Category: Marketing

ETM Angst

Working with Jeanne on University today, we got into the marketing plan.  I explained that for the past several years, the Help-U-Sell ETM (Entire Target Market Mailer) had fallen from general use.  It was that M part that was causing pushback:  Mailer.  Mailing thousands of marketing pieces regularly enough for them to have impact was proving cost prohibitive in the down market.  Some altered the delivery method, replacing the stamp with a poly bag that could be hung on a door knob, but by-and-large, most just quit doing them.

I understand this.  One of the guiding principals of Help-U-Sell is that we constantly evaluate the cost of our marketing pieces against the leads they produce, and if the ETM was not producing leads and the cost was high, the right thing to do would be to move on to something else.  After all, there are market realities at play here:  John Powell told us if he did a blanket mailer in Tucson, a large portion of them would arrive at vacant houses; other brokers asserted that the ETM was not effective in a short sale market.

It all made sense until Jeanne responded to my statement.  ‘If most brokers are not doing ETMs ,’ she asked, ‘How is that message getting out there.’

Bam!

She had reminded me that the ETM is not just a marketing piece.  It’s a message.  It’s our identity.  It’s one of the principle ways we differentiate ourselves in the marketplace.  We can’t simply abandon that without an effective and more efficient replacement.  To do so would drop us into the soup and mire of mere discounters!

Remember the message?

  1. We are HERE
  2. People use our service
  3. It works and they save money

Remember how we get that across in an ETM?

  • Pictures and descriptions of homes for sale
  • At least 1/3 of the listings feature a ‘Sold and Saved’ banner
  • At least 1 customer testimonial with photo
  • The Easy Way (probably on the back)
  • Our Guarantee

All of these elements work together to stake claim to a small piece of mental real estate between the ears of the consumers in your marketplace:  that we are different, that we get the job done, and we represent savings. 

I really want to hear from you:

Are you doing a regular ETM?  If so, how, how often, and what results are you getting?

Are you doing something similar but delivering it in an alternate way?

Do you have ideas about how we might adapt the ETM to today’s reality?

If you are not doing an ETM, how are you getting the message out there?

How To Do It: Step 3 – Build Consumer Awareness

(This is an elaboration of ‘How To Rule The (Real Estate) World In 10 #asy Steps‘)

I see your signs everywhere!

That’s it:  the magic phrase that tells you you’re doing a good job with this task.  What the consumer is really saying is:  ‘I see your LOGO everywhere,’ and there’s a lot behind getting to the point where you’ll hear that phrase.

First there is the Logo itself.  It has to be striking, memorable and it should reference something the consumer already has anchored deep within his or her brain.  I mean:  there’s no mystery why Prudential, when deciding to get into the real estate business, put the Rock of Gibraltar on its sign.  The Help-U-Sell logo has this kind of ‘stickiness,’ simply because it has been around and hasn’t changed in 34 years.  Regardless how many agents, offices or listings we have at any given moment in time, people have seen the logo and when they see it again it is familiar, and it sticks.

Second is the Brand and the niche the company owns in the consumer’s consciousness.  The logo has to stand for something unique and special and that should already be established.  For Help-U-Sell it is savings.  We occupy that niche in the consumer’s mind:  savings.  They see our sign and instantly recognize it as something they’ve seen before and immediately equate it with savings.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to accomplish those two things?  It takes years of careful message management to get to the point that people recognize your logo and know what you stand for.  Most companies never get there and many never have a chance.  Try getting your generic widget company that makes and sells widgets just like every other widget company to occupy a unique niche in consumer consciousness.  It can’t.  It’s just another widget company.

I want to take a minute to acknowledge the design aspects of logo and brand building.  Our founder, Don Taylor, spent serious time, energy and resources choosing the colors for the Help-U-Sell Brand — particularly the red.  Not only at the company’s inception but also 30 years later when the look was overhauled, Don had signs made using various shades of red.  He and others spent time testing the effectiveness of each shade in making the logo ‘Pop’ from as far away as possible.  Today we have a red and a sign and a logo that is recognizable from a great distance.  It is an identifier that is so strong that it isn’t even read by consumers — it’s just recognized.

