20 years
ago, if you wanted to be the best letting agent or estate agent in town, you
bought the most pages in the local rag. You were the daddy of estate agency
(and or lettings) in your town and you meant business. At my first office I
worked as an estate agent in 1992, my boss took the first 8 pages of the
property section .. he was king daddy of them all
.. and
that went for all media, every company up and down the country, neigh the
Western world ... huge multi national washing powder manufacturers would spend
millions assembling a large amount of attention. A TV network or a magazine or
even a billboard company found a place you can put an ad, and they sold you a
shot at reaching their audience. You rented space to get the eyeballs of the
customers on your product or service, so they would buy your product or service
Look at
what your marketing department with your marketing budget. Your marketing
department, don't care about the long-term value of this audience. It's like a
rental car. You want it to be clean and shiny when you get it, you want to
avoid getting in trouble when you return it, but hey, it's a rental, and so
when we they ads, we as letting agents ask, "how big an audience" and
then we design an ad with our brand in mind, not with the well-being of the audience
in mind. The amount of crap coffee table magazines that are 90% full of pages
of properties you’ve sold or let, you pay for a 1000 of them and if we get one
person using you to sell or rent their house, everyone celebrates. .. 0.1%
return.
Suddenly
the new social media thing comes along and the rules are different. You're not
renting an audience, you're building one. If you still ask, "how much
traffic is there," or "what's the google click thru rate?"
you're not getting it. Are you buying momentary attention or are you investing
in a long term asset?
Now, when
you buy something (that thing you used to call 'media'), you're not paying for
eyeballs, you're paying for a scaffolding. A scaffolding you can use to build
your own audience, one that you can nurture, educate and ultimately convert.
You'll take care of this audience differently, measure them differently and
have a different sales cycle. This isn't natural, but it works.
Two
steps: create a scaffolding and then fill it with people.
Some examples:
Consider
the local letting agent. He or she can spend to run ads every week in the local
paper or spend £300 a month on a google adwords campaign or she can use the same
money to start a legitimate media channel, a digital magazine (posh word for a
blog), say, one that talks about the local property market (because every
person who reads the local newspaper reads the agents pages, even if they aren’t
looking to move. Landlords read these as well, becuas ethey also want to know
what their rental properties are worth and if they are getting the right rent.
I have taught in previous post on how to write a blog .. JFDI! . It might take
a lot of time and effort and the best bit, not much money. You are building a scaffolding
Or
consider the local physio. He can spend money on a yellow pages ad or he can
invest in a scaffolding, creating a local running club and doing physio for its
members.
Compared
to the cost of renting eyeballs, buying a scaffolding is cheap.
Filling it with
people eager to hear from you... that's the expensive part, expensive not in
money but thought, time and creativity. But if you don't invest in the scaffolding,
you'll be at a disadvantage, now and forever. The smart way to build a brand
today is to invest in the elements of the scaffolding... the service, the technology,
the website and the systems you need to make it easy for people to show up at
your very own show. And then embrace these people and shoot for 90% conversion,
not 0.1%.
Like most
good investments, it's expensive .. but like I said before and I will say again
.. expensive not in money but thought, time and creativity and is worth more
than it costs. Within a couple of months of me starting this blog, I have
hundreds of people coming to the blog site every day. Lovely emails and posts
from people who enjoy reading it. It has kindly given me enough business to be
earning more than my previous job. I could stop writing the blog, but I won’t.
I enjoy doing it. You fellow letting agents should write a blog .. like I said,
I have told you how to do it on many many posts, in fact there are 69 posts
before this one. If you take the time to read them, just copy what I say and do
and you will succeed. It takes time .
but like most good things, they also take time.
