Estate agents are very good at doing things.
We’re decisive. Practical. Action-oriented. When something feels like it needs fixing, we roll our sleeves up and get on with it. That instinct has built businesses, won instructions, and kept the industry moving for decades.
But when it comes to marketing, that same instinct is often the thing that trips us up.
The most expensive marketing mistake estate agents keep making isn’t choosing the wrong platform or backing the wrong tactic. It’s starting with execution before stopping to ask whether that execution is actually pointed in the right direction.
Marketing activity is easy to generate. Marketing effectiveness is not.
Across the industry, marketing decisions are still overwhelmingly driven by momentum rather than understanding. A new channel gains traction, so agencies feel they should be on it. A competitor launches a campaign, so others follow. A supplier presents a compelling idea, so it gets signed off. Content gets created, posts go out, campaigns run - and everyone stays busy.
What’s often missing is certainty.
Without proper research and insight, there is no reliable way of knowing whether your marketing is speaking to the right people, in the right way, on the right channels. You might be visible, but visibility alone doesn’t guarantee relevance. You might be consistent, but consistency without direction simply reinforces the wrong message.
This is how marketing becomes expensive without ever feeling dramatic. Budgets get spent, time gets absorbed, energy gets drained - and the returns never quite justify the effort. When results don’t follow, the conclusion is rarely that the foundations were wrong. More often, the tactic gets blamed, the platform gets written off, or marketing itself gets quietly downgraded as something that “doesn’t really work”.
In reality, marketing hasn’t failed. It was never properly set up to succeed.
This is why we talk so often about structure at Unchained. Not because frameworks are fashionable, but because good marketing follows a logic. Miss a step, and everything that follows becomes harder than it needs to be.
The framework we use is called ISTAR: Insight, Strategy, Talent, Action, Results.
Everything starts with insight. Before deciding what to say, where to say it, or how often to show up, you need a clear understanding of who you are trying to reach. Not a vague sense of “our typical seller”, but a grounded view of the people who actually instruct you, what motivates them, what worries them, and how they behave when making decisions. Without that clarity, marketing defaults to assumptions, and assumptions are an expensive place to build from.
Insight on its own, though, doesn’t change anything. It has to inform strategy. Strategy is where insight turns into choices. Who are we prioritising? What do we want to be known for? Where should we focus our effort, and just as importantly, what are we prepared to ignore? A marketing strategy isn’t a list of channels or a content calendar. It’s a set of decisions that give execution meaning.
Then comes talent. This is the stage many agencies skip, usually unintentionally. Marketing plans fall apart not because the ideas are wrong, but because the people expected to deliver them don’t have the time, confidence, or support to do so properly. Being honest about capability - in-house and external - is uncomfortable, but essential. Execution without ownership is one of the quickest ways to waste good intent.
Only once insight, strategy, and talent are in place does action really make sense. At that point, execution stops being guesswork. Content has purpose. Channels are chosen deliberately. Consistency becomes an asset rather than a burden. The same level of effort suddenly produces very different outcomes.
Results, finally, close the loop. Not as a vanity exercise, but as a learning one. What resonated? What didn’t? What should be refined, stopped, or doubled down on? When results feed back into insight, marketing becomes a system rather than a series of disconnected bursts.
The reason starting with execution is so costly is that it masks the real problem. It keeps everyone moving while disconnecting effort from outcome. Over time, that erodes confidence - not just in marketing, but in decision-making more broadly.
None of this is about slowing businesses down for the sake of it. It’s about directing energy more intelligently. In a market where margins are tighter, attention is harder to earn, and customers are more selective, precision matters. Guesswork is a luxury the industry can no longer afford.
If there’s one useful question to sit with, it’s this: if you stopped all your marketing tomorrow and had to explain, clearly and confidently, who it’s for and why it should work - could you?
If the answer feels uncertain, that’s not a criticism. It’s an opportunity.
For those who want to sense-check how their current marketing stacks up against the ISTAR framework, we’ve created a free self-assessment quiz. It’s designed to highlight strengths, expose gaps, and bring a bit of clarity to where effort may be leaking out.
Because estate agency doesn’t need more marketing activity.
It needs better decisions - and those decisions start long before the first post goes live.