Episode 7: Marketing Smarts for Realtors

Jen Aprile Cunningham (00:01):

Keeping it strategic is where you’re going to get the biggest bang for your buck. And so what I mean by that is always ensuring that you’re starting off your plans with talking about your goals, understanding what your objectives are, and really leaning into who it is that you’re targeting.

Chris Cook (00:32):

Now we’re going here we are, we’re with Jen Aprile Cunningham, my good friend, marketing extraordinaire, somebody that I’ve relied on actually to start marketing. Well, I think strategically marketing within my own business as we brought you in to spend some time with us and to really start to understand what a strategic approach looks like versus just throwing a bunch of stuff up in the air and hope that the wind takes something in the right direction. So here you are. Welcome Jen. You’re freaked out. I love it.

Jen Aprile Cunningham (01:06):

I’m completely freaked out. Thanks for having me. Of course.

Chris Cook (01:12):

The nice thing is this isn’t live. You don’t have to worry about, we can edit the swears spits.

Jen Aprile Cunningham (01:20):

Yeah.

Chris Cook (01:24):

I’m interested to share, I know what your background is. Tell me where are you coming from, from a marketing perspective, why should somebody listen to you? Why are you a guru? Why are you the expert?

Jen Aprile Cunningham (01:37):

Yeah, I mean I have over 15 years of experience in the industry across advertising, marketing, and I’ve worked with global brands I global campaigns, huge efforts, and I’ve touched almost every advertising marketing channel you can imagine.

Chris Cook (02:00):

Okay. So what we’re really interested in doing I think with this podcast in general is having conversations with people that are operating small businesses that are, there are one-stop shop. They do everything from writing the offers to doing marketing campaigns, nurture sequence. They’re doing everything. Some other people have a small team and they’re looking to grow. One of the things that I found is one of the biggest mistakes that people make when they hire is they hire an admin to do their administrative tasks and then they also saddle them with marketing. How often it’s a bit of a leading question. How often do you see that happening in big companies?

Jen Aprile Cunningham (02:57):

Rarely. So marketing itself is a multifaceted field as I think most of us know, and it gets sliced and diced into a number of different areas of expertise. So hiring one person to achieve the goals across the board is pretty challenging. So I would think to look at the goals of what you’re trying to achieve, really streamline the person that is going to be the most value to your company in terms of the channels of which you want to focus on, and then try to fill that role based on those bulls and the tactics that we want to output.

Chris Cook (03:45):

I mean, I don’t think we have to pretend you and I, you saw you’ve seen inside of a small real estate business based on what you’ve seen and what you would suggest if you were going to sit down and meet with somebody that’s maybe got one admin and they’re the selling agent, it’s two people on the team got an agent and you have an admin, they want to start growing their business and invest in marketing. Let’s say that this is a team or I guess an individual that makes 200 grand a year, that’s their GCI, right? Their gross commission.

Jen Aprile Cunningham (04:29):

Yep.

Chris Cook (04:30):

Where’s a good starting place for that person?

Jen Aprile Cunningham (04:33):

I think first is to one, understand that any marketing advertising is indeed an investment, and so it is going to have some level of financial backing. Now when you are smaller, it doesn’t have to be huge. I think it’s easy to kind of look at some of the bigger brands out there, look at the spend that they’re putting against social billboards. There’s a range of things in which you can do. I think when it comes to small businesses, keeping it strategic is where you’re going to get the biggest bang for your buck. And so what I mean by that is always ensuring that you’re starting off your plans with talking about your goals, understanding what your objectives are, and really leaning into who it is that you’re targeting. Once you kind of get a sense of that, then you can put together a tactical plan. And what I mean by that is starting to choose some of the channels of which you want to have a presence in. So because you’re not a big brand, because you maybe don’t have a huge budget, you’re not able to kind of have that broad base reach that maybe some of the bigger guys can. And so you want to be able to think strategically and enact strategically, and so choose the channels that are going to be the best for your business.

