A seller called me from her home in Stillwater on a Saturday morning with a question that reflected something I find genuinely valuable in any seller I work with, which is the desire to understand what they are actually paying for before they commit to it.
She had been a homeowner for eleven years and had never sold before. She had heard the general idea that agents market homes and knew that this marketing was part of what the commission covered, but she had never looked closely at what modern real estate marketing actually involved. She had received a presentation from one agent who had talked about the MLS and photos and had left a brochure. She was not sure whether that was the extent of what agents did or whether there was meaningfully more.
“I want to understand what a good agent actually does to market a home today,” she told me. “I am not asking this to negotiate the commission down. I genuinely want to know what the work is so I can evaluate who is doing it well and who is just saying the right words.”
Her framing was excellent. Understanding what comprehensive modern home marketing actually involves is genuinely important for evaluating the difference between agents who market homes effectively and agents who go through the motions of marketing while doing the minimum that the basic listing process requires.
Here is the complete picture of what professional home marketing looks like in the current Minnesota market.
The Pre-Launch Phase: Everything Before the Listing Goes Live
The most significant marketing decisions a listing agent makes often happen before the home is ever visible to buyers, and the quality of the pre-launch work determines the trajectory of the listing from its very first moments on the market.
Strategic pricing is the foundation of everything else in the marketing process. A home that is priced correctly for its condition, its location, and the current market environment attracts the right buyers immediately and creates the competitive dynamic that produces strong offers. A home that is overpriced loses its initial market momentum, accumulates days on market, and often sells for less than it would have if it had been priced correctly from the beginning.
Pricing in Minnesota is informed by a comparative market analysis that evaluates recent sales of similar homes, current competing listings, and the specific features and condition of the subject property. The agent’s role is not to tell the seller what they want to hear about their home’s value but to provide an honest assessment that positions the home for the best possible outcome.
Professional staging consultation, which may involve a professional stager visiting the home or the agent providing specific guidance about how to present the home for maximum buyer appeal, is part of the preparation that good agents invest in before professional photos are taken. A home that has been properly edited, decluttered, and staged photographs and shows significantly better than one that has not, and the difference affects buyer perception at every subsequent stage of the marketing process.
Professional photography is the single most impactful investment in the marketing of a home and should be conducted by a professional real estate photographer, not by the agent with a smartphone. The photography session for a well-prepared home typically takes two to four hours and produces a set of images that will represent the home on every online platform, in every marketing material, and in every buyer’s memory of the property. The quality of these photos is the primary determinant of how the home performs in online search and first impressions.
The Coming Soon strategy, which involves entering the listing in NorthstarMLS with a Coming Soon designation before the Active listing date, allows the home to generate buyer interest and showing queue before it officially goes live. A well-executed Coming Soon campaign creates a pool of motivated buyers who are ready to see the home the moment it goes active, setting up the concentrated showing activity that produces competitive offers in the first days on market.
The MLS Listing: Quality, Not Just Presence
The MLS listing itself is not simply a data entry exercise. The quality of the listing determines how the home presents on every platform that pulls MLS data and is a direct reflection of the care and expertise the listing agent brings to the marketing function.
The listing description is one of the most underutilized marketing tools in real estate, because many agents write formulaic, jargon-heavy descriptions that communicate minimal useful information to buyers. A well-written listing description tells a story about the home that connects with the buyer’s imagination, highlights the specific features that make the property distinctive, and communicates the lifestyle the home enables rather than simply listing the number of bedrooms and the square footage.
The specific data fields in the MLS listing, including the categorization of features, the accurate representation of the home’s characteristics, and the complete and accurate entry of all relevant details, affect how the home appears in filtered searches and how buyers and buyer’s agents evaluate it against other listings.
The photo order in the MLS listing, specifically which photo appears first and serves as the listing thumbnail on every platform, affects the number of buyers who click through to see the full listing from search results pages. The thumbnail photo should always be the most compelling exterior or interior image that creates immediate buyer interest rather than defaulting to the front exterior photo if a more compelling image is available.
Active Digital Marketing: The Channels Beyond the MLS
The most significant distinction between comprehensive modern marketing and basic listing-and-hope marketing is what the agent does actively in the digital channels beyond the MLS feed.
Social media marketing is one of the most impactful active marketing channels available to listing agents, and the quality and reach of an agent’s social media presence varies enormously from agent to agent.
