, you could be implementing strategies that will keep you spinning your tires.
Understanding That Marketing Is a Career in Itself
Don’t beat yourself up! Yes, you will need to have a deep understanding of how marketing affects your business and be an active participant in the strategies you want to employ, BUT give yourself a break. Your job is to be an expert in real estate, NOT marketing.
Marketing isn’t just a skill – it’s an entire career path. Marketing professionals spend years studying and refining their expertise just like, often earning degrees in fields like:
- Advertising
- Public Relations
- Digital Marketing
As a real estate agent, it can be difficult to juggle the demands of your primary work with the complexities of marketing, which is why several agents employ the help of lead generation sites and IDX websites that can help take over some of the heavy lifting in marketing.
Why Marketing Plays a Crucial Role in Your Success as a Real Estate Agent
NO pressure, but your success hinges on your ability to market yourself effectively. Okay, yeah, there’s some pressure here. Why? Because:
- You are the brand: Potential clients have to trust you. You are dealing in high-dollar negotiations with people’s investments, to which they also have an emotional connection. Your marketing has to represent you as a genuine agent who can help guide potential clients toward the best deal that benefits their best interests.
- Visibility drives leads: Your name won’t appear in front of the right audience without consistent marketing. Algorithms rely on consistency in audience engagement and growth for better visibility.
- Credibility matters: Your marketing can tout your expertise, but if you haven’t had the time to refine your market knowledge and build your reputation, bumbling through phone calls or meetings can take a toll on your credibility.
Tools to Help With Marketing
If you are up to the challenge of marketing yourself, you don’t have to do it alone! Several user-friendly tools can help streamline your marketing workflow:
- Social Media Platforms: Use platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn to showcase your listings, share client testimonials, and build your professional network. Use MetaSuite to help organize your posts across all platforms. You can also implement PPC marketing through Google and Facebook to help engage the audience according to your budget.
- Canva: A popular, user-friendly graphic design tool with templates to help you create your logo, flyers, posts, and reels with your brand colors and fonts. If you need extra help, they also have templates you can tweak to suit your style.
- Hootsuite: A suggested platform for scheduling and managing social media posts. Sites like this can help you save time by timeblocking your calendar to focus on building out your campaigns for the week in advance.
- Email Marketing Services: Tools like Mailchimp or Constant Contact help you stay in touch with past and potential clients with bulk emails. These tools are especially important if you plan on segmenting your audiences for more personal emails with relevant information for their needs.
- CRM Software: Customer Relationship Management platforms like Follow Up Boss allow you to organize client data and automate outreach efforts. As your business grows, a proper CRM system is imperative to help you stay on top of incoming leads and ensure that no one falls through the cracks.
Lead Generation Companies with a Marketing Component
As you can see, marketing yourself does require implementing several platforms. If managing your marketing already feels overwhelming, consider partnering with a lead generation company that offers built-in marketing support. Here are a few to consider:
- EliteListings: Elite Listings provides targeted seller leads and includes done-for-you branded marketing strategies with uniquely designed postcards and Facebook ads to generate more leads through geo-centric marketing techniques.
- KeyLeads: Provides motivated seller leads while offering multiple marketing resources and scripts to bolster your marketing efforts reliably.
- CatalyzeAI: This company specializes in seller leads from unique situations, with integrated marketing resources and scripts to help you connect with potential leads before the competition.
Final Thoughts
Marketing yourself isn’t easy, and that’s okay. Remember that people have spent years becoming marketing experts; that can’t be your primary focus.
Understanding why marketing is challenging, acknowledging its downsides, leveraging the right tools, and seeking help from lead generation companies with marketing expertise can help you overcome any marketing challenges you face.
If you’re considering enlisting the help of lead generation platforms that also implement marketing, have this phrase on repeat in your mind: effective marketing is an investment in your success. Prioritize it, and you’ll see the results in your real estate career.