You’ve got XML, search engine optimisation (SEO), search engine marketing, pay per click, pay per action, PPM, social media, semantic web, viral, web2.0, web3.0 and even some talk of web4.0.
Oh wait; Web4.0 is already dead.
For people like real estate agents and professional communicators, people like me, sometimes you just want to go out back and put a bullet in your head rather than have to keep up with all this stuff.
(Then again, there are plenty of people who don’t keep up with it but feel very happy to spout off about it anyway. Maybe I could learn from them. Maybe I already have.)
That’s why I was so relieved to read this post on online and offline marketing, by Jack Trout. The gist of it is that a marketing strategy should above all be obvious and easy to understand.
That simplicity is one reason good online marketing strategies work so well.
It’s not as easy as just coming up with something obvious. Sometimes, it’s hard to get others to adopt your obvious online real estate marketing ideas because they don’t seem clever or surprising enough.
Trout writes that, in these situations, he gives his “evident speech”, which goes like this: “You’re right, it is evident. But if it’s evident to you it will also be evident to your customers, which is why it will work.”
According to Trout, the handbook for the Obvious Movement is only 40 pages long and was published back in 1916–about 90 years ago. It’s a slender book titled Obvious Adams: The Story of a Successful Businessman.
I managed to find a free download of Obvious Adams online, from the US Library of Congress. Beware. It’s a scan of the original and weighs in at 1.4 MB. Do not try this on a dial-up connection
Read it, and see what obvious ideas occur to you.