Guarantee Your Success with This Strategic Planning Tool
Here’s a little piece of business wisdom that may or may not surprise you:
The freedom, lifestyle and income you’ve always dreamed about depend upon you. It depends upon your patience and it depends upon your planning.
In his 2001 book The 7 Keys to Marketing Genius marketing consultant Michael Daehn, writes:
Many marketing books jump right into the promotion process where instructions on how to broadcast the marketing message are described in detail. The problem with that approach is that if you are sending out the wrong message, it will not only be ineffective but counterproductive.
That’s why it’s so important to create a sound strategy before you start the promotion process. Whether you employ new social media or stick to flagging classified ads or build a sales letter campaign from the ground up…
You need to analyze. You need to plan first.
A SWOT analysis will help you do that.
A SWOT Analysis, is a strategic planning tool used to evaluate the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats involved in a business venture.
A SWOT is about defining your advantage over the competition. The questions you have to ask yourself are:
- What do I do better than anyone else in my market?
- What can I do that my competition can’t do?
- What will separate me from my pack?
A simple SWOT analysis will help you find out what you do best. And it will give you the road map to a predictable and profitable business that will last for decades.
Here’s what you need to do:
1. Gather all stakeholders.
Since you are an individual contractor you are in a way defining your individual strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
But it may be helpful to you involve your spouse or a business partner or your broker. Someone who can help you see the things you can’t see.
This is especially helpful when speaking of weaknesses and threats, but sometimes people are so low on themselves they need help to see what they are really good at.
2. Focus on the strengths.
Hammer out all of the positive elements you can think of : education, experience, connections, knowledge.
This is important: Devote enough quiet time. Clear a day or a weekend. Get alone and discover what it is you are really good at. This is important that you get this right.
3. Dig deep and consider your weaknesses.
Even the brightest, most educated, highly successful individual has weaknesses. Find them.
But remember this about weaknesses: when it comes time to work on your weaknesses, only work on those that can damage your life or career.
Habitual drinking or a fear of confronting people are two weakness that could quickly destroy your hopes of success.
Work on these but ignore the benign weaknesses…otherwise you spend all your time on your weaknesses and not your strengths.
4. Evaluate the opportunities in your market.
Unlike strengths and weaknesses, opportunities are outside your influence. You merely exploit them.
For example, perhaps you identify a segment of your market that is not being serviced appropriately AND you have some well-connected people who can help you reach this segment.
This is a huge opportunity for you. Seize it.
5. Discover the threats in your market.
Threats can kill you. That’s why you must pay attention to them.
A threat could be monster brokerage house that systematically mows down competition. You need to realize this and figure out what to do about it. Otherwise you’ll be bankrupt and blue in less than a year.
Or a threat could be a cooling market. You need to identify this and ask yourself the question: is this the best time to go into real estate?
And remember: Be honest during this entire process. The freedom, lifestyle and income you’ve always dreamed about depend upon it.
Related Articles
The Top 10 Miracles of Real Estate Research
Competing with Proctor & Gamble
6 Unorthodox Ways to Become a Market Shaker
Bloodhound Blog Odysseus Medal Winner
I just learned this morning that last week’s post Naked Conversations: The Lynchpin to Your Real Estate Blog won Bloodhound Blog’s Odysseus Medal for the week of Thanksgiving.
Too cool.
And trust me when I say it is humbling because I simply love to write and to share ideas with agents and help them grow their business…and for it to come back with an honor like this blows me over.
Thank you everyone who subscribes and reads. This would be impossible without you.
It’s even more humbling to think my post The Curious Secret to Getting People to Believe You won the People’s Choice Award back at the end of October.
One thing this does is encourage me to work on this blog even harder.
It’s part of my nature to be motivated by these kinds of awards, and to then work my tail off to beat my previous accomplishments.
But not simply in self interest. These have to add value to you.
So, help me with that and let me know what you’d like to hear.
If I don’t hear from you I have to go by my gut. I have to go by what seems to be working based on my most commented posts and my posts that attract attention and awards.
I’d rather you lead me than my nose lead me [subtle hat tip there to the Bloodhound blog. Get it?]
