Digital Marketing Report + Bonus
2024 REAL ESTATE DIGITAL MARKETING REPORT
How To Transform Your Real Estate Website Into A
Marketing Powerhouse!
Does your realty website’s curb appeal get the right clients? Discover how to attract your ideal real estate client for your price bands.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Marketing 4.0
According to the New York Times, the pandemic drove people to get real estate licenses in record numbers across the United States (Jackson, 2022). As home values soar, more people are looking to cash in on a career change in real estate. Hedge fund investors and corporations have also targeted real estate as a revenue producer for their shareholders. While the National Association of Realtors has grown in membership, successful real estate professionals understand that your production is directly proportionate to your marketing prowess.
Unblock Your Growth
Digital marketing is a multifaceted and ever-involving discipline that no real estate licensing program ever covered. Only 23% of realty websites are developed and/or maintained by REALTORS® (Yun, 2023). No wonder sales professionals struggle to transform their online presence into a hot property for their brand. Now that global buyers and local sellers have access to property consultants from everywhere online, content marketing is a blind spot that real estate agents can’t afford to ignore.
Moreover, many licensed sales consultants have relied on outside help to build their digital presence. The conventional realty website templates have created cookie-cutter marketing when distinct, remarkable brands matter. The 2024 Real Estate Digital Marketing Report is a trustworthy guide to help professionals build a marketing engine with confidence.
REALTORS® deserve a website that creates more time to do what matters and attracts dream clients. It’s time to invest in your digital brand experience so that you can serve your metro with the best property advice.
The Digital Presence Upgrade
Your real estate website is the nexus of your digital brand presence. Your website is the best place to establish your local brand and build your market of superfans. However, our research team found that most real estate professionals need a digital marketing makeover. The choice is clear: stand out or become stagnant.
Just In Time Analysis
The 2024 Real Estate Digital Marketing Report uncovered many surprises for realty professionals regarding their digital marketing assumptions. The report found what’s working and what’s not for real estate professionals. The research tested real estate websites for best practices in content marketing. As you will see in the report, real estate professionals have a tremendous opportunity to level up their digital marketing presence in 2024.
Build Your Brand Momentum
Moreover, 2024 may be the last year to build a world-class content platform to attract your ideal client. The advent of artificial intelligence is flooding industries with half-baked marketing content. Plus, corporations are investing heavily in marketing and advertising to make local agents obsolete. Agents and brokers that invest in world-class content creation for their audiences have the best chance to break through the noise (Yun, 2023).
Realty Digital Branding Reimagined
Imagine your website as your perfect listing presentation.
- The ideal seller discovers that you have a proven plan to capture the most value for their property.
- Your people-first content is easy to navigate and provides an immersive experience for your listings.
- Each landing page invites your client into the property story with the opportunity to become the hero with your expert guidance.
- She submits the capture form, and your automated marketing creates tailored messaging for your well-qualified lead.
- After working with you, she makes a post to visit your website to see how delightful it is to do business with you.
Elevate Your Web Presence
Step 1. Order a meal.
Step 2. Gather your team.
Step 3. Open your website on a large display.
Step 4. Download the 2024 Real Estate Digital Marketing Report
Elevate your digital presence to become the marketing powerhouse that drives 10X production.
WEBSITE BENCHMARKS
Presence
Modern Website
Must-Have Features
Read more
Read more
Read more
Read more
Read more
Read more
Read more
Read more
Read more
Read more
Read more
RESEARCH FINDINGS
Content Platform
Are You the Leading Authority?
86.6% of real estate professionals do not regularly publish their high-value expertise in a blog or content platform. This is a missed opportunity. Real estate professional relying on word-of-mouth recommendations can only win if they have years of successful client experiences and an intentional referral system.
Prospecting 4.0
If you want to get found by the right prospects online, you need an active, authoritative blog that showcases your hyperlocal skills for your price band (Halligan & Shah, 2014). Content marketing, unlike advertising, creates enduring value for current and future clients. Creating a people-first content platform must be the priority for new and seasoned real estate professionals to differentiate themselves from the noise.
