31 Clever Real Estate Marketing Ideas for 2023

Looking for more real estate marketing ideas to grow your business in 2023? Even if you’re a brand-new agent, you’ve probably realized that there is only one rule in real estate marketing: What worked for you (or that flashy top producer on Instagram) last year might not work this year. If you want to improve your marketing, you need to be open to change.

To make your search a little easier, we updated our list of 31 proven strategies to improve your marketing in 2023 and beyond. I included my best tips with some from our team of real estate experts here at The Close and our friends at SERHANT. We also include links to our deep-dive strategy guides, buyer’s guides, and scripts so you can start transforming your marketing today.

So grab a cup of coffee, turn off your notifications, and dig in to our 31 best real estate marketing ideas for 2023:

Branding & Engagement Marketing Ideas

1. Build a Personal Brand That Attracts Clients While You Sleep

While it may seem like a waste of time if you’re struggling with day-to-day marketing tasks, starting your journey by building a compelling personal brand is still my best advice for every agent. Why? Simple. A personal brand that resonates with your target audience does something that a flashy website or glossy headshot never will. It helps you build a unique selling proposition that separates you from your competitors. This is more important than ever in 2023 because every agent in your farm area has access to the same marketing tools.

Here’s Kyle Scott, president of SERHANT. Ventures, to explain:

“A personal brand is not just what people say about you when you’re not in the room; it’s how to get people to talk about you when you’re nowhere near that room! Your personal brand will generate compound interest on your investments and, over time, the daily deposits you make into your brand turn into a massive lead generation machine that gets prospective leads coming to you, even when you’re sleeping.”

2. Create Clear & Honest Mission, Vision & Values to Guide Your Marketing

Since most leads make purchasing decisions based on emotion rather than facts, finding your why should be at the top of your list of marketing goals for 2023. This is the advice Sean Moudry gives to every single new coaching client he meets. It’s the most important lesson he learned in his 28-year career in real estate sales and coaching. Here’s Sean:

“If you want your leads to resonate with your brand, your marketing needs to resonate with their values and ideals. After all, who will get excited to work with someone who’s just in it for the money?

“So take the time to really think through why you became a real estate agent and create a clear and honest mission, vision, and values statement to guide your marketing. Maybe you were excited about the idea of helping people build generational wealth. Or maybe you wanted to help build your community. Whatever the answer is, I guarantee it will help you find lifetime customers better than, ‘I want to make lots of money.’”

You can learn how to create a clear and honest mission, vision, and values statement that you can use to steer your real estate marketing ideas in our guide below. It was written for brokerage owners, but don’t worry—these lessons apply to agents too.

3. Become the ‘Digital Mayor’ of Your Farm Area to Get More Referrals

Experienced agents know that local business owners can be a goldmine for referrals. Who else is as plugged into your community as the local salon owner, restaurateur, or florist? They know when people are getting married, getting divorced, or making other life changes that might lead to a transaction. Even better? People trust them. So if you want to generate motivated referrals, you can’t go wrong building relationships with local business owners.

The problem is that building relationships with these social connectors can take years. Parkbench makes it faster and much easier to execute on this real estate marketing idea. They provide hyperlocal websites and expert training to help you generate more referrals from business owners in less time. They also only allow one agent per ZIP code. Check if yours is available today.

Visit Parkbench

4. Write a Compelling Slogan & Use It in Your Marketing Materials

Once you’ve created your mission, vision, and values, you should have a clear and honest idea of what you have to offer your local community. The next key element of your marketing identity is a slogan: a short, memorable phrase that summarizes that value. Think of it as a one-sentence elevator pitch.

Summing up your value prop in one short sentence isn’t easy, but the benefits for your brand and marketing materials can be enormous. Writing a compelling slogan you can use on all of your marketing is a great way to make a personal connection with your local community. Great slogans are short, memorable, and ideally inspiring.

If you don’t already have a great slogan, or think yours needs work, check out my list of the 107 best real estate slogans below for inspiration. If you’re still not inspired, try using my free real estate slogan generator, which is embedded in the strategy guide.

