Aaron Hoos

Unlike many other professionals in the financial industry, private equity and venture capitalists have the unique benefit of not really needing to chase after clients – rather, they have the opposite problem of culling through a big list of potential clients to find the right ones. And in some cases, they might also have multiple audiences to consider: Prospective clients who are looking for capital, existing clients who already have capital, and joint venture investors who will be investing some of their capital.

1. How to start a business.
2. The investible business: How to build a business that VCs will WANT to invest in.
3. The perfect pitch: How to create a sales pitch without the BS.
4. Understanding corporate structures and share structures.
5. A collection of case studies of your most successful investments and how your money helped to make the business great.
6. How to evaluate companies as a VC or PE professional.
7. A collection of top tips and ideas from VCs or PE professionals for business owners who hope to get capital for their company.
8. How to work with a board of advisors.
9. You’ve got some money from your VC… now what?!?
10. How to become a private equity professional or venture capitalist.

A couple of years ago, I received a bunch of junk mail in my mailbox and just about threw some of it out when a bold headline told me that I could save money by buying a new (more efficient) furnace. Until that point, I was happy with my furnace because it heated my house adequately. But when the letter showed up in the mail, I suddenly realized that I had a problem I didn’t even know about (inefficient heating). I ended up buying a new furnace because of that letter.

As a financial or real estate professional, you offer solutions to a variety of problems. Unfortunately, your prospective clients don’t always know that they have a problem until you point it out to them. The challenging part is to point out the problem in a way that highlights the pain… not necessarily the problem itself.

If I received a letter in the mail that told me I had an inefficient furnace, I would have discarded the letter along with all of my other mail. Furnace efficiency is the problem but I didn’t care about it and I would have no way of knowing whether or not I had an efficient furnace. But the letter didn’t focus on the problem, it focused on the pain. My wallet. It told me that an inefficient furnace was costing me money and I could spend less each month by buying a new furnace. The next step was to have a salesperson come by my house and help me calculate how much I would save. I was skeptical about this step but I have to admit, the numbers were very real and quite compelling… and that’s what convinced me to buy a new furnace.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOU

First, know who your target market is. (“Everyone” is NOT your target market). Rather, your target market is a specific group of people. Use my 55 Target Market Questions to help you figure out who your target market is and what they are like. Once you know who they are, you can market to them more effectively. Note: It’s possible to have a few target markets. That’s okay… but you do need to define each one and fill out the 55 questions for each of those markets.

Second, know what problem you solve for your target market. I call it “the pickaxe factor” of your business. A few examples: Investment professionals provide the expertise to help someone build their wealth more than they could do on their own; Insurance professionals provide a way for people to preserve their wealth and minimize the impact of dramatic life events; Real estate professionals help people find the perfect home by navigating the overwhelming number of houses on the market and the complicated sale process.

Third, figure out where your target market experiences the pain of their problem. Do they notice it in their wallet? In their enjoyment of life? Do they lose sleep over it? Will their children suffer because of it? The possibilities are wide open (although for financial and real estate professionals, they tend to be focused on just a few similar factors… mostly wealth, peace of mind, opportunity, comfort-preservation… but there are others). If you have more than one target market, you need to figure out where each target market feels the pain.

Fourth, highlight that pain. In all of your marketing and communication with your target market, highlight the pain they feel in a compelling way.

[Image credit: AprilBell]

It doesn’t make much sense for someone to type in the word “real estate professional” or “REALTOR” and find your website or blog in the search results. If they’re in Dustytown, Australia and you’re in Wausau, Wisconsin, there’s not much you can do to help them.

So you need a plan to focus your search engine optimization on only your most likely prospects. So where do you start?

STEP 1: FIGURE OUT WHAT YOUR TARGET MARKET IS LOOKING FOR

Well, you first need to start by figuring out who your most likely prospects are. Are they people moving into town from out of town? Are they people buying or selling within town? Do you have an even more focused niche than that? (Hopefully you do).

Each of these groups is looking for something different.

