Marketing for real estate has two jobs, and agents tend to spend on only one. The first is selling this listing. The second is being the name people think of when a neighbor asks who they should call. The first job ends at closing. The second pays you for years, and it’s the one we’d fund first.
That goes for agents, small brokerages and property managers alike. Below is what makes this field different, five parts of a sound plan, and what to check before you hire anyone to help.
What makes marketing for real estate different
Most businesses market a product or a service. You market two things, the property and yourself, to someone making one of the biggest decisions of their life. People pick an agent they trust, so the relationship is part of what’s for sale. And the work is local down to the street. What works in Newtown may fall flat in Allentown.
The research backs up the relationship point. NAR’s 2025 Member Profile is a survey of members about their 2024 transactions. It found that REALTORS typically earned 20% of their business from repeat clients and 21% through referrals from past clients. In NAR’s 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, 87% of sellers said they would likely recommend their agent.
Those are national figures, and your own mix will differ. They still point to where we’d begin: with the people who already know you, and with what a referred stranger finds when they look you up.
Picture a barbecue in Harleysville where a neighbor says, “Call Dana, she sold the Hendersons’ house.” The next morning the homeowner types Dana’s name into her phone. She finds a brokerage profile that looks like every other agent’s, and a Google listing with reviews that stopped years ago. Dana’s reputation did the hard part. Her online presence let it go to waste.
Five parts of a sound real estate marketing plan
How much each one needs depends on what you want more of. Listings? Buyers? Owners for a rental portfolio?
1. An online presence that matches your reputation
Start with what people see when they search your name. You want a website, or at least a proper page of your own, that loads quickly, shows your listings and says which areas you work in. Your Google Business Profile needs current details and recent reviews from past clients.
Local SEO work aims at searches like an agent or property manager in a specific town. The big listing portals take up much of the space for home searches, so town-level searches are the more realistic target. Social media, mostly Instagram and Facebook, shows people your listings and gives them a sense of you.
2. Advertising with one job per campaign
Paid ads put you in front of people sooner than search work can, and they cost money for as long as they run. They work best when each campaign has one job. Compare two ads. One says “Selling your home in Yardley?” and lands on a general home page with featured listings and a mortgage calculator. The other leads to a page about seller consultations in two or three towns, and nothing else. Only the second is easy to judge. Our PPC advertising guide explains the ad types, including remarketing, which shows ads to people who have already visited your site.
Targeting has limits in this field. Google’s policy on restricted targeting in personalized advertising lists housing among the categories where advertisers in the United States and Canada can’t target by gender, age, parental status, marital status or ZIP code. Other platforms have their own rules, and fair housing obligations apply on top. You can gather the platform rules and your broker’s requirements. Your broker or an attorney has to confirm how they apply to a given ad.
3. Photos and video that sell the listing and you
Buyers look before they read. Clear, well-lit photos, a walkthrough video or a virtual tour let someone decide whether a home is worth a visit. They also show the next seller how you’d present theirs, and that second audience is easy to forget.
A photographer is worth paying for on bigger listings. For a short neighborhood video, a good phone and decent light can do. If a provider offers visual content, ask who produces it.
4. Local knowledge, in public
Your knowledge of the area is the one thing no agency can supply. Marketing should make it visible: pages and posts about the towns you know, with the detail only someone who works there would have. A note about what you noticed at three open houses in Newtown says more about you than a stock graphic about interest rates. Set your profile up around the phrases local people actually search.
5. Follow-up that outlasts the open house
Someone who walks through an open house may be a year from doing anything. Most of the work is staying in view until then. A CRM, which is just a system that records who you spoke with and when to call again, gives you one place for that. A regular email with something useful in it keeps your name familiar: what sold nearby, what’s changing in town, what to do before listing. Articles on your site can do the same, and we’ve written about whether a blog helps your SEO.
Checks before you hire help
None of these means a provider is wrong for you. They’re questions, and the answers should be easy to follow.
- Would the plan look the same for any agent in any town? Ask how it reflects your market and the clients you want.
- What gets measured? You should be able to see whether inquiries became clients. If visits go up but the inquiries are all renters and you wanted sellers, the goal hasn’t been reached.
- Is it one channel only? Print can still have a place locally. It shouldn’t be the whole plan.
What marketing can’t do, and what it needs from you
Marketing can’t change the market. Inventory, interest rates and the season are outside anyone’s control, and nobody can promise you a number of listings by a date. Search visibility usually takes longer to build than an ad campaign, and both depend on how many established agents already work your area.
We can’t know a neighborhood the way you do. We’d need your local knowledge, your photos and listing details, and your word on which inquiries were worth your time.
Look yourself up this week
Search your own name on your phone, then your name plus your main town. Write down what a stranger sees and mark anything that’s out of date. It takes about ten minutes and costs nothing.
Then tell us what you found and which clients you’d like more of. We’ll say what we’d fix first and why, and whether you need help at all. Your first consultation is free.