Chris Cook (06:04):

I think one of the things that I see small real estate teams do, and I did it myself as well, so I’m not casting too much mud here. I did this and I see it as a pretty big mistake is not fully leveraging all the free stuff first.

Jen Aprile Cunningham (06:30):

Yeah.

Chris Cook (06:32):

Make sure that your business is taking advantage of all your sphere, all of your sphere’s, sphere. How do you build all of that out? Make sure that you’ve really rung that sponge all the way dry before you start looking for other marketing avenues that end up costing you money. And I’d love your comment on this. I’d love for you to comment on this. Do you think that a really well run marketing campaign makes anybody’s life that much easier,

Jen Aprile Cunningham (07:19):

Makes their life easier, a well run campaign

Chris Cook (07:23):

Like their business? Does it make their business easier? They wake up in the morning and they’ve got all kinds of clients that are ready to do business with them? Because I think this is the impression that people have is if I’ve got a really great marketing campaign, I can sit back and let the cash roll in. And I love that you laugh because I feel like it’s probably I got my answer right there.

Jen Aprile Cunningham (07:50):

Yeah, well I think the way that we would interpret it that is what you’re talking about is the push versus pull marketing. And the push marketing is when as a business you are pushing your message out and you are expecting that your audience is going to react to it. And there’s a number of things that go into that. But I think where you’re trying to go is where some brands, some influencers even that we’re seeing have this whole notion of poll marketing in that you put enough out into the market, the market starts to react to your content, reacts to your brand, and naturally comes back into your customer cycle so that you’re able to engage with them and perhaps keep them in your loop, maybe sell them on a different product, maybe sell them on a different thing that you’ve got coming out launching. So I think there’s a bit of a difference between a questionable kind of strategy. Does it make life easier? I’m not sure how to answer that question. I

Chris Cook (09:00):

Dunno. Probably no, I think probably no, because you still have to have inputs. I don’t think you can ever take your foot off of the pedal and even if you’re doing a push marketing, there’s still work that has to be done there to get the content to be relevant, to write blogs, to do all these things. Yeah,

Jen Aprile Cunningham (09:23):

I mean consistency is definitely king in marketing. Frequency is a bigger question. It’s a bigger question of today. I mean I think that we see today in the digital social realm that we live in, that there’s definitely a race from any brand, any company perspective to get their message out and get it out as fast as possible and as often as possible. If we go back to our original question or original focus on small businesses, that’s certainly not where I would ever suggest to put your efforts. To me, it’s not about frequency. It then really relies on consistency and just anytime that you are being out in the marketplace ensuring that your brand is consistent, your values are consistent, your message is consistent is going to be more important and more valuable to you than frequency.

Chris Cook (10:24):

And would you say from my perspective as you’re saying that, I know it’s very hard to stay consistent as an entrepreneur. It’s one of those things that a lot of us have shiny object syndrome, we all like to chase the next thing and keeping that consistency, I see that really as a key responsibility of the person that is overseeing your marketing to stop the CEO from blowing off brand and doing things that are going to disrupt that consistency.

Jen Aprile Cunningham (11:06):

Yeah, absolutely. I mean the way of which we think about that is recall. And so that’s often the name of the game, which is that when something in your field is being spoken about that what is recalled is your company name. And so what you want to do is be consistent in your messaging so that by the sixth, seventh, 10th time that someone is exposed to your company, you are top of mind. And then they do their efforts in terms of searching for you or finding you because they think of you when they think of taking that action.

Chris Cook (11:58):

Where I’ve personally gone in the last couple of years is to say let’s what we talked about, let’s go make sure that we are fully taking full advantage of our sphere. We’re taking full advantage of the free marketing bins. So let’s assume that we have, and we’re speaking to an agent that has regular open houses, some kind of local signage in the marketplace, like some for sale signs on front lawns. So they’re doing the open houses for that. They might be doing some circle prospecting around those open houses that they’re running. There’s some door knocking talking to neighbors.