So, building consumer awareness is about making as many consumer impressions with your logo and company identifiers as possible.  If you’re just starting out (or just restarting), how do you do that?  Here’s a short list:

Get listings.  Each listing is worth a yard sign and a certain number of directional signs (which must include your prominent logo or their just . . . directionals, not awareness builders).

Show your sellers the benefits of seller involvement. Each seller with a set of six open house directional signs (again with your identifiers), putting them out every week multiplies your number of consumer impressions dramatically.  Seller involvement gets even more powerful when many sellers in your target market hold their homes open at the same time, blanketing your area with your identifiers.

Use blitz signs. Cheap and disposable, these little gems can be put up almost anywhere.  Realtors usually have difficulty embracing this idea because they are stuck in a paradigm that says you don’t use a sign unless you have something to sell.  But we’re not worrying about selling here; what we’re concerned with is building consumer awareness, and that’s a function of making as many logo impressions as possible.  Your competitors won’t like it, but in this case that just means you’re on the right track!  If you listen to them . . . well, you might as well just let your competitors design your marketing plan for you!

Get a car wrap.  It’s not a car, it’s a billboard. And yours is blank.  Get a big, bright, simple wrap and the effectiveness of all your marketing will increase.  Wrap a unique, special, fun or cute car and it will be even more powerful (bugs, cubes and classics lead the way).  Sure, you should drive the car, but some of its greatest power will come when you simply park it in a place where thousands of consumers in your area will see it every hour.  A good car wrap can go a long way toward curing a lousy office location with sign restrictions.

Blanket your target market with your identifiers and your message.  For years, direct mail, inserts in super market circulars and Penny Saver ads were an essential part of the Help-U-Sell marketing system.  They still are, but economic considerations have ratcheted them down a notch or two.  When the consumer pulls the mail from the box and sorts the junk from the bills, and your identifier passes by their eyes on the way to the trash can . . . that’s an impression.  And even that’s positive.  If they are thinking of selling, they may even reach down to fish your message from the trash – and that’s golden.  This kind of impression making doesn’t have to be expensive.  Door hangers and postcards under windshield wipers are a great alternative.

Use media.  If you have the budget, consider a set of radio spots or cable tv ads.  Don’t do this unless you have lots of signs and other identifiers in market.  You don’t start building consumer awareness on radio and tv, you enhance the awareness you’ve already established.  What you can do at start-up and beyond is work with the Internet.  Using YouTube, Facebook and other non-traditional platforms to build your local identity is inexpensive and effective — if you know what you’re doing.  Tami Patzer at Help-U-Sell Headquarters in Sarasota can get you started down this path.  She can usually get you on the first page or two of a Google search result in a matter of minutes.  If you’re not intrigued by that possibility, call your doctor, you may be dead.

Find sponsorship opportunities.  Who needs uniforms (that will include your logo)?  What stretch of highway needs adopting?  What charity walk/run event needs sponsors?  Why not invest in a portable canopy in glorious Help-U-Sell red with prominent logos and make it available to anyone doing a bake sale, rummage sale, parking lot promotion?  Remember: it’s about impressions.  Go make some.

Now, you’re three steps in and your phone should be ringing.  This is the point where the brand awareness you’ve created can begin to perpetuate itself.  So you have to get ready to answer the phone!  And that’s whatHow To Rule The (Real Estate) World In 10 #asy Steps is about:  the Buyer Inquiry.  Check in tomorrow for that.

How To Do It: Step 2 – A Better Deal

(This is an elaboration of  ‘How to Rule the (Real Estate) World in 10 Easy Steps‘)

Before we get on to Step 2, I want to clarify something about Step 1, which had to do with building listing market share.  If you get 20 listings this month, spread out over a 50 mile radius of your office, that’s nowhere near as powerful as 20 listings within a 3 -5 mile radius.  We’re not talking about taking any listing anywhere — that’s not what this is about.  This is about quickly creating a market presence that feeds you and perpetuates itself.  You do that in a compact target market.

