I just read a post called "10 Ways I Threw Away Money Marketing" by Greg Nino and man, could I ever identify with that guy! Over the years I've wasted I don't know how much money on various advertising schemes. That said, I
don't know that I've ever lost a cent on "Marketing"
What's the difference between the two? Well,"Marketing" is the long term exposure of your name and/or your company's name to the market whereas "Advertising" is a method of exposing your and/or your company's name to the market.
Advertising is generally a very expensive subset of marketing. Sometimes they overlap and are one in the same. For example, the ad that you buy in the local real estate magazine is advertising. When you run an ad in that magazine over a period of years, that ad becomes marketing. The flyer that you're passing out is an advertisment whereas passing out flyers is marketing. Does that make sense?
Marketing is broader in scope. Sometimes you pay somebody to take care of it for you, but other times you do it without even realizing that you are doing it. You hand out a business card at a social function....that's marketing. You volunteer to speak to your kid's high school business class, that's marketing. It's something that you probably do just about every day and as long as you're in business, you'll be marketing. As I mentioned, it's a long term process.
As I pointed out in the first paragraph, I've wasted some serious money on advertising schemes that didn't work. That is that didn't pay me back as much as they cost me, but one of the reasons that I view these advertising campaigns as failures is because I'm looking at them over the short run. Even an advertising campaign that doesn't create an immediate payback can be beneficial as a form of marketing. Especially if it's done right.
Viewing advertising in the short run and as a series of disjointed efforts are the biggest mistakes that I see real estate agents making. In his post, Mr. Nino talks about farming neighborhoods with postcards and how other agents have told him that it will "eventually" pay off. He looks at the fact that he's only gotten one call as evidence that the "advertising" didn't work. In the short run, he's right. He's spent more than he made off of the effort.
In the long haul though, the other agents who are encouraging him are right. Marketing surveys have shown that it takes the average consumer seeing your name something like 6 times before they will remember you. If you're mailing out postcards every quarter this means that at the end of the first year, you're just junk mail. Five years into it, you're a brand name!
It's basically the same with just about all forms of advertising. The first time you advertise on a radio station you
might get a certain amount of response, but it's not going to be the same as the twentieth time you run a flight of ads on that station. If you switch stations, you have to start over. TV? The same thing. Magazines? Ditto.
This is not to say that all forms of advertising are worthwhile and will pay off, even in the long haul. I've found TV to be too expensive, at least for me, to make it work. Same thing for advertising on the bigger radio stations. By the time it would work for me, I'd be broke and out of business! For the most part, agents having their pictures on billboards is more about that agent's ego that either advertising or marketing.
My point here isn't to say what forms of advertising work and which ones don't (that's the subject matter for a different post), it's to say that any advertising that you do should be part of a long term, systematic marketing plan. A plan designed to establish your name in your particular market place.
Can you do this in a year? Yeah, if you have enough money. Can you do it without breaking the bank? Yep, if you're consistent and have enough time!
R.B. "Bob" Mitchell
ValueList Real Estate Services, Inc.
Bob Mitchell is president of ValueList Real Estate Services, St. Louis' largest discount/full-service real estate and mortgage company. If you would like to find out more about Bob, ValueList or our flat-fee listing program, please feel free to visit our web site at valuelistre.com
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