Breathe Life Into Your Lifestyle Brand
Without a blog, your website has flatlined. Search engines don’t spend resources ranking pages that don’t have anything new to share for their audience. The algorithm rewards high quality and recency. If you can’t publish often, produce content that is more comprehensive and customer-centric than anything else on the web.
Headlines
Hook Your Clients Quickly
Almost nine out of ten (88.73%) of real estate websites don’t have a descriptive headline on their home page. Headlines are part of the top header (also called master header) section of your website. Moreover, your headline is the hook to intrigue your visitors and keep them engaged longer.
Your Brand Isn’t Your Logo
Our research revealed that realty websites used their business name or brandmark as a redundant headline. Still, other sites had no headlines and opted for a static property photo or a background video of the city. The header section is your most important digital real estate. Make every word you place in that space count.
Calls to Action
Is Your Website Converting High-Quality Leads
Most likely not. Only 16.4% of real estate professionals have a clear call-to-action (CTA) on their website. Avoid making your prospects guess what the next step might be.
There are few things that a visitor might come to your website to do:
- Find their dream home for their desired lifestyle.
- Sell their money pit to achieve their desired lifestyle.
- Find an investment property to increase their desired lifestyle.
- Get advice from the local expert and timing for financial decisions.
- Seek path to getting sponsorship to become a real estate professional.
- Get the contact information for the person they saw on the dating app.
Client-Success Oriented
Does your digital presence help visitors reach their desired goals? How would you ever know without clear CTAs, event tracking, and marketing funnels?
Prime Digital Real Estate
Your featured offer/call-to-action must be “above-the-fold” on your website (Miller, 2017). “Above-the-fold” is a term adapted from the newspaper industry to represent the information above-the-fold. That’s where the hottest stories that sell newspapers sit. For your website, above-the-fold is the first screen visitors see before scrolling.
Intentional Content With A Mission
Website conversions are won or lost with your above-the-fold content for every page. Don’t waste space with a background of the sky, houses, buildings, or videos of cities. Use your most valuable website real estate to direct your visitors to the help you can provide and the action they need to take to get it.
Lifestyle Photography
Promote Clients As Heroes
Your website must invite your prospects into a story where they see themselves. Pictures of people enjoying their new homes or business owners meeting in their new offices are great ways to make your invitation real. However, real estate websites only show pictures of emptiness—empty buildings and empty homes. No one is buying emptiness.
Attract What You Reflect
Only 16% of real estate websites feature pictures of happy people. There is a disconnect. We posited that the lack of people photography is happening for one of three reasons:
- The firm’s culture reflects its ideal client
- The agency hasn’t invested in getting pictures of delighted clients.
- The brokerage doesn’t have an avatar of their Superfan client.
Conventional Thinking Leads to Dull Marketing
As a result, real estate websites look like they are selling everything but a lifestyle or a dream. The absence of people photography is why so many websites look alike. Most realty brands are doing the same thing online and offline. The lack of differentiation doesn’t help build a memorable brand in the hearts and minds of your clients.
Branding
Are You Easy to Locate?
Real estate professionals could be underestimating the power of building a personal brand. Our research found hundreds of professionals that use free email accounts or service providers domains for business. Free email accounts can’t help you create a memorable brand identity.
Register Your Domain Name
The most successful real estate brands use their own company domain for their professional email address. However, franchise email addresses from the big real estate corporations didn’t help the branding for individual agents. Sales professionals dependent on browser cookies are losing leads as popular browsers block third-party cookies.
Are We On the Air?
For professionals with email addresses in their domain, we found that 21.4% of the websites do not exists. Our research also found that none of the websites under construction had a lead capture funnel to notify visitors when the site would be available.
Bolster Your Brand with Email
Here are our final insights on the importance of professional email addresses from the consultant and client perspective:
- Your email address represents ½ of your login credentials. If you’re concerned about your data privacy, you should always use your professional account with clients, prospects, and strangers to limit any compromising of your accounts.
- Someone can use your email address to find you on social media. You wouldn’t want to allow someone to see you at your home because they could quickly locate you on social networks.
