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Dear Friend,

This week I was talking with at least three or four people who were really curious about this concept of practically applying the concept of narrowing to a single target market.

We started off this season and I’m sharing the number one strategy that I would use is really narrowing my focus to a very specific target audience so a lot of people now are asking well what are the practical applications of that, how do you actually do that and the thing that I notice is the reason people ask that is that there’s a fear that that’s not going to be enough, there’s a fear that if I narrow it to a target market that there’s not going to be enough business or that you’re turning your back on other business.

First of all I just want to be absolutely clear that when I say narrow your target, narrow yourself to a single target market, I’m talking about it from a likeness of creating a brand, an individual brand. I’ve talked about Proctor & Gamble a lot, you’ve heard me say how Proctor & Gamble is an umbrella company that is made up of several individual very profitable, very specific brands. I point to an example, I point to crest.com as an example, Crest toothpaste. Now if you think about it it seems like a very simple thing, it’s a very narrow focus, teeth, toothpaste but if go to the crest.com website you’ll see how much actually goes into this. There are teams and teams of people who their entire job is to dream the day away thinking about how do we sell more Crest, how do we make Crest better, how do we make the tooth brushing experience better, how do we fight cavities, how do we do everything to do with their dental hygiene and dental health so when you start thinking about it that doesn’t stop them from having a focus also on laundry detergent. If you go to tide.com you’ll find exactly the same thing, it’s very, very focused, all of them working underneath that same umbrella so if you imagine that you are Proctor & Gamble and each of your target markets is an individual brand that you’re running.

So let me give you a couple of examples just to give you some practicality on how this actually works. I was talking with a gentleman in California, Jerry, who has a focus on REO properties and the interesting thing is as soon as you mention REO, real estate owned, bank owned properties the number one thing that people want to know is well how do I get those REO listings, how can I get registered with the banks to get those REO listings and the reality is why would you want to, why would you bother? If it seems like it’s such a hassle to have those listings and to do all the reporting and everything that’s required when you could just as easily focus on finding all the buyers for REO properties and you may as well act like all of those REO listings are your own because the difference is that most REO properties are empty, they’re vacant, you can show them any time you want and there’s nothing stopping you from advertising to find people who are looking for REO properties so what Jerry does he’s got a great little system, he runs a craigslist ad telling how many properties are available that are REO, that are under a specific price range and people respond to his craigslist ad so he’s got the first element of a very, very profitable specific target market. He’s got an engine that attracts a constant stream of buyers so he’s got a way for generating leads. If you run an ad in craigslist that says bank owned homes, must be sold, whatever the price range is, you could get a free list, respond to this ad you’re going to find people who are looking for bank owned properties and you’re going to have this constant stream of them. Now of course the goal then is what can you do because you can run that ad in sort of a rhythmic fashion I would say, you can run it again and again, you can run it every week. Once you figure out the right words to say, the right thing that is attractive to that audience you can run it again and again and consistently bring in buyers who are looking for bank owned properties.

Now once you’ve got that your next level that you want to think about is how can we get those people who are identifying themselves asking for this list to actually come and meet us and how can we do that in a rhythmic, repeatable, duplicatable way so we were talking and I suggested why not have a Saturday tour of bank owned properties where you’re getting all these people who are interested in the bank owned properties, you can communicate with them and let them know that this Saturday we’re having a special tour of bank owned properties and we’d love for you to join us, the tours are at 10.30 and one o’clock and 3.30 and the reality is that it doesn’t matter whether you have one person come on the tour or whether you have twenty-one people come on the tour, it does not matter. The point is that you are doing a repeatable, duplicatable thing, that your goal is every Saturday filling up your appointment slots to show bank owned properties to people who are interested in bank owned properties. It’s a fantastic way to create a repeatable little cycle. It’s a closed loop. You’ve got of all of the access to the real estate owned listings. You’ve got access to all of these buyers. You are giving them an easy way to take that next step. Now you might want to couple that with a workshop, with a free class on buying REO properties so maybe you do that at 10.30 on Saturday morning and maybe you have the tour starting at one o’clock and 3.30 so that people can come to the class or maybe you test having a class on a Wednesday evening so that now when you’re in contact with the people who are looking for REO properties you invite them to either the class on Wednesday night or the tour on Saturday and know that it’s okay that if they don’t come this Wednesday because we’re going to do another one two Wednesdays from now and it’s okay if they don’t come on the tour this Saturday because we’re going to do it every Saturday so you get into this and who knows how long this will last, how long REO properties will be as popular as they are right now and as plentiful as they are but certainly for the foreseeable future you’ve got a big opportunity laying in front of you if that’s a focus that you want to take.

