Category : Direct Mail
Your direct mail has the same job as your Facebook ads—and any piece of your advertising. It only has to get the prospect to the next step. More than likely, that step is to visit your website—even if the auction is conducted offline.
Most auction companies book deals with a great disparity of values. And not just in real estate. Estates, business liquidations, and farm packages come in all shapes and sizes. So do their advertising campaigns.
It won’t surprise most of my readers that an auction company hired me to design more than 120 different postcards last year or that the people on their mailing list purchased millions of dollars’ worth of assets from them in 2016. What might surprise you is that this client mailed each postcard to less than 1% of their mailing list database—or that this same customer spent at least three times as much on Facebook per auction than they did on that very successful direct mail.
That’s true, whether the asset is a $3,600,000 home or a rental house, a $350,000 combine or a twenty-year-old manure spreader, Marilyn Monroe’s $4,800,000 dress or a collection of Beanie Babies. While consumers might have to be convinced of a price point, they already know whether something appeals to them or not.
Have you ever been asked to market anything that had a national appeal, but the asset value didn’t allow a national advertising campaign? It happens to my clients on a regular basis. My advice for that situation has recently changed, as a burgeoning technology helps solves part of that problem.
YouTube is now the second largest search engine in North America. Web surfers watch almost five billion YouTube videos every single day. It’s a safe bet that Google, who owns the video streaming service, is learning a lot from all of the data it’s collecting. That data must be valuable enough for Google to lose $1.8 billion a year to keep YouTube up and running.
I’m not telling you how or where to spend your money. I’m just letting you know that neither you nor I can trust our assumptions.