I believe there are 3 areas where you might take listings:

  • 1 is your target market, where you spend time, money and effort to get listings.  It’s probably a 10 minute drive around your office, maybe smaller.
  • 2 is the area directly contiguous to your target.  It’s probably no more than 20 minutes from your office.  You’re not going to actively market there (until you’re ready to expand) but you’ll naturally get some inquiries and you won’t turn them down.
  • 3 is a much broader area where friends, family and former clients who refuse to work with anyone else have property.  Every once in awhile you’ll probably have to take one of those, but any listing that takes more than 30 minutes to get to from your office is probably a distraction from what you’re doing and should be avoided. Think about it:  showing a property like that or meeting with a seller to review price will take 30 minutes there and back – that’s an hour – plus however much time you’re spending at the property.  You easily could shoot an entire morning or afternoon taking care of one simple task, a morning or afternoon that could be spent getting another listing in your target market.  And though we all like getting paid when that distant listing sells, we’re probably not going to take advantage of the marketing opportunities the sale affords because, frankly, we’re not building anything there right now.

The word is FOCUS.  Clear?  Great:  on to Step 2 – the Better Deal

You can’t run into the market shouting ‘I do everything the other guys do and get paid just like they do, and that’s why you should list with me!’  There is no differentiator there, nothing to sell.  If that’s the consumer offer, my neighbor, 2 doors down is probably a better deal.  At least I’ll have peace in the neighborhood.  Now you might fluff that up with some fancy or hi-tech language, but consumers have become pretty savvy and are not nearly as susceptible to hyperbole as they were 20 years ago.

Neither can you run into the market shouting, ‘I do everything the other guys do and charge a lower commission than they do, and that’s why you should list with me!”  All you’re saying is that you’re the same old thing, just discounted.  If your competitor is charging 6% and you’re charging 1.75%, the consumer does the math and decides you’re a cut rate alternative, like the dollar store.  The question they will have in the back of their heads is:  what are you NOT going to do for me?   What am I giving up?

When you go into the market shouting, ‘I do everything the other guys do but have a completely different business model and charge in a completely different manner and that’s why you should list with me!’ you’ve said a mouthful!  In the back of the consumer’s mind is:  How does that work?  What do you do?  And you know, with Help-U-Sell, if any seller ever asks, ‘What do you do?’  you’re 80% assured of getting the listing.   The offer is so appealing that you’re almost always successful.   You’d probably have to make a mistake or not want the listing to fail.

So what is this better deal you’re offering sellers? It’s the BIG THREE:

Set Fee Pricing.  It says ‘I set my fees logically.  Just like any other business, my goal is to cover my expenses and make a reasonable profit, not a killing‘ (Who died?  The consumer!)  Really:  if you convert your set fee into a percentage, you take all the differentiating power and logic out of it.  You just become another discounter and the consumer question is:  What am I NOT going to get?  None of this means you should have only one set fee.  If logic dictates that you have 2 or even 3 (logic being things like marketing time and expense), you should have them.  But if your ‘set fee’ is graduating every $50,000 in price, it’s not a set fee at all.  It’s a percentage commission in a very bad disquise.  As we used to say Down South:  that bird won’t fly; that dog don’t hunt; that cat won’t flush.  (Sorry, cat lovers — couldn’t resist!)

Menu Pricing. This comes into play twice.  First, when the seller chooses the services he or she wants — open  houses?  MLS?  showing fee?  Second, when the house sells and the seller pays for ONLY the services that produced the sale.  This is a big differentiator (and if you haven’t noticed, anything that differentiates you from the stale traditional model is GOOD).  With your competitors, one size fits all.  No matter how the house sells — whether in the MLS through another broker or not, whether the seller happens to find his or her own buyer or not — the percentage based commission is not going to change.  Think about that for a minute . . . is that stupid or what?  If that made sense, every time you took your car in for a tune up, you’d be charged for an overhaul (just in case);  every time you ordered an entre in a restaurant, you’d be charged for an appetizer and desert (cause you might just get one).  The Seller Savings Comparison (it’s in the Download Library) is something you should be able to work in your sleep because it is the tool you use to present this wonderful consumer benefit.

