TLDR: Our brokerage spent two years building marketing that reliably produced buyers, then realized the thing we were short of was property to show them. The strategic marketing fix was not a bigger budget or a cleverer funnel. It was working out which side of the business was actually scarce and pointing the content there. Any company with two audiences, one that pays and one that supplies, is exposed to the same mistake.
It was a Saturday in June, and the office in Marrakech had that heavy afternoon stillness where the fan moves the air without cooling it. I had a spreadsheet open with forty-one inquiries from the previous three weeks. Real ones. People with real budgets and a reason to be in Marrakech that month.
Our head of sales was on the phone with a family from Dubai, working with a $1.2M (AED 4.4M) budget, who wanted a four-bedroom villa with a pool inside walking distance of a golf course, ready by the fall.
We had two properties on our books that fit. One was under offer. I remember the specific feeling of watching demand we had spent two years building arrive at a shelf that was almost empty.
A four-bedroom villa with a pool and garden, the kind of listing our buyers kept asking for and we did not have enough of. Photo: Shawn on Unsplash.
The Marketing That Worked Too Well
For those two years, every piece of marketing we made pointed at buyers. Neighborhood guides. Photography that showed the light in a courtyard at four in the afternoon. Phone-shot walkthroughs, because the polished films felt staged. Pages answering the questions a foreigner asks before wiring money into Morocco.
It worked. Inquiries roughly tripled over eight quarters while the cost per qualified inquiry fell by about half. My monthly reporting looked like the reporting of somebody doing a good job.
Nobody in the room, including me, had asked the more uncomfortable question. Everyone wanted to know whether we were pulling in enough buyers. No one asked what would happen the month we pulled in too many.
In a brokerage, the product is a signed mandate from an owner. Buyers are demand. Listings are supply. We had built an engine that only ever pressed one pedal, and we had done it because buyer marketing is easier to write and far more flattering to report on.
Every Small Business Has a Scarce Side
This is the part that transfers well beyond property.
A recruitment firm needs candidates and clients. A specialist contractor needs jobs and skilled crews. A logistics broker needs freight and trucks. An accounting firm needs clients and qualified staff. In each of those businesses, one side is the constraint in any given quarter, and it is almost never the side the marketing budget is pointed at.
The reason is human. Demand marketing is the visible kind. It produces a number your finance lead recognizes. Supply marketing is quieter and much harder to attribute, so it never wins the internal argument on the day the budget is set.
We had a version of this written into our own reporting. My dashboard tracked inquiries, cost per inquiry, inquiry-to-viewing rate, and viewing-to-offer rate. It did not have a single line for how many owners had contacted us about selling. That absence was the whole problem, and I had built the dashboard.
What the Search Data Said About Owners
The correction started with a boring exercise. I pulled the search demand for both sides of our market and put them next to each other.
Buyer-intent terms in our category were fat and expensive. Everyone in Marrakech real estate was writing for them, and the pages were interchangeable.
Owner-intent terms were a fraction of the volume. People searching how a villa in Marrakech gets valued, what a foreign owner pays in tax on a sale, whether to sell in the spring season or wait, how long a high-end property actually takes to move. Small numbers. Almost no competition. And every single one of those searches came from a person who might hand us a mandate worth more than fifty buyer inquiries.
That gap between competitive noise and commercial value is what keyword research is genuinely good for. Ahrefs makes the same point in its beginner’s guide to keyword research, where search volume is treated as one input among several and business potential decides which queries are actually worth writing for.
Owner behavior points the same way in markets nothing like ours. The National Association of Realtors has run its annual profile of home buyers and sellers since 1981, and the current edition describes a US market with tight inventory where homeowners sit and watch their equity grow while they decide what to do with it. That is the shape of the thing. Owners are not browsing every week the way buyers are. They think about selling quietly for months, then act in a few days. If you were invisible during the months, you are not in the room on the day.
Strategic Marketing Means Feeding the Constraint
The budget never moved. It sat at roughly $4,000 a month throughout. We moved roughly 60 percent of the content effort from the buyer side to the owner side and left the paid spend alone.
What changed in practice:
- Every buyer-facing property page got a short, honest section written for the person who owns the house next door, explaining what we do when an owner asks us to sell.
- We built a valuation explainer that answered what an owner wants to know before they call anyone, starting with how a property in this market actually gets priced.
- Our follow-up sequence for owners stretched to eighteen months, because an owner who is “thinking about it” in March is often signing in the fall of the following year.
- We stopped reporting inquiries as one number and split the dashboard in two, buyer and owner, so nobody could hide a supply shortage behind a demand headline.
Within a quarter, the most-read page on our site was the advisory work we do with property owners, written for owners weighing a resale and for investors sizing up a cross-border portfolio. It outdrew every villa listing we had. Four signed mandates have come through it since. The buyer pages, for all their traffic, produced none.
A property owner going through valuation and listing paperwork with an advisor, the conversation our marketing was never built to start. Photo: Carrie Allen www.carrieallen.com on Unsplash.
How to Find Your Own Scarce Side
If you run a small or mid-sized business and you suspect your marketing is pointed at the wrong audience, four checks will find it.
Start with the side that turns customers away. Look at the last quarter and count the times you said no because you lacked capacity, stock, staff, or inventory. That is your constraint, in plain numbers.
Put a number on one unit of the scarce side. In our case, the commission on a single owner mandate cleared what a full month of buyer marketing cost us. Once you have that figure, the reallocation argument makes itself. Harvard Business Review’s refresher on marketing ROI makes the point that the number earns its keep by deciding what to spend on next, not by defending what you already spent.
Check whether your reporting even has a row for it. If the scarce side does not appear on the dashboard, it does not exist in your weekly meeting, and it will never get funded.
Match your follow-up to the length of the decision. Supply-side decisions run slower than demand-side ones. Somebody choosing a broker for a $1.8M villa is on a different clock from somebody browsing listings. Your follow-up has to run on their clock rather than your reporting cycle.
Keep Feeding the Side That Still Works
Cutting buyer marketing would have been a different mistake with the same shape.
We kept publishing for buyers, because a serious international buyer still wants to walk through the Marrakech developments we currently represent in detail before they will commit to a viewing trip, and that content earns its place in the pipeline every month.
The shift was a rebalance, measured in percentage of effort. Strategic marketing at a small company is the discipline of moving effort toward whatever is currently binding, then moving it back when the binding constraint changes. It will change. When our listing book is full and buyer demand thins out in a slow season, the balance goes the other way, and the dashboard will tell us before instinct does.
The businesses that get stuck are the ones that decide once, in year one, what marketing is for, and never revisit it.
The Saturday That Looked Different
Eleven months after that heavy June afternoon, a different Saturday. Same office, same fan.
A colleague was on a call with an owner in Casablanca who had found our advisory page in February, read it, done nothing for four months, then called on a Friday to say she was ready. Her villa went on our books the following week, and it sold to a buyer who had been in our inquiry list since the previous fall, one of the forty-one who once had nothing to look at.
Both sides of that transaction came from content. Only one of them came from the content I would have written two years earlier.
The correction cost us nothing in budget. It cost an admission, which is harder, that the numbers I had been proud of were measuring the half of the business that was never in short supply.
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