Consistently using professional-looking, targeted marketing materials is an important lead generation tool for your business. Used effectively, online and print marketing materials can add substantially to the amount of business you do each year. And, if you are not careful, creating these materials and executing their use can be very time consuming, expensive and produce poor results. Fortunately, there are some leading-edge solutions that take most of the guesswork out of the equation and for a price that make most advertising people wring their hands in despair.

First let's explore the fundamental principles that need to be followed for any marketing campaign using print and/or online materials to be successful and cost effective:

1. Ability to Target - without specifically targeting your market with a message that is both congruent and highly valuable, it will land on deaf ears. Or worse, you will start annoying the very people you want to attract. This means that your marketing materials tool should give you the ability to customize your messages.
    

2. Flexibility - any marketing materials system or tool needs to be flexible in terms of customizing the look, feel and copy of the message. Ideally, it will also provide a multi-modal approach to getting your message out (i.e. print, e-mail, video, multi-media, etc.)
    

3. Easy to Implement - if your marketing materials tool is difficult to set up, customize, or use on a regular basis then you may as well not even get started. This is because all the other demands of your business will simply not allow a big portion of your time being spent on figuring out your marketing materials solution.
    

4. Consistency - it is crucial that your message be received multiple times and on an ongoing basis no matter how busy you get. One of the biggest mistakes that sales professionals make is that they allow new business to interrupt the consistent flow of sending out their marketing messages.
    

5. Easy to Track Results - if you cannot track your marketing efforts, how do you know if they are working or cost effective? Ideally, marketing material tools will give you the ability to track the "who, what, when" of your marketing materials distribution. And, if at all possible, track whether it was viewed by the recipient.
    

6. Affordable - direct marketing can become a bottomless money pit if you are not careful. Just the marketing piece design phase can cost thousands of dollars if you go the traditional route and hire a marketing/advertising firm.

Fortunately, there are several real-estate marketing tools vendors that incorporate most, if not all, of the above principles within their marketing tools. And the best part is, you can use these tools to create and send outstanding marketing materials using just your Web browser!

There are any number of companies offering marketing materials to real-estate sales professionals. However, two in particular tend to stand out as "Marketing Material Generators: Imprev and Sharper Agent." They each have their relative strengths and weaknesses which I will do my best to objectively layout so you can decide which is best for your marketing purposes.

Imprev Design Center

The best way to categorize Imprev is a Web-based marketing material design center. They provide a vast array of original designs for every kind of marketing piece you can imagine, including (current as of this writing):

Print Media (PDF)

• Flyers - over 150 designs (40 of which are two-sided)

• Postcards - 755 unique designs

• Tri-fold Brochures - 40

• 11 x 17 Showpiece Brochures

• Property Cards - (these are like business cards for the property --very cool!)

• CD/DVD Packaging - 4 unique designs

Multimedia (Flash)

• Virtual Tours - 4 unique designs (NOTE: this includes unlimited use for unlimited properties during the one-year subscription)

• Slideshow Tours - over 20 unique designs

• Web Commercials - 50 unique designs

• eCards - Flash as well as static image

NOTE: CLICK HERE to see examples of their extensive design gallery.

The photos, copy and fonts can be customized for any of the above designs. Once you sign up for an annual subscription (currently $299/yr), your personal photo, contact and company logo information is uploaded and stored on their servers. This means that they are automatically entered into all the marketing pieces for you.

The way each marketing piece is customized is very straightforward using Web forms. You simply fill out the Web form in their design center that corresponds to the piece you want to use. This includes changing the copy, fonts and uploading photos. Once the form is completed, a simple click of the mouse will generate a high-quality print resolution PDF (for print materials) or Web-ready Flash file (for multimedia pieces).  Imprev does not allow you to modify the layout of their designs.  This restriction was mainly to keep things simple for the users.  Given the large array of highly professional designs and  that most sales professionals are not well known for their design skills, I don't see this as a big concern.

The Imprev Design Center also offers several features that are rather unique:

• Phrase Assistant™ - This exclusive technology writes ad copy for the agent, stores all copy that the agent has ever used, allowing the agent to reuse text between virtual tours and flyers, postcards and slideshows. Think of this as your virtual copywriter who not only helps you come up with great copy, but remembers it all too!

