Way over here in San Diego our business model has been simple: We always keep in mind we’re the professionals our clients are looking to for solid, winning, advice. We leave nothing for our clients to do for themselves if we or our associates can do it better. Our clients are family — for life. If they prefer, they can execute a tax deferred exchange involving two states and never leave their own living room.
Our business plan on the other hand has been battered in the last few years by outside forces totally out of our control. Although Purposeful Planning is still the V-12 engine driving the plan, the marketing arm has taken a severe hit in the last few years.
What’s driven the growth of the company has been the ability to market directly to potential clients through highly targeted mailings. Our letters are rich in content, having more detail and humor than our competitors. When we’ve surveyed clients and prospects alike they’ve all agreed they responded to our letters because they seemed more real to them.
So what’s the problem?
All the cold calling in all the industries combined resulted in the no-call legislation. This led to many of them turning to, you guessed it, sending letters. This meant our letters were getting lost in the pile of dung they were receiving daily. We simply got lost in the shuffle. How bad was it? Before the new law, it wasn’t uncommon to generate more than 30 phone calls from a 3,000 piece mailing. Twice as much as marketing folks will tell you is better than average. About two years ago we sent out a 16,000 piece mailing and received not one phone call.
By the way, deep breathing really does help keep you calm. 🙂
We employed our own concept of Purposeful Planning as we searched for a solution. So for the last 28 months or so, we’ve been focused like a laser beam, searching for a new marketing approach. Can’t cold call, mailing is pretty much dead, and postcards are the only thing we’ve seen that can generate less than a 0% response. 🙂
We spent more money than I care to think about using a marketing firm to no avail. They were good, smart people, but ineffective. Turns out our ideas were more effective in the long run. But still, nothing we tried could even begin to compare with our historical success rate using the mail. In the end though, a purposeful, and well defined search produced results.
We knew we had to be online in a very big way. We just didn’t know how. Our audience didn’t need to be local because of the nature of our service. An investor could just as easily live in Atlanta as they could San Diego. It just didn’t matter. Perfect for an online presence.
Of course, this would require us to become part of the paradigm shift in American business. The internet was going to have to be a huge part of how we operated from now on. We had virtually no online presence. Locating a business strategist who was absolutely expert in all things internet was imperative. The search began.
One day while hopping from one website to another, I tripped over the site of a well known and respected midwest business strategist. There was an offer on the site saying she’d love to hook up with a business startup. I mentioned this to my son, Josh, who went to the site and immediately said I should call right then and there. What the heck. She said we weren’t what she was looking for, but was very intrigued by my description of the company, our history, and our current challenge.
After interviewing each other for several days we decided to work together.
It’s been a real eye opener. We’ve never had our website provide us with anything but bills. When her geeks first took over, a Google search would find our company’s website somewhere between the 15th and 20th page — or not at all. After a very brief period we’re now on the first page everywhere, and the first site on the first page in many major cities. I’ve yet to find where we’re lower than 5th on the first page anywhere. (Use Brown and Brown Investments on Google.)
Our blog also has moved up slowly but surely in popularity. By the end of April we’ll be in the top 90,000 blogs, out of 55Mil in the world. This isn’t as good as most of the cool house-related blogs, but we’re happy with the progress. Real estate investment blogs are few and far between. For every 100 house blog readers there’s one or two for the investment side. We’re simply competing in a different arena.
Next up — the new marketing plan.
