Marketing Your Appraisal Business: Attract, Build, and Retain Clients
As a professional accredited appraiser, you likely spend much of your time focused on delivering accurate appraisal reports, staying up to date with market trends, and ensuring your reports meet industry standards. But have you given the same attention to how you market your appraisal services? Having a strong marketing strategy is essential for attracting new clients, building your reputation, and ensuring long-term business success. Many appraisers assume that marketing is a complex, time-consuming process. While it does require effort, it doesn’t have to be overwhelming.
The key goals of marketing are to generate long-term profits, deliver customer satisfaction, and improve the competitive strengths of a business over time. The above marketing goals are really all about getting and keeping customers. This means that can we break marketing down to three simplistic responsibilities:
- Attract new customers
- Grow customer base
- Retain profitable customers
In other words – get – build – hold customers. An appraisal business many not always have repeat customers and seeking out your appraisal services may be a one-time deal. But it is important to realize that happy customers often spread the word regarding their positive experiences with a business. Word of mouth advertising can be one of the most powerful marketing tools, but is often out of your control as it is up to the consumer to spread the word, whether it be positive or negative. As a result, you want to work hard on creating a positive experience for your clients.
An easy way to understand marketing is by using the example of gardening. To ensure your plants thrive, regular maintenance is crucial. You need to trim leaves and flowers occasionally to help strengthen the plant and preserve nutrients. Weeds can also hinder your plants’ growth by absorbing vital nutrition. By removing weeds and pruning non-essential elements, you concentrate the energy, which promotes the growth of large, beautiful flowers. The same concept can be applied to marketing. Monitoring, adjusting, and evolving your marketing allows you to achieve powerful results by eliminating non-essentials.
