Why your ads and your marketing suck
The truth is that real estate agents are indeed a dime a dozen. They’re everywhere, it seems. And if you listen to the fear mongers, the state of the economy is not on their side either.
Even in a so-called slow or down economy, however, people are still buying houses. The question is whether they are buying from you. If you and your message look and sound like that of every other agent and their message, the answer to that question is probably in the negative.
I recently referred to Marc Davison, co-founder of 1000 Watt Consulting, and once again, he steps up to the plate to ask the following series of pointed questions (in his blog post on Capturing and communicating the essence of your company) designed to assess the status of your ads and marketing materials.
How would you answer?
How well do you advertise your company brand? Are you interchangeable with your competition? Does your brand statement have meaning or is it platitudinous vapor like “First Class Service, First Class Results”, “Making your real estate dreams come true”, or “We hold the key to your new home” — in other words, language used by hundreds of other companies that contain little in the way of true meaning?
Flip through your local paper. Scroll through your company website. Check what you have against others. Are you interchangeable? Could your brand just as easily be confused with others?
If the answer is “yes,” you’re suffering from just-like-every-other-agent-in-the-business syndrome.
Fortunately all is not lost.
First, of course, you need to identify who your ideal customer is and find out what they want. (Anyone else ready to throw up their cookies the next time a real estate agent says their perfect client is anyone who is in the market to buy or sell a home?) This takes a bit of work, but the guys at 1000wattblog.com offer a great place to start.
Check out the short 1-minute video they created and watch it over and over until you get it. (I’ve been referring back to the video for over a year, and I’m apparently not the only one. It’s been viewed over 11,000 times since the beginning of January 2008.)
At least as interesting as the video are all of the comments on the blog entry!
You’ve viewed the video by now, haven’t you? So, now that you have your ideal client clearly identified, now what?
Marc Davison says to stop whatever you’re doing in your marketing right now and answer these questions:
Imagine you are the client. Ask yourself these questions:
- What would arouse your interest?
- What would engage your desire?
- What would conjure up a sense of excitement about the process?
- What would serve to define and differentiate your company’s brand?
- What would activate you to go to the next step and make contact?
Get to it so you can stop sucking and start selling (magnetically, of course)!
(By the way, Marc, thanks for the great content. It clearly has relevance and longevity.)