(12:44):

They are connecting with their sphere on a regular basis. And that could be through email campaigns or phone calls or a combination of those things. And then I think the last thing, and it starts to venture outside of the free and into some of the paid is to start doing events for those people specifically. We’ve had a guest on here in the past, he is talked about spending 10% of what he makes on client events and client care and love and all the other sort of stuff he threats on his people. So let’s say that we have somebody that has gone through and they’re really taking full advantage of all those things and let’s also assume that they’ve taken the leap and they’ve hired somebody like yourself to oversee the strategy. Where’s the next logical step for a real estate agent to go at that

Jen Aprile Cunningham (13:49):

Point? So a lot of the tactics that you just mentioned are upper to mid funnel. And so when you’re thinking about where to go next to me, you always have to again rely back on your initial strategy and marketing plan and all of that has to be based on what are your goals and what it is that you’re trying to achieve. So it’s hard to answer the question based on the number of different tactics because it has to be related back to the specific goal. So when I think about upper funnel tactics, which are more event oriented, they are broad based awareness items to get you more exposure, more reached into different audiences. That is one objective of which there are a number of things that you can do to expose yourself. This is why I think some realtors put themselves on big billboards. It’s like huge audience, lots of viewership to say, this is my real estate company and call me at this number. That’s like one tactic you can do if that’s your bowls there. As you kind of work through the funnel and you kind of go into that mid layer, this is where you start to drive a lot more of that consideration and this is where your bowls and objectives should be related to that. So things like leave generation, things like more touch points and a callback or something to that regard. And there’s a number of tactics that fall in there.

Chris Cook (15:43):

I think one of the best answers, and I use it a lot when you’re dealing with a complicated topic like well, real estate or marketing or these other things, if somebody asks you a general high level question, you basically, I think if I was to boil down your answer, it would be say

Jen Aprile Cunningham (16:00):

It again.

Chris Cook (16:02):

It depends.

Jen Aprile Cunningham (16:04):

It all depends.

Chris Cook (16:04):

It depends what is it that you want to accomplish? And so we were talking about billboards versus mailers. There’s a lot of different tactics and different things, but you have to be strategic and it depends on what you want as an outcome. And that’s what I love about what you do is that it is very tactical and you do need to pay attention to the client, what the client’s trying to achieve and then build something that’s specifically for them. There are so many different avenues we can go down, and this is I think what causes a lot of people to have that video. Shiny object syndrome, oh, I’m going to invest in a new website with fancy SEO tags, and then I’m also going to put up a billboard and I’m going to do a farming campaign for 3000 houses. I’m going to do a magazine and an email campaign. It’s a lot of stuff that’s not very strategically put together, and I think that the result, I don’t think it, I know the result because I’ve been down this road, the result is no good result. The result is frustration and spent money on a bunch of stuff that maybe was inappropriately placed.

Jen Aprile Cunningham (17:43):

The

Chris Cook (17:43):

Timing of it, I think having you on here is like, I don’t want it to make it a list of things as like, don’t do this, don’t do that. Whatever you do, don’t sell here because it’s not the case. But the same way that your admin isn’t your marketing person, neither is the team leader. I don’t know that much about marketing. I’m actually a pretty poor marketer. No, you’re not really bad at it, but I’m pretty good at prospecting and there’s, I think a pretty big difference between those two

Jen Aprile Cunningham (18:27):

Things. I think if you were going to bring someone into your organization, have them understand the field of marketing and be able to speak the language of marketing so that you’re able to engage other vendors, other resources that are experts in the field, kind of like what we did. So not every person knows marketing talk to Tail, knows everything about it. We often rely on a number of different people to kind of fill out the expertise.