Same week, this week I was talking with a gentleman in Utah who’s chosen as a target market to focus on as condos and something happens when you narrow your focus even philosophically to a single target market. What happens is that it becomes very crystal clear to think about that target market. You can see specifically how the whole thing plays together because now just like the team at Crest has one goal of dreaming the day away thinking of how can we sell more Crest, how can we make the tooth brushing experience better your whole focus becomes how can we find people who want to buy condos in my town, how can I find people who are going to sell their condo in my town. Ideally that’s what you’re looking for is to do both of those. That’s why we do our Getting Listings program to use Getting Listings to find all of the people in the condos who are going to be selling their house so that they can raise their hand and you’re building this constant rhythmic repeatable flow of seller leads because we’re mailing the postcards each month, people are raising their hand, you’re building this pool of people who are potentially going to sell their condos in the next six to twelve months. Now at the same time using the Finding Buyers program or using the Thirty Day Lead Blitz program where you are focused on finding buyers for condos you’re doing that in a rhythmic repeatable way so you’re doing everything you can to find everybody who is looking for a condo to raise their hand and when you start looking at that, when you start thinking to yourself if all I had to do, if my whole world real estate wise is finding people who want to buy or sell my specific target market it becomes very easy. Now just because you choose condos to begin with doesn’t mean that you can’t then duplicate that for horse farms or duplicate it for lakefront properties. It’s very, very easy. Now all of these things that we talked about with the REO properties as far as converting those leads goes just as well. You could invite people who are responding for your guide to the condos and the condo prices. You could invite those people to a condo buying workshop or invite those people on a Saturday tour of condos.

Now when you start thinking about how can you make the experience of buying a condo or selling your condo even better if your main focus is one specific target market you’ve got a great opportunity here. I’m going to put up a couple of links here to show you some simple ways that you can use a blog to really go above and beyond what anybody else is willing to do for that target market. When I talk about it as you’re creating what Warren Buffet would call a moat around your business, a sustainable durable advantage because you’ve put the time and the effort into doing something that most people are not willing to do which is really go above and beyond and go out of your way in spending time creating tools like the guide, like the sell your house for top dollar fast booklet, like the get top dollar newsletter, all these things that are making the experience of buying or selling a condo even more pleasurable. So I’m going to put up a link to a couple of sites, one would be the all about townhouses which is a sample blog that I put together to show what you could do with a specific target market so look on the marketingmonday.com site for the link to all about townhouses. Now another site that you could do with that to create a rhythmic way of continuing to follow up with people who are looking for condos or town homes or whatever your target market is is another sample site that I’m going to put up here called town house Tuesday which would be a weekly update of all of the new properties that have come on the market and the sample sites that I’m going to put up for you is as a podcast just like the Marketing Monday podcast. You can do so much cool stuff with these podcasts that it really is creating a wonderful brand for you. If you had townhouse Tuesday and the people who are looking for townhouses know that every week that can get all the up to the minute information on all the new townhouses that have come on the market or condos or bank owned properties or lakefront homes or golf course properties or whatever your target market is if there’s a weekly destination for them to go to that’s going to be a fantastic opportunity for you because from that destination now you’ve got the opportunity to have people take that next step, come on a Saturday tour, come to a workshop, meet you in person for a consultation, whatever it is that would be the next step for these people that’s what you want to focus on. Now once you do it for one, once you create that sort of closed loop system for one target market it’s very easy for you to do it for others.

So there you go, there’s some practical applications and you can look for those links to find samples of how to put together some really cool blogs for your target market and then come back next week and we’ll talk about even more ways to get listings, to find buyers and to convert leads. Have a great week and I’ll talk to you next time.

Links for this week:

All about Townhouses

Townhouse Tuesday