Dear Friend,

This week I’m going to share a four part formula that really makes up the structure of all good marketing.  So we’re going to it’s almost like studying music theory this week.  You know knowing and mastering these components allows you to plug in your own market variables and get consistent, predictable results in every marketing campaign that you undertake.  And just like all hit songs have three verses, a bridge and a chorus, all hit marketing campaigns have these four elements in them.  So I’m going to share this amazing formula with you and then I’ll give you some examples of how all the elements work together.

Number 1: Identify a single target market

Now I talk about this a lot and so it sounds like I’m going down a path that I’ve already gone down here but this in the context of this formula, it’s very important.  A single target market for our definition here is a narrowly defined group of people who are all looking for the same thing.  Now you know there are three basic ways that you can divide up and select a single target market.  You can go buy the type of house or property, so townhouses, both people who are looking for townhouses would be one target market and people who have townhouses that they would like to sell would be a separate target market.  Same thing with golf course homes or horse farms or condos or lake front homes or new homes or apartment buildings or retail strip plazas or industrial buildings, any kind of unique type of property would be a separate target market.

Now and you can see how people who are looking horse farms are going to be different that people who are looking for condos.  And so by selecting that target market it really sets our tone for what we’re going to do and how we’re going to attract those people.  So whatever type of house you can think of, or type of property could be vacant land, it could be new homes, whatever it is, any type of single target market that you can think of is going to work for this first part of the formula.

Now aside from the types of homes or types of properties we also have neighbourhoods or geographic areas that could be a target market, and that could start as narrow as home owners in River Oaks or in Joshua Creek or Georgetown South or in any named community, any named planned community or neighbourhood that has a unique identity to it.  You know one level up from that would be a section of town or an area, you know a particular name of an area, the Park area, that would be a geographic target market.  The town that you live in would be sort of the broadest target market that I would recommend, I wouldn’t recommend that you go to the county level or the tri-town  area or tri-borough  or wherever it is, be very narrow, be very specific.

The third type of target market would be a personal identity and that could be what people would consider themselves, whether they’re nurses or teachers or police officers or lawyers or doctors, anything that somebody would identify with and say ‘I am a nurse, I am a doctor, I am a teacher’ whatever it is those can be good target markets.  Now they’re a little bit more sort of difficult to wrangle because they’re not all looking for the same thing, so my very first choice for you would be a type of a house or a neighbourhood but you can just as easily do an identity that somebody might have as a person.  And this is true especially if you have a way to get access to this unique group of people, if you know a nurse and you can get to nurses or you know a teacher and you can get to teachers or there’s a specific publication that you can use that only goes to teachers.  Those kinds of things are great.

Now the reason that these all work is for something that I call the horoscope effect and that is that people are primarily motivated by self interest.  So when you are looking at the horoscopes for instance the first place your eyes go are to your own sign, I’m a Taurus so that goes immediately to Taurus to find out what the Taurus’ have in store for the day.  And then immediately the next thing is my wife is a Virgo, so I go straight to the Virgo section to see how her horoscope is going to affect my life.  Again it’s all self centred, we’re completely focused on ourselves.  I don’t care and I’ve never ever read what the Pisces has in store for instance or what Cancer has in store for the day, I don’t care because I’m not a Cancer and I don’t know any Cancers.

And it’s the same exact thing when your target audience are looking at the real estate publications, the classified ads, driving around neighbourhoods.  If they’re looking for a condo they’re completely focussed on that, they are blind to horse farms or blind to new homes, whatever if its, if they are looking for something very specific that’s all they’re looking for.  So it doesn’t matter to you, doesn’t matter to them sorry that you can serve more than one target market, because all they’re focussed on is themselves.  So the more crystal clear that you can get in your mind a single target market and lock that in to place, the rest of the formula will take care of getting all of those people to call you.  Now you can do this one at a time, one single target market at a time but you can have as many target markets as you want.  You know all we’re doing is we’re focusing and going through the complete formula for one target market at a time and this really helps for the next step.

Number 2: Is compel your prospects to call you by making an irresistible offer.

So you have to ask yourself what are my target market already looking for?  What are the in motion already looking for?  You know I always say this to fine prospects who are in motion, don’t try and go convince people to get into motion, there’s enough people right now in any target market that you can think of that have already made up their mind that they want a condo or they want a golf course home or they want a lake front home.  And they are already seeking that out, so the very best thing that you can do is to offer them valuable information.

Information is a great commodity, a great currency that you have that you can offer in an irresistible way to your target audience so that they will identify themselves.  You know that’s what we really want, is we want to identify our prospects.  And that’s completely opposite of what most people go through because most real estate agents and most mortgage brokers want the market to be able to identify them, that’s why they spend so much money on personal promotion, advertising, on getting their name out there, they want the market place to be able to identify them and say ‘Oh yeah that Dean Jackson is in real estate’.  But you know what, all we’re looking for are our specific target market.  We really want everyone who’s going to sell their house in River Oaks in the next six to 12 months to identify themselves to us.  So it’s almost like we’re saying you know if we could drive through the neighbourhood in a military vehicle with a loud speaker saying ‘Attention River Oaks residents, everyone who’s going to sell your house in the next six to 12 months please raise your hand, please come to the street and raise your hand’.  Now that’s what we really want so that we can identify who they are, it’s far more valuable for us to know who our prospects are than it is for our prospects to know who we are.

