How to write good agency prospecting material

RAT 39 (Rawlings Agency Tip)

Today's tip is about one simple thing that you can do to double the effectiveness of your canvassing material, web content, standard letters, advertising and mailers.

I am often asked to review estate agents' marketing material, which, I have to admit can be about as painful as Freddie Kruger conducting a prostate examination (well perhaps not quite).

What makes me wince most is the apparent belief that marketing material is at its most persuasive when it tells the reader what you do and how good you are. But it just doesn't work that way.

A friend of mine Claudia d'Allebou wrote a book, sadly now out of print, called 'The Uninvited Canvasser'. In it, Claudia highlights four laws of effective prospecting, which are:

Offer something of value
Ask for nothing in return
Leave before they expect you to
Frequently

The most important of these is the first - offer something of value. And make it relevant and meaningful to the reader. This is one of the reasons I am so passionate about you as an estate agent developing your ads into something far more significant than just pictures of properties. But what about your mailing communications, or 'canvassing letters'?

The question has to be 'how does this piece of marketing material (be it an email, letter, mailer, etc) grab your target audience, identify with them, speak to them, and linger in their mind? A tall order? Actually, No! And a great deal of the solution can even lie simply in the way your material is written as much as the quality of your content. There is one especially powerful secret that you can address today. That is to check that there is more emphasis on the prospect than there is on you.

Try this - take your last mailer or prospecting letter and, with a red highlighter pen, highlight all the instances of the word 'I', 'my', 'we', or 'our'. Then, with a green highlighter, do the same exercise, but this time count up all the instances of 'you' and 'your'.

If the number of red instances outweighs the number of greens, then I suggest you revisit the piece as it is probably too 'selfish' to be effective, especially if it is a 'cold' approach that should really be seeking to earn the right to the business before attempting to close it!

And just to ram the point home, think about this - when you're on a date, do you find it more effective to ask your date about themselves, or do you just tell them how brilliant you are? So it is with prospecting.

Try the red/green highlighter exercise and I promise your communications will be much more effective! Or feel free to send me your own mailers and I'll happily have a quick look over them. I also have a over a dozen prospecting letters already prepared which you are welcome to use exclusively in your area if you are one of my Weekly Editorial Clients.

(By the way, if you are using MS 'Find' (CTRL+F) to locate the instances of a word in a document, remember that the word 'Your' also contains the word 'Our' in it, so be careful how you count it!)

Quote of the Day (for the vendor who wants too much money for their property): 'Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental' (probably best not to use this, but you'd like to!)