Take care and looking forward to hearing from you!
7 Concrete Steps to Improve Your Local Search Results
It’s old news that 84% of buyer’s start there search online [wink wink, nudge nudge], that offline advertising places are losing revenue that, that real estate blogging is hot as ever.
All of this begs the question of managing your online presence, winning the local search engine results war.
But it requires a proactive strategy.
What exactly is your marketing strategy for local search?
What Is Local Real Estate Search? And Why Should I Care?
If you live in Nashua, New Hampshire, for instance, and someone types in “Real estate Nashua New Hampshire,” that’s a local search.It doesn’t matter if they live in South Florida or West Washington or smack dab in Nashua. You want to dominate the search engine results page for those “local” keywords.
Here are seven concrete steps you can take to improve your local organic search results.
1. Make sure that you have a crawler friendly web site
The first step in improving your business performance in local search engines is to make sure that the search engines can easily crawl your site, and identify your business keywords.
This means you minimize the use of tables, and avoid deeply nested tables. Make sure that your business name and address are featured prominently on the page as text [in fact, make sure your business appears twice on every page] and not hidden from the crawlers in an image file.
Your page title should include your business name, address and key words. Place an “H1” header near the top of the page that also has your business name, address, and key words.
2. Add 10 pages of content to your website.
Any website that adds 10 pages of relevant content will get a boost in search engine visibility. It’s one of the easiest steps in an SEO campaign. Search engines love content. The more tightly focused, keyword rich [read: focused on your local market or markets] content you have on your website, the easier it is for search engines to understand what your website is about and categorize it appropriately.
A blog is a great way to add content to your site.
3. Use videos to supplement your search engine rankings
Great to see agents already seeing real world success with this strategy.
4. Take charge of your local listings
Yahoo! local search will give you a free 5-page Web site just for listing your company with their service.
Google’s local search service is more like a classified directory, but you still have direct control over how your listing appears.
But don’t stop with their Web listings. Take charge of the Yahoo! Mobile and Google Mobile services, too. People are increasingly using their cell phones to search the Internet.
5. Check out your competition
Do a local search for your business keywords (for example: houses, San Francisco, CA) and see who your competition is.
Find out who is linking to your competitors and investigate whether you can get the same sites to link to your business.
The links can be determined by going to Yahoo and typing “linkdomain:” and then your competitor’s web site (i.e. linkdomain:www.yourcompetitorssite.com). Click on “inlinks” in the results page.
Check inlinks for your site as well, and see who is linking to you. Make sure that the information on those sites is correct, and contact them if it isn’t.
6. Get your business rated
Ask your satisfied customers to write reviews and rate your business at Google, Yahoo, and MSN. More importantly, try to get them to use the same keywords that you use in the business description and on your web site as part of their review. Don’t add too many reviews over a short period of time, and make sure that the reviews are unique.
7. Solicit local links
Find the web directories that are local to your area, and ask them to link to your web site. Contact your local chambers of commerce and ask them to link to your business from their web site.
Conclusion
Of course there is much more you can do. And this only includes your organic search: I didn’t touch on paid online searches. But this is a great way to boost your local rankings if you haven’t done so yet.
I’d love to hear what you think.
Naked Conversations: The Lynchpin to Your Real Estate Marketing Blog
Sorry to disappoint you.
This is not a pitch for a nudist colony, a social network for swingers or a therapy method for “heavy talkers”.
It’s a pitch to get you “naked.” That is, to get your blog “naked.”
In 1999 the Cluetrain Manifesto declared:
These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.
Here’s my question to you: Are you faking your blog?
Are you natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking on your real estate blog?
The Essential Benefits of Real Estate Blogging
In the breezy book Naked Conversations, Robert Scoble and coauthor Shel Israel argue that every business can benefit from smart “naked” blogging, whether the company’s a small-town real estate agent or a multinational fashion house.
“If you ignore the blogosphere… you won’t know what people are saying about you. You can’t learn from them, and they won’t come to see you as a sincere human who cares about your business and its reputation.”
In a nutshell, blogging is one of the best ways to communicate with your market. Better than postcards, email newsletters, flyers, magazine articles, weekly radio shows.