- Spammers use free email accounts. If you want your clients to believe you are a real business, you need to look like one, not a side hustler or spammer. Having your business domain helps build your brand authority and identity online.
Website Search
Create Value Beyond Property Searches
While most business owners preoccupy themselves with SEO for Google, they ignore the search experience on their website. More than nine out of ten real estate websites don’t have a search form to help visitors discover their content or navigate the website.
Don’t Make Your Clients Burn Calories
Our study found that most realty websites only use database search for the local MLS or embed third-party listing services. These services are often made complicated by providing too many options. Many sites won’t allow visitors to browse the listing service without providing contact information.
Make Doing Business With You Easy
Please don’t assume someone can find the information they seek on your website. According to a recent study (Patel, 2023), nearly half of website visitors go directly to search when they visit your website. As websites mature, an internal search function can improve site usability.
Real Estate Creative
Future Proof Your Brand
87% of Real Estate Websites need interactive listing tours for their websites. Over 80% of real estate websites have no unique value or content presentation.
Immerse Your Buyers, Delight Your Sellers
Ten percent of real estate websites that indicated virtual tour content were misleading. The “virtual tour” button opened another website with a 2D slideshow of the same property images. These are not virtual tours or immersive content experiences.
Real 360° Tours Unlock New Marketunities™
Less than 2% of realty websites have the industry leading Matterport 3D Virtual Tours. Ricoh 360 Tours and iGuide are the only other 3D virtual tours used. As more people emigrate across the United States for business and lifestyle, providing 3D virtual tours is a clear strategy to attract global buyers to your hyperlocal brand.
Marketing
Sell Better Stories With Video
The advent of video content marketing has changed the way prospects consume and engage content.
Video-First Content Strategy
High-quality video marketing goes beyond property listings to include, but is not limited to, the following:
- Organizational culture
- Brand story
- Introduction of new hires
- Celebrations of seasoned professionals
- Market trends and analysis
Marketing Video Is the Essential Worker
The pervasiveness of video in content marketing is well-established. Nine out of ten people report watching some type of video weekly (Pulizzi & Piper, 2023, 2014). So, we were shocked to find that over 90% of real estate firms don’t use video for content marketing on their website. Research shows that pages with at least one video generate 70% more organic traffic than those without (Byers, Kyle; Loktionova, Margarita;, 2023).
Use Video to Make Your Brand Trustworthy
The lack of video marketing is one of the most significant missed opportunities in the 2024 Real Estate Digital Marketing Report. The absence of video from the real estate content strategy makes it more difficult for clients to know, like, and trust realty consultants.
Certificates
Secure Your Digital Brand Experience
One of the most surprising findings of our study is the number of unsecure websites. Nearly a third (31%) of realty websites don’t have a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate. All online businesses need an SSL certificate to protect the client data transactions.
NO SSL = SOL
The SSL certificate indicates that the website encrypts data between the web browser and server. In layman’s terms, your website protects all data sent between your website and your web visitor from the rest of the Internet.
Improve Your SEO with SSL
The importance of an SSL certificate can’t be understated. SSL certification is a ranking factor in all search algorithms. Without the SSL certificate, your website will rank lower in search results. Plus, modern browsers will warn your web visitors that your site is unsecure.
Management System
Anywhere, Anytime Content Platform
The Content Management System or CMS is the software that manages your website. Out of the box, your CMS can handle all your pages, blogs, articles, and media so that it’s presentable to your web audience.
Great Brands Are Built on WordPress
WordPress is the most popular CMS for real estate professionals, with 37.7% adoption. WordPress runs 43% of websites on earth. It’s free and boasts the largest designer, developer, and agency communities. That makes it an excellent choice for any business.
Realty-Only Digital Domains
After WordPress, real estate agents use proprietary platforms for their CMS. These are often template driven systems optimized for MLS and classic real estate marketing. Sadly, these templates need attention to best practices and modern digital marketing techniques.
The Usual CMS Suspects
Rounding out the CMS platforms are Wix, Amazon Web Services, Squarespace, and GoDaddy Website Builder. Notably, two in ten real estate professionals don’t use a CMS.