So you know when we’re looking at it some of the things you might off if let’s say you might have somebody who’s looking for lake front homes.  You might offer a free 2007 guide to lake front house prices, just like we talked about at Finding Buyers.com, the same kind of thing where you’re offering something of valuable information.  Now you could use that same chassis if you were putting together a lake front guide, you could use that same chassis to put together a golf course property guide or a new home community guide or a retirement community guide, anything like that.  If you’re using an identity like nurses or firemen or police officers you could run ads that offer a free recorded message that say ‘Zero down payment home loans for nurses’.  And the thing that we really want people to do after step two in our formula is we want them to do one of two things.  We either want them to call and listen to a recorded message and then leave a message for us so that we know who they are, or we want them to go to a website and we want them to leave their name and their email and maybe their contact information.  That’s all we’re looking for, we’re looking for what is it going to take to trade somebody raising their hand, telling us who they are for what kind of information are we willing to give them for that, or would they be willing to trade their contact information for.  So you always want to think what would be irresistible to me if I were this target market.

Number 3: is identify the five star prospects.

You know once we’ve gotten our target market to identify themselves the thing we want to do next is immediately connect with those prospects and we want to learn to have a great conversation, and we want to be able to bond with people over the phone.  You know we want to get good at identifying who the five star prospects are.

You know to review we’re looking for these five elements, we’re looking for people who are willing to engage in the dialogue, we’re looking for people who are friendly and co-operative when we talk with them, we’re looking for people who know what they want, they’ve got a plan and are realistic about it, that’s…  You know when people know what they want they’re willing to share it, good prospects always know what they want, they’ve always got a plan.

Number four is that they’re moving in the next six months, and I like to say next six to 12 months you know, the longer that you can extend your ability to communicate with people who are not yet ready, the more money you’re going to make.

And number five is they would like us to help them.  So any one of those five things if they’re missing is going to be a problem.  We’re looking for the people who have all five of those elements and the only goal of this third step in the formula is to identify five star prospects, decide whether they’re ready now or whether they’re ready later.  That’s the only thing that we’re looking to do in that step three in this formula.  Once we’ve identified them and we’ve identified that they’re now or later, most of them are going to be later, we want to move onto step number four.

Number 4: Follow up with added value for at least one year.

There’s been some very interesting studies that show that only 15 percent of people who enquire about something right now are going to buy in the next 90 days.  So you know that means the corollary to that is that 85 percent of all of the prospects that you are identifying right now are going to be 90 days or more away from buying a home.  That’s why I say you’re best off to be able to follow up with people for six to 12 months.  See most people, most of your competitors are only able to follow up or handle the relationship with somebody if they’re going to buy in the next six to 12 days, so you’ve got a big advantage if you’re able to follow up for six to 12 months.

Now once you’ve identified these five star prospects the most profitable thing you can do is consistently add value month after month after month.  You want to think like they think, you know and this is why everything that every program that I’ve done is always come with a built in turn key 12 month follow up program.  We did that with Finding Buyers.com, we did that with Getting Listings.com, we’ve done that with the 30 Day Lead Blitz, we’ve done it with every single thing that you’re doing to generate prospects.  Always have an eye to how are we going to manage this relationship with our prospects for 12 months.  You only want to think in terms of building the hot 100 list, and that’s 100 people in your target market that are going to buy a home in the next six to 12 months or who are going to sell their home.

You know it’s easy to follow up with a hundred people if they’re all looking for the same thing because you can sort of standardise the follow up.  You know if they’re buyers we can standardise that with a free subscription to our Home Finder newsletter.  The sellers we can standardise it with a subscription to our Get Top Dollar newsletter.  All of those things are going to really add up to huge potential returns on our investment.

So here’s how it works, so you know let’s put it all together here.  Let’s say that we chose River Oaks home owners, there’s 2,000 homes in River Oaks and our goal is to get listings.  So the first thing we would do is send lead generating postcards with an irresistible offer, so that the home owners are thinking of selling will raise their hands by either calling our free recorded message or going to a website and leaving their contact info.  Then we connect with them and find out who the five star prospects are.

Finally we launch a turn key follow up program and stick with it for at least 12 consecutive months.  If we do all of those steps and follow that winning formula we maximise our return on investment.  Now we can follow that formula again and again and again with any target market you choose.  You know we could do it with renters in a certain apartment complex, we can offer a free report or a free book on buying a home with zero down payment or a free recorded message.  We can identify who the five star prospects are and then we could follow up with our Home Finder newsletter for the five star prospects for one year.

You know just like writing a hit song comes down to writing three verses, a bridge and a chorus, once you know the underlying structure of this formula you can apply it to any target market you can think of.  You know there’s infinite numbers of ways to apply the same structure of a hit song, there’s infinite number of ways to apply the structure of a hit marketing campaign.

So there you have it, I hope that you will take this amazing formula and use it to make bucket loads of money in 2008 and beyond, and I will look forward to next week when I will share even more ideas for finding buyers, for getting listings and for converting leads.  So that’s it for this week, have a great week, we’ll talk to you next time.

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