Your Magical Marketers era starts now. (Yes, we’re trying out names for you, our beloved listeners. No, we haven’t nailed it yet, but we ARE nailing the marketing advice we’re offering in this episode!)

We’re digging even deeper into our 2026 marketing predictions with specific, actionable steps you can take if you want to get ahead and kick off the new year with your best marketing yet. From lifestyle marketing that inspires homeownership to ditching dupe photos for real moments only you can capture, this one’s all about taking messy action.

Set your timer, pick ONE thing, and just go for it!

Social Media is Now Interest Media: How to Make People Actually Want to Follow You

Chelsea said it perfectly:

“The last 10 posts I saved had nothing to do with anything except hosting ideas. And it was no one telling me three steps to hosting a party. It was like, how I hosted this girly Nutcracker theme party or whatever. It had nothing to do with teaching. It was bringing me along and showing me what they did that then inspires me.”

Social media is now interest media.

People are consuming information they’re currently interested in. And if you’re only posting about real estate, you’re missing most of your audience.

Think about it. There’s a good chance that your friends and family who follow you are no longer seeing your stuff. Not because they don’t care about you, but because you haven’t posted things they’re interested in, so your content doesn’t appear in their feeds.

That’s why we always talk about the content cocktail: mixing real estate with something local and something personal. As you layer local and personal details throughout your content, your followers will see more of your stuff. Not just because you’re their friend, but because you’re posting about things in their city, things they’re interested in, and things they engage with.

Here’s a good brainstorming exercise: Draw two circles that intersect, like a Venn diagram. In one circle, describe your ideal follower. Who would you love to follow you? If you had 500 perfect-fit followers who could hire you or refer you, what would they be like? They’re fun. They live in lake country. They have kids the same age. Whatever feels right to you.

In your circle, put things you like to do, talk about, and real estate topics. Then look at what intersects. That intersection is your content gold mine!

Your 24-Hour Action Step: Start with your stories. Document the drink you pick up on the way to a showing, your go-to meal after a closing, the TV show you love to binge after showing houses all day… You get it.

Just take a photo of you doing that thing and add text to your stories. That’s building interest media.

Consistency Beats Constant Reinvention: Pick ONE Thing and Repeat It

Let’s get one thing straight: consistency doesn’t mean doing a huge brand overhaul. It’s not about making everything look perfectly cohesive.

The realistic and sustainable way to be consistent is to choose one thing at a time.

Maybe it’s one color that you either wear consistently or tie into your graphics. If you’re in your car sharing what a client asked you, and you’re also wearing an on-brand color or you always wear really big sunglasses or you’re handing food in the backseat to your toddler, people start to build more interest in that.

Kayla said something that’s so true:

“I will watch someone unload their groceries as they’re sharing a story. And even if I don’t even really know who they are, I’ve always been like, what’d they buy from the grocery store? Like, what did they get? It builds curiosity.”

When you repeat that thing, people will keep seeing you and they may ignore the first 10 times they see you, but then they keep seeing you and it looks familiar. They’re eventually going to be like, wait, what is she saying? Or let me stop and listen to this.

There’s someone Chelsea follows who always does outfit try-ons, but she always starts with this black and white striped robe. It’s a visual cue that when you see the robe, you know she’s going to show you an outfit. That’s branding at its simplest form.

A Real-Life Example: Check out @lakiiisha_ on Instagram. She films in her car all the time. Every day it’s just one little text block with one thought for the day. Every time you see her in your feed, you recognize her car.

Your 24-Hour Action Step: Pick ONE of these three things and start there: a visual anchor like a color, a ritual like lighting a candle or pouring your coffee, or a topic you like talking about that you can start repeating.

Episodic Content and Journey-Style Series: Your New Bingeable Strategy

If you want to know the real secret to standing out in 2026, it’s this: episodic content and journey-style content.

Episodic content is consistently sharing the same series. Ellie Sue Barrows does “what the cool girls are wearing.” Lily Walters does “how to be cooler than your friends.”

For real estate agents, it could be “what the lake country buyers are looking for” where you share different features your clients are wanting. Or “what the lake country sellers are doing to get their home ready for the market.”

Think about human nature. Your neighbor’s house goes up for sale, and you instantly want to know how much it is. A series about that topic would be gold!

Journey-style content takes people along for the ride. Katie Buchholz does “thrifting things while we build our dream home.” Another creator does “resetting my life in X weeks.”

As a real estate agent, you could do “getting to know my city as a tourist” or “checking out all the places I’ve never been in city name.” Literally just go into these places you drive by all the time but have never stepped into, and let people know what it’s like.

You can also do this with your actual clients. “I’m trying to help 15 first-time home buyers in city name.” Or “I just met with my first first-time home buyer on Zoom. Here’s a couple of the questions they asked me.”

Stef Anderson does “day one of 16 holiday morning routine” and calls it a “little luxuries advent calendar.”

You could do “day one of 16, helping city name locals become homeowners.” Show little parts of your day and what you do to help your buyers. Even if you don’t have any buyers, walk through the process. What would you do if a buyer reached out right now? Those are your new B-roll clips to take.

Pro Tip: Stop looking at other real estate agents for inspiration. Look at lifestyle creators in other spaces. You’re not trying to become an influencer, but you are an influencer — influencing people to buy real estate where you live, learn about the market, find value in home ownership.

