[POST UPDATED]

This post is inspired by Broker Bryant. 

My apologies for the title.  I don’t know if your business is broken or if you perceive it as such, but since you are now reading it, I’ll assume that it could be better.

This post is my experiment in keeping things simple for once, as I am told most of you don’t have the time or the patience to wade through dissecting so many words to glean one or two nuggets of wisdom.  So here goes my ten-step program for anyone who is either ballsy enough or desperate enough to implement it, nuggets only.

Image courtesy Web Marketing Therapy

1.      Define your market.  Chances are no matter what area you serve you will never be the agent or lender of choice for everybody.  Figure out which niche(s) you are best suited to serve, and then jot down a small psychological profile of the kinds of people those niches attract.  This is step one for a reason – you MUST know who you are speaking to in order to draft your message.

2.      Make a choice to IGNORE your competition.  For as long as you are chasing someone with more listings or closings in your market, you will NEVER be the alpha dog.  You will always be two steps behind.  In addition, worrying about the bigger fish is a rather sad way to conduct your business.

3.      Take a good look at all your stuff.  In simple terms that includes everything out there in the world, whether real or virtual, with your name on it.  Now that you did that, would you, as a CONSUMER hire you, or would you move on to the next professional?

4.       Chances of you being entirely happy with everything you looked at in step 3 are nil  (if you are happy with everything, find another blog to read - you are done here).  Now, prioritize things you can afford to improve on, both financially and time wise, and draft a plan of attack.

5.      Write down everything you’ve ever done to get business and mark items that didn’t result in anything off that list.  If these include any services you are paying for – shut them down.  Of course this step will take actually knowing how to analyze results of your marketing and promotional efforts, but I am sure there are plenty of blogs on the subject, and I am trying to keep this short.

6.      Revamp the items in “5” that DID produce results to see if you can increase their effectiveness.  Yes, this is easier said than done, but hopefully, you’ve just saved yourself a few bucks and certainly some time by cutting out all the things that didn’t do anything for your business, so now you can devote more resources to stuff that, at the very least, has the potential of working.

7.      Track EVERYTHING you do.  Most of you have heard about tracking, but few do it in any meaningful way.  Anyone who has a website without analytics installed is working in the dark.  If you send out any direct mail but don’t log results to specific campaigns, you’re throwing crap against the wall, hoping it sticks.  Simply creating an Excel file where each marketing endeavor is named and tracking your efforts there will give you a resource for planning each future promotion.

8.      Set your budget based on something more than a guess.  So many marketing budgets are based on an arbitrary number.  Examples of arbitrary: money you have available at the moment, a percentage of anticipated or past sales, what the successful guy or gal at a competing office spent last year or a sum of last night’s lottery numbers.  Your REAL budget should be based solidly on actual costs of implementing things in step 6.

9.      Save your time and energy and STOP reading marketing books.  They will NOT teach you how to market yourself.  The only way you will ever learn it is by doing it.  No textbook in the world, no matter how many bestseller lists it's on, will help you appropriately define your niche, and suddenly grow a talent for saying just the right thing in just the right way to get to your consumers.

10  Unless endowed with exceptional graphic sense and an instinctive knowledge of what will work for your consumers, hire a professional to help you make your stuff look good, or at least consistent.  Clip Art is so last century.  Fonts that come by default with your MS Office install do NOT convey the right message, and any time you put out a half-baked image of yourself out there, no matter how unique – you are taken less seriously as a professional who's supposed to be capable of marketing someone’s home.  Looking fantastic on the net and on paper still matters, no matter what the gurus say, unless your niche is selling ugly homes to blind people, and then you are fine.

So there you have it.  If any of this is still confusing, pick up the phone and I’ll walk you through it, within reason. 

[PLEASE READ MY COMMENT AT #46 BEFORE HITTING THAT SUBSCRIBE TO BUTTON OR IMPLEMENTING ANY OF THESE STEPS]

For those who do not know me, and in the interest of full disclosure, I own a marketing company, and would love it if you hired us to help you implement some of these fixes.  We do good work, or so our clients tell us (read the Kudos here), and from what we hear, we are pretty fun.