A good magician can make you believe in something that you can’t see. So can a really good marketing campaign. In my course, Marketing Magic: Strategies to Educate, Engage and Attract Business, you can learn some of the best—and easiest—ways to increase your client base.
The right approach
I think that some of us may overcomplicate this whole marketing process. I think it can be much simpler than we make it, so this class looks at marketing across the board—in traditional, as well as online and digital formats. It will show you that content is everywhere. You don’t have to wrack your brain about it. You don’t have to do anything complicated to have marketing content that produces great results.
The core of the message of this course is that for marketing to be effective, it needs to be relevant to the consumer. I must brag a bit and say that I was once chatting with “Drive” author Daniel Pink and told him that REALTORS® send out too many chicken fettuccine recipes. (He liked that quip so much that he incorporated it into his remarks for the CRS event he was speaking at.) In this course, you will discover ways to “get your foot in the door” in a way that leads more seamlessly to the relevant, core topic—real estate.
Another pitfall in marketing is being too boring. The best thing you can do for a consumer is to educate them, engage them and maybe even entertain them just a bit. We frequently do too much that’s dry and boring—like providing a flood of statistics on your sales figures. I speak to you as someone who was in social studies education for high school kids, and I can tell you that if you’re boring and dry, no one’s going to pay attention to your message.
Coming from a place of confidence
As you approach your marketing, think about it as an exercise in self-awareness—understanding who you are, what you know, what you’re good at and then being unafraid of answering useful questions. We have to become less afraid of the results of our message. If you worry, “What if I do a video and no one watches it?” Well, so what? Plenty of people do videos that no one watches. There are also plenty of people who do terrible videos and hundreds of thousands of people watch them. You don’t ever know what you can do until you try, so I encourage people to go for it.
Run with an idea for a while and then adapt the message to some other medium. I can answer someone’s question, like “What’s a walkability score?” and turn it into a postcard that I send via the United States Postal Service. Later, I can take that same content and make a short podcast episode out of it. I can use it any way I want. The most effective way to spread your message is to put it on multiple platforms. In the class, I’ll show a simple example of a question you could answer and how you could get 21 marketing touches out of that one question.
Tell a good story
To bring this back to Daniel Pink, there’s a quote I love from his book, “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future” that says, “When facts become so widely available and instantly accessible, each one becomes less valuable. What begins to matter more is the ability to place these facts into context and to deliver them with emotional impact.” He says stories are easier to remember because stories are how we remember.
Let’s turn our marketing into engaging, educational and simple stories—with just a dash of magic.
