Real Estate Digital Marketing Trends That Are Dated in 2024
To be successful now, into the new year, and even into the foreseeable future, you should understand that your marketing strategy is never done.
Your marketing strategy is an ever-changing, living plan that needs to be looked at and changed periodically to continue to build success and help you reach your marketing goals.
To help set you and your business up for success in 2024, here are some marketing strategies you should consider leaving behind.
Pivot From Print Direct Mail Marketing
Obviously, print direct mail marketing still works, and for a lot of real estate agents, it’s still an important part of their overall distributed marketing mix, but as we head into the future, print marketing is likely to change.
But, it won’t change because it doesn’t work or isn’t effective, but rather, because more and more people see a mailbox stuffed full of printed advertising material as extremely wasteful and negative for the environment.
With the environment and sustainability becoming an increasing area of concern for people, and as more government agencies push for more legislation around environmental concerns, it’s likely that print direct mail marketing will be affected at some point.
Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if more environmentally friendly cities begin to regulate or even phase out this type of marketing eventually (some already have begun to do so). And if that happens, having a strong digital marketing strategy in place will be more important than ever.
If you rely heavily on print direct mail marketing to generate leads, it’s probably time to begin to adjust your focus to digital, even if it’s only slowly.
A Quantity Over Quality Content Strategy
There was a time when the more content you had on your website, the better it was for SEO and search; and while producing a lot of content regularly can be “good for SEO”, having a lot of content that’s short, poorly written, and not value-based for the reader, just because you think it’s good for SEO, definitely isn’t.
Right now, and into 2024, producing high-quality, well-written content is more important than ever, not just for attracting your target audience, but also, for attracting search engines. This is especially true over the past year as Google, as part of their Helpful Content Update, made multiple changes to its search algorithm and rewarded high-quality content while penalizing content that was created purely for SEO reasons.
★ You can do a deeper dive into Google’s Helpful Content System right here.
But what exactly defines content as quality?
It’s well-written, well-constructed, well-thought-out content that has value to the person reading it. It’s content that informs the person and answers whatever question brought them to your piece of content in the first place. It’s content that’s well-formatted and stylized so that it’s enjoyable to read.
Basically, it’s value-based, well-written content that a person would actually want to read and absorb, and even enjoy doing so.
A lot of real estate agents are guilty of having a content strategy that’s based on quantity over quality. For example:
- Having a lot of neighborhood pages, with generic or plagiarized content, that doesn’t convey any value, just because you think they will show up in search results.
- Uploading an image of a chart that shows the monthly market trends and stats, with one single sentence underneath it, and thinking you have a blog content strategy in place.
In both of the examples above, quantity is being put ahead of quality, and that’s a mistake in 2024. In fact, if you have a lot of pages on your website, that no one visits at all, it could be an indicator to search engines that you have a lot of low-quality pages, which could negatively impact your overall SEO strategy (even for any high-quality pages).
★ Want to learn more about the importance of quality content? Have a look at these posts:
- Does Using AI-Generated Content Negatively Affect Your SEO Strategy?
- Using Pillar Pages to Make Old Content More Accessible
- Optimizing Your Content for Humans (And Not Just for Search Engines)
Relying on Highly Targeted Ad Strategies
More and more consumers are unhappy with how technology collects and uses their personal information, and in response, they’re demanding more privacy.
And while privacy is a good thing if you’re a consumer, it’s not so great if you’re an advertiser who relies on that personal information to serve relevant and timely ads to a specific target audience. But as marketers, our ability to collect data as part of increasing privacy concerns is becoming more challenging (and will continue to into 2024).
And because of privacy concerns and increasing anonymity, advertising campaigns need to also change by becoming more general and, unfortunately, less targeted.
Time will tell if people prefer to see ads that are irrelevant to them instead of ads that are relevant to them; but with anonymity, safety of personal data, and privacy continuing to be important to consumers, there are probably more changes on the way for digital advertisers in 2024.
While you can certainly adapt your advertising strategy to work better in advertising’s changing landscape, another option is to pivot what you’re doing entirely and rely less on advertising as a way for people to find you, and instead, focus on search, content, and inbound marketing.
★ Want to learn more about Inbound Marketing? Have a look at this post called: The Philosophy of Inbound Marketing, and Why it Works for Agents.
Relying on Dated IDX Listing Search
If you’re building inbound marketing into your overall marketing strategy in 2024, then you may want to rethink building an IDX listings search into your website.
It may sound like a bold claim, but in my personal opinion, IDX is antiquated and isn’t part of a modern lead generation strategy.
Simply put, regardless of whatever IDX listings solution you have on your website, it’ll never be as good as big tech, like Zillow, RedFin, Realtor.com, HouseSigma, etc, and a lot of agents make the mistake of trying to compete with them directly.
Those tech platforms have many millions of dollars behind them, and they exclusively focus on providing an excellent search experience for people wanting to look for homes for sale. The fact is, you won’t be able to compete with them, nor should you want to.
Another reason most IDX listing strategies won’t be as effective into 2024 is because of privacy reasons. Right now, privacy is really important to people, and they’re more careful than ever about giving out their personal information.
For example, if you have gated listings content on your website, where someone needs to put in their email address or create an account to see the list price for properties, they’re going to be a lot less likely to do that; especially because that information is most likely available un-gated on Realtor.com or Zillow. And if it’s not, simply because those big tech platforms are more well-known, the average person is more likely to trust those bigger brands with their contact information than you.
Going into 2024, you should be focusing less on the traditional, more common IDX listings search strategy, and more on building a strong, inbound marketing strategy that brings in better, more quality leads, and will help you build business far into the future.
★ Want to learn more about IDX? Have a look at these posts:
- Why IDX is Antiquated and Shouldn’t Be Part of Your Future Lead Generation Strategy
- Does Your Real Estate Website Really Need IDX Integration?
Plan for the Future
Just like the real estate market is always changing, your marketing strategy should always be changing. What works today, may not work in the future.
By staying ahead of it, and changing your marketing strategy accordingly, you’ll have a better chance of setting up yourself and your business for success in the future.
