Your October 2023 Burning Real Estate Marketing Questions, Answered

What Should I Post on Instagram When I Don’t Have New Listings to Share?

For most agents, listings are a key theme in their social media content calendar.

Sharing new listings on Instagram can be a highly effective way to drum up buyer interest and communicate to your audience that you’re a busy working agent. 

All agents have listing dry spells. What you don’t want to do is scale back your Instagram content in response; going quiet telegraphs that your business is quiet. Not good!

Instead, you want to focus on creating and posting valuable, shareable content that highlights your expertise and experience.

That could mean ramping up content like…

• Thought leadership (weighing in on real estate market stats and news headlines)
• Tips and tricks for homeowners and/or prospective sellers
• Buyer spotlights, where you congratulate a buyer client and share a bit about their story
• Neighbourhood highlights

I’m a New Agent. My Brokerage Provides Personal Websites to All Its Agents. Can I Just Use That Instead of Creating My Own?

The realtor website provided by your brokerage has one major advantage over a website you create yourself: it’s free to use. 

But that’s where the advantages end. 

A brokerage website almost always restricts an agent’s ability to make significant tweaks, additions and customizations — limitations that can seriously impede your ability to generate real leads from your website.

A successful, lead-generating real estate website needs custom landing pages and lead capture forms, personalized branding, IDX or DDF, plenty of content marketing and the ability to edit all of that on a whim as needed.

Remember that a well-crafted personal realtor website is one of the best investments you can make in your business. It’s your digital first impression. 

If the legwork, not the cost, is what intimidates you, opt for a ready-to-go, highly customizable website designed specifically for real estate agents.

The Area I Serve Is Shifting Towards a Buyer’s Market After Years of Being More Favourable to Sellers. How Do I Adapt My Marketing Accordingly?

Recognizing that a marketing pivot is required is the first step in ensuring that your business will survive and thrive during a period of change.

Your chosen marketing mediums — your real estate website, your newsletter, Instagram and TikTok, print postcards and pay-per-click ads, for example — don’t have to change. But your content and your tone do.

Here’s what we mean. 

Your seller-focused marketing 

Not every prospective seller will decide to wait things out; your job is to try to capture those who want to sell despite a change in market conditions. 

You can’t rely on the same seller marketing messages you used during a seller’s market. Time to switch up your key messaging, tone and the specific areas you target.

For example, rather than cast a wide net, zero in on highly desirable neighbourhoods where homes are more likely to sell at above-average prices despite market conditions. Use your messaging to remind sellers that there are buyers out there waiting, in a tone that’s friendly and helpful, but not brazen. 

Your buyer-focused marketing 

Time to beef up how you market to buyers and strengthen your marketing messages.

Your goal is to make buyers feel excited about the market possibilities and empowered to take the leap — with you as their trusty advisor.

While your seller-focused marketing will become more reserved in both message and tone, your buyer-focused marketing should become bolder and more confident. 

Other things to consider

• Whether you’re marketing to sellers or to buyers, remember to remind them why they need a realtor in these particular market conditions.
  
• Think about redistributing your marketing budget in order to more strongly target buyers.
  

Never try to manipulate statistics in order to exaggerate or minimize market conditions.