Are you running digital marketing campaigns and not seeing the kind of results you were hoping for?

Here are 6 major mistakes marketers make very often. Chances are you might be guilty of one or more of these yourself.

Fortunately after reading this you’ll be able to correct your mistakes and start seeing much better results from your campaigns.

For this post we’re going to look at the real estate industry and use that for all the examples.

Mistake 1: Selling Features Instead of Benefits

A very common mistake is highlighting features instead of benefits in your advertising.

Features are things like:

• Number of bedrooms
• Number of bathrooms
• A large back yard
• A spacious dining room

Benefits on the other hand are things like:

• Being able to use a second bathroom instead of having to wait for someone to finish
• Having an area outside where your kids can play but you can still keep an eye on them
• Being able to have your entire extended family over for dinner during the holidays

When you try to sell based on features you’re making the customer do all the work.

They have to come up with their own reasons why they want the home.

It’s in your best interest to explain the benefits and do the work for them.

By highlighting benefits your ads will be much more emotional and connect better with your prospects.

The easiest way to come up with benefits is to imagine that you’re a client and then ask yourself, “What’s in it for me?”

Mistake 2: Talking too Much About Yourself

Your prospects don’t really care about you we’re sorry to say. They don’t care about all the reasons why you’re an awesome agent.

All they care about is what you’re going to do for them.

Talking too much about yourself instead of making this about your audience is another very common mistake.

Especially on social media.

Don’t do it.

Instead find out things about your prospects like:

• What do they want or need?
• What specific problems to they have?
• How can you help them solve these problems?
• How can you improve their lives?

Figure out the answers to these questions and talk about what you can do for your prospects.

Not about why you’re a great choice yourself.

Mistake 3: Using Buzzwords and Industry Jargon

With advertising you need to always remember to keep things as simple as possible.

Just because you work in the real estate industry every day and understand how everything works doesn’t mean your clients will too.

There are a lot of words and terms that have obvious meanings to you but mean nothing to people who have never bought or sold a home before.

Most people think selling or buying a home is a complicated process.

They’re already nervous about it too.

Using terms like “reserve fund”, “good faith estimate” or “lien” might make perfect sense to you.

Unfortunately if your audience isn’t familiar with terms like this it may make them feel stupid.

Nobody wants to do business with someone who makes them feel stupid.

Stop using industry-specific vocabulary and make your ad copy as easy to understand as possible.

Mistake 4: Not Targeting the Correct Audience

The old days of running an ad in a newspaper and having no idea who saw it are over.

Now most digital advertising platforms offer a huge amount of targeting options to really narrow down your audience.

Search engine marketing platforms like Google Adwords or Bing Ads offer tons of options for selecting keywords.

Social media advertising platforms like Facebook on the other hand have very in-depth demographic targeting options.

Figure out the characteristics of your ideal audience and use those to target your ads.

The less broad and more targeted they are the higher your conversion rate will be.

If you have a listing for a much more expensive home for example don’t target young recent university graduates. Instead only show your ads to an older, more affluent audience.

The options to target groups like this exist, you just have to use them.

Mistake 5: Running the Same Ads for Way too Long

You absolutely need to change up your ad copy.

Not only should you rotate through different ads but you should constantly be split testing different ads, placements and copy.

This will allow you to constantly optimize your campaigns to figure out what works best.

At the bare minimum you should be running two different ads at a time on services like Google Adwords.

You also need to be changing them at least monthly.

Frequency is definitely important when it comes to advertising but too much, especially online and after a while your prospects will get bored and tune you out.

Mistake 6: Your Website Isn’t Properly Optimized

This is one of the most common mistakes and it has some of the biggest consequences.

There is absolutely no point running any sort of advertising campaign if your website isn’t optimized.

The entire point of your advertising is to get people to your website so they’ll either look at your listings or contact you.

If people click on an ad and land on a terrible looking website or worse, they can’t find what they’re looking for they’ll leave.
This just wasted your money.

You need not only a beautiful looking, well-designed and mobile optimized website but you also need specifically designed landing pages for your ads.

If someone clicks on an ad after doing a search they need to land on a page that has the information they were searching for.

For another example if you have an ad for a specific listing that leads to your homepage the visitor will leave.

They’re not going to try to navigate your site to find information about that listing.

In the rare cases that they do this will be highly frustrating.

Optimizing your website is the absolute first thing you should do before even thinking about running any sort of marketing campaign.

Both online or offline.

In Conclusion

Are you guilty of making any of these mistakes? If so that’s ok, now you know exactly what you need to do to fix it.

Digital marketing is still pretty new and there’s always something new to learn.

You can start fixing these mistakes today and you’ll definitely see a big improvement with your digital marketing campaigns.