How are blogs better than these communication channels?
There are six key differences between blogging and any other communications channel.
1. Publishable. Anyone can publish a blog.You can do it cheaply and post often. In addition, each posting is instantly available worldwide.
2. Searchable. Through search engines, people will find blogs by subject, by author, or both. The more you post, the more findable you become.
3. Social. The blogosphere is one big conversation. Interesting topical conversations move from site to site, linking to each other. Through blogs, people with shared interests build relationships unrestricted by geographic borders.
4. Viral. Information often spreads faster through blogs than via a news service. No form of viral marketing matches the speed and efficiency of a blog.
5. Syndicatable. By clicking on an icon, you can get free “home delivery” of RSS- enabled blogs into your e-mail software. This process is considerably more efficient than the last- generation method of visiting one page of one web site at a time looking for changes.
6.Linkable. Because each blog can link to all others, every blogger has access to the tens of millions of people who visit the blogosphere every day.
Of course you can find each of these elements elsewhere. And none is, in itself, all that remarkable.
But in final assembly, they are the benefits of the most powerful two-way Internet communications tool so far developed.
However, bloggers and sophisticated readers of blogs will sniff you out as a fake if you lie, hide, withhold or micromanage information.
Successful blogging is about being off-the-cuff, transparent and off-the-record so to speak. Even if you sin.
What to Do If You Sin and Suffer
In a New York Times interview, David Neeleman, founder and CEO of JetBlue, said he was “humiliated and mortified” with how JetBlue customers were treated and how his organization melted down.
Then he went onto tick off a number of problems with his company, including the low-cost model he developed.
Did you catch that?
He publicly aired corporate problems.
Using a blog would have been a better communications tool. But remember that like a hammer, a blog is just a tool.
JetBlue sinned. It suffered. But it publicly repented. And the guy at the top probably ignored a whole bevy of lawyers telling him not to admit any kind of culpability.
This is transparency. And it is a case study for how a CEO, politician or real estate agent can use it.
Naturally, you shouldn’t wait until you’ve embarrassed yourself, your family, your clients to start using a blog. You should start before that.
And you should remain open, natural, honest and transparent. Telling the truth is the curious secret to getting people to believe you.
In fact, airing out your dirty laundry makes everything else you say more believable.
Just ask David Neeleman.
In July 2007, JetBlue reported that its second-quarter revenue increased from the first quarter. In fact, JetBlue was one of the few major airlines to post a profit in that quarter.
How to Create Electrifying Landing Pages That Will Even Engage a Fruit Fly
The fruit fly.
It’s got red eyes, a yellow-brown thorax and black rings around it’s abdomen.
Fruit flies are so small you could fit five in a drop of water.
It’s got a life span less than 30 days. And a spastic, ridiculously short attention span to match.
Believe it or not, but this, my friend, also describes your typical web visitor. [Just the attention span part, that is.]
This means on the web, you have about 8 seconds to lock-down that attention span and get it to do whatever you want it to do.
Here’s how to do that.
As I mentioned in the past, you are probably going to find yourself working with landing pages if you decide to run a special online prospecting campaign.
This means if you are offering a subscription to a weekly newsletter, market updates or blog subscriptions.
And great landing page design is about leading the eye on a journey that ends in conversion.
However, you can fit an almost infinite amount and type of content into your landing page through links, long copy, audio or streamed video.
For best results, however, you must obey two rules:
- Relevance: All of the content should be absolutely relevant and focused on conversion.
- Clarity: Content must be organized so it’s very easy for the visitor to figure out what to look at, in what order, and how to take the conversion step when they are ready.
Now, it may seem impossible to merge these two rules together…at the same time creating a flawless funnel that leads a visitor to conversion.
It’s not.
But to help you accomplish that seemingly complex task, keep these rules in mind:
1. All critical elements above the fold.
Make sure the critical elements in your creative are visible to almost all the visitors without scrolling. Keep them inside the upper 300 pixels of the page.
This way every single visitor can see and act on the critical elements of the page without scrolling.