If your target market is military families who are moving to Wausau, Wisconsin from elsewhere to work on the ultra-secret military base then they are searching the web for very different terms than if your target market is soccer moms and dads who are looking to sell their first home and upgrade because they have baby #3 on the way.

Figure out what your target market is looking for and the types of words they are using to search online.

STEP 2: GET THE SEARCH TERMS

Head over to Google’s Keyword Tool and type in some of those words into Google’s keyword search. In the example below, you see I’ve done that with the fairly generic term “Homes for sale Wausau Wisconsin”…

By the way: The key here is to combine an action verb — “buy home”, “sell home”, “list home”, “find home” — with a location — in this case “Wausau Wisconsin”. Don’t forget to try mixing words like “buy house” instead of “buy home” and also try the short form of your state instead of the full name (or, drop the state altogether and see what the results are).

When you click the Search button you get the result of your search…

And just below that, you get a big list of ideas that are similar to the terms you’ve written…

This list is useful because it shows you related keywords that people are searching for that you might be able to use.

Find a few that you want to focus on — somewhere between 3 and 6 keywords. If you help people buy AND list homes then consider focusing on 3 buying-specific keywords and 3 listing-specific keywords.

STEP 3: USE THOSE SEARCH TERMS EVERYWHERE

You’ve found the terms that your clients are looking for. Now it’s time to use those search terms everywhere. Use them in the following places:

• In your website domain name
• In your website title and subtitle
• In the title of your blog posts and web pages
• In your article marketing (in the title of the article and in the text)
• In your press releases
• In the title of your ebooks
• In the title of your print book
• As the name of your ezine
• In the title of your Storify locally-focused stories
• In your Twitter description
• … and anywhere else that you put online and offline

Mix and match them. Pepper them throughout your work. “Own” the words by making your brand synonymous with those words.

As the economy crumbles and peoples’ portfolios are decimated, financial advisors have to work harder than ever to gain the trust of their potential clients. Ebooks can help to establish expertise and demonstrate value. They offer another advantage as well: Written correctly, they can help to make the client an integral part of the financial planning process (without erasing the need for a financial advisor’s invaluable advice).

1. How to build wealth – ideas, techniques, strategies (and scams you should watch out for).
2. How to decode today’s troubled economy.
3. Why your investment portfolio is just part of the larger picture – how insurance, mortgages, wills, and tax planning (etc.) work together to protect and build wealth.
4. How to understand the stock market.
5. Where should I invest next? (This is a question many people are asking and you can write this ebook while remaining SEC compliant! Use this ebook to instruct readers about stock market basics and portfolio management, and educate them about timelines and goal setting).
6. How to understand what your investment portfolio is and what “tools” do you need to manage your portfolio?
7. How to read the stock market (This is a good one for your clients who rely on rumors and tips they’ve overheard from their unqualified-to-invest neighbor).
8. How to develop your own personal investing philosophy.
9. Step-by-step to financial mastery: How to minimize debt, get control of your finances, and improve your net worth.
10. Why gold should be part of your portfolio. (Or change gold for any other type of investment you recommend)

We are real estate professionals.

We are essential to the complicated process of buying or listing a home or commercial property for our clients and we perform this essential service in friendly and professional cooperative competition with other real estate professionals.

Our prospective clients need to see this. Our past and present clients need to be reminded of this. But our real estate marketing doesn’t always communicate it.

REAL ESTATE MARKETING IS MISSING THE MARK

All too often, real estate professionals end up buying into the same old marketing channels (bus benches and mail-outs) and offering the same old services and bonuses (free market valuations) because that’s how it’s always been done and it seems to be working for some professionals somewhere.

It’s too easy to conform to conventional real estate marketing practices, forcing our “square peg” personalities and marketing budgets into the “round hole” real estate marketing habits that have been used for decades.

And through these marketing channels, real estate professionals end up boasting about the services they offer (even though it’s the same boasts about the same service that most professionals offer).

