By Than Merrill

I am often asked by my students what area of the business they should focus on first. This is understandable as it is a daunting task learning all you need to know when you are building a real estate investment business. Learning a little bit about everything, while mastering none, is a such step toward investment floundering in the beginning life of your business. In my experience, it is better to concentrate on the best revenue producing method at the time, while picking up details of other methods. What is important now is the customer contact that will allow purchases of properties at 50 to 65 cents on the dollar. In order to do this you must become a Master Marketer!

The foundation of your Real Estate business is built upon your knowledge of marketing. Customer contacts, lead generation, and closings are made via your marketing accumen. Leads are the lifeblood of your business, breathing life into your business. Increase the number of leads and your business will prosper. Becoming a better marketer is a matter of leaning the principals all successful marketers apply.

Real Estate Marketing Principal: Define Your Target Market Only about 5% of potential sellers are motivated and willing to sell their property at a significant discount. You must gear your market efforts towards those people who have sufficient reason for selling their property under market value. Death, divorce, bankruptcy, and foreclosure are but a few of the many reasons why someone would want to sell their property quickly. Public records are an important source in finding these motivated sellers. Reaching out to this market is your next step in your marketing efforts.

Real Estate Marketing Principal: Create a Compelling Message Once you have narrowed down your target market you then must compel the prospect to take action. Distressed property owners are by nature procrastinators and thus unlikely to respond to a generic offer. Therefore, you must create an irresistible offer so compelling it gets the prospect off the couch and over to the phone. The message must strike an emotional chord within the prospect if it is going to be effective.

Real Estate Marketing Principal: Create Systems for Outsourcing and Deliver The average prospect will not respond to your marketing contacts until they have seen your message at least seven times. Successful marketers development systems to respond to this reluctance. Developing a system will prevent you from wasting time while you respond to quality leads.

If you ever have the pleasure of visiting my office you will see that we have a system for every one of our marketing campaigns. For example, we mail to homeowners in bankruptcy every Monday. Every week my marketing assistant grabs the new list off the internet. She then downloads the names into our database for tracking purposes before emailing the list off to an intern. The intern then uses the pre-designed letters and postcards on file to fulfill the mailing. The mailings are then organized and mailed out on Tuesday. The beauty of the system is that I have nothing to do with the process and all I have to do is pick through the deals when they come in.

It is your responsibility as the owner to recognize the need, develop, and implement systems for your work processes. Without these systems, you will be forever mired in business detail and unable to free yourself for the important process of selecting and closing on offers.

Real Estate Marketing Principal: Test and Track You want to build a profitable real estate investment company. To do this you must eliminate waste and unprofitable process directions. After all, it is the bottom line that will determine success in your venture. You cannot be blind to this necessity thus your goal as an owner and marketer is to have a system to concisely test and track your marketing and provide you with an understand the numbers.

I sit down every month and review my marketing expenditures. I look at how much was spent, how many leads came in, and which campaigns produced actual deals. I then make decisions for the next month shifting money from one marketing campaign to another so as to maximize the return on my investment. If you dont have a tool for testing and tracking your marketing then precious dollars will slip through the cracks. I created a tool to track my marketing and it is highly effective and has literally saved me thousands of dollars over the years. To find more wealth building articles like this one go to www.ThanandPaul.com.

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