Remember, your visitor has the attention span of a fruit fly. Your screen must convince them not to bail immediately. That means…
2. Put enough content above this fold.
Definitely your headline, subheadlines, no less than 100 words of copy should be above the fold.
Include critical images, your streaming video [if you are using any].
And DEFINITELY any type of call to action copy with the “Subscribe” button or feed icon visible.
3. Use a single column of copy.
According to Marketing Sherpa, two columns generally outperform 3 columns, and 1 column generally being the best design.
The problem is that more columns equal more confusion.
Over 30 years ago David Ogilvy conclusively proved that multiple columns confuses the eye. The eye is not sure where to look.
One column relentlessly draws the eye in one direction: to a conversion.
4. Eliminate your navigation bar.
The only time you need navigation on your landing page is if it is part of a micro site and navigation is critical to the conversion path and contains no distracting links.
Otherwise, nix navigation.
5. Write emotionally-charged copy.
So, maybe you’d like to spend more time on the world’s most exotic, sprawling golf courses, gazing out over a blue Pacific Ocean while your buddy digs his ball out of a sand pit.
Or maybe you’d just like to buy three pairs of Gucci pumps, a new Prada handbag to replace your old one and a bottle of Versace fragrance on a whim one afternoon and not worry if you have the money or not. Because you do.
Maybe you just want to pay off your mortgage. Or a car note. Or simply climb out of drowning, joy-killing debt.
Whatever your ambition, you need to use emotionally-charged copy if you want any ounce of your marketing to make substantial profits quickly.
Here’s what I know: even if you had all of the elements on your landing page perfect still wouldn’t t save it from bad copy.
On the other hand, great copy could save a clunky, second-rate landing page that looks like a child’s Thanksgiving turkey art project. [Not by much, but imagine if it had bad copy, too!]
So, if you don’t have time to learn the craft and write great copy yourself, then hire a great copywriter.
You will not regret the investment.
So, you’ve got five engaging elements to produce a landing page that will convert more visitors: what are you going to do now?
Go get started. And let me know what you think? Am I missing something? Overbearing about the copy thing? Maybe you got landing page test results that prove some of my points wrong. Please share.
Related Articles
How to Kill the Deal: 5 BIG Landing Page Errors
The Six Steps of Landing Page Design
Your Website Is a Room Full of Furniture for Half Blind People
How to Kill the Deal: 5 Big Errors in Landing Page Design
Today, I wanted to share with you what I consider the biggest errors in landing page design.
These are errors that will drain you of money as visitors arrive at your landing page and flee, leaving you with nothing to show for your hard work.
The thing is, these are simple, easy to avoid mistakes.
But I see these most often with real estate agent sites, and I know from our own experience that these goofs can waste huge opportunities to connect with willing, paying clients.
And you don’t want to lose willing, paying clients, do you?
So, before we dive into good landing page design in the next post, here’s what you need to avoid.
Landing Page Error 1 | Hard-to-Read Type
Make sure your headline is big enough, that it stands out.
But also, what about your body copy? Is it large enough to read on screen?
You don’t want to use font size smaller than 10 points, cause that’s a definite turn off.
As Jakob Neilson said: Tiny text tyrannizes users by dramatically reducing task throughput.
Also, stay away from fancy font styles. One big reason is because fancy formatting and font styles are ignored.
Landing Page Error 2 | Home Page Navigation Bar
Your landing page has one purpose: conversion.
If you put links or a navigation bar on your landing page, invariably people will click on them.
You have to remember this about advertising: people are looking for any excuse to ignore you, to put off their decision you are asking them to make.
You might think “Well, I don’t mind so much if they work their way through my site. They’ll probably come across some useful stuff.”
The problem with that is they may come across some useful stuff, and then go away.
You don’t want that.
Create your landing page like a funnel that people slide into, and convert.
Read Seth Godin’s blog post on the funnel to learn more.
Landing Page Error 3 | Click Here to Start the Conversion Process
You’ve got them to your landing page. Now you want to close them. That means you place everything you need to convert them on your landing page.
Don’t stick a link on there that says, “Click here to Begin.”
