Managing people is a lot of work.

And if you’re a top-producing real estate agent, the lead on a real estate team, or a marketing manager at a brokerage, you’ve probably hired a marketing assistant to lighten the load.

I’m sure you quickly realized that you needed to train this person. And that doing this was going to take perhaps a bit more energy than you had hoped.

I have been on both sides here. I have been hired by single real estate agents, teams, and brokerages as a marketing professional. I have also hired contractors to help me with my work.

Hiring writers and designers to help me was truly a valuable learning experience. At the time, I was struggling to keep up with my workload, and I also thought I wanted to grow my business into a creative agency. I was lucky to have the opportunity to work with several different talented contractors over the years. Some of these contractors were still in college (yay English majors!), and some already had a few years of experience in marketing.

But no matter how much experience someone came to me with, I still needed to train them.

To be clear, these were incredibly smart and talented professionals (that’s why I hired them!). They were quick learners, had great ideas, and created excellent work.

But I still needed them to learn the specific way that I wanted things done (turns out I have a hard time letting go, heh). I needed to educate them on the nuances of real estate marketing (I could write a book about it! Maybe I will!). I also needed to provide constructive feedback so they could learn, grow, and eventually be able to create what I needed them to without my help.

At times, I bit off more than I could chew.

I was hiring people because I was so busy, and I needed to lighten my workload. But it turned out that needing to train these awesome folks took even more work. Sure, the investment would be worth it in the long run, but in the moment, I was drowning. At times, it truly felt like it would be easier to just do the work myself.

On the other side of things, I’ve also been the marketing professional who has been hired. I’ve had the chance to work with so many different real estate agents, each one with a different work style, personality, expertise, locality… and more. My decade in real estate marketing has been filled with learning, learning, learning—each new client is an opportunity for me to learn something new about how I can show up better and provide a tailored experience for my client.

One important thing I’ve learned along the way is that I can’t read my clients’ minds. I might get pretty good at it—especially after working with someone for several years—but ultimately I need their input and I need them to be some level of hands-on.

Since your marketing assistant can’t read your mind, what can you do to support them?
How can you invest in this person and both benefit from each other?

I’m so excited to pass on the knowledge I’ve gathered along the way, so you and your marketing assistant can have a productive, thriving, and creatively fulfilling work relationship.

Here are my tips for working with a real estate marketing assistant:

Have a standing meeting where you can give your marketing assistant your full attention.

This meeting should be at least once a week. It’s a time where you can sit down with your marketing assistant and just focus on marketing. In order to make the best use of your time, you both should come to the meeting prepared with a list of things you want to cover. Use this time to review content your marketing assistant needs input on, brainstorm new content together, get an understanding of what marketing is coming up, plan for next month, and more.

Take the time to provide constructive feedback.

Especially when your marketing assistant is new, you need to make sure you dedicate time to setting expectations and sharing feedback. Let them know what you like, and where you’d like to see things tweaked (and the reasons behind why). This feedback will help your marketing assistant get closer and closer to “reading your mind.”

From my vantage point, I always want constructive feedback along the way. For example, if I’ve created and published 10 blog posts for a client that they have approved, but on the 11th one they want me to change something I’ve been doing all along (turns out they don’t like listicles and all 10 blogs were listicles… ahhh!), it’s a bummer! I feel bad that I wasn’t doing what they wanted, but I also recognize I had no way of knowing since they didn’t offer feedback along the way. It’s not the end of the world, it’s a learning experience, but you can avoid things like this. (The listicle thing didn’t actually happen, btw, but… it could!)

Make sure you both understand what success looks like.

You and your marketing assistant should be on the same page when it comes to measuring success. Maybe to you, success is having your marketing assistant accomplish a set amount of tasks, and you’re just happy it gets done. Or maybe, success looks like a certain amount of website traffic or social media engagement that you can correlate to a certain number of transactions.

This goal can be adjusted, but you both need to be on the same page. I know that it can be challenging for me if a client feels like they’re not doing enough marketing or not getting their desired outcome if there is no clear picture of what that even looks like.

You can avoid this by having a clear line of communication from day one!