Stop Picking Channels. Start Influencing Thinking.

A masterclass in the fundamental basics of modern marketing

Range Rover has a commercial where someone drives up a massive flight of stairs at a countryside estate to go fetch a dog’s ball. It’s completely absurd. You are never going to drive your SUV up a staircase. You’re never going to ford a river or tear across the Sahara Desert. But that’s not what they’re selling you. They’re priming you to associate Range Rover with big houses, legacy, and the version of yourself you want to become. So you go spend $150,000 on a car you’ll drive in traffic at 15 miles an hour, right next to cars that cost a fraction of what you paid, and it doesn’t matter. Because it delivers a feeling that the cheaper car never could.

That is a psychological masterpiece. And it has nothing to do with which channel the ad ran on.

I think the single biggest mistake real estate agents make with their marketing is starting with the channel. “We should send an email.” “We need to be on Instagram.” “Let’s run some Google ads.” If you think in channels right off the bat, you’ve already lost. Because a channel is only a means of delivering a message. The message is what’s important, not the channel.

Marketing is influencing thinking

Here’s my definition, and I’ll die on this hill: marketing is influencing thinking through written or spoken word. That’s it.

Most people would say marketing is about influencing behavior. Getting someone to click, to call, to fill out a form. And yes, that’s the end goal. But behavior is the outcome, not the starting point. In order for someone to open a door, a thought has to occur that tells them “I need to open this door.” And the better, more powerful version of that thought is “I want to open this door.” 

There’s a massive difference between needs and wants. People need shoes to walk. Could be $10 shoes, could be $2,000 shoes. People want Jordans. People want Louboutins. Why? Because something occurred in their brain that told them “I become a different person when I put these on.” That’s where marketing actually lives. It lives in the mind.

So when you’re developing a strategy for a marketing campaign, whether it’s for your listings, your personal brand, or your sphere of influence outreach, you should start with one question: what is the thinking I want to influence?

Because once someone thinks something, they act on it. And if you’ve influenced the right thinking, you’ve also set an expectation of what’s going to happen next. That expectation is what fuels wanting. I want this because in my head, when I click this button, when I meet this agent, when I walk into this open house, I already know what I’m going to get. You’ve pre-sold the experience before it even happens.

Work backwards from the behavior you want

Once you know the thinking you want to influence, then you figure out the behavior you’re trying to achieve. Maybe it’s getting someone to open an email. Maybe it’s getting them to click on an ad. Maybe it’s getting them to fill out a form on your website. That’s your end destination.

Now work backwards. What’s the most efficient and effective path to taking someone from where they are right now all the way to that desired behavior? What’s the sequence of thinking you need to influence along the way?

This is where you’ll start to realize that certain messages actually belong in certain places. Maybe step one, the initial thought you need someone to have before anything else can happen, is perfect for a text message. Short, personal, direct. 

Then step two might be an email that builds on that thought with more detail. And maybe you have ads running in the background that, if someone happens to see them, will trigger and reinforce what they already received yesterday. 

You start to architect a story across touchpoints, and the channels become servants of the narrative instead of the other way around.

This is how a real marketing strategy works. It’s rooted in influencing a sequence of thinking that leads people to wanting to take the action you’ve designed for them. Some would call that end point a value proposition. I’d call it giving someone a reason to do something, which is a lot simpler than most people make it.

Peter Drucker, the business philosopher, said something decades ago that I think about constantly: the entire purpose of marketing is to make the concept of selling irrelevant. If your marketing is doing its job, you should never have to sell anyone on anything because they already want it. 

They’ve already done the thinking. They’ve already arrived at the conclusion you designed for them. And that’s the real test of whether your strategy is working. If you still feel like you’re convincing people at the end of the journey, you didn’t influence the right thinking at the beginning.

Become the most biased version of yourself

Here’s where consumer behavior gets interesting, and where most agents completely miss the mark. If you want to understand how your prospects are going to experience your marketing, you have to become the most biased version of yourself possible. You have to live in that reality. 

Because your clients aren’t analyzing your ad with a strategic lens. They’re not thinking about how long it took you to write that caption. They’re scrolling Instagram because they wanted to see what their friends are doing. They’re death scrolling into purgatory. So why should they stop on your ad?

Ask yourself that honestly. If you were scrolling with the expectation of seeing your friend’s latest vacation photos, would you stop on your own ad? If the answer is no, don’t publish it.

People are wildly irrational. They write two-star reviews of a product because shipping took too long, even though the product itself was exactly what they wanted. That’s consumer behavior. And in a massively life-changing, emotional purchase like real estate, everything is on steroids. 

People are going to get upset about things that make absolutely no sense to you. If you can’t put yourself in that headspace, your marketing will always feel like it was made by someone who’s never been on the receiving end of it.

The same principle applies to paid search. When someone types “best agents in Nashville” into Google and sees your ad alongside three or four others, you have a tiny amount of real estate (pun intended) to capture their attention. Don’t operate in a vacuum. Don’t assume they’re only going to see yours. Have a clear hypothesis for why your specific words are going to earn their click over everyone else’s.

Root everything in a hypothesis

This is the part that separates agents who say “ads don’t work for me” from agents who are consistently generating business through advertising. It’s fifth grade scientific method, and almost nobody does it.

Before you publish any ad, any email, any piece of content, write down your hypothesis. I think by doing X, Y will occur, because of this reason. I think by showing a photo of me hanging upside down from a tree in front of a listing, people will stop scrolling, because it’s visually unexpected and interrupts the pattern of what they’re used to seeing. That’s an ad concept rooted in a theory.

When it works, you know exactly why. You can take that insight and apply it to your next campaign, your social ads, your email subject lines. When it doesn’t work, you also know why, and you cross it off the list. You don’t repeat the same mistake and you don’t throw in the towel thinking advertising is broken. Your advertising was broken because it wasn’t rooted in a reason.

David Ogilvy, the godfather of advertising, said it as simply as anyone ever has: advertising has two jobs. First, capture attention. Second, convert that attention into enough interest to act. That’s it. If you can’t articulate why you think your ad will accomplish job one, you haven’t earned the right to expect job two.

And this applies to your CRM outreach just as much as it applies to your paid campaigns. When a smart CRM like ours surfaces someone in your network who just got a new job or just hit a life milestone, that’s a signal. But just because you can move fast doesn’t mean you should. Think about the relationship. Think about the last interaction you had with that person. 

Hyper-personalize the message in a way that feels organic and human, because every touch point is its own little marketing journey with a desired outcome. If the desired outcome is a coffee meeting, you shouldn’t be selling them on that in the first message. You should be influencing the thinking that makes them want to say yes on their own.

Give yourself permission to fail

The agents who figure this out and commit to treating their marketing like a series of experiments, with real hypotheses, real measurement, and real learning, are the ones who are going to crush it as these tools get smarter and competition gets tighter. Because they’ll have a library of data points about what works for their specific audience that nobody else can replicate.

Remove your ego from the equation. Just like a scientist, you’re trying to find the truth about what captures your market’s attention. Most of your best ideas are going to fail horribly, and that’s fine. A failed experiment with a documented hypothesis is worth ten times more than a successful accident you can’t repeat.

So before you open up your ad platform or draft your next email campaign, put the channels aside. Start with the mind. What do you want them to think? Work backwards from there, and I promise you’ll build something that actually moves people.