Hi Reader,

Two weeks ago I was in Boston for HubSpot's Unbound, standing by a coffee cart with two marketing coworkers I almost never see, because we work remote and all live in different states.

We were doing the thing you do at a conference. Scrolling the agenda, deciding how we'd divide and conquer the sessions.

Every session was about AI.

I write about AI. I build with it every day. And I could not make myself walk into one more room to hear what it means for marketing.

So I picked the only session on the list that wasn't about it. "Why Weird Works," given by Beth Dunn. It was the best hour of the week.

One of her examples was Liquid Death. The canned water, sold in a tallboy that looks like cheap beer, branded like a metal band.

The idea came from musicians. If you fill a beer can with water onstage, nobody asks you about it.

So the product isn't water. It's water plus never having to explain yourself.

Then Dunn put up the part I hadn't thought about.

Being different costs you something. In the research she walked through, people who broke the norm got read as more creative and less competent at the same time. The second one is what loses the deal.

Unless they also came across as warm. Kind, decent, and actually interested in you. Then the competence penalty vanished.

Different gets you noticed. Warm gets you believed. Neither one works alone.

Which explains why every agent's marketing looks like every other agent's marketing. It isn't laziness. Standing out feels unprofessional, and looking unprofessional feels expensive.

That instinct is half right. The half it gets wrong is the half costing you listings.

The Thing They Shouldn't Have to Explain

Dunn's last line was that your weird has to be about the people you're trying to help. So the question isn't how do I stand out. It's "what is my person bracing for?"

Liquid Death sells to people who don't want to drink and are tired of being asked why.

Yours are bracing for something too.

The first-time buyer who thinks her question is stupid, so she never asks it.

The seller who won't let you in the house until he's cleaned it, and he's been meaning to clean it since March.

The couple eight months out who think that makes them a waste of your time.

Pick the one you see most. Say it out loud in your marketing.

Not louder. Not funnier. One sentence that tells a specific person you already know what they were maybe about to apologize for.

Open the last marketing piece you created. Your newsletter, a listing post, your bio.

Ask one question. Could another agent in your market put their name on this and change nothing?

If yes, it isn't a copy problem. You're writing for everybody, which is the same as writing for nobody in particular.

Pick a side instead. Write for the downsizer dreading the stairs conversation. You'll lose the people who were never going to call you anyway.

We wrote up ten ways agents actually do this: 10 Real Estate Branding Strategies for Agents​

While Unbound was incredible, the time I spent not just with my RealScout coworkers but networking with other marketers around the country mattered more than most of the sessions.

That one you can't automate.

And if you want a deep dive on how to create that warmth in your marketing, I highly recommend the book The Charisma Myth.

Alice

P.S. Most people who have RealScout use it for alerts and nothing else. Chase Whitney is walking through the rest of it on Tuesday, October 6, at 10 am PT. It includes turning a Follow Up Boss call transcript into a finished search in under two minutes. This is a Real Estate Collective event, not ours. Grab your seat on their site. ​

The Heist · Marketing playbooks for real estate agents, stolen from every industry except this one.

​
​Unsubscribe · Preferences​