Real Estate Digital Marketing Trends That Are Dated in 2026
To be successful now, into the new year, and even into the foreseeable future, you should know that your marketing strategy is never finished.
Your marketing strategy should be an ever-changing, constantly-evolving plan that needs to be reviewed and updated periodically to continue to build success and help you reach your marketing goals.
As part of that process of change, and to help set you and your business up for success in 2026, here are some marketing strategies you might want to consider leaving behind.
Overusing Artificial Intelligence
As an agent with a busy schedule, it’s easy to see AI as the answer to a lot of your marketing problems. It can increasingly do more and more to make your life easier and help you get things done.
And since it’s so easy and convenient, it’s also really easy to become reliant on it and overuse it, especially when it comes to real estate marketing.
A lot of agents without a marketing strategy in place see AI as a way to market themselves and their business, easily and quickly, with minimal effort; and while it can do that, if it’s low quality, is that impression you want to give of your business and your brand?
For example, if you use AI to quickly generate a listing description, copy and paste it into MLS, and click publish, is that an effective marketing strategy that represents your business the way you want it to? If you want to create a blog post as part of your content strategy, and you copy and paste whatever ChatGPT puts out and publish it on your website, is that serving your overall marketing goals effectively?
Or, in the examples above, are you just getting a task off your plate so you can move onto something else?
When it comes to real estate marketing, overusing AI to execute your marketing strategy for everything from listings to social media to email marketing doesn’t make you seem modern – it makes you seem robotic and unable to properly market yourself, your business, and your properties.
To most people (especially someone buying or selling a high-priced asset as a house), overusing AI can certainly come across as low effort, and it’s easy for someone to get the impression that their agent isn’t doing enough if all they do is continually use AI, in a noticeable way, to do their jobs.
Another example of overusing AI is in communication, no matter what that is. For example, if you’re responding to your client’s emails and text messages automatically using AI, they’re going to notice, and they probably aren’t going to happy about it or see value in what you’re doing – after all, no one wants to talk to a robot, especially when they expect to be talking to a real human.
While AI has a place in real estate marketing when it comes to things like generating ideas, coming up with a marketing framework, and serving as a general guide in your marketing efforts, relying on it in everything you do as part of lead generation, real estate transactions, and overall communication dehumanizes you, and overall, devalues the critical work that agents do as part of a real estate transaction from start to finish.
★ Want to learn more about how to use AI more effectively in your real estate marketing strategy? Have a look at these posts:
- Building an Answers Engine Optimization (AEO) Strategy for AI
- When (and When Not) to Use AI in Your Real Estate Content Strategy
- Does Using AI-Generated Content Negatively Affect Your SEO Strategy?
- Pivoting Your Website Content Strategy to See More Success in AI Search Results
- Building a Real Estate Online Presence Strategy to Get Found in LLMs (like ChatGPT)
Taking A Quantity Over Quality Approach to Your Content Strategy
There was a time when the more content you had on your website, the better it seemed for SEO and your search strategy; and while producing a lot of content regularly and strategically can be good for SEO, creating a lot of content that’s short, poorly written, and not valuable for the reader, just because you think it’s good for SEO or because you want to get something published quickly, definitely isn’t.
This is especially true when it comes to quickly creating low-quality, AI generated content that doesn’t work towards helping your audience discover you or trust you. When it comes to creating content, quality is always more important than quality (and no matter where you want your content to be found online, traditional search results and AI search results feel the same way).
That means that right now, and into 2026, producing high-quality, well-written content is more important than ever – not just for attracting your target audience, but also, for attracting search engines and building a strong search strategy.
But what exactly defines content as quality?
It’s well-written, well-constructed, well-thought-out content that has value to the person reading it. It’s content that informs the person and answers whatever question they searched that brought them to your piece of content in the first place. It’s content that’s well-formatted and stylized so that it’s enjoyable to read and look at.
Basically, it’s value-based, well-written content that a person would actually want to read and absorb, and even enjoy doing so.
A lot of real estate agents are guilty of having a content strategy that’s based on quantity over quality. For example:
- Having a lot of neighborhood pages, with generic or plagiarized content, that doesn’t convey any value, just because you think they will show up in search results.
- Uploading an image of a chart that shows the monthly market trends and stats, with one single sentence underneath it, and thinking you have a blog content strategy in place.
In both of the examples above, quantity is being put ahead of quality, and that’s a mistake in 2026. In fact, if you have a lot of pages on your website that no one visits at all, it could be an indicator to AI search engines and that you have a lot of low-quality pages, which could negatively impact your overall search strategy (even for any high-quality pages).
★ Want to learn more about the importance of quality content? Have a look at these posts:
- Creating a People-Powered, People-First Content Strategy
- The Benefits of Building a Long-Form Real Estate Content Strategy
- Creating an Evergreen Real Estate Content Strategy
- Using Pillar Pages to Make Old Content More Accessible
- Optimizing Your Content for Humans (And Not Just for Search Engines)
Relying on Direct Mail Marketing
While it’s certainly a good idea to distribute you marketing efforts and make sure you have a well-rounded strategy, in 2026, direct mail marketing is probably one of those areas that you should scale back on. Specifically, the door-to-door direct print marketing that shows up in and overflows people’s mailboxes.
Why? Nowadays, people just don’t respond to it the way they used to, and for a number of different reasons.
For example, with a lot of people becoming more and more conscious of the environmental impact of their actions, direct mail seems wasteful and careless, which is probably not a quality that you want to associate with your brand and your business. You may even get negative emails and calls from people directly complaining about your marketing actions.
Even more troubling, if you’re in Canada and you heavily rely on direct mail marketing for generating business, there’s no doubt that the revolving Canada Post mail strikes have impacted you and your ability to reach the people you want to. With the postal service becoming increasingly unreliable, it’s probably better to look to other ways of reaching people.
That’s where a shift to digital marketing can help. Digital marketing allows you to create more targeted, more trackable, more scalable marketing that attracts the right people, for the right time, and for the right reasons.
★ Want to learn more about creating a digital marketing strategy? Have a look at these posts and resources:
- Establishing a Behavioral Marketing Strategy
- Building a Real Estate Marketing Stickiness Strategy
- Using Familiarity in Your Marketing Strategy to Get More Business
- The Philosophy of Inbound Marketing, and Why it Works for Agents
- Building an Inbound Marketing Strategy to Get Higher Quality Leads
- Creating a Brand Associative Real Estate Marketing Strategy (to Get Better Leads)
Plan for the Future
Just like the real estate market is always changing, your marketing strategy should always be changing. What works today, may not work in the future.
By staying ahead of it, and adapting your marketing strategy accordingly, you’ll have a better chance of setting up yourself and your business for success into 2026 and beyond.
Want to learn more about what Artifakt Digital can do and how we can help your business get ahead of the competition? Book a no-obligation consultation call with our team quickly and easily.