An agent with a strong social media following who shares high-quality listing content, including professional photos, video walkthroughs, neighborhood highlights, and compelling storytelling about the property, reaches an audience that the MLS feed alone does not touch. When followers share listing content with their networks, the exposure extends beyond the agent’s direct audience to a broader community that may include active buyers or people who know active buyers.
Paid social media advertising allows listing agents to invest in precisely targeted promotion of a specific listing to buyer audiences defined by location, demographics, and interests. A listing agent who allocates a specific paid advertising budget to each listing, targeting buyers searching in the relevant geography and price range, is reaching motivated buyers who may not have discovered the home through their MLS search alone.
Facebook and Instagram advertising for real estate listings can produce meaningful additional exposure at a relatively modest cost, and agents who make this investment for their listings are providing a genuine marketing enhancement over agents who rely entirely on organic MLS syndication.
Email marketing to a curated list of active buyer clients and buyer’s agents is another active marketing channel that good agents use systematically. An agent who maintains a database of buyers who are actively searching in the price range and area of a new listing and who sends a direct email notification to those buyers and their agents when the listing goes live is creating a targeted immediate audience that is more motivated than the general market.
Direct outreach to buyer’s agents who have recently shown or inquired about similar properties is a specific agent-to-agent marketing activity that can bring qualified buyers to a listing before it has even generated significant organic traffic. An agent who calls or emails buyer’s agents who have shown similar homes in the area and invites them to schedule early showings is actively cultivating buyer interest rather than waiting for it to emerge organically.
Video Marketing and Its Growing Importance
The role of video content in real estate marketing has grown substantially and continues to grow as buyer behavior shifts toward video as a primary medium for evaluating properties before scheduling in-person showings.
Listing video walkthroughs, which provide a moving tour through the home that gives buyers a sense of flow and spatial relationship that still photos cannot fully convey, are increasingly standard for homes in the middle and upper price ranges and are becoming more common across price ranges as the cost of video production decreases.
A good listing video is not simply a phone camera tour of the rooms. It is a produced piece of content that begins with an exterior establishing shot, moves through the home in a logical and appealing sequence, highlights the most compelling features with appropriate camera movement and framing, and concludes with an impression that leaves the viewer wanting to schedule a showing.
Drone footage is a specific form of video content that is particularly valuable for homes with distinctive site characteristics, including large lots, water views, proximity to parks or natural features, and neighborhood context that is meaningfully better understood from aerial perspective. A home on a lake in the Stillwater area, to use the seller’s location as an example, is dramatically better represented by drone footage that shows the water relationship, the lot, and the surrounding landscape than by ground-level photography alone.
YouTube distribution of listing videos creates discoverable content that appears in both YouTube searches and Google search results, extending the life and reach of the video beyond the immediate launch period.
Social media video content, including short-form video for Instagram Reels and Facebook video posts, reaches the growing percentage of buyers who engage with real estate content through these formats on their mobile devices.
Print and Physical Marketing: What Still Matters
The shift to digital marketing has not made all physical marketing irrelevant, and there are specific forms of physical marketing that continue to serve meaningful functions in the Minnesota market.
For Sale signage on the property itself is one of the most consistently effective marketing tools for generating neighborhood interest. Neighbors who see a For Sale sign on a property they have been curious about become aware of the listing and often tell friends and family who are looking to live in the neighborhood. The neighbor network is a genuinely meaningful source of buyer leads for properties in established neighborhoods where there is sustained demand from people who specifically want to live in that community.
Just Listed postcards sent to the surrounding neighborhood and to a broader list of potential buyers are a traditional marketing tool that maintains relevance because they reach people who may not be active online searchers but who would be interested in a specific property in a specific location.
Property feature sheets or brochures available at the home during showings give visiting buyers a physical takeaway that reminds them of the home’s specific features and contact information after they leave. For buyers who are viewing multiple properties in a day, the physical reminder can be the difference between being remembered and being forgotten.
Open Houses as a Marketing Tool
Open houses are a specific marketing event that serves several purposes in the overall marketing strategy, and their role is addressed in detail in the next article in this series. For the purposes of this article, it is worth noting that open houses represent an active marketing effort that brings potential buyers to the property in a structured environment and that generates showing traffic beyond what the online platforms produce on their own.
The Agent Network and Referral Marketing
An often underappreciated component of professional home marketing is the listing agent’s relationships with other agents and their ability to leverage those relationships to bring buyer clients to the property.