• Image Cropping – This an easy-to-use Web-based tool for an image processing that can accept over 100 file types including jpg, gif, png, and pdf. It also allows you to easily manipulate photos for best results without having to really think about it.

• Design Themes - Many of the designs are part of "themes" that run through the entire scope of brochures, flyers, cards, etc. This allows you to create many different types of marketing pieces that maintain a consistent look throughout.

Imprev Design Center is an extremely rich, and easy-to-use tool for creating a vast array of professional-looking marketing pieces for both print and multimedia. Quality and variety of the design materials are its strength. Distribution of these materials however is definitely its weakness. For individual users, Imprev really offers no easy way to send or track their materials. You need to use other systems in order to do so effectively. Our next vendor on the other hand, does this with ease.

Sharper Agent

With the possible exception of postcards, Sharper Agent does not have nearly the same array or scope of unique designs as Imprev. While they may not have as many designs, Sharper Agent does offer some unique content in the form of local sporting event schedules for most U.S. markets. They have also created a broad range of seasonal "keep-in-touch" pieces that do a great job of keeping you in the forefront of your past clients and sphere-of-influence minds.

Sharper Agent offers some design flexibility that you won't find elsewhere. First of all, you can upload your own designs created by anyone. Also, they have a unique Advanced Editor that allows you to modify any of the designs of their postcards or greeting cards right from a Web browser. CLICK HERE to see a demonstration of this rather cool tool.

Sharper Agent's main strength however, is that it is really more of a marketing system, rather than a Web-based design center. Much of the value of what Sharper Agent has to offer surrounds its well-designed and tested contact management system that tracks every message sent to your database, whether e-mail or direct mail. When sending e-mail through Sharper Agent you can tell if it was received and when it was opened by the recipient —all vital feedback to see if your message is hitting home. The built-in contact management system also allows you to segment your entire contact database into subgroups. This is extremely useful since it allows you to target and track your subgroups with messaging that will have the highest impact on just them.

Sharper Agent has gone one step further in that they incorporated their material into "campaigns" which make up a series of messages that go out to recipients without any further intervention. And, much to their credit, they also offer the services of several Virtual Assistants (for an extra fee) who can run all of your Sharper Agent marketing for you. This is an innovative approach I have personally been speaking and writing about for several years and it is encouraging to see a major vendor incorporate this into their services. This removes the burden of learning and using the system and allows it to be used for your benefit almost immediately.

You can try Sharper Agent for 30 days for free —after that it is $323.46/yr (as of this writing). Not a bad price for a fair amount of design work, localized content and especially a very powerful message delivery system that lets you easily track and measure your marketing efforts.

Which One?

Both Imprev and Sharper Agent do a great job of providing more marketing materials than you could ever hope to use. I give Imprev the definite edge in quality, variety and scope of marketing materials. Sharper Agent easily dominates in the area of localized content, message delivery and tracking. 

As you can imagine, I am asked all the time which "tool" is the best to use. My answer is one that never fails to surprise people, because it isn't what they expect. No, it's not "the one you use" as many would think —it's the one used for you. It doesn't matter how easy these or any other tools are, you simply don't have the time to learn and use them consistently. To do so means you are paying top dollar for amateur results! 

The most expensive marketing you can do is not doing any at all. The next most expensive is trying to do it yourself, even with the best of tools. The ideal marketing solution is to find the "tool user" (i.e. a Virtual Assistant who specializes in e-mail and direct marketing) who will run these systems while freeing you up to do what you do best —list, sell, negotiate.

NOTE: Mr. Internet®, RUSSER Communications, its staff and officers receive no compensation whatsoever from any third party vendors and makes no recommendations as to the suitability of the products or services mentioned in this article. Always thoroughly investigate any product or service before trying or purchasing.

Mr. Internet is the alter-ego of Michael J. Russer, an internationally recognized Internet speaker, trainer, author, and strategic consultant to the real estate industry. He's dedicated to helping real estate professionals leverage their people skills into profit on the Internet. You'll see his column on REALTOR® Magazine Online every month and in the magazine quarterly. Send your Internet questions to help@askmrinternet.com or you can visit his Web site at http://www.russer.com

This article is reprinted in its entirety from the April 2006 issue of REALTOR® Magazine by permission of the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS®. Copyright 2006. All Rights Reserved other than mentioned above. Mr. Internet® is a registered trademark and Ask Mr. Internet!™ is a trademark of RUSSER Communications.