Chris Cook (19:02):

Actually, I mean, you sent us over to our website guy and SEO marketing, and one of the first things that we had to do was to actually niche out in our approach with our website. We had to talk specifically to the people that we wanted to target.

Jen Aprile Cunningham (19:24):

That’s right.

Chris Cook (19:25):

And it’s been really scary. Thanks for that.

Jen Aprile Cunningham (19:27):

But wait, can we talk about the exercise that we did?

Chris Cook (19:30):

Yeah,

Jen Aprile Cunningham (19:31):

Yeah. Well, we got there because we went back to basics and we started with the strategy and then we really honed in on the seller’s journey and we walked through a day in the life, a week in the life, a month in the life of a seller and all of the key milestones that they go through, the decisions that they have to make, the media that they’re using, the feelings that they’re having throughout the entire process. By doing that exercise, we were then able to understand where they were or where they are in different parts of the journey and then be able to look at your marketing and say, oh, we need to actually fine tune our website and have it act more as a tool so that when sellers come to your site, they’re able to clearly understand your capabilities, your services, and that there is a signup form immediately to accept any leads that come to your site so that you’re able to capture that and take that away. We also talked about your baseline SE to make sure that you were covered and being searchable, that your ranking was a little bit higher, so that when people in your demographic that we had identified, we had done that whole exercise on the target audience and where they were and who they are and the persona of the family that we wanted to go after. And by doing that, we were able to indicate how to reach them, where to reach them. And that informed the two tactics that you took away.

Chris Cook (21:21):

And I mean, what we ended up doing, it’s interesting because it wasn’t news to me. Yeah, you do. I knew that the most,

(21:34):

The people that are successful in any industry are the people that have specialized. I always use doctors for example, like a GP isn’t nearly as successful as a hip surgeon or a podiatrist in any industry. The people that specialize are the ones that are the most successful. And I find real estate’s interesting because I don’t think with the exception of commercial and residential, nope. There’s not a lot of specialization that ends up happening, especially on the residential side. I always see those billboards and park benches that say, buy, sell, invest. Call me for all your real estate needs and I want to, it’s terrible marketing. It basically says, yeah, I’m okay.

Jen Aprile Cunningham (22:30):

I mean, that’s your perspective. I would say from someone who’s been in the advertising business for quite a while. I mean, there are certainly key guidelines you want to have if you’re ever doing what we call at a home. So that’s an out of home placement. And typically you leverage what would be maybe more of your brand narrative or your value proposition or your unique identifier, what makes you stand out amongst all the other realtors that will be the place to put that message. And so we don’t often encourage putting your phone number up on a billboard because that would be something we would reserve for something a little bit lower down the funnel.

Chris Cook (23:17):

Sure. Yeah. I feel like the start of that was you saying, no, Chris, you’re wrong.

Jen Aprile Cunningham (23:26):

We had a healthy argument.

Chris Cook (23:30):

It’s not an argument. I think I already admitted that I don’t really know much about marketing, and that’s why I got you here is to share that information with people is like that I’ve made between our business being real estate and your business in marketing. And I think both industries, and it happens a lot I think in any industry where people oversimplify what it is, they don’t understand the complexities of it and how when it’s done, how powerful it can be. And that was the one thing that I really took away was the amount of research that you did on my business, how deep you went and the things that you looked at and what the competition was doing that was working for them. We take a look at some people in our market and we know who the agents are that are successful. I think for a lot of real estate agents, it’s a bit of a question mark, why is that person doing so well? Why do I see their signs everywhere? Why are they able to sit in front of so many opportunities? And I’m not, and that was the question that I asked you. I was, I feel like my value proposition is very good. I think I’m really good at my job, but I don’t get enough opportunity to sit in front of people that are ready

Jen Aprile Cunningham (25:17):

To

Chris Cook (25:18):

Hear what I have to say and ultimately choose me as their real estate agent. And it’s still, I don’t want to go too much onto the macro. You’ve instructed me and I’m trying to behave and not press you too much on this. I guess going back to that agent that’s doing 15 or 20 deals a year, let’s say, what is the timeline that they might be able to expect? I guess I’m trying to find the answer. For me, it’s probably different. My timelines 18 months to 24 months, I expect to start seeing some traction and some uptick. If I’m spending 15% of my GCI, I’m going to spend $15,000 a year on something. You and I talked before and you’re like, yeah, but you’re competing with space with people that are spending 15 million a year. It’s the same space, right? It’s

Jen Aprile Cunningham (26:32):

Certainly big. Yeah.