Seller Involvement. Yes, this is a big consumer benefit.  Over an over, the research indicates that sellers are quite happy to take on some of the less challenging aspects of selling their home, especially if there is a potential financial reward for doing so.  If we first present Menu Pricing and then demonstrate how a seller increases his or her odds of saving the greatest amount of money by participating, they almost always say, ‘Heck yeah!  Save $6,000?  I’ll hold a few open houses and keep my flyer box stocked!’

There are lots of other components of the consumer offer, but these are the three that will cause sellers to pursue you.  If you’re working with a seller who is so intrigued by the Big Three that he or she wants more and more detail, you might also talk about:

Targeted Marketing.  It fuels our program.

Broker Control.  It brings sanity back into office operation so that we can offer our incredibly good pricing deal and still make more money than our competitors.

Focused Job Descriptions for Office Staff (including Buyer Agents).  Like Broker Control, this is something that makes it all work.

It’s going to be a rare seller who’s going to want to know all about the second set of three . . . and if you run across one, call me because they’re probably a good candidate for buying a franchise!  And if you’re getting into that level of detail in a listing consultation you’re probably spending too much time.  Help-U-Sell makes perfect sense and so it doesn’t take long to explain.  This is significant.  I remember working at brand X and training agents to make elaborate and long listing presentations.  The presentations were long because it takes a long time to justify a commission that makes no sense, or to wear a seller down, whichever comes first!  If you’re presenting Help-U-Sell effectively, you should be done with that part of the presentation in 10 – 15 minutes.  Pricing should take another 15 – 25 depending on how realistic your seller is, and coaching the seller on how to prepare and participate will take longer: 20 – 30 minutes.  You should be in an out in about an hour.  I’m not kidding.

Tomorrow, unless I get hit by a bus, we’re ‘How to Rule the (Real Estate) World in 10 Easy Steps:  building consumer awareness and interest.

How To Do It: Step 1 – Listing Market Share

(This is an elaboration of here ‘)

You’re starting out from scratch (or starting over from scratch . . . or barely scratching by and wanting to start over) and you want to take that first step:  build listing market share.  What do you do?  You don’t have much money and you may not see much on the horizon among your slim and tenuous pendings. Here’s the formula:

Learning:  The Elevator Speech and the Listing Consultation.  In today’s market you also want to check your knowledge of how to help a homeowner who is upside down or in distress.  Don’t worry about fancy schmancy objections and all the shiny things you can hang on these basic bits of information right now. There will time for that later.  You want to work the Elevator Speech until it flows off your tongue without any hesitation whenever anybody asks ‘What do you do?’  There are thoughts here and Step 2!as well as in the Operations Manual, posted in the Download Library.  You’ll also find the Listing Consultation in the DL Library along with video of John Powell working with a seller.  The whole consultation is important BUT there are two key pieces on which to focus:  The Service Comparison Chart and the Seller Savings Comparison.  They are the heart of the whole conversation.

Prospecting:  Start with people who are begging for your help:  FSBOs and Expireds.  Become obsessed with them and obsessive about contacting and maintaining contact with them.  Select powerful handouts to leave with them that differentiate you from the pack.  The old Help-U-Sell DVD, though a little dated, still works very well and, last time I checked was a bargain at about 40 cents apiece via NBS Printing, but a simple flyer that says who you are, and how you’re different is fine, too.

At the same time, mix in the folks who already know who you are and appreciate what you do:  past customers and clients.  Every day, call a few.  You’re catching up, giving them some market information (an item of value) and keeping your business in the top of their minds.

Marketing:  Choose your handouts for use with FSBOs, Expireds and anyone else you’ll be contacting.  You should have several so that you can go back to people with something new.  Also, doorhangers are important at this stage:  since you’re economizing you’ll want things you can leave on a door knob rather than mailing.  Doorhangers can be good for arounds and have the added benefit of giving you an opportunity to actually meet a neighbor face-to-face (if you deliver them yourself).  Speaking of arounds and brags — this is where to spend your marketing dollars in this first phase.  Your efforts are all about getting listings, so when you get one, pull out all the stops in exploiting the opportunities to market around it.

