Marketing in a new economy. The power of planning.
We’ve presented Marketing in a New Economy – 7 “Must Do” Tactics in webinars and throughout a number of speaking engagements and thought it’s be helpful to summarize some key points for all.
The first topic we addressed is the importance of creating and executing against a thoughtful strategy. I shared with attendees the PMG Marketing Quadrants (seen below) that I developed over the years and use as a guide in creating my “acquisition” strategies.
Pirrotti Acquisition Quadrants - Click to View Larger
Marketing in our current economy requires that you drive extreme efficiencies into your process. A gun shot approach – a little classified ad her, a keyword there etc… — will not serve you well in the long run. I have empirical data to prove this. Invest a bit of time on the front end to establish your strategy and you will have the tools and foundation to profoundly impact your Return on Investment (ROI).
VALUE:
Lets begin with the perimeter of the box. The first step is to establish a powerful value proposition (VALUE = BENEFITS / COST. The more benefits you provide to outweigh the cost, the greater the value proposition). To be clear, this is an area that is seriously flawed in our industry. I’ve reviewed websites and marketing collateral and have gone through the sales process of too many business center operators to count. Just about every operator is trying to compete on providing fully furnished, staffed and equipped offices with flexible terms, on-demand. No wonder we’re being asked to slash prices. We’ve completely commoditized our offering! So, the point here is to establish a powerful and compelling value proposition that blows the competition out of the water. We’ll review some steps in establishing your Unique Bundle of Promises in a later blog post.
Office packages for cost-conscious SMEs
Offer Savings without "Losing"
Unemployment is at the highest point in recent history. While millions have lost their paycheck, these hard working individuals still need to put food on the table. So, when Americans with a survival spirit can’t find jobs – they create their own work. As a result, many operators are seeing more prospects with start up businesses and home based offices moving to virtual, shared, or full-time offices. These SMEs are cost-conscious for sure, but, slashing price on your core office product is not your only solution. Have you created an office plan specifically for this group? There is a nice opportunity here to provide a practical, no-risk, cost sensitive solution that will truly differentiate your offering from traditional / sublet / home office space. If you would like to explore ideas, post here or give us a call.
2010 Plan: Timing
Thank you to everyone who attended our Webinar yesterday on Creating the Optimal 2010 Marketing
Plan. OBCAI an BCM look forward to presenting this same session on November 17th at 8:00am Eastern for members located in EMEA and AsiaPac. Ok – with that aside. Yesterday we started the discussion review the Pirrotti Marketing Quadrants, which is really the roadmap or foundation for our marketing strategy.
We’ll be posting notes for the key slides of each section but I wanted to quickly address “timing”. Right now you should be taking a look back at your 2009 results. Go ahead and benchmark your efforts. Review your KPIs by source for the year and drill right down to ROI / by source and product. From there you will establish your baseline to establish your targets for 2010.
By the end of November you should have your plan nailed down so that you are executing in December and launching your programs in very early January. So, while your competitors are scrambling to get the word out, you will have already begun your outreach. A very nice place to be. We have found that it’s best to break down your annual plan into 120-day programs. 120-days is a perfect amount of time to: deploy the plan, monitor results, identify areas for optimization and then re-launch for the next program.
Webinar Nov 11th: Harnessing Social Media to Drive Results
Young Real Estate Professionals, are you still wondering what all the buzz on social media is about and how you can tap into it to match your business needs?
During this 60-minute dynamic and informative session, attendees will walk away with the core tools to “immediately” reap the benefits from this powerful source.
This Webinar will be held on Nov 11th, 2009
Details are as follows:
Young Real Estate Professionals
Harnessing Social Media to Drive Results
Webinar Nov 11th 2009
1:00 pm EST
http://www.regonline.com/builder/site/Default.aspx?eventid=785224
Key topics include:
• Why Social Media should matter to you
• Establishing program goals and objectives
• Identifying and documenting Key Performance Indicators to assess the program
• Creating the optimal Social Media road map: Avoiding “death by a thousand cuts”
• “Must do” steps to generate leads “now”
• Precautions you must take to yield positive results: “Celebration v. Execution”
Please join us for our Webinar: Marketing in a New Economy. Top 7 “Must Do” Tips.
Over the years, we’ve tested a number of marketing initiatives to raise brand awareness and drive leads. Some initiatives included branding train and subway stations, wrapping busses and cars, touring mobile billboards and flying a plane with a flexible officing message over the Dallas Cowboy stadium. Great fun, really. And, these tactics were on strategy to support where that firm’s brand and business was at the time.
But, the fact is, you really need to nail down the basics before testing any out of the box media. During our Webinar on June 25th we are going to share with you a list of basic activities and provide tools to implement those activities the next morning.
Webinar - Don't miss out!Over the years, we
We’ll talk about core initiatives including how to:
- Educate, involve and engage the brokerage community
- Use “PR 3.0″ tools (ie: Social Medai) to really begin to raise awareness and build equity for your brand (and drive leads too!)
- Get more from your existing customer base
- Generate more leads from your website
- Reduce the chance of your sales discussion plummeting down the “price death spiral”
- Increase conversion rate
And, because I just can’t help myself….we are going to talk a bit about “BRAND”
Our discussion will be practical and actionable.
If you have any topics that you would like reviewed, just let us know by leaving a comment. We’ll do our best to address your questions.
We look forward to your participation! Click here for more info and to register.
5 SMART Ways to Trim Marketing Costs
More Results - Less $
Streamlining costs is a critical component of an overall plan to beat this recession. We have a few easy tips to help you stretch your marketing dollars:
1) BE FOCUSED: Be assured, companies still need office space, meeting rooms, virtual offices, videoconference capabilities and business support services. There are people who are looking for your products, right now. Identify the key media sources where they are looking (on-line, classifieds, brokers, signage etc…) and ensure that you are there – all day, everyday. We’ll talk about the types of ads, call to action and offers that work another time, so start to identify your key media sources now.
Filling Seats!
In May of 2007 during a relatively strong economic environment BusinessWeek reported that on avg. 60% of a typical company’s office space was sitting empty. Can you imagine the financial burden that vacancy rate places on a company? And, it will be quite some time before we begin to uncover the impact on current vacancy rates from the recent layoffs.
The bottom line is in boom times and bad, the current Logic of Commercial Real Estate doesn’t work. Read more