Real Estate Digital Marketing Trends That Are Dated in 2025
To be successful now, into the new year, and even into the foreseeable future, you should know that your marketing strategy is never finished.
Your marketing strategy should be an ever-changing, constantly-evolving plan that needs to be reviewed and updated periodically to continue to build success and help you reach your marketing goals.
As part of that process of change, and to help set you and your business up for success in 2025, here are some marketing strategies you might want to consider leaving behind.
Taking A Quantity Over Quality Content Strategy
There was a time when the more content you had on your website, the better it seemed for SEO and your search strategy; 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.
This is especially true in the last year with so much AI-generated content being created: a lot of it poorly, and a lot of it, purposely created to rank for SEO searches. And to account for that, in 2024, Google rolled out multiple changes to its search algorithm that rewarded high-quality content while penalizing content that was created purely for SEO reasons.
That means that right now, and into 2025, producing high-quality, well-written content is more important than ever – not just for attracting your target audience, but also, for attracting search engines and building a strong SEO strategy.
★ You can do a deeper dive into Google’s primary core updates, that focused on rewarding high-quality content, 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 they searched that 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 and look at.
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 2025. 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:
- Creating a People-Powered, People-First Content Strategy
- Creating an Evergreen Real Estate Content Strategy
- 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 Social Media Advertising
Social media platforms, like Facebook, have tightened up their rules to the point that advertising on them might not be worth it anymore because it’s difficult to get results.
A lot of the changes they’ve implemented make advertising more and more restrictive to advertisers that fall into specific categories of advertising; like real estate agents and real estate related content, which falls under the “special housing” category. These rules are intended to make it so advertisers can’t disproportionately target people based on demographics (like like age, exact location, gender, etc.) if they fall under a specific category.
Overall of course, that’s a good thing, but again, because real estate related ads fall under one of these more restrictive categories, it forces them to run advertising campaigns that are less targeted.
For example, if you wanted to run a Facebook ad campaign to attract sellers in a specific neighborhood, because real estate related ads are in the special housing category, you won’t be able to define important demographics like age, which means you’ll more or less be showing them to everyone and anyone in that area.
And of course, that’s likely to make your traditional advertising strategies a lot less effective if you can’t directly include or exclude based on your target audience.
While that’s being done so that advertising is fair and equal, it also makes advertising a lot more difficult for real estate agents, and in some instances, totally useless to do.
This means that your advertising, wherever you do it, will be far less targeted, and as a result, your advertising campaigns will need to be a lot more general to be effective.
However, there’s a difference between advertising and boosting a post. While targeted advertising is a lot more difficult to do, simple boosting of your social content, with the goal of getting a click to your website, is still a good spend of marketing money.
★ Want to learn more about advertising? Have a look at these posts:
- Building a Well-Rounded Search Strategy Using Both Organic and Paid Sources
- Why Your Digital Advertising Strategy Might Not Get You Real Estate Leads
Focusing on Dated IDX Listing Search
If you’re building inbound marketing into your overall marketing strategy in 2025, 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 setting themselves up to compete with them directly by focusing on IDX.
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 2025 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 over a single agent’s janky IDX search.
Going into 2025, you should be focusing less on the traditional, dated IDX listings search strategy, and more on building a strong, inbound marketing strategy that brings you 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 adapting your marketing strategy accordingly, you’ll have a better chance of setting up yourself and your business for success into 2025 and beyond.
Want to learn more about what Artifakt Digital can do and how we can help your business get ahead of the competition? Book a no-obligation consultation call with our team quickly and easily.
