CRUSH Your Competition (Part 1)

Dear Real Estate Super-Stars,

I was all ready to rant off about the 3Ms of marketing, but I realized I've been promising for a while how I'd write about my most favorite subject of all:

Stomping Your Competitors Into The Ground
With Better, Smarter Marketing

See gang, I'm a pure-and-simple capitalist, and I'm a competitive one at that. I think you should revel in making money. You should want to do your business better than everyone else - no time for losers. May the strongest business win! Can't handle it - get a job.

To that end I absolutely hate dumb marketers, and the world is full of them.

So here is the story, you need to figure out what works in your market and tune into why its working. I always ask peope WHY they call me, and if you're starting out you'd be surprised what people tell you.

Here's one such call:

ME: "How did you find out about us?"
Caller: "Oh yeah, you wuz with a bunch a signs on the road"
ME: "Did you call any others?"
Caller: "Nope."
ME: "Why'd you call me?"
Caller: "Yours was the only one I could read!"

Holy cow I thought! Could this be real? You bet! A little common sense and you can tweak your marketing. In any kind of signage readability is king - screw pretty pictures, extra words, it's all crap. Make the stuff readable!

But how do you figure this out?

TEST IT!!!! My friend and I tried all sorts of things... for signs we fiddled with text sizes, colors and other little details... we poured hours over everything. The difference is in the details.

I do the same thing for mailings. I'll write literally a hundred headlines anytime I want to mail something. (Yes a hundred headlines, anything less is sad excuse for an effort.)

Moving on, I want to share how I started to clue into other media... I started with the standard crap you see in Real Estate courses you know the stuff they give you just to get up and running with.

I wasn't sure how to make it better, so the next person I went to see I made a deal with. While on the phone I offered them a quarter for every piece of advertising they had that had anything to do with selling their house. You know what?

I spent nearly Fifty Bucks on junk mail!

It was a damn good investment. I had my competitions' stuff. I now had a clue what floats around out there... most of it is truely garbage. Some of it ain't.

What I found out, will come in the Part 2.

-Ted