Real Estate In Review: Consideration Equals A High-Performing Marketing Team

Steve Osborn

Managing Director, Identity Marketing

This piece has been rolling around in my head for a few months now. I’ve found myself sitting in board rooms across from owners of very successful real estate companies, I keep hearing the same thing. “All our marketing ideas are driven by me, my marketing team isn’t creative, our marketing looks like our competitors or we just don’t have new ideas.”

This becomes a problem for business owners because the sales team complains about the people in the marketing team, which translates into bad morale and staff turnover which doesn’t solve the problem of having new ideas.

At first glance, it’s easy to side with the sales team, but the problem goes so much deeper. It takes a lot of consideration to create a high-performing marketing team. The following breaks down the major mistakes companies make to help you get you and your marketing team back on track.

Start With the Problem

Most marketing teams are too accessible. Sales agents can call, email, SMS, slack, DM or pop into the office of a marketing person. Being overly accessible and working for too many agents can mean they’re spread too thin. They only have time to respond to incoming requests, plus the only reward for completing a task is more tasks. The problem is you’re judging the marketing team on creativity, but companies give them a sheer volume of work and no time for creative ideation. 

Look At Your Strategy, Not Your Calendar

Real estate trainers have been saying for decades to ‘start with a marketing calendar,’ but that’s a mistake. Marketing should start with strategy. A strategy defines the problem, and this is translated into an overarching objective and goals, which then becomes projects and activities, which are then finally translated into a marketing calendar. The leader of the marketing team is then responsible for rolling this out and the owner of the business should support them in what they need to make that happen. This might mean outside agency help, or having the admin team update basic property marketing templates.

Give Space for Creative Ideas

Let’s say one of your strategy goals is to increase your market share in a few postcodes. This would then break down into a series of projects and tasks, one of them may involve a campaign to bring the brand to life with creative messaging, motion animation and design. Time would need to be allotted to work on the creative work. To give you an idea, we (meaning a team of 10 people) spend about 40 hours coming up with two pitches for campaign messaging before any of the deliverables (DL’s, social posts, emails, etc) are created. The idea itself, not the deliverable, is the place to start.

You might need to give the marketing department multiple days at home each week, implement a system for creative requests and again, move the task of updating the property marketing templates to the administration team.

Know When to Get Outside Help

When it comes to external help, You’ll need someone who understands a lot about your industry and has experience in doing strategy work. Having someone doing this internally doesn’t make sense for most companies financially. Get agency help. You still might struggle with ideas for campaigns or messaging but a good agency can help provide a framework that your internal marketing team can run with to create new messaging ideas. 

There’s hope out there. Just be clear on the problem you are trying to solve. And go with a strategy-first approach. Be aware you may need to restructure the marketing team internally and get outside help. Marketing is a tool with unlimited potential – not a box to be ticked. So make that investment. 

Interested in more insight from Steve Osborn? Check out his piece on strategies for growth in a downturn here.