If you want subscribers to your blog, then insert a fat feed icon on the page with copy that says, “Click here to subscribe.”
If you want a name and an email address, include the entry boxes on the page AND a voluptuous “Subscribe Now” or “Get Free Report Now” button under the forms.
Rule of thumb: Make it simple and quick. Web users have the attention span of fruit flies.
Landing Page Error 4 | Scary Forms
Speaking of forms, don’t frighten people away by asking more information from them than necessary.
If you want to give someone a free report, all you really need is an email address. So that’s all you need to ask for. [Of course it’s polite to ask for a first name so you can personal the return email.]
Don’t forget: when creating forms, imagine the minimal amount of info you need, and stick to that.
Landing Page Error 5 | Bad Copy and Graphics
This is the daddy of mistakes.
Anything that serves to distract a visitor is the kiss of death. This includes self-centered messages about how important or successful you are.
Avoid that like the plague.
Use emotionally-charged copy to attract attention, create desire, boost interest and motivate to action.
And the copy should be linear and simple. It should be written with one clear, unrelenting purpose: conversion.
If you can’t do that, hire a copywriter to do it for you. Trust me, it WILL pay off for you in the end.
Related Articles
Your Website Is a Room Full of Furniture for Half Blind People
The Six Steps of Landing Page Design
Last week I started a mini series on landing pages, which relates to your internet marketing efforts.
The good news is a landing page designed for higher conversion rates probably won’t cost you much more than landing pages you are creating now. It’s more of a paradigm shift, a better way of thinking.
And with some agents saying they are lucky to sell one house a month, better conversion of leads into clients, especially buyer clients is more important than ever.
The bad news, however, is this: it will take you more time and thought. But…you take the time and effort and mental sweat to convert more leads…and you’ll rise above your competitors.
Many marketers don’t want to work all that hard. They like to coast. If you’re prepared to roll up your shirt sleeves, the battle is yours.
Here’s are the six steps to designing better landing pages.
Step One | Landing Page Conversion Definition
Before you start designing your landing pages, define precisely what you are trying to do:
- Lead generation: Are you giving away an article, report or webinar?
- Branding or education: Do you have a significant amount of content on your site that you want prospects to read and interact with? Then your landing page would serve as a gateway for this content.
- Relationship: Are you promising to send them more info about homes, market conditions?
- Membership: Perhaps you have some sort of “second home” club or charity event you use to generate business.
- Viral: Is this leading into an effort to encourage people to share the content on the landing page?
Note: Landing pages should handle only one conversion goal.
Step Two | Selecting URL and Hosting
Here are some questions to think about when selecting the URL:
- Will the landing page have it’s on URL?
- Will each prospect you target have their own URL? [This only works if you have a house list]
- Will you need many URLs leading to the same landing page?
- Is there a chance someone will need to type in the URL? Or cut and paste?
- Does the URL need to be easy to remember?
- How about easy to spell?
One more consideration: use Google Analytics to track results. It’s free. And then decide who is going to monitor those results. It must be a person who can make changes rapidly.
Step 3 | Landing Page Demographic Research
Get your mind off your campaign, your messaging, your creative, your offer and into your prospect’s mind.
Spend some time thinking about the perfect person you want to convert. Then construct your landing page for that perfect prospect.
Don’t try to segment your market here. If you think your market needs to be segmented, then each segment is it’s own campaign.
Here’s what I know: don’t construct a page to appeal broadly. It won’t appeal to anyone. Visitors have to believe the appeal is perfect for their individual needs.
Step 4 | Landing Page Layout
Make a list of all the elements that need to be on the page and then sketch out how you see the page. This is called wireframing.
One thing you want to pay attention to is where your fold is. This is important when you go to write copy.
Step 5 | Landing Page Copywriting
Divide copywriting into 3 steps.
First, your headline. Understand this is the most important element to your landing page. And slight tweaks to headlines can cause conversion rates to soar or plummet.
Second, consider your call to action. You are asking them to do something, correct? Test this with your headline so that they match. And make sure that your call to action not only appears in the copy but appears in on button: “Join Now”.
