On Aug. 10, 1991, the World Wide Web went live. Now, more than 25 years later, it’s had a lasting impact on real estate, business and the world.
Despite the fact that the internet has changed how the vast majority of consumers search for and hire people in service-related industries such as real estate, some businesses still haven’t caught up with the times.
The real estate industry in particular seems to have a hard time letting older less effective marketing methods go.
If you’re still wasting resources on marketing methods that became obsolete along with floppy drives and dial-up modems, it’s time to make a change.
Here are five real estate marketing methods that should have died off years ago:
1. Print advertisements
Print advertisements are more expensive and less effective than ever. Not only are less people looking at these ads year after year, but it’s also nearly impossible to target potential clients via printed ads with any success.
Stop wasting your time and money with printed ads, and start learning how to reach the right people via Facebook advertising.
2. Cold calling
Don’t you just hate making cold calls? That’s probably because the vast majority of modern consumers hate receiving them.
Instead of popping into people’s lives unannounced and unappreciated, reach out to leads at opportune times with a system that allows you to catch them when they’re ready and willing to hear what you have to offer.
3. Door-knocking
There’s one thing that people hate even more than unsolicited phone calls: unsolicited home visits.
If you’re knocking on random doors in random neighborhoods and hoping to snag a few eager clients, you’re going to be disappointed.
On the other hand, if you’re hosting an open house nearby, stopping by neighbors’ homes to invite them over is a lot less likely to end with doors slamming in your face.
4. Spamming subscribers
Believe it or not, your contact list is not interested in every detail pertaining to local real estate. If you regularly send generic messages to your entire email database en masse, please do everyone (including yourself) a favor and stop.
Marketing via email is fine, but you need to do it in a strategic, segmented manner to achieve respectable results.
5. Pushing non-mobile-friendly content
A decade ago, pushing out content that wasn’t optimized for mobile was pretty much a non-issue. Now that nearly everyone has and uses a smartphone, however, mobile-friendly websites and emails are essential for effective marketing.
Consider this: How effective can your marketing truly be if roughly half of the people reading it are thinking about how bad the formatting is instead of the message you’re trying to convey?
As the internet continues to shape how potential clients perceive your business and your marketing, there’s only one thing you can do: adapt.
If you’re still reliant on any of the aforementioned marketing methods, take a moment to step back and evaluate your strategy. If you somehow manage to make it work, by all means keep at it.
However, if you’re doing what you’re doing simply because it’s what you’ve always done, keeping your business afloat is only going to get harder unless you make some major changes.
Pat Hiban is the author of the NYT bestselling book “6 steps to 7 figures – A Real Estate Professional’s Guide to Building Wealth and Creating Your Destiny,” the founder of online real estate sales training site Rebus University, and the host of Pat Hiban Interviews Real Estate Rockstars, an agent-to-agent real estate podcast with Hiban Digital in Baltimore, Maryland. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter.