by Brian Brady
Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL
Hilary Shantz, a real estate agent from Oakville, ON asks:
Hi Brian,
You are on the cutting edge of marketing/blogging. Do you think that it is sufficient to have a business blog and forgo having a newsletter, just send people a reminder every time you post a blog which they can go to if they want or if it interests them? I am trying to decide. I have neither and have been in business 2 years.
Signed,
Hilary from Oakville, Ontario, Canada.
Thanks for the kind words, Hilary. I notice from your website that you have a MBA and a background in banking. I’ll speak somewhat academically here and then give you some practical suggestions.
Blogging is a marketing communication. Think of it like writing an article for your hometown paper, Oakville Today. The first time you had an article published, you’d probably call all of your friends, past clients, and family and tell them to run out to the newsstands; that would be fine. If you wrote a weekly column, however, that serial self promotion would become tired quickly.
I said that blogging is a marketing communication but it is a subtle one. It’s call pull marketing as opposed to push marketing. Pull marketing entices the consumer to call you. Think of the movie Glen Garry Glen Ross when you think of push marketing. Be careful to understand that the permission-based e-mail system I use is, indeed, permission-based. Abuse that permission and the consumer takes it away. I think an e-mail every three weeks is often enough to keep you in the consumer’s eye without abusing that permission.
Again, blogging is a marketing communication. Remember the principles of promotion class you had to pass in business school? Blogging falls somewhere between public relations and advertising in the promotional mix. You’ll notice that there are two more very important factors in the promotional mix: personal selling and sales promotion. You want to be certain that you weave those components into your blogging message without sounding like an overt advertisement.
Finally, effective promotion is a multi-media approach. The more “senses” you can use, the more effective your marketing Read more
Good or bad, that’s my brand on the internet. That goofy picture was taken at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood on a free Kodak machine. I emailed myself the picture and have been using it for the past two years in all of my online marketing efforts. And while I’m not necessarily the best user of photoshop, I’m a pretty damned good viral marketer.