Chris Cook (26:35):

Well, maybe I tend to exaggerate.

Jen Aprile Cunningham (26:37):

Yeah. I think what is challenged challenging for realtors is that are often working in the sea of sameness. And so you’re all vying for the same tactics with a very similar message and a very similar offering with very similar services. And so to me in your field, it’s all about driving distinction and finding that unique element that helps you stand out in the marketplace and then being strategic about your plan. So putting yourself in front of your audience, whether it be sellers or buyers or whomever your goals are with, and ensuring that your unique message is being placed in front of them at the right time.

Chris Cook (27:32):

Am I frustrating you yet? Are you

Jen Aprile Cunningham (27:34):

Frustrated? I’m not frustrated? Do I see frustrated

Chris Cook (27:36):

You? I don’t think Chris gets it because that happens. And sometimes I feel like there are things that I don’t get, and I always like to surround myself with people that get it and fill in some of the blind spots. My admin, Olga, who I can’t do the stuff that she does, I can’t do what you do. I have to surround myself with most people. And sometimes I feel like when I’m asking questions, it’s simply legitimate. I am like a one or a zero kind of guy. I am like, no, Jen, tell me what the formula is. I want to know.

Jen Aprile Cunningham (28:31):

I think you’re often looking for the answer keep and marking and advertising are as an expertise. It is a test and learn type of thing. So you have to put something out into the market, study it, learn it, see how it performs, and then decide whether to do it again or not. And that’s kind of the starting of a marketing plan and how it starts to take shape for you to start to understand your audience, where they are, what they’re doing, and what performs best for your business. So you do, you often try to go to the results, but marketing often is, let’s try this, let’s try that, let’s see what works, and then garner the results from there.

Chris Cook (29:27):

Do you think that’s a difference in our businesses where real estate agents are very results driven? It’s like, no, you do this, you get that, and why? It’s maybe such a difficult thing for real estate agents to create something

Jen Aprile Cunningham (29:44):

That’s right, really works. I remember us having a lot of these conversations and you kind of thinking that, well, if I do x, I will receive that in return. And it’s not necessarily how it works. Marketing and advertising is definitely a long-term investment, and you have to look at it from that perspective. You’re building, you’re building something, you’re building your brand, you’re building your message, you are expressing your tone, voice, the values of your company, and from there gets translated into the many tactics that you can do that the audiences see and then react to. And you have to go from there.

Chris Cook (30:35):

I’m going to try not to tick you off at this question. You like, stop it. It’s the same. I know a lot of real estate agents do what we call r and d, rip off

Jen Aprile Cunningham (30:50):

And

Chris Cook (30:50):

Duplicate. Okay.

Jen Aprile Cunningham (30:51):

Yep, yep.

Chris Cook (30:53):

RD, it worked like a billboard. That billboard, that agent successful, they have a billboard that agent’s successful, they farm a neighborhood. How much do you think if somebody did that versus actually doing something that built their brand and built something, if you were to give me advice, you know me and let’s talk, we’ll use some of a real example. If I was like, no, no, Jen, we’re not going to bother with any of that. We’re going to put up a billboard and we’re going to pay for a neighborhood. What’s the long-term benefits of staying the course and building a proper marketing campaign that’s going to build the proper audience versus just doing the r and d?

