Naples Florida Real Estate: Is Your Marketing Working? Not When You're Marketing Like This.

The only thing more challenging than marketing to buyers and sellers right now must be marketing to Realtors.  Talk about a tough prospect base right?  I can hear it in the voices of the masses who call me wanting me to sign up for advertising and other various tools and services.  I'm sure times are really tough for them too. 

I'm inundated with so many email advertisements that I find it challenging just keeping my email box clean enough to handle my own business.  It's rare that any emails catch my eye anymore which leads me to believe that maybe my efforts are going unnoticed as well. 

Effective marketing is tricky since so many people and entities are going after our Realtor eyeballs but let me share something with my prospective vendors going after my business that doesn't work.

Example #1 

Here are excerpts from an email advertisement I received the other day:

Fellow Agent

One of these days -- very soon -- a customer is going to ask you:

"Which do you recommend, new construction or re-sale?"

If you are like most residential Realtors, you will stumble through some explanation about value, trying to push your prospect to re-sales where you have lots of information (the MLS) and away from new construction where you only have limited information. 

But it doesn't have to be that way.

For only $24 you can have access to *** with thousands of local models in all price ranges and information about hundreds of communities.  Information that is not available to the general public.  Information that lets you say, "Depends . . . what is most important to you?" and not worry that you may not have enough product knowledge to make a sale.

It also means contact and incentive information almost impossible to find elsewhere.

So don't be the Agent who can't answer the simple question, "What would this cost me if it is new instead of re-sale?" or the question "What community is offering a great deal?"

Excuse me?  Calling me and the colleagues in my industry lazy and incompetent is probably not the fastest way to sell me a membership

Example #2

Here's the subject line of an email I received within minutes of the last one:

Shouldn't YOU in an office that is Internationally recognized to improve your bottom line?

Does anyone want to try to figure out what that says?

Example #3

As I'm writing this blog I just received a call from a recording telling me my website isn't working and how bad my web development is....

Do these automated recordings work for anything???  It was positioned as if someone had just unplugged my server as if it were a real live emergency...WOW!

We could have some real fun by taking these three examples and rewriting them for Realtors but I gotta get back to work! 

Moral of this story:  Take a little care and consideration...provide a benefit and show up not your automated voice message and let's see what happens with sales!