An agent who has been active in the Minnesota market for several years has developed professional relationships with buyer’s agents throughout the Twin Cities and surrounding areas. When that agent has a new listing, they have the ability to personally notify buyer’s agents they know who represent buyers looking for that type of property. This direct agent-to-agent communication is marketing that no platform can replicate because it is built on personal professional relationship and trust.
Networking at real estate industry events, participation in agent caravans that allow buyer’s agents to preview listings before showings open to the public, and active engagement in brokerage and association networks all contribute to the professional visibility that makes an experienced listing agent more than just a data entry service for the MLS.
Measuring and Adjusting: The Active Management of a Listing
Marketing a home effectively is not a one-time event at launch. It is an ongoing process of measuring how the listing is performing and adjusting the strategy when the initial results indicate that changes are needed.
Monitoring the online listing statistics including views, saves, and clicks on the major platforms provides data about how much buyer interest the listing is generating. High views with low showing requests suggest that buyers are interested but something in the listing presentation is preventing them from taking the next step, which may indicate a pricing issue or a presentation quality issue that can be addressed.
Monitoring showing traffic and showing feedback provides real-time market intelligence about how the home is being received by buyers who have seen it in person. Consistent feedback about a specific concern, whether price, condition, odor, noise, or any other factor, is actionable market data that the listing agent should be sharing with the seller and discussing in the context of whether adjustments are warranted.
Days on market is a specific metric that affects how the home is perceived in the market. A listing that accumulates days on market without offers is increasingly perceived by buyers as problematic, and the listing agent’s ability to identify and address the cause of the stagnation before it becomes significant is a genuine marketing management skill.
Common Mistakes Sellers Make When Evaluating Agent Marketing
Accepting vague descriptions of marketing activity without asking for specific details about what the agent will actually do, how often they will do it, and what their track record with these activities looks like.
Evaluating marketing plans without asking specifically about the agent’s own buyer client database and how they will use it to expose the listing to motivated buyers directly.
Not asking to see examples of the agent’s previous listings on Zillow and social media to evaluate the actual quality of their listing presentations before committing.
Assuming that all agents provide professional photography when some still use smartphone photos for listings.
Practical Tips for Minnesota Sellers
Ask every agent you interview to walk you through their complete marketing plan in specific detail, including pre-launch preparation, MLS entry quality, social media strategy, email marketing, video content, and open house approach.
Search for the agent’s current and recent listings online and evaluate the photo quality, description quality, and social media content quality as evidence of how your home will be marketed.
Ask specifically about the agent’s own buyer client database and how they will notify active buyers who match your home’s profile.
Request references from sellers whose homes the agent has listed within the past year and ask those sellers specifically about the marketing activity they observed throughout the listing period.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much should an agent spend on marketing my home?
There is no universal answer, but professional photography, MLS listing preparation, and active social media marketing are baseline expectations. Some agents include paid social media advertising in their marketing budget. For homes in higher price ranges, investments in video production, drone footage, and premium listing formats on Zillow are appropriate marketing expenditures.
Is social media marketing actually effective for selling homes?
Yes, particularly for generating buyer awareness in specific geographic and demographic audiences. Social media marketing does not replace MLS exposure but supplements it with targeted reach to buyers who may not have discovered the home through their standard MLS search.
What is an agent caravan and does it help sell my home?
An agent caravan is an organized tour of new listings for buyer’s agents before the listings open to the general public. Not all brokerages conduct caravans, but where they are available they provide an opportunity for buyer’s agents to preview the home and identify it for clients who are searching in that price range.
Final Thoughts
The seller in Stillwater left our conversation with a clear and specific picture of what comprehensive modern home marketing actually involves. She was able to evaluate the two presentations she had already received with new clarity and recognized that one of the agents had described only the minimum baseline while the other had described a more complete marketing approach.
She chose the agent whose marketing plan included professional photography, a Coming Soon strategy, active social media marketing with a paid advertising budget, direct email notification to buyer clients, and a video walkthrough for her home’s lakeside lot.
Her home listed on a Wednesday morning and received nine showings in the first four days. She accepted an offer above list price at the end of the first week.
The marketing worked because the agent who won the listing understood what modern marketing required and delivered it from the first day the home was visible to buyers.
Understanding what to ask for is what makes choosing the right agent possible.
Lesley The Realtor provides every Minnesota seller with the complete, professional marketing approach that the home deserves, with transparent communication about every channel being used throughout the listing period.
Visit https://sell.dreamhomesminnesota.com/ to start the conversation.