Ignorance in Marketing

Ignorance! Now there’s a condition that gets tossed around a lot.

There are some great quotes regarding ignorance like…

“Education is a progressive discovery of your own ignorance.”
– Will Durant

“It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.”
– Thomas Sowell

“I pretty much operate on adrenaline and ignorance.”
– Johnny Knoxville

And the list goes on, some funnier than others, and some I would consider tragic. However, many people really don’t understand what ignorance means or seem to forget when there’s a chance that it might be oneself who is, in fact, ignorant. You could say, “We’re all ignorant in so far as we don’t all know everything.” Unless you’re a teenager, then you know everything, right?

Ignorance is defined by a lack of knowledge or a lack of information. That’s fairly straightforward, so what does this have to do with marketing?

Well, many seem to understand that they have to be involved with marketing to some degree, but almost an equal amount of people remain ignorant on how to go about it; what it entails, what works for what industries and why, etc. Many people see that almost everyone has an email address, for example, and, therefore, many believe that email marketing is the way to go. Oddly, email doesn’t work like it used to initially, and it has never really worked for those in the mortgage industry. There are reasons for that, yet some will fight to the death to defend their use of email marketing, despite a lack of real results. They’re convinced that their time is going to come and it’s going to work…eventually.

If an email campaign is producing one phone call every 6 to 8 months while your mailing list is slowly dwindling, then it’s not working.

If you are looking at past clients as you would borrowers, you’re making a huge mistake. If you feel as though your only avenue of marketing message is to prove how articulate you are with the figures and spend all of your marketing currency trying to be impressive, you will compound a non-working medium (in this case, email) with a dismal message that won’t get read, and will only serve as an exercise in mistaking activity for achievement.

Here’s a quote by Saul Bellow that I find extremely insightful:

“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”

In other words, marketing is serious in that it plays a large role in the growth and imaging of your brand. Since there’re many opinions on the subject and these opinions are based on what the salesman is trying to sell, the truth can get clouded.

Fortunately, we don’t work that way here at Exodus. You can’t accidentally buy marketing and hope it’s going to work.

There are only two reasons why direct marketing doesn’t work for a big-ticket-item business like mortgage and real estate.

1. You don’t do a very good job (as an LO or REA)
2. People don’t like you, you aren’t likable. It happens and some people are just jerks

And these are the only reasons our marketing concept for direct marketing sometimes doesn’t work.

We have no clients who aren’t happy with us or are unhappy with the work that we do who don’t fall into the two aforementioned categories.

It’s important to understand to whom you’re marketing and why. Figuring that out is easier than you might think and we can help you.

This is why we offer a free Discovery Call. This consultation will give us an opportunity to see what your view on marketing is, what your goals are, what you’ve done in the past, and give you some real answers as to what is going to work for you along with the best direction going forward that will make you money, bring you more clients, and turn your existing client base into living, breathing ambassadors for you and your business. Everyone says that referrals are the lifeblood of their business, but very few do anything to make those referrals happen, as they should.

Take 20 minutes of your business life and invest it in finally figuring out what’s going to work for you and, as we’ve seen over and over again, it will be the best 20 minutes you spend on your business without spending any money.