Is your marketing making the very best first impression?
Does it truly focus on the agent? As proud as you may be of your marketing materials, most agents only care how much you can help solve their problems. If you want more agents to send you clients, your focus has to be on them. With the words you use in your marketing messages, whether it be an advertisement, a postcard, a flyer or pages on your website, they determine how much focus is on the agent.
Use this week's article to sample test your marketing materials. Learn how to tell if your marketing talks mostly about agents or if you're talking mostly about yourself.
Take the We-We Test
First, grab a piece of literature you use in your marketing, like a brochure, flyer or sales letter. Something with a couple paragraphs so you can truly measure the focus of your message. You'll easily assess how much your message is full of we-we by measuring two types of words:
- Agent-focused words
- Self-focused words
It can be a painful discovery, but possibly the most important one when it comes to attracting more clients.
Total Number of Agent-Focused Words
Count how many times the words - "you", "your", and "yourself" appear and also include abbreviations like "you've" and "you're". These words are what you consider being agent-focused.
Total Number of Self-Focused Words
Ok, here comes the scary part for many of us. Count all the words in the document that are self-focused, which includes - "I", "me", "my", "mine", "myself", "our", "us" and don't forget to add your name and company name, if mentioned.
Calculating Your We-We Score
Now comes the moment of truth. First, total the sum of agent-focused words and self-focused words. Next, determine the percentage of agent-focused words is represented. Do this by dividing the total number of agent-focused words by the total sum of agent-focused words and self-focused words.
So for instance, if your total number of agent-focused words is 12 and the total sum of agent-focused words and self-focused words together equal 40, if you divide 12 by 40, you get an agent-focus rate of 30%.
Use a similar calculation for self-focused words. Divide the number of self-focused words by the total sum of agent-focused words and self-focused words. Or in the case of the example, 28 divided by 40. The self-focused rate is 70%.
If this was an accurate example of your brochure, it means you speak about yourself nearly 2 ½ times as often as you speak about the agent. Obviously not very good, and if that were truly the case, begin immediately converting your message to be more agent-focused.
Which side of the scale is tipped greater, agent-focused or self-focused? If it's toward agent-focused - congratulations - your marketing really does focus on them! And on the other hand, if it's not, like I said earlier, this could be your most important discovery about your marketing.
Convert from being Self-Focused to Agent-Focused
If you want to become more agent-focused there are some things you can do to improve your conversion. Start by doing a we-we test all your marketing materials, and be sure to account for the three most common mistakes with brochures, see my article, Why Agents Don't Read Your Brochure.
Secondly, recognize that you're in the service business, not the sales business. There's a significant difference between the two and changes the style of your marketing altogether, see my article, Sell Problems, Not Solutions.
I hope you find these additional resources helpful. If you're not happy with the outcome of the sample test and you've tested other pieces only to come up with similar results, you're capable of making improvements. Just don't try to do everything at once and get overwhelmed. Take it one step at a time.
Finally, if you're having a difficult time calculating your we-we score on a marketing piece, send me a copy of the text and I'll convert it for you. You can send it by email to jeffn@soarinsales.com, type "we-we score" in the subject line. Or you can fax it directly to my office at (480) 367-8350, be sure to include your name and where you would like me to send you the calculations.
Thanks for support,
Jeff Nelson
Salesachievers
Helping loan officers attract more clients
© 2004, 2005 by Jeff Nelson
All rights reserved