End Content Mess with Robust CMS
A complicated CMS or lack of one will make it difficult for real estate firms to showcase their expertise. Moreover, organic discovery through search engines is difficult without a robust CMS.
Does the CMS Platform Matter?
Yes and No. The CMS Platform matters for organizing, automating, and publishing your best content to reach and attract your audience. However, it doesn’t matter for achieving the standards outlined in the report. You can improve your digital presence by following our recommendations with any CMS Platform.
EXPERT ANALYSIS
Marketunist Analysis
- Create a Best-In-Class Content Platform
- Do a Digital Homepage Makeover
- Add Immersive and Interactive Content
Triage. Major Surgery. Last Rites.
Real estate professionals have a massive opportunity to build brands that are centers for marketing excellence for their clients. Only some real estate professionals use their website marketing to stand out, showcase their hyperlocal expertise, and attract ideal clients. The real question is can you leverage existing investments, make new investments, or start with a clean slate?
Start With Your Client Success Journey
Before you start website upgrade, remember this is not a technical or technology project at all. Achieving your organization goals are the metrics that matter. Your client success experience has to be core driver for transforming your website into the marketing powerhouse that feeds your high-quality referral engine.
Risk Nothing and Lose Everything
The only option that real estate professionals don’t have is to do nothing. Don’t let inertia cause your business to stagnate in 2024. You can’t afford to play catch up in an era of continuous innovation.
Should I Redesign My Real Estate Website?
Before you redesign your website, you should revisit your overall marketing strategy. Your value proposition and brand promise must be crystal clear, so your ideal buyer finds them compelling. By following our top six recommendations, you will position yourself with optimized messaging and data to make a redesign effective.
Homepage Renovation
First, redesign your website home page. Give your visitors an intuitive experience that reflects how they use the web on desktop and mobile. Most of the websites in our study could be more effective if they adhered to the fundamentals of excellent web design and search engine optimization (SEO.) Use your homepage to demonstrate your understanding of your audience’s needs and value with your content.
Outcomes-Based Content Marketing.
Your website is the face of your digital presence. While website aesthetics are an essential design element, your website should first and foremost help you achieve your business goals. Integrating your content management systems (CMS) with your marketing and sales CRM will allow you to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and listing creative. Make this a requirement in your redesign.
Drive All Traffic to Your Realty Website
Your website is the nexus of your digital brand presence. It’s the only platform you have complete control. Ensure all your social channels and out-of-home content have a call-to-action to visit your landing page. Test and optimize your landing pages so that you can develop your own best practices for getting leads.
Social Is The Sizzle. Your Website Is The Steak.
We recommend mobile-optimized video and high-end photography that leverages interactive features for your social channels. Invest in your marketing creative to get your dream customer to stop scrolling and click through to your landing page. Social media only serves to connect and direct prospects to your website.
Make Content That Makes Alternatives Irrelevant.
The content and copy you share online will allow your prospects to infer your marketing capabilities and local expertise. This is where your brand promise matters most. Your content will also communicate who your audience is by your tone, language, inclusiveness, and storytelling. Your prospect is consuming content across multiple channels. You must provide your expertise where they are hang out online and invite them into your brand story—your website.
Invest In World-Class Creative For Your People-First Content
Blogs are the pulse of your website. Search engines know that your website is active and needs to be indexed regularly by the frequency of your blog content. The goal of the search engine is to present the most authoritative and current information to browsers. Your blog is the primary place on your website to find current, thought leadership.
Build Content For Each Stage of Your Client Journey.
If you don’t have a blog, your website gets ranked lower than sites with regularly, updated blog content. You can help your prospect discover you before they start considering alternative real estate agents. That’s the power of publishing helpful content consistently.
Let’s look at some of the ideas that can ignite your content production:
- Changing neighborhood demographics
- Communities with new housing construction
- Home affordability
- Changing mortgage rates
- Things to include in your homeowner’s insurance coverage
- Great recipes for families with double ovens
- Advice on remodeling versus buying a new home
- How to find a real estate that understands you and meets your needs
Embrace Long-Tail Economics
We can’t overstate the opportunity for real estate professionals to create content that attracts their ideal prospects. Content marketing has a far longer shelf-life that all forms of advertising. It’s the most significant differentiator you can make to showcase your value and maximize your fees.
