Kevin Ray Ward argues that the biggest marketing mistake real estate agents make is focusing first on marketing strategy (channels, ads, SEO, farming) instead of first becoming great at delivering results for clients. He frames marketing as two parts: (1) the strategy/channels and (2) what you are marketing — yourself and your ability to deliver outcomes. Ward's prescription: prioritize building the skills, systems, presence, and processes to convert leads into clients and deliver excellent results; then your marketing (including word-of-mouth) becomes far more effective and efficient. He cautions against buying marketing strategies without the back-end capability to convert and fulfill.
Chapters
Foreign. Hi there, it's Kevin. And I get asked this question quite often. What is the best way to market yourself as a real estate agent? How is the best way to market yourself? What's the best marketing? Should I use social media marketing? Should I use SEO marketing? How do I market myself? Do I do geographic farming, print advertising? What is the best marketing strategy on the planet? And I really think it's the wrong question or it's the wrong approach. And I'm going to talk in this video about what I consider to be the biggest mistake, marketing mistake in the real estate industry. And that is how real estate agents approach marketing. Here is the mistake. First, let's just kind of lay out how this works. So you've got two elements to marketing. One is your marketing strategy. So here you've got your marketing strategy. That's how am I going to market myself? And then that's on the front end and then on the back end is what are you marketing? Right? What is it that you're actually marketing? And in real estate, in this case, what you're marketing is you. You are marketing you. When you're looking to generate business as a part of your lead generation strategy, you're using marketing. What you're marketing is I'm trying to market who I am to people so they will hire me, so they will choose me. And whether you're using prospecting as a mode of lead generation or marketing as a mode of lead generation, it's what you're, what you're attracting people to or bringing people to is you. Now here is the mistake that I see happening over and over again and that is that we focus on this before we work on this. We focus on our marketing strategy before we really think about what am I marketing. For example, if I market to a seller, I get a seller to call me or I get a seller to opt in on my form for a free market analysis. When they talk to me, if they're interested in selling, do I know what to do to deliver them the best result? And so what people are trying to do is, is that real estate agents are trying to find a great marketing strategy. I need a great marketing strategy. And by the way, marketing companies and real estate coaches get rich so selling you great marketing strategies. And I get comments and I get emails from real estate agents all the time saying I've spent all this money in marketing and I've made nothing from it. What's wrong? What am I doing wrong with my marketing? And my answer is it may not be the marketing it may be that once you get the marketing works and you actually get the prospect, you get the lead, do you know what to do with them on the back end? Do you have a process? Do you have the skill, do you have the presence and the knowledge to be able to inspire them to hire you and then once they hire you to deliver the results. So here is the answer. The biggest marketing mistake is we focused here first. We focused on the marketing strategy first. When the solution is, the answer is to focus here first, focus on this. That is, I don't need a great marketing strategy until I've committed to be great. The moment you commit to be great and you say, I'm going to be the best real estate agent in the market so that whenever somebody comes to me, I can deliver them the best results, I can give them the best service, and I can give them the best results. So when I market to my, to my market, I market them to come to me. Once they come to me, I'm not stumbling around like, oh, I don't know what to do. Oh my gosh, what happens next? And all of the skills, all of the strategies, all the systems that you need on the back end need to be developed for this to be effective. The biggest mistake the real estate agents make is they focus on the marketing strategy and then they get tons of prospects or tons of leads. And they need tons of leads. They need 1500 leads a month to convert to because they don't know what they're doing. Whereas if you knew what you were doing, if you were great, your power of converting, it's not generating the leads that's important. What's important is learning how to convert the leads. You can generate tons of leads and funnel them to you, but when they get to you, do you know how to convert them? Do you know how to convert leads into clients? And do you know how to convert clients into satisfied clients because you delivered them the best results? So my challenge is for you to focus on creating greatness in you and then start working on creating greatness in your marketing. And you can do them both at the same time. If you're a real estate agent, especially if you're new, you probably don't have enough time to work on becoming the perfect agent before you start getting some business. So you want to start marketing and, and putting yourself out there immediately. Prospecting. All the ways of lead generation all work, but if you want them to work better, what makes them work better is not just improving this, the marketing strategy, it's improving this and that is what you are marketing, which is you. And when you get better, when you become a master, don't become a master marketer. Become a master at delivering results for your clients. Because then every client that you deliver a great result for becomes your word of mouth marketing team. They become a part of your marketing system, a part of your marketing strategy. And that marketing strategy becomes free. And it gets more and more powerful. The better this gets, the better you get, the better results you're able to deliver. The more powerful every part of every act or every resource you invest in marketing, the more effective it's going to be. So here's what you do. You commit to making you great. Remember, your responsibility is to be the best. And when you do that, you can always expect yes.