5. Use Social Media Templates to Quickly Scale Your Instagram & Facebook Accounts

If you want to scale your social media accounts quickly enough to generate leads, you need to increase the number of times you post per week, or even per day. In a 2021 Q&A, Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri suggested posting “a couple feed posts a week and a couple stories a day.” While that might sound like a lot, it’s what the algorithm rewards. So if you want to build your social media accounts to market your personal brand, you need to start posting more.

One of the best ways to tackle this real estate marketing idea is to use templates from marketing companies like Coffee & Contracts, Lab Coat Agents Marketing Center, and Agent Crate. Unlike Canva templates, their offerings are real estate-specific. They create beautifully designed and prewritten posts providing first-time buyer education, market updates, home maintenance tips, staging advice, and more. They even include templates for Stories and Reels. If you follow my advice on vertical video (which you should), you’ll understand the value add here.

Here is a quick rundown of my take on the best social media template providers:

6. Copy Successful Social Media Strategies From Top Real Estate Influencers

If you want your social media accounts to help you market your brand and generate leads, you need to learn from the best and copy what they’re doing. If it worked for them, chances are it will work for your accounts too. Just make sure to put your own personality and spin on their strategies! Copying their content verbatim is not only unethical, but might turn off your followers if they follow the same influencers you do. 

Getting started is easy. Start following a few real estate influencers you resonate with and see which topics get them the most views and engagement for their Reels, Stories, and posts. Then write them down and add them to your marketing calendar.

Here are a four must-follow influencers to start with:

For more social media tips from top influencers, check out my guide to their best social media strategy tips here:

7. Learn How to Make Engaging Vertical Videos

The shocking success of vertical video platforms like TikTok over the last two years is a crucial trend that you need to pay attention to—even if you’re not using the platform. Instagram, Facebook, and even YouTube have all taken note and are now pushing quick-hit vertical videos in a major way. So if you want a chance of getting your content in front of your followers on any platform in 2023, you need to learn how to make compelling vertical videos. FAST.

Don’t worry, they’re easier to make than you think. Here’s Cody D’Ambrosio, head of SERHANT. Studios, with a quick viral vertical video format for listings that you can steal:

Cody D’Ambrosio, Head, SERHANT. Studios

“Start your videos by shooting a quick introduction of yourself and the property—trying to take up as much of the frame as possible—before cutting to footage of your listing for the remainder of the video. We’ve seen a 3x increase in performance (both views and engagement) for videos that start in this fashion.”

If you want some more inspiration, check out my list of 147 viral real estate social media ideas below. It’s chock-full of dozens of vertical video ideas you can try.

8. Boost Engagement With Contests, Polls & Q&A Stickers on Instagram Stories

Once you start making vertical videos, you will quickly learn that engagement, not views, is what prompts Instagram to show your content to more people. While there are many ways to get engagement on Instagram, contests, polls, and Q&A stickers are what most influencers use to make their posts go viral.

Here’s Dustin Brohm, host of the Massive Agent Podcast, to explain:

“Ask questions, use GIFs, and make the content as easy to engage with as possible. The more people engage with you, the more they will remember you. You can also run contests and giveaways within Instagram Stories. Master how to get people engaged and coming back for more, and you’ll win.”

9. Give Your Social Media Accounts a Boost (Without Hiring a Marketing Manager)

If you’re a busy agent, spending hours each day creating content for social media is probably not a good use of your time. In 2023, smart agents are using services like Porchlyte to give their social accounts a boost from the pros while they concentrate on selling houses.

Unlike some social media marketing platforms, Porchlyte doesn’t just offer templates for Instagram and Facebook posts. They also offer monthly content strategies and fully done-for-you content creation and posting with their new Posted by Porchlyte feature so you can get the benefits of social media while their team does all the work.

Visit Porchlyte

10. Beat the Instagram Algorithm by Marketing Yourself on Instagram Stories & Reels

At this point, you are probably sick of me suggesting you try vertical video, but trust me, every single social media platform has been pushing that approach over the past couple of years and that trend will only increase as TikTok gobbles up market share.

