The question I hear most often in some form is “What is the secret to success in this business? What is the one thing that can be done to ensure success?” In other words, who has the magic wand?

We all know that there is no one thing that makes any business successful. It is the consistent application of the fundamentals that makes the difference. But if I had to distill it down to just one function that makes the biggest difference in any business I would have to say it is marketing.

Marketing will make or break you in any business. Even if you have just invested the most incredible teleportation machine that will allow the purchaser to travel anywhere in the world in seconds, you would still never sell the first unit without telling people…that IS marketing. It is communicating what you have and what it will do for your target market.

You need marketing to find motivated sellers and to find the deals. If you can find the great deals you are always going to be successful. You also need marketing to find and build a list of investor buyers. You want to have those lists of investor buyers so that as soon as you find a great deal you can find someone to sell it to. You need marketing to sell or rent your properties. And finally you need marketing to get interested private lenders to work with you.

Unfortunately, most business people are not students of marketing. In fact, if you asked them to rank all the skills needed to do business, marketing would rank fairly low. That is amazing to me because I think marketing is the cornerstone or foundation of any business. You have to be able to find all the customers and resources you are going to need.

What happens so many times, especially in the real estate business, is that people will try to market and they get no immediate results so they quit. Marketing is a process that takes some work. You have to develop your marketing, implement it, test it, and then based on the results you get from that test, go back and make improvements.

Tweak it and then you go back and you repeat the whole process. Each time, you will get a better marketing piece. The thing to remember is that marketing changes over time. I don’t know why, but something that worked yesterday doesn’t work today. And then something that is not working today will suddenly work tomorrow. You never want to stop the process of implementing, testing, and improving.

Unfortunately, one of the first things to get cut in a small business when dollars are getting tight is the marketing budget. It is seen as more of an expense with no direct monetary benefit. Be careful of this vicious cycle. If you can’t afford to market you will not find deals. If you do not find deals you will not have sales, which results in less money. Remember marketing is really the cornerstone of your business. When dollars get tight that is the time to do more marketing, not less.

Allocate whatever few dollars you have and pump it into marketing. It will all come back to you multiplied.

Make something happen. Create the deals. The deals aren’t going to create themselves. You have got to do the marketing. Then you are going to see the results of that. The results of a well executed marketing plan are increased sales. Let the marketing do the work for you. What will happen is you will have more deals and make more dollars per deal. You will have more buyers fighting for your deals. You will close them faster and you will also reduce the risk of your overall financing. All this because you are doing great marketing that is bringing in really strong leads.

Tips For Successful Marketing…

1. You have to have consistency. One of the most important facets of marketing is consistency. Your customers need to always be seeing you. They should be always be seeing your advertising. Marketing gets better with age. The longer it is in the marketplace the better it is going to work for you.

2. Marketing is not about immediate gratification. You don’t do marketing and get immediate results. Marketing is about setting a foundation. Putting it out there in your marketplace and keeping it going. You will get rewarded over time. Something that today only had a small response rate will, over time, have a deeper and deeper response rate, especially if people get to know you. It takes about 5-7 times of somebody seeing your advertising before the masses will start to respond. In other words, the first few times that they see your marketing piece they don’t even notice it. It is just like they are blind to it. So marketing is truly about repetition. If you want better results then do it more often. I’ve looked at people’s marketing plans before where they have been marketing for 4, 5, 6 months and not much is happening. But when you look at their marketing plan they have large gaps in there where nothing was really happening. Or they were doing so little advertising that they average person wasn’t seeing their advertising even more than one time. While it felt to them that they were advertising for a long period of time, the truth of the matter was that the individual people weren’t getting their advertising all that often.

3. Pick a small enough target area so that you can afford to really saturate the marketplace with your marketing. If your area is too large, people will not see your advertising enough times. As your marketing gets going in the small area, you can slowly start to expand into new marketplaces.

4. Have a brand name. You have to have a brand name to be able to distinguish yourself from other people. How else will somebody know one marketing piece from another? For some reason in real estate investing, most people don’t brand themselves. They use “I” or “We” buy houses. This is NOT a brand! Companies in every other industry brand themselves so investors should too. You need to differentiate yourself from your competition. Make sure your brand is easy to remember. Come up with something funny or unique. For example: Home Realty Solutions is not a great name. Who’s going to remember that? Grandpa buys houses is a much better name. People can remember that grandpa buys houses. Create a logo to go with your brand name and make sure you put it on every piece of marketing you do.

5. Use multiple medias. Choose different ways to advertise. The second most asked question is if I am going to do marketing what is the one type of marketing to do that is going to make all the difference? There’s not one thing you should be doing. You should be doing a whole bunch of different things. It is a combination of all the different things together that makes a difference. Where marketers make a mistake is to pick just one method and hang all their hopes on just that one type of marketing. You want to use multiple media types. You should have both an online presence and an offline presence. You should have some that is direct to home and some that is mass media. Direct to home would be direct mail or flyers that would be delivered to the house. Mass marketing would be signs or billboards. The real key is to be creative and to think about other ways to get your name out there.

6. Have an online presence. Create a website and drive people to that website. Give your customers two choices. They can either contact you directly and talk with you on the phone or they can go to the website to get more information and to sign up there. You will find that some people want an immediate gratification and want to talk to somebody right now and get this resolved. Others are not sure whether they want to do it yet or not. They want a little bit more information. Having that online presence gives you credibility and it gives you a way to give people a two way approach.

7. The critical piece of your marketing is the ad copy or the words. Pay a lot of attention to your ad copy. Do not write as if you were writing to executives. Remember that most of the United States reads at a 6th grade level. Written word that is more conversational in style is much easier to read than something that is very business like. Write like you speak. Make it very conversational. Make it easy. Make it fun. Your message should always be centered on what you can do for the reader and how you can help them. The more you can think like your customer and use the words that they are using in their head, the more effective your marketing will be

8. Use headlines. Headlines are the attention grabbers and get people to continue to read. If you are writing a very long piece of marketing, then break it up with headlines throughout. As people start to skim down they will see the headlines and find the topics they are interested in. Include a P.S. after the signature line. Studies show that people read the headline, decide whether or not they are interested, then look for the bottom line. Of course, the P.S. is the bottom line. If both of those seem interesting then they will go back and read the whole piece. .

9. Sign your marketing with your personal name so that you come across as a person and not a business.

10. Make it easy and clear to understand how people should contact you. If you want them to call, then say call now and include your phone number. If you want them to go to your website then tell them and give the web address. Your contact information should be bold, easy to find, and listed several times within your marketing piece.

When you consistently market your business, you’ll see how quickly your revenues grow.