Real Estate Agent Web Marketing Mistakes

To start our series, we thought we’d share the most common Real Estate Agent Web Marketing Mistakes

Welcome everyone and thank you for listening to the Agent Web Success podcast, dedicated to supporting real estate agents who want to generate more business online. I am Will Rico.

I am Jamie Gosweiler. Thanks for listening today.

Will Rico: So Jamie, today we are going to discuss the number 1 mistake that real estate agents make when marketing their web sites and you have told me that this mistake has actually caused thousands of dollars for agents, sometimes even tens of thousands of dollars, so what is that mistake?

Jamie Gosweiler: Yes indeed, well, I think that, you know, the number 1 mistake is that they begin their marketing effort without evaluating how the website is set to prepare for success in terms of what they can do to convert the traffic that is about to come.

Will Rico: Okay, that’s a little bit much for me to digest all at once, so maybe you can slow down. Now you said their website is not set up to convert. What do you mean by that?

Jamie Gosweiler: Okay. I got three specific things that agents should be looking at before they begin their marketing campaign and I am talking about before they open up with outwards account, before they pay thousands of dollars for a consultant to come in to search engine optimization or they spend money on bannerettes. Three simple things that they need to look at on their own websites and hopefully they are gonna … you know when you are listening to this you are going to take this advice and start to critically evaluate your own sites so what do I mean, essentially the first thing of the three is that they are not focused on their target customer.

Will Rico: Ok so … they are not focused or their website isn’t focused?

Jamie Gosweiler: Their website … that’s a good point …their website is not focused on the target customer and the reason what I am talking about is a lot of these agents come to the web with lots of things they think about, the design, look and feel, the hosting, the technical requirements, whether or not they are going to integrate some sort of search to connect to the local MOS through an IDX provider. There are a lot of distractions and the one thing that gets lost unfortunately with the website is the focus on the target customer and if you are an agent, you need to think about who is coming to my website and I think a lot of agents will say well it can be anybody who are looking to buy a home or anybody looking to sell a home and that is the mistake you cannot position yourself as a credible expert to anybody. You have to be specific. So that is mistake number 1 is they don’t focus on a target customer.

Will Rico: Got it.

Jamie Gosweiler: Mistake number 2. Once the target customer arrives, there is nothing on the website that I should say one of the mistakes these folks …. real estate agents make is that there are few what I call calls to action on the website. There is nothing that is going to engage that person to want to explore the website or reach out and contact that agent in a way that they raise their hand and says “hey, I need some help here.” Most real estate agents get the fact and I think are good at when it comes to the websites, they are good at creating an IDX connection, in other words, the ability to search for listings online but that is not really a call to action, that just perpetuates surfing on a website. So what I want agents to do and I think what we talked about a lot Will is how do we get the internet consumer who is coming to the real estate agent’s website, off the website and into that agent’s car in the fastest possible way and the way you do that is with effective calls to action.

Will Rico: So could you give us some examples, I mean, isn’t it enough just to list the phone number of the agent and then if the home buyer or seller is interested they’ll give that agent a call or do you mean something more by a call to action?

Jamie Gosweiler: Yeah, it’s gotta be more. I think that the phone number is not enough and so let me give you a couple of specifics. I am a retired, you know, person that is looking to move to a specific area of the country and I go onto a real estate agent’s website in an area that I want to retire to and I notice that there is a button on the right hand side of the page that says special relocation package or free relocation package for retirees, click here. That is a specific example of a call to action. I am a retiree, I am looking to get relocation information that gets me going and engages me to want to click on that button and accomplish something and that is just a point I am also going to make is that people are very globe oriented online so I think establishing those calls to action and again remember what I just said about being a retiree, if you know who your customers are at first and you can lead them to the action that is a good example of you know what you can do in kind of not doing those two mistakes that we mentioned earlier is avoiding the customers and not leading people to action.

Will Rico: Particularly an action in your example where the real estate agent is then capturing the contact information of the potential customer.

Jamie Gosweiler: Exactly and if you want to talk for a second about the contact information what happens after we click on that button typically that we found with our clients Will, you know, where we lead them to and I think it where we lead them to is this form page where they can add their name, their phone number, their address and that’s … and a lot of agents will tell us, you know, we don’t think that people fill our forms and that’s just not true. We have made lots of money in commission money for real estate agents across the country by allowing including form submissions on the websites.

Will Rico: So we have talked about not focusing on their target customer, no calls to action, those are two mistakes. You mentioned three mistakes. What is the third mistake?

Jamie Gosweiler: Well, the third mistake is the fact that they don’t deliver value and let me explain what that means. The third biggest mistake that I see or the third biggest mistake that I see on real estate agent websites is that the typical agent website will have lots of choices for the real estate consumer. They might have you know a dozen or two dozen links throughout the navigation to drive that customer to different sections of the website and a lot of the links lead to customers searching for real estate, for homes for sale, and the area through the IDX service that they provide and in the end that that was the traditional value add and I know most of the agents listening to this will agree that traditional value add that agents brought to the table was access to listings and that’s forever changed because listings are now online so we have to ask ourselves, you know, what value as a real estate agent you deliver to the table and the best value you can deliver is become a credible resource and deliver information that is relevant to your potential customer at various stages of the home buying or home selling process and so if a customer arrives at the site and just starting to search being able to offer up special reports, being able to offer up you know community information but not just waking that person on the websites, being able to create unique content that’s relevant to that particular customer at that stage of buying a home and being able to deliver that in a you know format that is easily and readily readable so that when your customer arrives in your web page they seek exactly what they need to explore and go from there.

Will Rico: Content that’s going to engage the potential customer, keep them on the real estate agent’s website and it sounds like keep them on there long enough to grab their attention if one of those calls to action which gets them into the next step in the buying cycle.

Jamie Gosweiler: That’s exactly right. We see all the time that the agents don’t do that. They just kind of sell out and just put up a search bar or search bar that says you know find homes for sale and then a lot of agents are left wondering why traffic, you know, and some agents are a little more advanced than others and are actually looking at their web stats and looking at you know through Google analytics and are looking at … “oh Jeez I gotta a lot of traffic to the website.” But where is all that traffic going and one of the reasons why they don’t know where its going is they haven’t put the systems in place to you know engage that customer and then stand out from the crowd by delivering value in the form of unique content as you just mentioned.

Will Rico: Well, that’s a lot of sense and we are just about coming towards the end of our podcast today, so let me take the opportunity to summarize. We talked about the biggest mistake that real estate agents make when they are starting their marketing efforts for their website and that mistake was,
ot focusing on their customer number 1, number 2 not including calls to action on their website and number 3 not providing any value added information to keep customers engaged on their website.

Jamie Gosweiler: Exactly.

Will Rico: And that’s all great stuff, stuff that when you make those mistakes and you are not evaluating your website first but instead you are spending money on Google ad words or searching and optimization, you could easily wind up with lots of money going out the door without any customers coming into the door or getting into your cars as we always like to say.

Jamie Gosweiler: That’s right.

Will Rico: Excellent. Well, thank you everyone for listening today. We want to invite you to share your comments with us as well. If you have any comments of questions, visit www.agentwebsuccess.com. You will see a big “Ask Jamie and Will button.” We would love to hear from you and while you are there you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed or email notices so you will be one of the first to know when we release a new podcast with marketing tips specifically geared towards real estate agents. Again, www.agentwebsuccess.com. Until next time, Jamie and I wish you the greatest success online and off.