Personal marketing is easy to throw money at -- just look at the thousands of agents who waste millions of dollars a year in marketing that yields little to no results.

We have all fallen into the same trap. We start spending money on an idea and then we feel a moral obligation to continue spending money until we see some kind of results -- no matter how much money it may cost us!

So the question becomes: Is there a better way a way to ensure that our personal marketing will be the absolute best that it can be, and provide a steady stream of buyers and seller leads? Can we move up to results-focused personal marketing? My answer is absolutely yes!

Let's take a look at some simple strategies you can use to build your best personal marketing campaign ever.

Five ways to build a Results-Focused Marketing Campaign:

Kill Your Ego

When you look at most agents' marketing you find a common mistake: The majority agents market themselves and not their business. This is sometimes called vanity marketing.

Does the client care about you? No! They only care about themselves. So-called image ads do not answer the age old WIFM question, otherwise known as "What's In It for ME?"

Move Toward Value-Building

Ask yourself, other than your beautiful personality why should someone choose to work with you as opposed to anyone else in your town? Is there a compelling reason to jump toward your services or do you just offer the same old stuff that everyone else does?

The key to creating a competitive advantage is to create unique value; services you offer that your competitors don't offer. Until you take the time to build a platform of unique services you will forever be measured against the wall of mediocrity.

What types of services can you create to become unique?

Look at your niche, your background and your specialized skills. By studying your strengths there will be many areas that you can work on to create unique value.

Examples:

• Offering free relocation tours
• Creating free reports
• Offering virtual tours
• Creating teams of professionals (Example: estate planning team)
• Offering a lifestyle tour for seniors
• Creating a first-time home buyers class
• Building a free for-sale-by-owner kit

There are literally thousands of ways you can set yourself apart in the marketplace. Start with just one idea, then add another, and then another.

Use The AIDA Approach

Marketing and sales students have been instructed for years in the concept of "AIDA" which is an acronym for:

A- Attention
I- Interest
D- Desire
A- Action

When building your next advertising piece ask yourself if it meets the AIDA standard. Let's take a look:

Attention - Does your advertisement reach out and stop the prospect dead in their tracks, or is it a boring "we've all seen this before" marketing piece?

Headlines are read ten times more than the body of your advertising so make your headline attention getting. One of the best ways is by asking a question. A question forces the reader to stop and at least for a second think of a response.

Remember this ad: GOT MILK?

Interest - The audience has to be interested in what you have to say. It's one thing to grab someone's attention; it's a whole other thing to keep it.

What is the best way to hold someone's attention? By offering them something they have never seen before.

Remember, find ways to offer unique value!

Desire - Now you've got their attention and you've held their interest. What next? Now is the time to build desire! How can you build desire?

One of the best ways is to show others enjoying the services you are offering. Some may call this the take away close. For instance, provide testimonials from others on how they enjoyed your services and what you were able to do to help them with their needs.

Action - The last but most important step is creating enough excitement that the client actually takes action. If you can't motivate your audience to take action your entire marketing plan has failed.

Ask yourself, does this ad motivate me? Does this ad create excitement?

A real world example:

This real agent's name is Phyllis, and she specializes in working with rural and ranch land owners. Her target group is rural property, owners with 5 acres or more.

She needs to develop a message that will create instant interest in her services. Through her research she has found that many are concerned about the changing water tables, and the effects on the pastures.

If she put together an ad that perhaps offered a free seminar on the changing water tables, and in addition she invited a local expert to provide information on the topic do you think this would get ranch and rural property owners' attention?

Of course it would, because she already understands their specific concerns and has adapted her message to it. She could run this in the paper, hang it up at local feed stores, mail it directly to her target base, and phone each of her prospects to personally invite them to her seminar.

Know Your Audience

Where you place your advertising will have a major on impact on your effectiveness. You may want to ask yourself:

• What does my target audience read?
• Which newspaper do they pick up?
• Which television stations do they watch?
• Which radio stations do they listen to?
• Which websites do they visit?

How would you know the answers to these questions? There is only one way to know for sure. You must ask your clients! Take the time to interview your clients and you soon will discover that they will be more than happy to share this information with you, especially when you tell them your goal is to create a more effective marketing campaign to attract both buyers and sellers.

In addition, before you begin any marketing campaigns with any vendor ask to see a copy of their demographic package, sometimes known as their media kit. This media kit will break down the companies' audience and will often reveal if in fact you will be reaching your intended audience. This can be crucial information when deciding where to invest your advertising dollars.

Track Your Responses

As a business professional you have an obligation to track all of your marketing investments and measure them against their effectiveness. In fact one rule of thumb in business and a motto you should live by is this:

If you can't track it, don't do it!

As an example I will use myself. For many years as a young agent I sent out thousands of pieces of mail each month. These mailing pieces were directed mainly to absentee property owners -- folks that owned real estate in my county but did not actually live in the area. I found these people to be ripe prospects and so I focused my marketing efforts on this group.

To increase my effectiveness I often would change my styles. For instance, one month I might try postcards, another month a different colored paper, another month a different insert. But the key ingredient with all of these variations was a tracking system.

My system for tracking my effectiveness was very simple. My assistant placed a three-digit code on the bottom right-hand-corner of each mailing. When we would have a response to our mailings either by mail or by fax we could ask the responder to identify the code, and thus we could identify exactly what worked and what did not work.

Take the time to track every response to your marketing and you will be able to vastly increase your profitability!