Marketing a note business isn’t one big idea. It’s a box of small tools you use over and over. Here are the ones we’ve seen work, grouped by what they do for you.
Repeat your message
If you remember only one tip, make it this one. Your message must be seen or heard 9 times before a prospect becomes a customer. Since prospects are distracted two-thirds of the time, it takes 27 exposures to make 9 impressions.
- An audience forgets 90% of what it sees within two weeks.
- Regular advertising takes 3 to 4 months to show results.
- Many small ads are better than a few large ones.
- Always reprint favorable publicity in your brochures or ads.
- Design multiple uses for your materials. For example, use brochure copy in your cover letters.
- Use print to reinforce direct mail, signs, public relations, electronic media and community involvement. A mixed-media message is far more effective than one medium.
Enough repetition will eventually secure a share of your market. Your message is a doorway to the unconscious, where many buying decisions are made.
Build a referral-based business
Form strategic alliances with Realtors, title companies, escrow agents, attorneys and bank trust officers. You’ll create repeat business from people who see many notes, instead of spending your marketing dollars on “one-trick ponies” (note holders with one note to sell).
It is five times more expensive to sell a stranger than someone who has already done a transaction with you. So work toward referrals from day one:
- Ask satisfied clients to write you a letter about their experience, and ask permission to show it to others. This may be your most powerful marketing tool.
- Include testimonials. The more a note seller or investor can relate to people who have worked with you, the better.
- Prove what you claim with specifics, such as case histories.
Write copy that sells
Most note ads say the same thing. “I Buy Notes” is awful. People want to know what you will do for them. “I Will Solve Your Money Problems!” gets attention.
- Create an outstanding headline. It must convey an idea or make the reader want to read more.
- Build your marketing around one idea, such as speed of service, savings or hope.
- Write to one person, as if that person is a good friend. Use “you,” not “all of you” or “they.”
- Address an intelligent reader. Don’t talk over anyone’s head or beneath their dignity.
- Be specific about your benefits. Use few adjectives but lots of names and numbers.
- Write numbers as numerals. The eye skims over “a hundred and thirteen,” but 113 catches it.
- Use words that feel new and newsy, and attention-getters like “You gain money” or “Proven benefits.”
- Involve the reader with a question, a contest or an action that earns a discount.
- Challenge their curiosity, then tell them exactly what to do next.
- Write timeless copy. “Founded in 1995” never needs rewriting. “Four years old” does.
Make print materials easy to read: short paragraphs, short sentences and short words. Twelve-point type is the minimum for marketing copy. Don’t use all capital letters, and don’t overuse italics, bold and underlining. Save them for your key message. Use color if you can; according to studies the authors cite, color increases readership by 41% and the inclination to act by 26%. Visuals help too: selling points made to the eyes are 68% more effective than those made to the ear.
Choose where you advertise
Even though you have competitors, your goal should be to have no competition. Pay attention to where competitors advertise, since you may need a presence there too. But if they all crowd one section of the classifieds, you should be somewhere else.
- Readers of classified ads are serious buyers. Avoid headings like “mortgages wanted” (who reads that?) and try “merchandise wanted” or “money to lend.”
- The most-read classified column used to be the personals. One playful idea: “I’ve got plenty of cash to spend on the right person, and if you are receiving payments on a note or mortgage, you may get lucky!”
- Don’t ignore rural weekly papers. For the cost of a few tiny classifieds in a major daily, you can run a good-sized ad in a weekly for 6 months or more, with no other note buyers in sight. If you get one note a year this way, you’re doing fine.
- Don’t use other ads to send people to a directory listing, unless you’re the only note buyer in it. Otherwise you’re referring them to your competition.
- Experiment with radio. You reach people one-on-one while they’re driving or working at home.
- Invest in a full-page ad in a regional edition of a major magazine once. Then use reprints of the ad forever.
- Place ads through your own in-house ad agency and you’ll save the agency commission.
Know what to expect from bulk mail: about 50% is read right away, 25% is scanned and tossed, 10% is set aside for later and 15% is tossed unopened. Set your media budget at 10% to 15% of projected gross, and test every idea. What works in Boston may flop in Los Angeles.
Stand for something
Don’t be just another “cash for your note” company. People want to support businesses that make the world a better place. If you aren’t involved in charities and community service, get involved, and publicize it.
- Offer investors a discount on a note if they donate that amount to a charity.
- Offer note sellers a bonus paid to their favorite charity when the note closes (the check goes to the charity).
- Sponsor an event that benefits a nonprofit. It may earn you news stories, which is free publicity.
- Buy an ad that highlights a nonprofit your customers admire, with a message about your business.
- Publicize your in-kind donations and volunteer work.
- Offer prospects a gift to try your services, such as $100 if you buy their note. A premium that also helps a nonprofit is doubly effective.
Give valuable advice that helps your prospects; a newsletter does this well. And learn to make offers competitors can’t, such as partial purchases, back ends and reverse partials.
Keep sharpening your skills
Commit to spending one hour a day thinking about how to improve your marketing. If nothing comes after 10 minutes, read marketing books. Start with Jay Levinson’s “Guerrilla Marketing” series.
For writing, W. J. Mencarow recommends The Art of Readable Writing and The Art of Plain Talk by Rudolf Flesch, and The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White. His one piece of advice for anyone who wants to write well: read good writing. The more well-written books you read, the better your writing will be.
