MAKE BIGGER COMMISSIONS
Ryan helps auction companies look like marketing experts by clarifying their message, communicating that message well, and measuring its effectiveness.

142: Keep Your Mission Statement to Yourself

If you’re living up to your mission, you don’t have to tell people. If you’re not consistently hitting those goals, why create expectations in the marketplace that you can’t meet? If, like many firms, you’re filling that part of the business plan outline with mushy cliches that give you a lot of leeway, what are you communicating with those vapid words?

141: A New Tool for Better Marketing Videos

Their service is super simple: upload the clips you recorded into their site, type in some direction as to what you’d like the finished product to be, select how long you want the finished video to run, key in your credit card information, and then wait for the link to their finished product. You can also choose upgrades like expedited editing and even a 15-second teaser video to use for Instagram and other social media.

140: 4 Reasons Guerrilla Marketing Has Worked for Me This Year

The interesting thing is that it doesn’t take much more time to use the above principles than not to use them. What they do require is courage to move away from auction industry standards toward communication principles proven to be more attractive and effective in the marketplace. It’s not about creativity—at least not in my daily work.

A Powerful New Use for Your Bidders’ Email Addresses

Facebook isn’t the first company to offer this demographic extrapolation and replication service. They are, however, the first to do it for free. Also, with more than a decade of consumer data and more than a billion users, they have more datapoint to use for comparison.

138: 5 Design Attributes of Premium Auction Advertising

The irony is that Bonhams showed more restraint for expensive items than we often do with much lesser lots. Maybe it’s not ironic, since most of us sell utilitarian items instead of luxury goods. Regardless, while it’s impractical for most auctioneers to put these principles in action to the degree Bonhams did, we can all move in these directions for advertising that competes in the marketplace—not just in the auction industry.

137: 5 Ways to Generate More End User Bidding

The difference between wholesale and retail prices should be enough incentive to investigate changes to our workflow, terms, and marketing. Your path to consumer-driven prices might be on very different paths than these five options. That’s okay. What’s important is that we’re interacting with the marketplace, evaluating our processes based on the feedback we gather, and then making changes to our practices to adapt.

136: 5 Things Missing From Most Auction Proposals

I hate taking auctioneer’s misdirected money. I typically don’t up-sell. In fact, my clients will tell you that I often advise against extraneous media. That said, I regularly accept paychecks to build ineffective proposals. It’s true. Sure, they will represent aesthetic upgrades from their old materials; but the final product doesn’t always have my confidence

Read More →