The "New Way" vs. the "Old Way" of Selling Real Estate

Are your marketing practices outdated? If they consist of adding a listing to the MLS, installing a yard sign, and little else, the answer is probably, "Yes."

Unfortunately, that's the case for many agents. At too many brokerages, the process of onboarding new agents is limited to providing a desk and just telling you to call people that you know. There's little training and virtually no discussion of how to attract and work with today's consumer.

But a whopping 97 percent of today's real estate consumers are online, according to Google. If you're relying on "old school" tactics alone to market your listings, you're missing out--and so are your sellers.

That said, the "new school" techniques of online marketing aren't something one can just jump into without any prior knowledge or training (not without wasting significant time and money, anyway). If you want to be an engineer, you can't just start "doing" engineering. You need to learn the techniques and best practices first. The same holds true for online marketing.

For example, let's say one of your favorite traditional ways of marketing a home is via printed flyers. The "new school" corollary of this would likely be a landing page on your website for that specific property. You can drive leads from PPC ads, Facebook ads, and other marketing activities directly to this page for more information.

However, just setting up the page isn't enough to guarantee its success. You need to be conscious of how Google indexes pages and returns them in search results in order to be successful. The Paperless Agent, a company that provides digital marketing training for agents, suggests the following techniques to do just that:

• Making sure the landing page's title, URL, and H1 tags all contain the whole property address in it, e.g. yourwebsite.com/123-Main-Street-City-State.
• Photos should also include the full address in the file name before you upload them anywhere, e.g. 123-Main-Street-City-State.jpg.
• Create videos or virtual tours about the property that you can upload to YouTube. Don't forget to put the full address in the video's title and description, too.
• Run Facebook ads targeted to your geographic area to drive traffic to your landing page. Don't worry about breaking the bank either, as this only costs about $2 per day.
• Create backlinks to your landing page on social media by promoting it to your networks.