Third, go through several rounds of writing copy. This includes sub-headlines, bulleted lists, guarantees, testimonials, explanations and descriptions. Getting the copywriting right is critical to your success so don’t cut corners.
Finally…
Step 6 | Testing, Measuring and Tweaking
Here are your standards:
- Lead generation: leads v. number of visitors, estimated sales value per lead generated by traffic source, readiness of particular leads
- Education: Percent of number of leads who stay on your site longer than 30 seconds. The percent over one minute. Average visit time, page views and click paths of visitors who stay a minute.
- Relationship: Opt-ins or feed subscribers as a percent of total visitors. Percent of return versus one-time visitors. Average dollar amount of each visitor.
- Membership: Length of active members. New Members as a percent of visitors.
- Viral outreach: Viral growth curve [visitors per week charted over time]. Number of line-backs from blogs. Emails generated with email tool.
Keep this in mind: try not to rush a landing page. However, you can test and tweak throughout a campaign to optimize a landing page so you don’t have to wait until you have a perfect landing page to launch.
Testing and tweaking is key to getting the best results.
Next post I promise to share with you 5 of the greatest mistakes in landing page design.
Marketing in a Real Estate Recession
When the sky is close to falling in, what should you do when you need every penny to sustain your earnings? Stop advertising?
If you are new to real estate, you will probably kill your career. For ever. Studies of the last six recessions have demonstrated that companies which do not cut back their advertising budget achieve greater increases in profit than companies which do cut back.
This applies to real estate advertising, too.
In a survey of 40,000 men and women involved in the purchase of 23 industrial products over five years, it was found that share of market went up in bad times–when advertising was continued.
I have come to regard advertising as part of what you sell, it’s part of your real estate services, to be treated as a “production cost,” not a selling cost. It follows that it should not be cut back when times are hard, any more than you would cut any other essential ingredient in running your business.
Why Advertise at All?
Many agents secretly question whether advertising really sells their services, but are vaguely afraid that their competitors might steal a march on them if they stopped.
Others–advertise to keep their name before the public. Others, because it helps them to referrals.
Only a minority of real estate agents advertise because they have found that it increases their profits.
On a train journey to California a friend asked Mr. Wrigley why with the lion’s share of the market, he continued to advertise his chewing gum.
“How fast do you think this train is going?” asked Wrigley.
“I would say about ninety miles an hour.”
“Well,” Wrigley said, “do you suggest we unhitch the engine?”
Advertising is still the cheapest form of selling. It would cost you thousands to call a thousand homes. A yard sign can do it for $4.69.
The True Task of Advertising
Back in the early 80’s, one A. S. C. Ehrenberg of the London Business School said that consumers mostly ignore advertising for brands they are not already using.
He went on to say that real conversion from virgin ignorance to full-blooded long-term commitment does not happen often…sales levels of most brands tend to be fairly steady.
Advertising expert Dr. John Treasure agreed.
He said that the task of advertising is not primarily one of conversion but rather of reinforcement and assurance.
Sales of a given brand may be increases without converting to the brand any new consumers, but merely by inducing its existing users, those who already are sold out to the product, to use the product more frequently.
What This Means to You
Clients that you have already worked with are more likely to use you again in the future–and sooner–as long as you continue to advertise, since they are already loyal to you. [This is only true if you served them well.]
Your advertising maintains the awareness that you are out there and consistently available .
In other words, that you are here to stay.
Furthermore, advertising allows you to promote new services or suggest ideas, like a new development in a new area or a resort condos you caught wind of.
These are things your clients will never know unless you tell them. Thus you advertise.
Finally, what advertising does for you is allow you to win over those clients who are not loyal to anyone agent.
Perhaps they’d like to use their last agent, he did such a swell job, but their agent has fallen off the map and they can’t find his business card or phone listing…because he’s preserving his money.
See how that will drain your resources?
So many people back off of advertising in a recession that it really isn’t a surprise that those who maintain their advertising grow market share. The economy abhors a vacuum and those who fill it are rewarded, right?
The Top 10 Miracles of Real Estate Research
Real estate agents who ignore research are quite dangerous. They are about as dangerous as real estate agents who neglect business plan, who neglect marketing strategy.