Convert Visitors Into High-Quality Leads
We couldn’t end our analysis without talking specifically about lead generation. Frankly, we were surprised by the lead generation methods used by real estate professionals. The findings can be placed in three buckets:
- No lead generation. Real estate websites have zero content for lead generation. No one is signing up for your newsletter when you don’t have a blog.
- Gated basic content. Several real estate websites attempt to capture email addresses before allowing the visitor to see the basic property listing that can be viewed elsewhere.
- Giving away high-value content without a call-to-action (CTA). Commercial real estate agents are providing their market analysis reports as ungated content without embedding any CTAs to bring prospective clients back to their website.
Our observation is that the lead generation problem is related to the lack of direct and transitional CTAs on real estate websites. If your website only has a direct CTA, you’ll only get conversions for people at their stage in their buying journey.
CASE STUDIES
Marketing Exemplars
Speak Your Ideal Client’s Language
Your audience wants to know that you “get them.” Can they trust you with their real estate concerns? Do you keep your word. However, if the only thing your website promotes is you and what you’re selling, you’re missing the opportunity to make a rich, human connection.
Make Your First Impression Count
Your home page is the landing page your audience is most likely to visit. This is the place you need to clearly state the problem you solve and the benefit you provide with your lead offer. Clarity is key. Make the path towards success easy for your client to follow.
Make Your Visitors Feel At Home!
Did you know the value of your content goes up the longer visitors engage your website? When visitors leave (or bounce) quickly that signals to search engines that the page didn’t meet expectations. Interactive video, web stories, calculators, dynamic content, and 360° virtual tours keep visitors engaged longer. Map your immersive content to each stage of your client success journey.
2024 REAL ESTATE DIGITAL MARKETING REPORT ACTION PLAN
Real Estate Websites
We recommend real estate professionals take the five actions below to transform their real estate website into a marketing powerhouse:
BRAND STORY
1. INVITE YOUR AUDIENCE INTO YOUR STORY
Confuse people don’t buy. Showcase your expertise to guide your clients through complex transactions easily, provide high-value advice, and position properties for dream fulfillment.
MAKEOVER
2. UPDATE YOUR WEBSITE CURB APPEAL
You’ve got three second or less to impress your website visitors(Barr, 2010). Reimagine your website homepage using best practices to increase audience engagement and lead generation.
CONTENT PLATFORM
3. ATTRACT IDEAL PROSPECTS WITH 10X CONTENT
Grow your audience. Invest in attracting the right clientele for your local market and pricing band by building a high-quality, people-first content platform.
EXPERIENCES
4. CAPTURE MORE LEADS WITH IMMERSIVE CONTENT
Keep site visitors longer. Embed interactive video and 360° virtual tours into your site to improve your search rankings and increase customer duration of prospect visits so that they will convert to leads.
COPYWRITING
5. INCREASE ORGANIC TRAFFIC WITH SEO COPYWRITING
Capture more leads. Transform each page into a goal-specific landing page to build your brand, grow your subscribers, generate new marketing leads, or attract new talent. The customer journey is non-linear. Make each page count.
EVERYTHING
6. TEST, MEASURE, AND OPTIMIZE ALL OF YOUR CONTENT
Run experiments weekly. Everything can be tested, measured, and improved with data. Create variations in your content marketing to find what works best to convert your audience into real estate leads.
FIX YOUR WEBSITE
CONNECT BUYERS WITH THEIR DESIRES
Level Up Your Website
We’ve created the Real Estate Accelerator based on the 2024 Real Estate Digital Marketing Report findings. Get your website fixed this week. Unlock the offer details below.
HOW WE WENT ABOUT IT
Methodology
ACTIVE REALTY PROFESSIONALS
We compiled a list of real estate sales agents and brokers. From these 260,000 listings, we took a more manageable sample of 2,000 real estate professionals.