THE RESULT OF COOKIE-CUTTER MARKETING

This expensive practice makes us appear as cookie-cutter clones to our potential clients and it’s not true to who we are – so it negatively impacts our potential for success and it reduces our enjoyment of the real estate profession.

Because most professionals seem to offer identical things through identical marketing channels, clients see no difference between one professional and another… so clients demand an advantage… of price.

When it comes to real estate professionals and clients, it’s a “buyers market” and clients are squeezing us on price because they don’t see any other value or uniqueness.

WE REJECT THE CONVENTIONAL PRACTICES OF REAL ESTATE MARKETING

We reject the idea that we are exactly the same as every other real estate professional out there. Although we all offer generally the same services, we do so with our unique qualities and advantages and talents, and we offer those services to a unique group of people in a unique location. Our real estate marketing must show that we are unique from every other professional in our industry!

We reject the idea that we are anything less than essential to the process of buying or listing a home or commercial property. Although buyers and sellers might feel that there are more affordable options, our service ensures the safest, fastest, most price-optimized way of buying or listing a property. Our real estate marketing must show that the most discerning buyers and sellers hire a professional to help them!

We reject the idea that we have to spend thousands of dollars each month on marketing that forces us to conform to marketing standards set in a different real estate environment many years ago. We have unique personalities and marketplaces and there is a wide selection of online and offline opportunities to connect and engage with potential buyers and sellers – opportunities that our potential clients are more attuned to! Our real estate marketing must conform to our needs and preferences instead of the other way around!

WE COMMIT TO LOOKING AT REAL ESTATE MARKETING IN A NEW WAY

Now is the time for real estate professionals to take a closer look at their marketing practices and methods and decide if those practices and methods are accomplishing the following goals:

1. Does this real estate marketing provide me with the measurable value I expect from it?
2. Does this real estate marketing raise the profile of the real estate industry as a whole?
3. Does this real estate marketing capture the attention of my specific target market in a way that resonates with their needs?
4. Does this real estate marketing allow me to express the unique advantages that I bring to my potential clients?
5. Does this real estate marketing demonstrate how essential I am to the process of buying or selling a property?

If your bus bench or mail-out isn’t accomplishing these five things, stop hemorrhaging money; stop trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole.

WE ADOPT A FRESH APPROACH TO REAL ESTATE MARKETING

Adopt real estate marketing that is measurable. Start with simple-to-measure tactics like page-views and click-throughs and newsletter subscriptions. As you grow comfortable measuring your marketing and tying it back to your success, increase your measurables to include other metrics as well.

Adopt real estate marketing that raises the profile of the real estate industry as a whole. If every real estate professional advertised the same services in the same way, how can potential clients discover value in that? Position yourself as an exclusive expert instead of just another one of the crowd offering free market valuations.

Adopt real estate marketing that captures the attention of your specific target market by discovering the information and resources they need and delivering it to them in a way that they are comfortable with. This is where the real lead-generating opportunities are, and online real estate marketing techniques are so much more cost effective because they are created once and used over and over.

Adopt real estate marketing that expresses your unique advantages… first means that you need to identify what you bring to the real estate profession that no other professional does. What combination of skills, experience, attitude, education, personality, and expertise do you possess that gives you the edge for a specific group of potential buyers and sellers?

Adopt real estate marketing that demonstrates how essential you are to the process of buying and selling property usually requires that you brand yourself as an exclusive expert (not as just another real estate agent) and you continually show people who they can benefit from your expertise.

WE ARE ESSENTIAL AND UNIQUE… AND NOW OUR REAL ESTATE MARKETING EXPRESSES IT

We reject the old custom of conforming to over-used marketing practices. We explore and adopt new real estate marketing opportunities to express how essential we are to the buying and listing process and to express how much unique value we provide. We fight the temptation to adopt the same messages and practices and channels that the cookie-cutter professionals are over-using.

Let’s turn this buyers’ market into a sellers’ market by transforming our real estate marketing.

[Photo credit: digital_a]