Monday, October 6, 2008

Never Do Nuttin', Always Do Somepin'


In my last post I mentioned the bad times the business is going through due to economic factors. I also mentioned if you do not become aggressive, you will perish. This is perhaps the biggest action I took that could have pulled things out in and by itself. And yes, it's my fav -- marketing!

I began to do what no one else was doing.

History, my two biggest marketing methods are in this order, custom lawn signs and free online classifieds (newspaper ads are expensive and useless and yes I have benchmarked the newspaper ads against online ads).

This year I was not receiving calls. It was so slow I decided to take action and do something no one else thought of. I hand-wrote some property detail signs. Cost, about $1.50 per house (my lawn signs are $25 each). It listed all the information someone would ask about a house on a HUGE sign and posted them in each house.

Then I made some smaller hand-written signs and posted those all over the target area. Cost, about 25 cents each. Just a generic sign. I also posted a list of all my properties everywhere I could find. Stores, posts, wherever. The city took some down but who cares.

I was the only one out there with advertising that was not just a FOR RENT lawn sign. People saw my number all over.

Something magical happened. The signs I had in the two HOT areas started getting calls. I would tell them to have a look at x property, y property, etc.

I then decided to do open houses for the rentals. I would sit at the hottest properties all day and put signs on my truck and lawn to come in. This didn't work all that well but at one point I decided to do something different. I would walk around the general area looking for people and give them a flyer of all the houses. In other words instead of sitting there waiting for people to come to me I went to them. The houses began renting this way and each person I was aggressive with referred me to others as well. Why? Because I was the only person that they could get a hold of to see a place.

In other words, I was the only person out there doing something! I was the only one adjusting with the times.

Can you imagine thousands of places sitting empty and the Landlords are only relying on one or two marketing methods (that are not working this year!)

Find out what no one else is doing. Do it. Do anything and it will work!

No comments: