Written By: Karen Deis
I recently read an article by Donald Trump called "Knowledge is Power". In the article, he professes that while he is forever a "student", studying real estate, the market, financials, etc., he has learned to ask himself six important questions that have never let him down and helped him to create the financial empire he has today.
Originally attributed to a poem by Rudyard Kipling, the quote goes something like this:
"I keep 6 honest men - who taught me all I knew - their names are What and Why and When - and How and Where and Who."
While Trump answers these important questions when deciding on multi-million dollar deals, why not ask yourself these 6 questions when deciding on spending your hard-earned dollars on your sales and marketing efforts.
Let's talk about advertising that we are all familiar with - Mortgage Ads in Homes (Real Estate) Magazines. I receive tons of calls and emails from loan originators saying that while they spend thousands of dollars on 1/2 and full-page ads, they cannot attribute one single deal as coming from the marketing source.
The problem I see with most ads is that we try to be all things to all people. We have every program known to mankind (and we use technical jargon which consumers don't understand anyway), and of course what great service we provide. To the consumer, the ad looks the same - other than the picture of the loan officer and the company logo.
I believe that Kipling used the order of the questions for rhyming purposes and I think they should be re-arranged in this order when creating a sales or marketing initiative:
Who
Why
What
How
Where
When
The bottom line is that each marketing piece that you create - to be effective - must have a specific, niche market in mind.
Since 40% of all purchase transactions (for the last 10 years) have been made by 1st time homebuyers, let's tak a few minutes to answer each question above, using the 1st time homebuyers as the target market.
Who? First-time homebuyers!
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