Jen Aprile Cunningham (31:46):

So when we think about the attention span of audiences today, when we think about it in social media, oftentimes we’re talking about two seconds or less. As we were looking in the market around you and what other realtors were doing, most had that classic postcard that everybody was mailing out that was in the mail, and I must have collected a number of them. And we looked through them and they all had the phone number and all of the points and a nice picture of a house and a nice picture of the realtor. And comparatively they were all the same. And then that one postcard from that one realtor came through and they had decided to use a bigger size. And so it immediately caught my eye because it was irregular in my inbox. So then and there, just by doing something distinct was actually beneficial because I read it and then I realized, oh wow, this is from a realtor. And on that postcard, they had a very distinct call to action that was clearly their way of trying to establish a lead from me. I could be skeptical knowing some of these tactics, but it was very compelling in order for someone to say, oh, okay, I will reach out to this realtor because they’re able to give me a free consultation or something in return for their time.

Chris Cook (33:17):

Yeah, I think that’s the thing that’s missing from a lot of real estate marketing is that there’s no quid pro quo. You’re not offering me anything you’re pushing and not differentiating. I mean, that’s the one sort of takeaway and what scares the bejesus out of me about my own website is it basically says we only work with families. That’s what we specialize in, and you better be right.

Jen Aprile Cunningham (33:53):

I was like, but don’t you work with families?

Chris Cook (33:56):

Yeah, we sure, of course we do. And I always say, if you’ve ever helped a family move, it’s the hardest thing in the world. We’ve got kids and dogs and rats and dishes and furniture that’s been marked up and everything else. I can help anybody move. If you can help a family move, you can help anybody. It’s just the hardest. And I think our work with you really gave us the confidence to be able to take that leap and say, no, we’re going to be specialists here. This is what, this is where we want to focus our energy. And it’s scary. It’s scary to start to draw a line and say, this is what we want to do. But I truly believe that having a niche in residential real estate, some of the coaches that I’ve worked with have talked about this very, very intentionally, and very few people had done it both feet in and said, no, you know what? I’m going to do this. I knew this. I know her loosely, but this agent was an older agent. All she did was help doctors. If you weren’t a doctor, I’m good. She had a brisk business. Yeah. I think that’s what’s so cool about residential real estate in particular, is that there are all these opportunities to remove yourself from that sea of sameness to stop doing what everybody else is doing.

Jen Aprile Cunningham (35:40):

But let’s think about why we decided to go there for you because in some of our upfront strategic work, we found that there were certain credentials that sellers were looking for from the realtor and was part of their decision making process of why they would choose a seller. And if I recall, one of them was experience, experience and dedicated years as well as an understanding of the neighborhood, the specific neighborhood of which they’re selling. And so that’s why we thought, okay, let’s change up your strategy a little bit. Let’s change up your communications so that you’re being really clear that these particular neighborhoods, you’re very experienced in the field. And so that when a seller does to think of who they want to choose, because if you remember, I think wasn’t there one to four realtors as an option on the table at any given time that a seller could choose from? And so we thought of the one of four, we want to be the one.

Chris Cook (36:58):

Yeah. So there is, when you do sit at the table, you’re most likely in competition. They are thinking about somebody else. They have somebody that’s just as close to them are closer. I think I saw the numbers were almost 90,000 realtors in Ontario.

Jen Aprile Cunningham (37:19):

That’s right. Yes.

Chris Cook (37:21):

It’s hard to differentiate yourself and to show real value in a industry that is largely commoditized, can’t compete on price. I’ll find somebody that can, so then it becomes a value proposition and how do you put that out into the marketplace?

Jen Aprile Cunningham (37:41):

That’s right. And trust was a very big proponent of their decision-making. And then we know from a lot of our research that the perception of realtors, broadly speaking isn’t always as positive as we’d like it to be. And so you’re already working with people who don’t entirely trust the people at the table, and so you want to make sure that your website’s very clear in terms of your credentials and who you are and that you’re a trusted individual, the community, and you’re a good choice.