Worried About Commitment? Make it seasonal. Do “episode one of 10” of helping homeowners prep for the spring market. There’s a deadline. Come spring, you stop. It gives you an out without feeling like you’re a quitter.

And you can do more than one series. Every week, add one thing from one series, then next week add something to the next one. Make it sustainable.

Your 24-Hour Action Step: Pick one series idea and try it out!

Lifestyle Marketing: Paint the Picture of What Homeownership Really Feels Like

Show what home ownership actually looks like, not just the champagne on closing day, but the everyday magic.

Document when you turn on your fireplace and turn on a show. Eating dinner around the table. Helping your kids with homework. Having friends over. Whatever it is, just document. And when we say document, we mean literally take a 10-second clip. This doesn’t have to be a film production!

Kayla shared:

“There’s a couple spots in my house, which is so funny because our house is not like anything special. But guess what? Most people’s houses really aren’t. But there are certain spots in our home where the way that the light shines through or in the morning, our living room, the way the sun comes up, it is just gold. It’s the most cozy place to be for like 30 minutes every morning.”

Chelsea shared how she loves features in her own home that she never would have planned:

“We have a room right off of our living room that we made Henry’s playroom. I can sit on the couch and see into it. Now if we’re ready to build, I would probably put that feature somehow in our new house because it just works really well.”

There’s a listing video Chelsea saw that was the best she’s ever seen. Someone’s walking up to the house, and then the girl daydreams. In between, they flip to her envisioning herself in this house. Her friends are coming in, they’re pouring wine, and they have pizza, they’re in the backyard, in the kitchen, playing games.

It was for a $2 million house, but you weren’t even really focused on the house. You were more focused on the lifestyle. Look, they have room for playing cards with their friends. Look at the backyard with string lights. You could do “what I meant when I said I wanted blank” with your own house or your listings.

Your 24-Hour Action Step: Document one lifestyle moment from your own home today, just a 10-second clip. Share it in your stories with text like “this is what I meant when I said I wanted natural light” or “Monday mornings in our home.”

Stop Using Dupe Photos and Start Taking Your Own Content

Every agent out there is using Dupe photos, so if you want to actually make your content stand out in 2026, you need to take your own photos.

You don’t have to be an incredible photographer. You just have to be willing to suck at it for a little bit when you first start.

Use Dupe photos or any photos you see on the internet as inspiration, and recreate them.

When you see a drink on a table next to a notebook and a laptop with keys, do that. Literally put your stuff in those same positions and take that photo. When you see photos on Dupe of a person, recreate that. Stand in a similar position. Use the angle they’ve got. Get in the practice of recreating instead of just downloading.

There’s a reason we all gravitate to Dupe photos: they look like they’re authentic photos from anyone’s iPhone camera roll. What’s amazing is you have an iPhone. You have the ability to do the exact same thing!

So instead of using someone else’s photos, take your own so they build your brand. Because if we’re using Dupe photos, we’re not building a brand. It’s kind of disappointing seeing a really good carousel post like “you’re not just buying a house” and all the photos are Dupe photos. It would be so much better to see you in your living room, you on your front porch with a coffee, your house or your car or your outfit or your dog.

Your 24-Hour Action Step: Pick five photos from Dupe or Instagram that you like. Download them for inspiration. Then recreate at least one of them today.

ChatGPT-Coded Content: Use AI to Enhance, Not Replace

We use ChatGPT every single day but NOT to write our content. We don’t use it to say “write a caption for this” because people can sniff it out a mile away.

Use ChatGPT to enhance what you’re already doing, not to replace you doing it. You can use it to save time by having it analyze data or identify patterns in your analytics. Chelsea saves meeting chat summaries from trainings at Modern Agent, then asks: what were the top questions? What are people’s biggest hurdles? It gives you so much data without sifting through it yourself.

But using it to say “write me real estate content ideas” and then it asks, “oh great, these are such good ideas. Do you want me to write eight posts for you too?” And you’re like, “great, this is so good.” But no it isn’t!

Use it to think of metaphors. If you have a story, you can put it into ChatGPT and say, “how can I compare this to buying a home for the first time?”

Kayla shared a story about a Christmas cactus that wasn’t blooming. Then she took it out of a room with too much natural light, put it in a darker room, and that’s when it started to bloom. She could have put that in ChatGPT and said, “give me 10 lessons that someone could learn from this.” Then she could say, “I like these two. Help me write an email that would explain that.”

But, no matter what, we don’t want to copy and paste from it and just publish. We don’t want to use it word-for-word or let it become us on social media. If our content is robot-generated, no one will want to consume it.

Your 24-Hour Action Step: Think of one story from your life, something that happened recently. Put it into ChatGPT and ask it to give you 10 ways you could relate that story to real estate. Pick one metaphor you like and use it in a post or email this week. But write it yourself. Let ChatGPT give you the idea, then you make it yours!

Remember: Choose One Thing

Pick one thing from any of these categories and do it in the next 24 hours. We’re not telling you to do one thing from each category. Pick ONE thing that you’re going to do, and then you can always come back to this episode and try another one.

The agents winning in 2026 aren’t the ones with perfect content plans. They’re the ones who started before they felt ready and got better as they went.

So set your timer. Pick your thing. And just go for it!

This episode was edited by Adrienne Cruz.