First Rule of Marketing: Know Your Market Inside Out!

We are always amazed when marketing questions are answered with generalized advice.  The first rule of marketing is know your marketplace.  Each market is distinctly different, even in the same city or across the street from the community you work in.  No one size or strategy works for all.

One of the most  common advice given is Print is Dead, don't waste your money!   That may be true for some communities, but it is not true for Santa Barbara County.  Pictured above it the Santa Barbara Independent publication. And the other side in the Santa Ynez Star.  Santa Ynez is a small city (population 4,418) with large ranches and vineyards. The savvy agents (those who make money and have listings) know that this works for them.

The Santa Barbara Independent Real Estate has created a front page for the real estate section by adding its banner on the back cover, so it looks like two publications in one.  It is so popular that I noticed the pile dwindling as we were having lunch at Superica, last Thursday. 

The paper  comes out every Thursday without fail.  It is distributed to every retail area, restaurants, hotels, and every newsstand, etc. I counted 28 pages of real estate inventory. . Santa Barbara population including the independent cities is (100,000) .We also included the Santa Ynez Star showing the back cover page with real estate ads.

This morning at the Baker's Table, in Santa Ynez, I noticed that people were picking up their coffee and pastries as well as the Santa Ynez Star.  In both of these instances, print has value in marketing the property as well as the agent and their brand.

In one of the communities we work in on the East Coast, our clients promote their listings every week in their weekly paper.  The other agents do not because they know better--"print is dead", they will tell you with great certainty.  Guess who has the lion's share of listings in this community?  Our clients keep getting listings on a regular basis... 

Know your marketplace inside and out.  As we work around the country, we know that newspaper ads may not work in your neck of the woods, and we also found that videos are rarely viewed in other locales. We have also learned that glossy magazines are well received in certain communities.  All those generalizations mean nothing, unless you research and find out what works and what does not.  You will be surprised.  In marketing, one size does not fit all.