While there are opportunities for Realtors on TikTok, focusing your vertical video efforts on Instagram Stories and Reels will be much easier and more effective than starting a whole new account on a different social media platform.

Here’s Eric Simon, Los Angeles Realtor and founder of The Broke Agent, on why Stories and Reels are so important for Realtors this year:

“This isn’t speculation. I built my own Instagram account to over 400,000 followers by focusing more of my marketing efforts on Stories and Reels and making sure they both gave the algorithm what it wants: engagement.”

11. 10x Email Engagement Rates With Facebook Messenger Ads

If you’re not getting the results you want from Facebook advertising or email marketing, Facebook Messenger ads can be an excellent addition to your marketing tool kit. Here’s why. Your potential customers probably get dozens of emails and see hundreds of Facebook posts per day. But they only get a handful of private Facebook messages.

Studies have even shown that open rates for Facebook Messenger ads are 242% higher than email. If you’re still not convinced, remember that the median age of home sellers in 2022 was 60 years old and more than 35% of Facebook Messenger users are over the age of 45.

Referral Marketing Ideas

12. Build More Trustworthy Social Proof With Video Testimonials

A few years ago, the only social proof Realtors needed was a few 5-star reviews on Zillow. This has changed. Zillow reviews are still a crucial part of your online presence, but they are not enough. With so many fake reviews on sites like Amazon, people are starting to get a little bit skeptical of written reviews. They are too easy to fake. Video testimonials are nearly impossible to fake and as an added bonus, can be used across Instagram, Facebook, your landing pages, website, and even YouTube.

Here are a few quick best practices to help your video testimonials shine this year:

• Keep them short: Shorter videos are more likely to be watched through to the end, an important signal for YouTube and other social media platforms.
• Consider shooting vertical video: This will make them easier to share on Instagram Stories, Reels, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts.
• Send questions in advance: This will make it easier for clients to think of responses, and they will be less nervous the day of the shoot.
• Done is better than perfect: You don’t need to make a big production out of your testimonial videos. Sometimes candid videos shot on your phone work better.

If you need more tips and inspiration for shooting testimonials, check out our strategy guide below.

13. Automate Your Review Gathering Process to 4X Social Proof

Instead of manually chasing down past clients to leave reviews on multiple websites, smart agents automate their review-gathering process with reputation management platforms like Birdeye.

Birdeye reduces the friction (and awkwardness) of asking for reviews on multiple platforms so you get more reviews on more websites with less work. The company estimates that agents using Birdeye see a 420% increase in reviews on average.

Visit Birdeye

14. Keep Former Real Estate Clients Engaged With Experiential Marketing

As any experienced agent will tell you, five minutes of in-person engagement is worth hours of engagement online. That’s why many top-producing agents today are offering their former clients exclusive offline experiences like dinners, wine tastings, educational seminars, and charity drives. This is called experiential marketing, and it is one of the hottest trends of the year for Fortune 1000 companies.

How hot is it? Well, one study showed that a whopping 91% of consumers said that they were more likely to make a purchase after attending a brand’s event or experience.

15. Give More Thoughtful Closing Gifts That Keep You Top of Mind

While closing gifts are an excellent way to boost referrals, most Realtors focus too much on promoting themselves instead of taking the time to learn what past clients actually want.

Here’s Beth Incorvati, real estate coach and founder of Agent Activator, on why taking the time to choose a closing gift that your clients actually want is so important:

“If you’re still giving low-quality steak knives with your logo on them as closing gifts, STOP! The odds of them being stashed in a cupboard and forgotten about are virtually 100%. Instead, do the work to figure out what your clients want or need so you can give them a gift they actually want that still keeps you top of mind.”

Take Beth’s advice and check out my buyer’s guide with 32 examples of gifts that do just that below. Now you have no more excuses for giving cheesy closing gifts.

Property Marketing Ideas

Marketing Planning & Strategy

Creative Marketing Ideas

Your Turn

Have any killer real estate marketing ideas that you think our readers need to know about? Let us know in the comments.