Flowers: I market to people who never read a word

In 2004, we spent a good part of every week bundling postcards and driving them to the post office.

In Ontario we could send unaddressed ad mail without envelopes, so there was no stuffing, no licking, no labels. Just stacks of cards, bundled and dropped off, then carried to 400 front doors by someone other than us. On each card was our photo, our logo, and a line or two of something. A just listed, if we had one. A just sold, borrowed from a colleague if we did not. A note about the neighbourhood if we had nothing at all.

Here is the part I never said out loud back then. I knew almost no one was going to read it.

I knew the homeowner would pick it up, glance at it on the walk from the mailbox to the kitchen, and drop it in the recycling before dinner. That was fine. That was the plan. The words on the card were never the point. Being seen was the point. Every 10 days, another card, another impression, our face and our name landing in front of 400 families whether they asked for it or not.

One of Amy Flowers’ final pieces of direct mail, 2016

At the time, an agent branding themselves was a new idea. Most of us hid behind the brokerage. I put our logo on a postcard and mailed it to strangers, and it felt slightly reckless. It worked.

Here is what made it addictive. Nobody knew who we were, so everything was measurable. When a listing came out of that 400-home farm, we knew exactly where it came from. There was no other explanation. So we could look at what we spent and what we earned and draw a straight line between the two.

The line was steep. It started at around 700 per cent return for every dollar we put into that farm, and over time it grew past 900. So we did the obvious thing. We made the farm bigger. Four hundred homes became 1,000. That became 3,000. At its peak we were marketing to 10,000 doors, and at its best the return capped out at over 1,000 per cent.

It did not hold forever. Eventually I noticed that people well outside our mailing route knew who we were. The brand had outgrown the farm, which told me two things at once. It was working, and we were near a ceiling. I sat down with my mentor, one of the people who had helped brand me in the first place, and he put a name to what I was feeling. Diminishing returns. Past a certain point, another dollar in the mailbox stops buying another dollar back.

So we shifted. Not away from the idea, only away from the medium. Branded vehicles. A bigger push online. Social media, right as social media was becoming the thing everyone watched. Same goal, more places to be seen.

The postcards were over 20 years ago. Here is what we are doing now.

Being cited is the new being seen

We are building websites with hundreds of pages of content. Neighbourhood pages, property pages, guides, answers to the questions buyers and sellers actually ask. And I will tell you the same thing I would have told you about those postcards. I know almost no one is going to sit and read it.

Because this time, the reader is not a person. It is a machine.

The content we write today is written for AI. It is structured so that a bot crawling the page can read it, make sense of it, trust it, and repeat it. When someone asks an AI assistant about our market, I want ours to be the name it returns. But being cited is only the first step. The real goal is the click-through, the AI sending that person to our website. That is the whole game now. The crawler makes the rounds the way the letter carrier once did. Being cited is the new being seen.

Our marketing team did not love this at first, and I understand why. They came up through 15 years of social media, where short and punchy wins. So when I wrote a long page, they pushed back. Amy, this is too long. Nobody is going to read it.

I know, I said. It was never meant to be read.

The same thing happened with video. I would record a three- or four-minute piece for YouTube, and my social managers would come back with the same worry. Amy, nobody is going to watch this, it is too long.

I know, I said. It was never meant to be watched. Not by a person, anyway.

A blur that used to frustrate me

Now the honest part, because a piece like this loses its value the moment it starts to brag.

In 2004, we could prove every dollar. Today we cannot, at least not the same way. After 25 years in one market, when a new client calls, I can rarely tell you the single reason they chose us. Was it the AI answer that named us? Was it the 25 years of postcards and vehicles and video that came before it? Probably both.

That blur used to frustrate me. Now I think it is the whole point. The measurement went fuzzy at exactly the moment the brand got strong enough that no single tactic could take the credit. A brand you can perfectly attribute is a brand that is still small.

So no, I cannot hand you a clean number for this one the way I could for the farm. But clients tell us they found us through AI more and more, so I know it is landing. I do not need one, because I have seen this before.

It feels like 2004 all over again. The medium is new and the debate is familiar. Back then, agents argued about whether it was worth branding yourself at all. Today they argue about whether it is worth writing content for a machine that a human may never read. I am not in the argument. We are already at the post office, except the postcards are web pages now.

I know how this one ends.

The post Flowers: I market to people who never read a word appeared first on REM.