Drunkards Leaning on a Lamppost
Sometimes this ignorance is born, well, from ignorance. They don’t realize that there are methods they can use to see which size postcard pulls in more responses, which email subject line rocket-launches open rates.
Some ignore research because they are afraid of it. It’s something new to them and so they ignore it. They excuse themselves from their responsibility by saying, “I’m not exactly sure how I’d go about finding out how home buyers think.”
What they don’t realize is how easy it is: grab a piece of paper, a pencil and the phone. Dial. “Hello, what are you looking for in a real estate agent?” That’s the easiest way to go about it.
Others ignore it because of “research pitfalls,” like Liars: If you interview someone, they won’t always tell you the truth. [Of course, there are ways around this: one enterprising St. Louis pub used a private room and served patrons a free beer if they answered a questionnaire.]
Then there are those who abuse research. They use research as a drunkard uses a lamppost–not for illumination but for support. They use research to prove that they are right.
10 Miracles of Real Estate Research
On the whole, however, research can be of incalculable help in producing more effective advertising.
Here are the top 10 miracles real estate research can perform for you:
1. Research can help you decided the perfect positioning statement for you.
2. Research can help you define your target audience. Seniors or Gen Xers. FSBO or foreclosure. Education. Lifestyle. Habits.
3. Research can help you determine what’s the most important point in a purchase for a home buyer or what sellers want to hear from you during a listing presentation.
4. Research can warn you when buyers and sellers needs change, when trends in buying or selling occur, when a competitor may be taking market share. It can help you find these things out before it’s too late.
5. Research can help you keep track of a competitor, whether he’s cutting his commission to get listings or simply warming up to every home builder in the area–a thought that hadn’t occurred to you.
6. Research can determine the most persuasive promise. Samuel Johnson said, “Promise, large promise is the soul of an advertisement.”
When he auctioned off the contents of the Anchor Brewery Johnson made the following promise: “We are not here to sell boilers and vats, but the potential of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice.”
Advertising that does not promise a benefit to the reader does not sell, yet the majority of ads out there contain no promise whatsoever. [That is the most important sentence in this post. Read it again.]
7. Research can tell you which headline will work the best. Dig this: Write two ads, with two different promises in the headlines. Insert a call to action. Run the test so the ads rotate. And bingo. You have a winner. This technique is called “split run” and was invented by Richard Stanton. Its merit is that it tests promises in the context of a real advertisement versus an interview.
8. Research can tell you not only are you sending the right message, but any message at all. Remember E. B. White’s warning, “When you say something, make sure you have said it. The chances of you having said it are only fair.”
9. Research can measure the wear out of your advertisement. For five years the theme of Shell’s commercials were mileage, and tracking studies recorded increasingly favorable attitudes to this promise. When attitudes stopped improving, and only then, the ads were changed to consumer testimonial, and the upward trend resumed.
And finally.
10. Research can settle arguments. If your broker is dead set against trying out new technology or an unconventional marketing strategy, tell him this: “Let’s just test it for 30 days. If it works, we keep it. If it doesn’t, we’ll ditch it.” If 30 days is too long, offer 21 days. And so on. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
For an in-depth study of research I recommend Charles Young’s, The Advertising Research Handbook, Ideas in Flight.
Skim the chapters and skip the case studies and you’ll be done in an afternoon, yet armed and dangerous. Dangerous in a good way this time.
Competing with Proctor & Gamble
Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?Of course, as a real estate agent, you don’t need to fear Proctor & Gamble. You aren’t competing with them.
However, it is a good practice to every once in awhile look in a completely different industry and study successful companies, to see how they do things, why they have been successful for so long.
Proctor & Gamble is a great example. Especially when it comes to marketing and advertising consumer goods. Knowing a handful of people who have worked there, I’m able to offer you this advice.
Discipline: Create and Work the Plan
First, P&G is disciplined. Their guiding philosophy is to plan thoroughly, minimize risk and stick to proven principles.
Back in August I wrote about business and real estate marketing plans. I encouraged you to take the time to create both plans if you already haven’t. This helps you in the long run, allowing you to make more informed decisions faster.
