The Real Estate Marketer’s Hippocratic Oath
February 28th, 2007 Real Estate Marketing Landon Ray
“First, do no harm.”
I’ve discovered in recent minutes that this phrase is not, in fact, the Hippocratic Oath or even a part of it. It is, though, a principal precept taught to all medical students and since I’ve associated it with Hippocrates my whole life (haven’t you?) I’m running with it.
It is so insanely easy to blow money while marketing your business, it’s scary. Almost all of us in business know this from still-tender experiences of zero return on our [insert marketing spend here]. To ‘do no harm’ to our wallets would be good enough reason to swear an oath.
But the money wasted isn’t the only cost of bad marketing choices, and it’s the deeper consequences that are more serious.
John Jantsch surprised me in his just-released book ‘Duct Tape Marketing’. A solid mid-westerner with a blue collar image and simple, down-to-earth advice (check out that title!). John is not the guy I’d expect to write a chapter on ‘The Power of Positive Expectancy’. Maybe since Oprah’s done ‘The Secret’ this sort of thinking has gone mainstream, or maybe John’s just a bit more cutting-edge than he lets on.
John says that if you know your marketing is going to make the phone ring – it will.
I don’t know why what he says it true, but I’m pretty certain it is. It could be that there’s actually some kind of cosmic law at work, like ‘The Secrets’ Law of Attraction.
Or I’ve imagined that perhaps we’re all just a little smarter on the inside than we give ourselves credit for. That is, we know when we’re making a good marketing decision on a deep level, and so we’re confident about it. When we respond to a cold-caller hawking ‘top search engine positioning,’ maybe we have a little gut feeling that our ‘investment’ is less than rock-solid. No surprise then that it doesn’t work out.
Whatever the cause/effect situation happens to be, I’m convinced that what Jantsch calls ‘positive expectancy’ is a powerful force for success – or for failure.
And this takes us back to Hippocrates. Many agents have subtly given up on marketing. Or they’ve given up on Internet marketing. And it’s easy to see why – every dollar they spend wasted, over and over again. Not only do they wound their pocketbook, but slowly, a belief is created:
“The Internet doesn’t work.”
“Postcards don’t work.”
“Advertising doesn’t work.”
“Nothing works.”
Often, this kind of thinking isn’t conscious or overt. But there’s a frustration and throwing-up-of-hands towards the whole process that really stops the kind of thinking and innovation required to create a message and a process of delivering it that’s effective.
It’s too bad, because all businesses are fundamentally marketing businesses. To ignore marketing is a mistake. To simply follow what everyone else is doing only serves to tell the marketplace that you’re no different - a recipe for disappointing results.
The solution? ‘First, do no harm.’
There’s a ton to say about how to avoid wasting money on marketing, and we’ll get to it in coming posts. But for now, let’s agree that trying to convert total strangers into clients is the black-diamond slopes of marketing. It’s the hardest thing you can try to do.
So, start with the low-hanging fruit: the people who already know and trust you. Create a compelling message that demonstrates your unique value, and deliver it to your sphere in a systematic and provocative way. Build on small successes, and take on the greater challenges over time.
In coming installments, we’ll talk about things like how to create that compelling message and how to avoid getting burned online, from SEO and Adwords to web sites and e-mail. It’s not as hard as you may have come to believe.