DATA CLEANSE
We derived business websites from email addresses. We removed all records with free email accounts and Internet service providers’ email addresses. Finally, we pulled duplicate records for franchise agents and brokers.
COHORT COMPOSITION
Brokers and owners (90% of the group) represented the lion’s share of profiles that were used in the sample.
ABOUT CAM EVANS, MBA
Marketunist
CAM EVANS, MBA is an accomplished business leader that believes every entrepreneur must be able to create irresistible value for their market to make growth automatic.
FORWARD-THINKING THOUGHT LEADER
Over three decades, CAM led the digital transformation for large organizations across education, finance, sales, marketing, cloud, and IT. Most recently, he was the chief technology officer and national spokesperson for digital transformation and strategy in PK-20 education.
TRANSFORMATION ARCHITECT
Throughout his career, CAM leveraged lean practices, combined with the ability to motivate communities towards achieving marketing and revenue objectives. He is a master storyteller that helps people find themselves as the heroes of growth and transformation.
VETERAN INNOVATOR
CAM is a United States Air Force veteran with commendation for meritorious service in leading digital transformation. He’s a father, author, record producer, and the host of The Marketunity, the official podcast of MADEGRANDBYCAM.
ABOUT MADEGRANDBYCAM
Digital Agency
MADEGRANDBYCAM (MGXC) helps business owners grow by getting the right customers to convert to Superfans with marketing and commerce strategies.
EVERYTHING MADE GRAND
MGXC provides specialized consulting and production services for content, automation, and marketing for integrated growth campaigns. CEOs rely on MGXC for candid, tailored advice to help them reach their ideal buyer and grow customer lifetime value.
TRANSFORMATION SPECIALISTS
As the leading digital marketing and commerce agency, MGXC is well-positioned to help your firm thrive in the fourth industrial age.
Hire MGXC for the latest in growth marketing and best practices for your business.
Learn more at madegrandbycam.com. Or schedule your free consultation at madegrandbycam.com/consultation.
REFERENCES
Notes
Barr, C. (2010). The Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Byers, Kyle; Loktionova, Margarita;. (2023). The State of Content Marketing 2023 Global Report. Boston: Semrush Holdings, Inc.
Halligan, B., & Shah, D. (2014). Inbound Marketing: Attract, Engage, and Delight Customers Online. Hoboken: Wiley.
Jackson, C. (2022, March 4). Why So Many People Became Real Estate Agents in the Pandemic. Retrieved from New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/04/realestate/real-estate-agents-pandemic.html
Krug, S. (2000). Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. Indianapolis: New Riders.
Miller, D. (2017). Building A Story Brand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen. Nashville: Harper Collins Leadership.
Patel, N. (2023, 12 05). How Site Search is Killing Your Conversion Rate (And How to Fix It). Retrieved from neilpatel.com: https://neilpatel.com/blog/site-search-killing-your-conversion/
Pulizzi, J., & Piper, B. (2023, 2014). Epic Content Marketing, Second Edition. New York: McGraw Hill.
Yun, L. (2023). 2023 Member Profile. Retrieved from National Association of REALTORS®: https://nar.realtor/
COPYRIGHT
Rights Reserved
© MADEGRANDBYCAM, LLC. “2024 REAL ESTATE DIGITAL MARKETING REPORT” is a trademark of MADEGRANDBYCAM, LLC. For permission to reproduce this report, please contact us @madegrandbycam.com.
Social Proof
Building Confidence Into Your Customer Journey
Every brand must move customers through the Know You, Like You, and Trust You stages to get a sale. Nothing will accelerate your client’s journey more than providing evidence that you can solve their problems.
Broaden The Measures That Matter
While ratings and testimonials are types of evidence, our research study provides a broad view of what demonstrates evidence of competence:
Home for Show and Tell
Even with the broadest definition of evidence & social proof, less than a third of real estate professionals provide any trust-building support on their homepage. If you’re great at what you do, you must show it.
All Things Considered
Our study doesn’t give any additional weight to one form of evidence over another. Our goal is to determine whether it exists: yes or no. Don’t make your customers look for this data. It’s your responsibility to provide it on your homepage.