Dear Friend,

This week I’m going to talk a little bit about a subject that has been one of my passions for the last closing in on 20 years now, and that is direct response marketing and the psychology of persuasion.

Now this week I had a chance to spend a lot of time in my library here in Florida, I had my wisdom teeth out on Tuesday and so I probably have to apologise for my mouth, it’s probably a little bit jumbled here so I might not annunciate as clearly as I could.  But this week I got to spend a lot of time in my library and you know was looking I’ve got hundreds and hundreds of books on advertising and marketing and psychology.  And you know as I was able to read some of my favourites it reminded me of some of the great lessons that I’ve learned and the application of those lessons over the last 20 years.  And you know I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve had when I started studying direct responses, studying psychology, I had a laboratory of my real estate business to apply it.  Which really was the perfect place to apply all of these lessons and so when I look back on what direct response advertising and persuasion and psychology has been able to do in my life, I think boy there’s really nothing better that you could dedicate some amount of study to.

You know what direct response advertising can do is remove you from every having to make cold calls again.  You know when I first started out in real estate I used to make a hundred cold calls a day and when I first discovered direct response advertising I’ll never forget it because I was able to send out the postcard to some apartment complexes offering a free book on how to buy your first house.  And I remember getting the replies from the postcard and calling the people who had responded one evening, and it was such an amazing experience that every person that I talked to knew who I was, they were expecting my call, least they recalled asking for this book and you know out of I think I got 11 responses that first day and talked to six or seven of those people.  And everyone of them were what I would’ve classified as an A or B prospect, and it would’ve taken me I don’t know how many but hundreds of calls, of cold calling to get to six or seven of the people who were of the quality of the people who were responding and calling me.  And I’ll never forget it because that night was the very end of my cold calling career, once I realised that I could write something on a postcard or I could write something in an ad or I could write something on a flyer that would get somebody to call me, my days of making cold calls were over.  And I owe that you know directly to understanding direct response marketing.

You know another thing direct response marketing can do is eliminate the cycles of up and down income.  You know because what happens when you’re doing cold prospecting is of course that you get busy from the results that you’re prospecting will yield and you stop doing the prospecting, and as soon as you stop doing the prospecting of course you’re not generating new prospects but you’re working with the ones that you have.  And then as soon as you’re done working with the ones who are… when they buy a house or when they sell their house or when they get a loan, now you’ve got to go back out and find more people.  And you know what I found was direct response because it’s so leveragable is a way to you know get a constant and predictable stream of new prospects for your business, and that constancy and predictability is so reassuring going forward.

So you know I would encourage you to really dedicate some time especially now that we’ve got the time coming up on the holidays here.  So you’ve got some opportunity if people are going to give you some Amazon gift certificates or Barnes and Noble gift certificates…  You know I’m going to share with you over the next few weeks here some of the very best books that I’ve read, some of the lessons that I’ve applied because of them and hopefully some of the lessons that you can learn from them.  So I’m going to just… I don’t know how long it’ll take here, I don’t know how many weeks we’ll do this but I’m going to start with the first couple of principles and the first couple of application lessons that I’ve learned and hopefully you can apply them too.

Lesson 1: No-one cares about you or your product or service like you care about you, your product or service

I find that one very interesting because the first thing that we’re concerned about when we get into the real estate business is how are we going to get our name out there?  And how are we going to differentiate ourselves?  How are we going to make ourselves stand out from the crowd because there’s so many other people, how are we going to make ourselves different so that people will choose us?

And you know I fell into that too I remember going through you know coming up with a different, unique logo for my name, for my… you know to differentiate myself.  I remember getting the full body pictures, this is at a time when that was kind of a brand new thing using the white screen and getting the full body pictures so that you could have your full body standing there in the ads, and you know all these different things that are kind of you know putting your picture bigger in your ads, your name bigger with my personal logo.  All of those kind of things were designed to kind of make me stand out and I realised that the big turning point for me was when I discovered that the best thing that you can do is not try and make yourself stand out but try and focus all of your attention on your prospects because that’s all that they care about, they really don’t care about you.

You know and it’s so funny that all that… in my observation all that typical real estate agents and mortgage brokers really care about are themselves, especially when we’re doing the personal promotion stuff.  And I say that with love because I was one of them, you know that you look… that all I really cared about was how cool is this going to make me look?  How is this going to make me look?  How do I feel about it?  And you know when I read a book by Dr Jeffrey Lant called Cash Copy, and that’s going to be my first recommendation here for you if you get an Amazon gift certificate.  Cash Copy by Dr Jeffrey Lant, I’ll put a picture of it up here on Marketing Monday for you.  But when I started looking at this he is the first person that I read that had a real no nonsense approach to explaining why we should only focus on other people.  You know in the book at the beginning of the book he’s got a section called 21 egregious copy errors and why you make them, and you know I’m just going to read a little excerpt here from egregious error number two.

