Selling a piece of land can be as easy or as hard as you make it. In this month's column I'd like to take a look at a few quick and easy marketing methods implemented throughout the marketing world and apply them specifically to selling your land parcel. For years, direct-response marketing has been the redheaded stepchild of the ad agency world. While many agencies have direct-response aspects, or flirt with the idea (especially during economic slowdowns), occasionally creating direct-response divisions, very few agencies fully embrace or even acknowledge simple ROI (return on investment) tenets that direct response marketing relies upon.

Here's how the story goes: Years back, an executive for a book publisher decided to tie together two forms of advertisingñTV and print. Now that doesn't seem a big deal, but when they decided then to have their TV ads spend precious seconds telling people to look into the upcoming TV Guide to search within the pages to find a golden box in their "Book of the Month Club,
and then to fill in the code flashing on the screen to get a free book, industry people literally cried foul.

But it worked. Not only did they add more subscribing members that month then ever before, but they also realized that TV ads gave them great response in their core demographic. That's something that is truly a rare gem for national broadcast media buys.

So, all this said, how does it apply to you? Simple. The lesson is that you don't have to know exactly who your target demographic is (usually), but odds are that you do know them-your prospective buyers-well. However, what you need is a way to drive traffic and track sales leads.

Create a Brand for Your Land

People who specialize in selling land vary more widely than in most other areas of real estate. Why? Because land is probably the most varied asset class within all of real estate. In light of that, you have to create some brand around your land parcel. Remember when selling it: it isn't what it is, but rather what it could be. That swampland you own in the middle of nowhere isn't "Parcel 394-3445;
rather it's the "Alicia Springs Reserve.

Own Your Brand Now that you have a brand, you need to own it. The simplest way to do that is to buy the domain online and develop a simple template-driven website. There are literally thousands of people out there who specialize in creating simple web solutions for real estate alone.

From here, it's time to promote the sale of this property and track the results. The simplest ways to conduct promotion of your brand are through e-mail, online advertising and direct mail. In all of these, the more personal and more targeted an audience you can create, the better. A good example is to create a personally addressed letter for all the landowners abutting or adjacent to your parcel. Create a sense of urgency by stating that you plan on selling by a certain date. Develop a competitive environment by saying that while the letter is written to them, a similar letter was written to all the other land owners. Finally, drive that traffic to your website with a simple call to action.

You can do similar things with e-mails to peers in a related industry. Whatever you do, make sure you're aboveboard and concise with what you're stating. The last thing you want to do is lead them down one path thinking that you're only courting them as a prospect. Creating an open, honest, and fair bidding environment helps everyone win.

Call to Action

When advertising, it's important to give clear information and remember the very best marketable feature to each target audience. To the adjacent landowners it might be something very simple, such as, "highway access adjacent.
To other builders in the industry it might be a tax credit or special government interest in your specific project. Remember to keep the copy light and drive them to either your website or your phone line.

You want to capture that prospect and to know as much as possible about them with as little work as possible. I always think that the Web gives you more of that ability than any other medium; that's why I recommend it to drive traffic. Of course there are many other sophisticated routes you can take once you've mastered these basic approaches.

Other aspects might include teasers, like giving an invitation to the "property preview.
That could be a glimpse into your website or an actual parcel viewing before you put it on the market, etc.

Closing the Sale

Direct response is only the first part of a very crucial process; it drives the traffic and leads, but from there, it's your job to sell the land and close the sale. Using these techniques, you'll get more traffic and increase awareness a great deal.