If you’re starting from scratch (or starting over from scratch), becoming visible is very important.  Make sure you present the benefits of seller involvement in the Listing Consultation.  Seller involvement frees you to do more high payoff activities and, if coached properly, means more directional and open house signs in the neighborhood that you don’t have to manage.  Supplement this growing number of signs with inexpensive Blitz Signs.  Even if you have to put them out on Friday and Pick them up Sunday evening, these little gems instantly make the statement that you are here and can save sellers thousands.  Consider investing in a car wrap.  You’ll spend $1,200 – $2,000 (I’m sure you could spend more) but you’ll have a mobile billboard you can park anywhere you want to make a statement.  If your budget is too tight at the moment, opt for magnetic car signs with the Help-U-Sell logo and use them! (drive nice).

Staffing:  If you’re starting from scratch you probably can’t afford help yet.  However, if you have the ability (rather, when you have the ability, which should be soon if you do what’s outlined here), the first person to hire is a good solid administrator who can take over most of the office activities and free you to be out meeting people.  Yes, a real estate license is a big plus and in today’s economy they are plentiful and available.

Time Management:  If the sun is up, the highest and best use of your time is meeting potential customers and at this point that usually means sellers.  Save learning (which is very important) for after 8 in the evening and before 8 in the morning.  When the sun is up become a people meeting machine.  Create opportunities to tell your story.  If you need some down time, schedule it for 2pm Eastern time on Tuesday and Wednesday.  Use that hour to attend the Help-U-Sell webinars to get fresh ideas and connect with other Help-U-Sell members.  Unless you have very thick skin, one of the things that will wear you down is the feeling of being all alone out there.  You’re not, and the Tuesday and Wednesday calls are an opportunity to tap in and re-energize.

Here is a Great Truth:  there’s no reason you can’t get 20 or more listings this month all by yourself.  Really.  A listing is something you can DO as Floyd Wickman used to say.  You can get out of bed this morning and say, ‘Today I’m going to get at least one new listing,’ and there are things you can DO to make that happen.  You can’t DO a sale — there are too many variables, too many other people involved.  But you really can go out and get a listing today and most every day if you make that your purpose.  I’m not much for fear motivation but really:  if someone held a gun to your head and commanded you to go out and get a listing, you could do it, right? So, if you are on the ‘Build Listing Market Share’ step, why not just decide you’re going to get one every day this month?   There will be days that something will block you, of course, but I bet if you are single-minded in the pursuit you can get 20 in 30 days.

OK?  On to Step 2!

Smack A Young Person Today! (It’s All Their Fault)

Here’s a little statistical analysis for you, courtesy of NAR.  First is a chart comparing rates of homeownership by age group in 2004 with the second quarter of 2010:

The blue line is the 2004 rate, the green is 2010 and the yellow is the % difference in the two.  What’s important is that homeownership has declined for every age group since 2004 with the biggest decline occurring in the under 35 group.  The good news:  there’s a whole lotta folks out there who NEED to buy a home!

Here’s another graph, this time from the Census Bureau.  It’s showing the ‘Mover Rate’ — which tells us who’s moving around out there.  Again, it’s the under 35 set that’s moving the most.  They are running around like chickens with their head cut off when what they should be doing is so simple:  buy a home!

Finally, here’s a non-comparative graph showing rates of homeownership, again by age:

Again, it’s that under 35 set that has the greatest need.

So, it’s younger people who are moving around the most, who have the greatest NEED to buy, but who are pulling back from homeownership at a faster rate than anyone else!  And all of this is happening at a time when interest rates are very low and housing is more affordable than it’s been in decades.

I sniff a sales challenge here.  What are we saying to the under 35 set to get them interested in buying real estate?  What should we be saying?  Does the old rent vs. buy analysis still work?  Or is it old hat?  What’s it going to take to get these folks off the fence and back into the market?

I also believe it’s time for young people to step up and take responsibility for this mess!  Clean it up!  Young people:  it is your DUTY to get out and buy a home this week.  You don’t just owe it to yourself, you owe it to your ECONOMY!  Personally, I think each of us should go out and find someone under 35 and just smack them!  It’s all their fault!

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