What Real Estate Agents Should Know About Marketing vs. Selling

Look at this real estate sign…

Can you tell me what is wrong with this real estate sign?

I’ll tell you what’s wrong with this sign.

Everything.

From top to bottom, this sign is bad. In my 20 years as a broker, this just makes me sad.

I mean c’mon, “a free pizza with the purchase of a house”? Does that come with a two-liter and a side of garlic knots as well?

Here’s the problem with real estate marketing and selling, people don’t know the difference.

Some say you can’t have marketing without selling, others claim you can absolutely have selling without marketing, and when you ask most agents what they think, they just say, “it’s all the same.”

But I’m here to tell you it’s not, and the real estate agents that know the difference between marketing and selling are going to be the ones counting their referrals and happy clients when the year is over.

If you’re one of those agents who’s been wondering what that difference is, we’re about to dive in. 

What’s the difference between marketing and selling in real estate?

Real Estate Marketing 

Before we do anything else, we need to create a clear definition of what marketing is in the real estate world because a lot of brokerages, brokers, and agents have it confused. 

Marketing is everything that leads up to a point of purchase. 

It’s the trust that you build between an audience member and yourself over the course of experiences. From engagement on social media content and virtual home tours to marketing pieces and blog posts, it helps build interest, maintain conversation, and over time, convert people into clients. 

In short, you are pre-selling and conditioning people about what it’s like to work with you

While there are some real estate agents that absolutely crush marketing, the reality is that most don’t, and here’s why.

Marketing is not pretty images and crisp logos—anyone with deep pockets can put on a great marketing front.

Partner with the right creative minds, give them time and money, and you can manufacture marketing that looks and sounds good. But if your sales skills are that of a kiosk salesman at the mall, chances are that house you promised would be off the market in less than a month, is going to be up for sale awhile. Or worse, you never get hired!

I like to give new real estate agents this example when explaining marketing…

Imagine if you were selling your home and hired me because I said I have the “best marketing in town” (please never tell a prospect this—they’ve heard it all before).

I contract music superstar, Taylor Swift, to play a concert in the backyard of your home.

Half of the town shows up for this free concert, cheering and singing every word to every song, and when she is done, they all go home.

Does that now mean you can charge an extra $50,000 dollars for your home? 

Nope!

Here’s the thing, if a seller hires you because of your marketing, and the home doesn’t sell, your marketing has failed. This is when a seller requests you to amp up the marketing on their home. 

But…

If they hire you for your market knowledge and the home hasn’t sold, the discussion focuses on the market as a whole and how their home fits into it, not just how good or bad your marketing is.

Quality marketing in real estate goes beyond an expensive Facebook advertisement, celebrity name drop, or copy-and-paste lawn sign. It’s an end-to-end experience that helps prospects become familiar with who you are as an agent.

Not only does this put your potential client first from the beginning, but it also helps create an authentic relationship with you, their agent, who’s always looking out for their best interest.

Real Estate Selling

Now that you know marketing, let’s talk about selling.

The definition I subscribe to is a friend of mine, Dan Sullivan’s—he said, “Selling is getting someone intellectually engaged in a future result that is good for them and getting them to emotionally commit to take action to achieve that result.”

Selling is more than the act of completing a transaction between a home buyer and the seller. 

Whether you’re on either end of that equation, understanding the complete process of selling is critically important if you want to find success in real estate. On the surface, selling sounds more simple than marketing, but the fact of the matter is that most of the time, it’s the selling part of this work that holds agents back.

The selling process can be long and arduous as most of us agents know. In fact, by my estimation, there are 9 key points in every residential real estate transaction where some form of selling or buy-in happens.

Very rarely does a client come in the doors, eager, willing, and ready to make a purchase without any questions or hesitations. It can take weeks of scripting mortgage paperwork and looking at budgets before that final contract is even close to your client’s hands. 

Then you have to actually help them make a decision, which for many homebuyers, is the hardest part of the process.

Over the course of this time, agents can get worn down, frustrated, and short-tempered with clients. It’s in this dazed and confused state that they lose sight of helping their clients and start to become pushy. The moment that happens, they shoot all that hard marketing (pre-selling) work right in the foot.

Why?

Because they don’t practice what they preach.

There are a lot of real estate agents who think that their marketing will sell for them. They’re under the guise that the energy (aka money) they put in on the marketing end will magically spit itself back out as a paycheck on the other side without doing any of the grunt work to truly know their market and deliver for their clients.

How do real estate agents do a better job of selling?

It starts with knowing your market better than the rest of the agents around you, even in your own brokerage.

Become a practitioner instead of a prospector. The more you know about the entire business of real estate, the hyper-local market, and what is happening, the better you can position yourself as a representative of your client. 

• Understand and explain the paperwork to your clients—make sure you can answer all of their questions. 
• Know the difference between a mortgage and a loan—you’d be shocked at how many agents don’t. 
• Spend time studying the policies and practices of your state and company—consider talking with real estate lawyers who have experience in your market.
• Be conscious of varying deal structures and how they work. 
• Build your circle of trust advisors. 
• Make friends with other agents, brokers, and brands in and out of your market so that you have a pulse for what’s going on around you and in our industry. 

Just like building a strong body requires reps and sets, so does this real estate hustle. The more reps you do, the stronger you get, so that when the time comes for a client to pull the trigger, you’re more than prepared. 

When you invest time into market knowledge, you arm yourself with commoditized information that others don’t have. Your strengths now are your knowledge and ability to position any home in the market because you know how it works. 

Now you can put your client in the best position possible to sell or buy, not just have the most unique marketing. 

Make your marketing and selling work together! 

Marketing and selling are not at odds with one another, they need to complement each other! 

Think about it like this—selling is what happens when we are in dialogue with a buyer, buyer’s agent, seller, or seller’s agent. Marketing is everything we do to get into dialogue with a buyer, buyer’s agent, seller, or seller’s agent.

Use your marketing to drive interest, create conversation, and convert online experiences into real-life exchanges! From there, allow selling to seal the deal because you know the market, have done the work, and are ready to deliver for your client. 

Now get out there and make it happen!

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