‘Your prospects are not interested in your products or services, they’re interested only in themselves.  In their all too often petty aspirations, floored desires, cracked brain anxieties and foolish fears, thus it is to these not the manifest wonders of your product or service that you must appeal.  No-one will ever be as interested in what you’re selling as you are, particularly if you are the inventor of said wonder.  Expect no-one to be as interested as you are, take please from the fact that you are the genius who’s conceived such a marvel but take your pleasure quietly, individually or gather clandestinely with other such wonder workers to beat the collective drums of hubris for your unrivalled, unbelievable, astonishing and surpassingly marvellous creation.  Then go back to the real business of business, focussing on the wants, needs and aspirations of the severely floored people who are the only people who can provide you with the lifestyle you desire, your prospects.’

And you know it’s so interesting because when we start out thinking about how we’re going to get our name out there and we focus all of our attention on that, we’re not focussing on what our clients, our prospects’ needs are, what they really want.  And it wasn’t until I let go of my desire to get my name out there focussed all my attention on what would my prospects want that I was able to let go of the personal promotion stuff and focus on developing the Guide to Halton Hills.  Just like I describe in our Finding Buyers.com program that everything that I did there was completely nothing about me, 100 percent about what somebody who’s looking to move to Halton Hills would be interested in.  And by letting go of myself, making the information the star of the ad instead of me, more people were able to respond and I was able to build a consistently predictable flow of new business from people who were responding for the Guide to Halton Hills.

Lesson 2: Stop trying to be clever and creative and focus on being simple, clear and direct.

Now this is an interesting situation because so often we want to try and be clever and I remember my friend Eban Pagan and I were talking with a real estate agent in San Francisco who was designing or representing a developer who was building these lofts in the Soma area, south of Market.  And they were focussed on these highly clever, creative ads that they were taking out quarter page, half page ads in the San Francisco… the big San Francisco newspaper there.  And the ads if you can picture this were an overhead view of an illustration of a turtle, so you’re looking down on the turtle’s shell with his legs and arms sticking out and his head sticking out, and that took up most of the space of the ad.  And then there was an arrow pointing to the turtle’s head with little handwriting saying ‘This is you’ and it was pointing to the turtle, and then there was another arrow pointing to the shell saying ‘This is your new home at…’ whatever the name of the lofts were, south of Market’.  And you know that is what they were using as the big promotion for these lofts and it was very funny because you didn’t really get it at first except that it was a play on the fact that you’re buying a shell, you’re buying a loft shell and you get to finish the inside.

Well what we did you know and this is a thing that most people who are representing builders who are selling more than one property do, is they focus on the fact that they’ve got… that they’re marketing a development.  Meaning they’re choosing the name and they’re focussing that and they’re focussing on the logo of the development and they’re marketing the community, but the reality is if you’ve got ten or 20 or 40 homes or units to sell you’ve got to stop thinking that you’re trying to sell ten or 20 or 40 units and start realising that you’re really only trying to sell one 40 times.  You’re trying to find 40 individuals or ten individuals, or how ever many it is to buy in that new development.

So what we did was we focussed on what would we do if we were going to try and sell one of these lofts.  So we did a little classified ad that said… started out ‘Soma…’ and that was the you know S.O.M.A, which was the lead of the ad, that’s what people recognised, it was probably an area in your time that people are familiar with if you lead with that in a classified.  We wrote the ad, the classified said ‘Really cool loft south of Market, you finish inside’ and then we asked people to call and listen to a voicemail.  And when people would call and listen to the voicemail we would make it sound like it was the gentleman’s voicemail, it was just one guy.

So the voicemail said ‘Hey this is Jack if you’re calling about the loft I’m going to be over there on Sunday afternoon at two o’clock and here’s how you get there’ and that was the essence of the message, you know just focussed on the very simple thing.  Now the reality of what happened is after running that ad one time on that first open house he had 23 people come through the open house and sold multiple of those units, and then never ran the ad again because the developer… it wasn’t the image that the developer wanted to portray.  The developer had already committed to this advertising agency and wanted to build this hip persona, this hip image for the development which was ultimately something that end up costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars to do.

So it was very interesting that just one little you know shift of shifting away from being clever to being crystal clear and direct and getting right to the essence of what it is you’re trying to do, which is find one person who wants to buy one loft shell.  And if you’re selling multiple units in a luxury home development you’re looking for not multiple people but one person who’s looking for one luxury home in that area, doesn’t matter what the name of the subdivision is or the amenities or the image of the subdivision, it’s all about finding one person at a time and you can do that by being crystal clear and direct.

So that’s it for tonight, that’s the first of many lessons here that I’ve learned in direct response that I’ll share with you over the next few weeks as we go into the holidays here.  Again thanks for sticking with me here so if my voice might have been a little off here or my mouth a little bit full of pain relievers, but we’ll be back next time with even more ideas for finding buyers, for getting listings and converting leads.  So have a great week and we’ll talk to you next time.