ACTION061405 - What Your Don't Know About Marketing Could Hurt You

If your marketing strategy doesn't have Agents lined up at your door begging to use your services, read my articles closely over the next four weeks. Today's issue begins a four-part series that tells-all on how to develop an effective strategy that converts agents into clients.

These next several weeks of ACTION e-zine could very well be the information that could turn your marketing up a notch and help you crack the code to earning more agent-referred business.

Today's issue introduces the secret ingredient missing in your marketing.

If you chase Agents, they'll always feel they have the upper hand. How do you reverse this pattern? What's involved with getting Agents lined up at your door? It begins with relationship building, that's what your business is about isn't it?

As noted in last week's article, your marketing strategy should reflect the major processes of relationship building; lead generation, client acquisition and client retention. Understanding each of the processes is the easy part, executing them to get the results you want is more challenging...unless of course, you know the secret ingredient.

Most Agents you meet today aren't ready to do business with you because you're a stranger. Remember growing up, the phrase mommy coined, "stranger-danger." You were told to stay away from strangers, don't accept anything from strangers.

Gee, is it no wonder why as adults our defensive guard is immediate when we meet someone that we don't know for the first time. Let's not fault Agents for feeling the same way. They're human too, well, most of them anyway.

What's it take to become an Agent's friend? The same thing it took when you met your best friend. When the two of you first met you weren't instantly best friends, the relationship grew over time. That's obvious, but what does it have to do with Agents? It's not like we're real anxious to make them our best friends.

It has everything to do with Agents. Both, the Agent and your best friend's needs are similar. Familiarity, comfort, and trust are the seeds to growing a relationship.

So how can your marketing turn strangers into friends, friends into clients and clients into loyal clients (best friends)? Let's get back to learning about the secret ingredient.

Since most Agents you want to attract to your business are strangers, your first goal is to establish familiarity. They have to get to know and trust you before they'll do business with you. Don't make the mistake that every other loan officer commits, by directly confronting Agents and soliciting them, a.k.a. cold calling.

Good, I'm glad to hear you don't like cold calling because you shouldn't do it. It's the most difficult way to attract relationships.

OK, I'm getting to the point, enough dragging this out. The secret ingredient that most loan officers are missing in their marketing is the same ingredient that gets a political candidate elected to public office.

Of course I'm not talking about the lying and cheating part. I'm talking about what they do up to Election Day. They campaign! The key ingredient to your success in becoming an Agent Magnet is campaigning.

A campaign is a connected series of messages corresponded over time designed to bring about your most wanted response. It's what drives your message, keeps it in front of the prospect, and sustains it long enough for the prospect to take the action you most desire.

Let me briefly cover what a campaign isn't. A campaign isn't sending out a series of postcards or flyers and getting an Agent to call you, that's called advertising. A campaign isn't sending an email message or calling an Agent every once in awhile to check in on how they're doing or learning if they have a deal for you. That's called soliciting.

Now don't lose the wind in your sails. There's more to campaigning then you realize. Campaigning is what moves each process of relationship building forward. Remember the three process; lead generation, client acquisition and client retention.

You need campaigns to match up with each process. It's a form of action. Nothing moves without action. The three specific campaigns I'll teach you include:

Each campaign serves different purposes with preplanned desired responses to move the Agent through the relationship building process. It's important to read my future issues, as I'll discuss how each one works and share different strategies to implement them into your marketing plan.

ACTION E-zine

What You Don't Know About Marketing Could Hurt You

Do you offer superior service, consistently close loans on time and overall are more adept than your competitors, yet you're struggling to figure out the marketing puzzle?