Author: Jeff Patterson, owner of Residential Appraisals - For the past 25 years, Jeff has been providing residential appraisals for most of southern and central Maine. Jeff's clients range from private appraisals to working with brokers, banks, litigation support and expert court testimony.
In the past 25 years I have gone through numerous seminars pertaining to selling and marketing. This does not make me an expert, but what I can say without doubt is that if you don’t ask for the business you will not get it. With that in mind I have separated my principles of marketing in four parts . . .and will present them in this two-part series.
- Marketing 101 - It’s all about numbers
- Marketing 102 - Profit is all about effective marketing
- Marketing 103 - Recording what works and what doesn’t
- Marketing 104 - It is all about your plan
Marketing 101 - It's All About The Numbers
101 Marketing is about numbers, the more people you ask for the work, the bigger chances you have you’re going to get a yes. You have to ignore the no’s, and simply concentrate on how many “no thank you’s” you have to go through in order to get a “Yes”. While supply and demand for your services comes into play, it comes down to the less demand the higher your numbers “no’s” you have to go through. That is to say, in a low demand market you have to advertise your services more to get the same amount of orders you did when there is a high demand.
Let’s say you’re looking to market your services several different ways.
- Telephone calls
- Mailings
- E-mails
- Door to door solicitation
The more business you solicit the more your going to receive, and each way will have different results. At this point and time the 80/20 rule should be acknowledged, which states that 80 percent of your business will come from 20% of your clients or marketing efforts. Meaning in your given area, 20% of marketing campaigns that will work and 80% will not. So in order to be successful you have to get use to rejection.
Once you understand this, your effective marketing comes into play or marketing 102. Before I digress into marketing 102, let’s acknowledge some percentages of returns from some of the campaigns.
Mass marketing is one of the cheapest methods of marketing. However the return might be less than 02%. That is to say, you send out 1,000 e-mails or post cards you can expect 20 inquires. . While telephone calls typically give you a 20% return so out of 100 calls you will get 10 inquire. Door to door is hard to get a handle on, however my results have been about 25%. Which means 40 contacts give you 10 inquires.
I say inquires since, getting their attention is one thing, getting them to buy means you have to compete in the market’s demand for good, fast and cheap. Depending on what your selling, who your contacting or focusing on, will depend on how many inquires you can turn into sales.
It should also be noted that you can increase the percentage of inquires with the right campaign of message, or a decrease if your campaign has the wrong message.
Marketing 102 - Is all about deriving sales from your marketing efforts.
If your marketing clients that are looking for fast and cheap appraisal services, and you are trying to sell good and fast, you are going to get a lower percentage of return on your marketing efforts. On the other hand you might have clients that are looking for good and cheap, in which case trying to sell fast and cheap is not going to work.
As the adage goes, the always market looks for good, fast and cheap, but no matter how suppliers try they can only provide two out of three.
From the supplier’s side of things, if you provide poor, slow and expensive you will soon be out of business. It is also important to understand that “good” is from the seller’s perspective not the supplier’s perspective. Many clients complain that appraisers are telling them what they want, when they are the client and they know what they need.
While in our industry idealistically USPAP sets the standard for quality or “good” it’s ultimately the market in the form of competing suppliers and enforcement of these regulations set the minimum standards. My perspective is that this confusion is where much of our industry has failed. But I digress.
Let us say “good” to a lender is someone that is FHA/HUD approved. Then as a supplier of appraisal services, you will have to offer this service to your client.
Some marketing campaigns are based on informing the market or disillusioned them that certain aspects of the services you have to offer is considered good. Such as taking a certain pill (let’s say vitamin X) will reduce your chances of getting tongue tied and you don’t want to get tongue tied it will make you unattractive. So buy vitamin X today.
You know that if you market this product enough, someone is going to buy it. The problem is that it might cost you more to market the product than your return on selling this product.
In order to gage your profitability or determine what the market wants we have to be able to derive what is selling and what is not selling by tracking the demand. This brings us to Marketing 103 . . .in Part Two of my series!
Author: Jeff Patterson, owner of Residential Appraisals - Has been providing residential appraisals for most of southern and central Maine for the past 25 years. Jeff's clients range from private appraisals to working with brokers, banks, litigation support and expert court testimony.
477 Mouse Lane
Alfred, ME 04002
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