Whether you are wholesaling, flipping or looking to buy and hold, the one aspect of your business that will separate you from your competition is your ability to source off market deals. Your ability to source consistent discounted deals off market will allow you to turn a hobby into a lucrative business. When you begin your real estate investing journey, standard belief is that you need to work with a real estate agent or scour the internet searching for potential deals through the MLS. As you begin to educate yourself on the business, you learn that there are several different mediums that you can utilize to get in front of potential sellers who are interested in selling their property at a discount for the benefit of speed of transaction. Sourcing off market deals, has very little to do with real estate and a whole lot to do with marketing and sales. In order to consistently generate leads, track, follow up and close, you will need to implement specific systems and processes to streamline this aspect of your business and scale your operation.
Marketing
So how do we generate discounted off market deals? We have to put together a marketing strategy surrounding a specific target market so not only are we consistently generating leads but generating quality leads that result in deals that meet our criteria. First, let's discuss our target market so we ensure we are bringing in quality leads. In our business, we are not necessarily looking for specific properties but on the search for specific situations of people who own property. Here are the type of people/situations we will be looking to market to:
Absentee Homeowners
Vacant Properties
Inherited/Probate Properties
Free and Clear Properties
High Equity Properties
Delinquent Taxes
Divorce
Bankruptcy
Code Violations
Financially Distressed Homeowners
Behind On Mortgage
Job Relocation
Paying Multiple Mortgages
Seniors 65+
And More
These are the different motivation types that we will want to get our marketing in front of to increase the likelihood of generating quality leads.
Once we determine our target market and the situations we are going to market to, we have to put together a marketing plan to determine what mediums we are going to use to reach these folks. Marketing is all about testing and tracking results to see which mediums are performing well, what mediums are slacking so you can make business decisions around where to spend your marketing dollars. We will get into how we are going to track our marketing efforts a little later but for now, let's go over the possible marketing mediums we can test for our plan.
Direct Mail
Bandit Signs
Google PPC
Paid Facebook Advertising
Cold Calling
Door Knocking
Craigslist
Radio
Television
Billboards
Door Hangers
Flyers
Business Cards
Through these marketing mediums, we will want to educate ourselves on 2-3 of them for our initial marketing plan to begin testing and executing. Within our marketing plan, we will want to determine a monthly marketing budget and allocate those monthly funds to the 3 different marketing mediums. Before you dive into any of these marketing mediums make sure you educate yourself on them and come up with a plan for each of them. It is very easy to spend a lot of money on marketing and get 0 results. For each of these marketing mediums, you will want to create systems to help streamline your marketing efforts so it make's it easier to consistently deliver your message on a monthly basis. You want to create a scalable approach to your marketing and you can complete this through established systems. Choose your 3 mediums, put together a budget, put together systems to consistently deliver your message, be consistent and execute your plan.
Tracking
If you are not measuring and tracking your marketing results, you will lose lots of money and not consistently do deals. By tracking and measuring your marketing results, you will know exactly what mediums are performing well and which mediums are shitting the bed. You will also be able to track specific to each lead and create systems to consistently follow up with leads. (as I am writing this, we just locked up a wholesale deal that we have been following up with and mailing for over a year) if we did not have the proper tracking & follow up systems in place, we would have never been able to get this deal.
So how do we track our lead flow and our marketing results? Well lucky for us, there is a tremendous amount of technology out there to help us out with this. As we always do, we are going to speak on this topic from experience and let you guys know what we use and how we track our results to consistently produce deals on a weekly basis in our market.
CRM
The first step is creating a "Customer Relationship Management System". The CRM that we use, which is a popular one for many Real estate investors, is Podio. Podio is a very customizable CRM that allows you to create your own apps and workspaces specifically around the real estate investment industry. It also allows you to utilize a third party software, called GlobiFlow to build in automation into your Podio Account. There are several resources on the internet, that will give you information and instruction on how to build your Podio account to be set up to operate a real estate investment business. There are also softwares out there that allow you to buy their built in Podio automation, like InvestorFuse.
Now that we have our CRM established, let's discuss how we are going to track our marketing mediums. When it comes to marketing, there are inbound mediums and outbound mediums. With the proper built in automation within Podio, you will be able to track your lead flow from both inbound and outbound. Let's first talk about our outbound mediums, these are going to be mediums that potential sellers will call, when they see or receive your marketing.
For each one of these marketing mediums, you are going to have to assign a different phone number to the specific medium for tracking. For instance, if you decide to utilize bandit signs, you will establish a specific phone number for that medium, so when people call that number it will register in Podio that the lead was derived from the Bandit Sign. If you decide to utilize Direct Mail, you will assign each list you mail to, a specific phone number so that when call's are received, Podio will register that the lead was derived from that specific list. We utilize a software called CallRail to create our phone numbers. CallRail will allow you to create as many phone numbers as necessary for your marketing plan.
Once you create all of your phone numbers for your specific mediums, you will then link your CallRail account to your Podio account utilzing Globiflow to create the automation needed to track your responses, leads, appointments, offers and closed deals. Now that we have our tracking created through our CRM, we need a one stop shop to view all of these important marketing KPI's. This one stop shop for our KPI's will be called a dashboard. On our dashboard we will be able to view the performance of all of our current marketing mediums, to give us visability of performance which will allow us to review and make business decisions as to where to further or reduce our marketing spend. Through the help of Globiflow, we will be able to create a Dashboard that shows our conversion rates, number of leads per medium & cost per lead for our responses, leads, appointments, offers and closings. As you can imagine, if you have this information at your finger tips, you have a better chance of successful producing quality leads that result in revenue for your business.
Wrapping It Up
Your ability to successfully execute a marketing plan while producing a system that allows you to track your results giving you the ability to make business decisions to iterate your marketing plan will separate you from your competition. The more data you have on your marketing the better chance you will have of being successful. Taking the time to put together the necessary systems to produce an accurate dashboard is very important to your success as a real estate investor. If you guys need any assistance with setting up your CRM or have any questions on sourcing off market deals, feel free to reach out to us at info@hspropertyfunds.com and we would be happy to help.