When an entrepreneur decides to start a business, one of the first things she thinks about is marketing and sales. In most cases, she’ll need some kind of outreach plan to catch the attention of potential clients. Once she’s established the business, she can use her product to reach out to existing customers, and make more sales. When you’re starting a business, particularly one from the ground up, marketing and sales are among the first things you’ll encounter. One of the best guides I’ve found on how to market and sell a product is Copywriting For Real Estate Producers by Joel Comm. In this guide, Joel teaches you the importance of taking a creative approach to marketing and sales, and shows you exactly how to implement the strategy you need to become a successful copywriter for real estate agents and brokers.
If you’re interested in becoming a rainmaker with copywriting, then this guide is for you. In the rest of this article, you’ll learn about the steps you’ll need to take to become the go-to copywriter for real estate professionals.
Audience Analysis
When you’ve decided to become a rainmaker with copywriting, the first step you need to take is to examine your audience. Who are you writing for? What are they looking for? What do they believe about the industry you’re entering? To answer these questions, you need to perform an audience analysis. The better you get at this, the more effective your marketing and sales efforts will be. If you want to write for real estate brokers and agents, then your audience analysis should include a section on what draws them to your message and what keeps them coming back for more.
Product Research & Development
After you’ve determined your audience, you can move on to the next vital step of your campaign, which is to research and develop your product. Before you dive headfirst into the research, it’s important to have a clear idea of what you’re looking for. You can’t create quality content if you don’t know how to find quality subject matter. The easiest way to do this is to look for problems and pain points in your industry, and develop products to solve those problems. If you want to create content that real estate professionals will value and use, then you need to focus your research and development efforts on creating an answer to a problem that hasn’t be solved yet. That way you’ll be able to offer real value to your audience, and get them to trust you enough to continue using your services.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Another important element of your marketing and sales strategy is to set key performance indicators (KPIs) for your copywriting efforts. These are quantitative measures you’ll use to determine the effectiveness of your campaign. Common KPIs include:
- New leads generated through marketing methods (e.g. SEO, Social Media)
- Revenue generated from a marketing or sales effort
- Costs associated with a marketing or sales effort
- Content sharing and social media engagement (e.g. number of article shares, likes, and comments)
- Quality of calls to action on a website (CTAs) – Are they working? Are they effective? Are they worth repeating?
- Delivery of a sales pitch (e.g. number of appointments made, conversion rate, and average deal size)
- Average deal size (e.g. the greater the number of offers, the greater the average size of the deal)
- Average sales time (e.g. the longer your salespeople spend closing deals, the greater their efficiency)
- Overall company performance (e.g. return on investment from a marketing and sales perspective)
Setting KPIs for your marketing and sales efforts is important because it allows you to track the effectiveness of your creative content, and determine if further effort is required. To create a successful campaign, you need to find the right balance between content creation and measurement. Too much emphasis on content creation, and not enough emphasis on measurement and analysis, can lead to you producing a lot of content with not much to show for it. This is called content inflation, and it’s never a good thing.
Analytics
Once you’ve established yourself as a subject matter expert in your industry, you can move on to the final step of your strategy, which is to analyze the results of your efforts. You’ll use analytics to track the results of your content creation and marketing efforts, and determine if your strategy is working or whether you need to adjust your approach. There are a variety of analytics tools specialized in SEO and content marketing, so you can track the effectiveness of your efforts across different platforms. Some SEO analytics tools also provide you with information on the performance of your content.
Optimization
To finish up, I’d like to briefly discuss the role of optimization in your strategy. Just as with any other area of business, SEO optimization is all about making small tweaks to your strategy to see bigger improvements in your results. One of the things you’ll want to do as part of your SEO efforts is to make sure your website is accessible to everyone, regardless of whether or not they have a disability. You can do this by ensuring your website is built with semantic HTML and that all page content is easily readable. Another important thing to do is to regularly audit your website content for grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, and overall readability. Make sure you consult with a professional editor before putting your finished product online.
This is a brief introduction to marketing and sales for a product, but it’s an important one. Without a clear idea of who you’re writing for, what you’re trying to sell, and the problems you’re trying to solve, it’s hard to expect brilliant results from your marketing and sales efforts. By understanding your target audience’s needs, and creating products relevant to them, you’ll be able to develop a successful strategy, and become a rainmaker with copywriting.