And once that plan is finished, work and never deviate from it. Remain disciplined.
Prognosticate
Second, they use market research to identify consumer needs. They are forever trying to see what lies around the corner. They are forever studying the consumer and trying to identify new trends in tastes, needs, environment and living habits.
They are trying to predict the future.
More importantly, they have a way of creating products which are superior to their competitors. And with blind in-home tests, they make sure the superiority is apparent to the consumer.
The key to their successful marketing superior product performance…if the consumer does not perceive any real benefits in the brand, then no amount of ingenious advertising and selling can save it.
Your takeaway: make sure you communicate to your market why you are superior to every other real estate agent in the market. Avoid egotistical claims. Make it a real benefit for the home buyer or seller.
Present the Promise Clearly
Proctor & Gamble believes that the first duty of advertising is to communicate effectively, not to be original or entertaining.
Proctor & Gambles commercials deliver the promise verbally, and reinforce it. And in every commercial they typically end with a repetition of the promise. And in their commercials they tend to use a lot of words, sometimes more than a hundred in a 30-second commercial.
Communicating effectively goes back to delivering a promise to the home buyer or seller. If you are a new agent, it may take you some time to find out what you are really good at and what you can give the market that your competitors can’t.It will be hard work. But take the time. It will pay dividends because 90% your competitors won’t take the time. And they can drop out as you take their business.
In addition, they measure communication at three stages: before the copy is written, after the advertisements are run and in test markets.
You should do the same: knock on doors, call people, attend PTA meetings or volunteer for a local organization. Anything to get the inside scoop on a particular street, neighborhood or county.
Then sit down and knock out your ads.
Once you’ve launched the ads, measure their success. Keep a log of all of this information. For the next ad launch, tweak the copy or test a different photograph or market based on your results. They idea is to optimize the real winners.
And don’t forget A/B split tests. Their is even A/B split testing software available.
The Sacred “B” Word
Very often Proctor & Gamble will show the users of their products deriving some emotional benefit. That’s benefit with a capital B.
In your copy you should do the same. Make sure you are communicating clearly the benefit a home buyer or seller should get when they use you.
Try to fashion your headlines to contain one or more of these four key points:
- The most important is it must be written with the self-interest of your reader in mind
- Try to make the headline appear to be something news-worthy.
- Provide some timely news
- Make it appear that you have a quick and easy solution to their problem
- Avoid headlines that only provoke curiosity…combine curiosity
- with self-interest, news and a quick and easy solution and you’re
virtually guaranteed a winner
Using these tips will allow you to communicate a benefit to your reader.
Wall Street Journal Had It Right, Too
Once P&G have evolved a campaign that works, they keep running it for a long time, in many cases for ten years or more. But they continue to test new executions of the ongoing strategy.
Resist the temptation to change a winner because YOU are getting bored with it. You the results from your tests to determine when a winner has finally become a loser.
Wall Street Journal ran this ad for over 27 years.
Here’s how it starts:
Dear Reader:
On a beautiful late spring afternoon, twenty-five years ago, two young men graduated from the same college. They were very much alike, these two young men. Both had been better than average students, both were personable and both – as young college graduates are – were filled with ambitious dreams for the future.
Recently, these two men returned to college for their 25th reunion.
As long as it was working, they wouldn’t dream of pulling it. And you should keep the same discipline when it comes to your winners.
What to Do With Your Budget
Once Proctor & Gamble established the advertising budget, they continually test higher levels of expenditure.
This means that you increase your expense on an ad [whether you increase frequency, exposure or length] to see if you can optimize the results. You might find that paying an additional $100 a month brings in an additional 50 leads.
Flight Ads Only If It Works for You
Finally, almost all P&G brands are advertised through the year.
They have found that this works better than “flighting”–running an ad for six weeks on, six weeks off. It also provides considerable cost savings from bulk buys.
My advice for you: test to see if this works for you. We’ve tested it ourselves and we actually found the opposite to be true, that flighting allows the ad to refresh and pull better next time around.
One thing worth repeating: test everything. If you do that, you’ll learn, grow, dominate and succeed.