How to Avoid Marketing Fatigue for Your Audience

How to Avoid Marketing Fatigue for Your Audience

 April 6, 2017

Whether you like it or not, a big part of real estate is marketing. You have to get the word out about your listings, your company, and yourself. Every day is an opportunity to generate a lead or find a client. While it’s a big part of your career, it can be exhausting for the people you’re marketing to. Take a lighter approach to help your followers and leads avoid marketing fatigue.

What you don’t want to do is make people unsubscribe from your emails or unfollow you on social media because they’re tired of hearing from you. If you find yourself losing more than a couple of followers a week without gaining more or fewer people are reading your emails, it may be time to do something different.

Here’s how to fix or avoid marketing fatigue.

Be Careful About What You Share

Taking a political stand, talking about the personal things in your life, or sharing your opinions should be a mindful decision. For some agents, doing this works for them because they’re consistent. They have a love it or hate it approach. If you aren’t ready to make that purposeful decision and embrace that idea in all of your marketing, be careful what you share.

Political rants, off-color jokes, off-topic content, and more can turn off an audience who isn’t expecting it from you and doesn’t want it. Consider what you want your brand to be – highly informative, extremely personable, or both – and stick with that. If you’re not ready for the backlash you can get from one bad joke, don’t go down that path.

Mix It Up

Pictures of your kids or dogs are great. But a new picture of your furbaby every hour without anything else to break it up is exhausting. The same is true with real estate articles, listings for sale, pleas for buyers, and anything else you may share on social media or in a newsletter.

Mix up what you share. Not every newsletter should be filled with listings and open houses. Add information as well. Not every Facebook post or Instagram should be a picture of a house. Let people see your face. You’ll keep people interested by sharing a variety of relevant content.

Try New Things

Don’t be afraid to try something new whether it’s a Facebook Live video or an Instagram story. Maybe you send a video in your newsletter instead of written text. Your audience will be curious because it’s new. And if you preface it with, “This is something new I’m trying…” they’ll forgive most errors or mistakes.

Your loyal followers want to go on a journey with you. If you’ve been posting nothing but industry-related info, some will be curious and delighted when you share a video from your vacation. Be mindful of your brand and the experience you’re trying to create but don’t be afraid to experiment, either.

Be Yourself

Remember earlier when we talked about political stands and personal information? Being completely yourself, warts and all, online is a personal decision. Not everyone wants to let it all hang out. That said, you should always be yourself online.

People sense when someone is fake or holding back, and it turns people off. You don’t have to share your deepest secrets, but you should always come across as genuine. It’s okay to let people see you smile or hear the snort in your laugh. Don’t be what you think the “ideal real estate professional” is like. Be yourself, and your followers will appreciate it.

Too Much Boring Stuff

The two sins of sharing anything online either in your blog, on your newsletter, or across social media are this: don’t share too much and don’t bore people. Too much, and people will do anything to make it stop – like unfollowing you or blocking you. Too boring and no one pays attention anyway, so what’s the point?

What’s boring? Dry content that doesn’t engage, no matter how informative it is. Bland content that doesn’t make anyone feel anything or are easy to scroll by definitely count as boring. How will you know if your followers are bored? They’ll stop engaging with you and eventually unfollow.

What’s too much? That depends on the platform. More than one email a day is definitely too much, but one a week is probably best. Facebook posts should be kept to a few a day. Twitter is more forgiving so post more often. What you never want to do is flood anyone’s newfeed, stream, or inbox with your content.

You can’t make everyone happy all the time, and you shouldn’t try. But you also don’t want to drive your existing followers away. If you’ve noticed your numbers dropping, it could be marketing fatigue. Take a look at what you’re doing, and when in doubt, take a break and come back with new and fresh ideas.


Michaela Mitchell

By Michaela Mitchell

Former Communications Director for a local Realtor Association and a big cheerleader for all things real estate related, Michaela is now a full-time freelance writer specializing in real estate and other business industries. When she's not writing the serious business-y stuff, she's likely to be found writing about the hilarity of being a Mom to two rowdy boys.