How useful is your marketing to the people you’re trying to reach with it?
Jimmy Mackin, the CEO of Curaytor and first guest of the new Branded podcast with Brad McCallum, had plenty to say about real estate marketing—specifically:
- Where so many real estate marketers go wrong
- Where marketing fits in the customer journey, and
- What questions your marketing should answer
If Google could answer all those questions in a matter of seconds, consumers wouldn’t need help sifting through the massive info-dump from their internet browser.
Sure, you can still ask Google for information on pretty much anything, but since the results depend on how well the available content is optimized for SEO, you’ll often find yourself wading through a lifetime’s worth of content just to find the answer to one simple question.
No one’s got time for that. This is where the AI in tools like ChatGPT comes in awfully handy.
The AI does the searching, consolidates everything it finds, and presents it in a form users can more easily digest.
And that’s exactly what you should be doing for your audience.
As things are now shifting, we’re now seeing a world where people are just using AI. And AI is doing the searching for them and consolidating the information. And I think that’s a great analogy, like, that’s your job as a marketer. Your job is to go out there, find all this information, consolidate it and condense it in a way that’s easy for people to understand so they can make an informed decision.
This is why, instead of cranking out a steady stream of video content to please the algorithm, Mackin is “on a mission to become the most useful person to follow in real estate.”
Marketing should serve people—not the algorithm
At the end of the day, the value of your marketing is not based on your SEO score but on the value perceived by the people who consume it.
A part of marketing right now that I think is going to get eviscerated… SEO has ruined marketing for a lot of people, right? ‘Hey, what’s a blueberry muffin recipe?’ You have to scroll through the history of the blueberry muffin just to get to where the ingredients are. Because most SEO experts are optimizing for the search engines to crawl.
Use your marketing as a tool for closing the knowledge gap—being “useful” to your target market—just as ChatGPT has evolved to become more useful and user-friendly than a simple Google search.
The Problem with Most Real Estate Marketing
What creates an obstacle for many real estate content creators is the widespread misconception of where marketing actually fits into the customer journey.
What people don’t realize about marketing, and it’s probably the biggest mistake people make about marketing…marketing is the beginning of the consumer journey—not the end. So, however someone comes across your brand…this is the beginning of the consumer journey.
Effective marketing has never really been about creating the perfect funnel.
From a marketing perspective, what agents have to understand… People always try to get very clever with this idea of building the perfect marketing funnel. I’ve been in marketing now for 20 years. There is no marketing funnel. I mean, the consumer journey is so random, so unpredictable, so chaotic, and the challenge is, as consumers, we have so many options, and we don’t even fully understand why we buy.
And so the best thing you can do is get as many shots on goal as you can. Get in front of more people more frequently, with better content that adds more value. That is the only real predictable way for any business to try to attract new customers.
Mackin’s main issue with real estate marketing, though, has to do with how complicated it’s become. Because it doesn’t have to be.
What really bothers me about real estate marketing specifically is we make it so complicated…and as a result, it pushes agents away from doing it… I think there’s a much simpler way to think about marketing and branding that attracts customers than what agents are being sold today.
McCallum agreed and shared a gem of a quote that he lives by as a real estate professional.
In reality, nobody is going through a 25-point interview process with five or six different agents…I think Ryan Serhant says it really well: “People want to go shopping with a friend.”
It’s not that it’s wrong to dress as a professional for your meetings with clients and prospects. This is not an invitation to swap out your suits and dress shoes for Hawaiian shirts and flip-flops.
It’s more about how you see the client, which infuses every piece of marketing you put out there.
Jimmy Mackin’s 3-Question Marketing Framework
So, how do you, as a real estate professional, create powerful connections with potential clients?
Mackin uses a three-question framework for his client-focused marketing, saying, “The thing that I think about is this idea of ‘Can I?’ ‘Should I?’ ‘How do I?’”
Can I?
Mackin broke down the “Can I?” question like this:
“So, the question for consumers is, ‘Can I afford to buy a house when interest rates are at 5.5%?’ (Note: In Canada, 5% rates are considered high)
“And right now, if your marketing isn’t answering a question like that, in many ways, they’re going to struggle to understand what value you’re going to bring… The initial thought is, ‘Can I even do this thing I’m trying to do? Is it even possible for me to achieve this?’”
Should I?
Just talking about how great the market is (in general terms) doesn’t answer these ‘Can I?” questions. The second part is ‘Should I?’
“So, let’s say I can afford to buy a house… ‘Should I actually even do it? is now a good time to actually buy?’
“Well, the answer to that question is, of course, ‘It depends. How long are you going to live in the property? What are your other options? What’s your current situation with your rentals?’ And so, if you’re not answering that question, then you’re leaving the consumer to figure it out on their own…”
How Do I?
The last part is ‘How do I?’
“The challenge right now for a lot of agents is they go for the views, they go for the likes, they go for the comments—which, listen, it’s easy to get addicted to that validation—but what we should be optimizing for is impact.”
Watch the full episode to enjoy the full conversation.
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