Chris Cook (38:24):

So let’s do this, Jen. Let’s engage the audience, the people that are subscribed and listening to the Mind your real estate business podcast and let’s say how many people would be interested in us going through the process of where do you start, what are the next steps, what’s important? How do you avoid going after that shiny object syndrome? All of these things are really, I think you’re right. I think that’d be a really great follow-up podcast. I already have a couple of follow-ups that I think is really important. There’s one where I want to follow an agent through their process of actually getting control of their business, not being as reactive, but doing a follow up with really specific of and where we could talk about it. We maybe can relive some of our own experiences of having worked together. I like that idea. What we can do is maybe put that on the calendar for early fall or even into the summer or something like that when things are a little quieter maybe for both of us and maybe plan our first longer form podcast where we can maybe talk for a little bit longer and then we can edit it and make it something that’s really concise.

Jen Aprile Cunningham (39:55):

Yeah,

Chris Cook (39:56):

I would love that.

Jen Aprile Cunningham (39:58):

Yeah. I think that would help bring focus and even I could come prepared with top five things to do so that you can snippet autonomize it as we say, and yeah.

Chris Cook (40:15):

Yeah, so we’re going to plan on that. We’ll plan on that for some time in maybe in August or September, but thank you for reminding me just how much, it depends what you’re trying to do. I think for me, that’s one of the biggest takeaways is there is no black and white, no, do this, do this, do this, and then the business will start flowing in. As much as I wish that was the case, and I know there’s probably about 10,000 other real estate agents out there that are frustrated and they wish that that was the answer and that they didn’t have to do this trial by error, test, repeat, change, adapt, improve, because we do want everything that we want it now, and so I think it leaves a lot of people doing the wrong stuff and maybe leaving before it starts to really start working. That’s my takeaway from my time with you, and I had that last time and you reminded me of that, where you’re like, let’s stop

Jen Aprile Cunningham (41:26):

It. It all starts with a good plan.

Chris Cook (41:28):

It’s not black and white. It’s very complex. There’s no right answer. It looks like there’s a couple of agents out there that have cracked the formula, but that’s their formula, not yours.

Jen Aprile Cunningham (41:40):

Exactly. That’s exactly it. And they would be reviewing that formula on a daily, weekly basis. They’re learning constantly on it. There is no set formula for any company and that nothing that stays stagnant throughout time, especially in the industry now and all the moving parts and all the variables and all the shifting economies and everything that’s happening right now. Nothing’s a constant.

Chris Cook (42:16):

That was my anxiety, but I’ll be okay. Thanks Jen.

Jen Aprile Cunningham (42:21):

Yeah. Okay. Amazing.

Chris Cook (42:30):

Here are the top three things I took from that great conversation with Jen first, strategy tactics second. It depends really became the MA mantra of that conversation. Jen reinforced that marketing is not a one size fits all, and it has to be grounded on clear goals. Number two, consistency over frequency. Jen drilled this into me. Consistency is king. As a business owner, I get shiny object syndrome all the time. I’m tempted to chase the next cool thing, but Jen emphasized the real trust and recall comes from showing up the same way again and again. Finally, specialization takes courage, but given time it works. The scariest thing I did was actually niche down. Jen gave me the confidence to plant my flag and say We work with families. That level of focus has helped us stand out in a sea of sameness. She reminded me that generalists rarely win in crowded industries like real estate, and that building a brand is about making hard choices, not trying to be everything to everyone.

(43:54):

If you like this podcast, please like and subscribe, tell a friend. We would love to be able to get some feedback as well about my next episode with Jen, which we’re aiming to bring out in August or early September, where we go through exactly what the process is to get started and what she would do with a brand new real estate agent. Well, I say brand new real estate agent, but somebody that is hitting that 200 K mark and looking to grow. Looking forward to your feedback on that. See you next time on Mind Your real Estate Business.