What is the most difficult aspect of the real estate investing business?
Some may say your ability to find funding, but we would have to argue, your ability to produce leads, is the most important.
We are all on the search for how to bring in more qualified leads to our real estate investment businesses. Whether you are taking the traditional or outbound approach:
Brochures
Flyers
Bandit Signs
Sending direct mail
Driving for dollars
Billboards
Radio
Television
or you are taking an a more inbound marketing or digital approach. Our main goal when it comes to marketing as a real estate investment business is to produce a lot of high quality leads to fill up our pipeline and add revenue to our business. When it comes to marketing, both approaches are necessary and to some degree work off of each other. In today's market more than any other, potential leads are using the internet to verify credibility and to do research on your business. So all of the offline exposure you get will typically lead back to your online presence.
To supplement your outbound approach, we suggest taking the time to educate yourself on inbound marketing and to learn how it could drastically effect your real estate investment business.
The Importance Of Inbound Marketing For Real Estate Investors
Inbound marketing is a way to attract, convert, close and delight your ideal buyer persona through different mediums on the internet. You are educating your target market on your services, allowing them to sign up or submit their information on your offering and then making contact with them to set appointments and close deals. In essence you are taking a different approach from the traditional outbound mediums. You are no longer using mass media to push your message and services to the public, but allowing your ideal customer the ability to educate themselves on your offerings and signing up when the time is right.
As an inbound marketer or using inbound concepts, we do not want to interrupt our customers in the way of per say direct mail, television or radio ads. We want to focus our time on pulling customers in (or attracting) thus building our brands exposure through the creation of valuable content.
Here are some quick statistics supporting the movement from outbound advertising to an inbound marketing approach;
Google currently processes over 40,000 search queries every second. (100 billion searches a month)
93% of online searches begins with a search engine (IM Forza 2017)
80% of smart phone users, use their phones to shop (The Google Mobile Playbook)
More google searches take place on phones compared to computers
Companies that blog, generate 67% more leads than those who do not (Hubspot, 2016)
8 out of 10 people identify themselves as blog readers
Inbound leads costs approx 60% less than outbound leads (Search Engine Journal, 2016)
As you can see, we are seeing a shift in improved results from outbound marketing to inbound marketing. Through these brief statistics, you can see how naturally incorporating inbound strategies can begin to have a great effect on your overall business.
All of this just sounds great, right? The next question is what is the best or most effective way to begin to take advantage of the inbound methodology and begin implementing the strategy to see results in your business. Before, we get into some of the details and some tips on how to attract motivated sellers, I want to explain to you that the implementation of this marketing medium will take some time.
Inbound Marketing Strategies To Attract Motivated Sellers
The first step of the inbound methodology is to attract your potential customers. Within this methodology, you should be attracting very targeted clients who are more likely to use your service. By attracting more targeted clients, you will in effect lower your cost per lead thus increasing the number of deals your business can do. So, if the first step is attracting our potential clients, how exactly do we do it. Here are some of the ways that you can draw your potential customer towards your business and help gain the exposure your brand needs to produce leads effectively using inbound marketing;
Blogs
Ebooks
White Papers
Podcasts
Social Media Advertising & Curation
SEO
Landing Pages
Infographics
Youtube (video marketing)
To attract a motivated seller, we need to think like a motivated seller. We need to create content around potential questions that motivated sellers will be searching for. You are typically going to be exposed to your potential client when they are searching for a way to solve their problem. As you know as a real estate investor, our best motivated sellers come from individuals who find themselves in difficult situations, these situations may be;
Divorce
Default
Mortgage problems
Delinquent Taxes
Code Violations
Job Relocation
Vacant Properties
Financial Distress
Medical Bills
Sickness
Family Death
Inheritance
This means that we have to create content around answers that people in these specific situations may be "searching" for. So our goal is to make sure that we are in front of them when they turn to the internet to get these questions answered.
1) SEO - or Search Engine Optimization is where we optimize all of the content we create around specific keywords that our ideal customers may be searching for. By optimizing our content around these specific keywords, building credibility and building an authoritative relationship with your customer, overtime we will begin to rank on the first page of google, ideally at #1 for this specific keyword. (75% of users never scroll past the 1st page of results - Hubspot, 2016). From our previous point, we need to think just like our ideal customer, so that when they head to google to begin their search we have already optimized our content around specific keywords they are searching for.
2) Blogging - This is one of the mediums that we will use to answer the questions our ideal customers are searching for. A blog allows us to write articles (or blogs) centered around specific topics that will help to answer our potential clients questions. Each blog article that we write, we are effectively adding another page to our website, giving our business another chance to stand out and be the resource our customers are looking for. ContentPlus published that blogs give websites 434% more indexed pages and 97% more indexed links. Indexed pages and indexed links translate into higher rankings for search engines, thus increasing our exposure online in effect giving our business greater odds of being placed in front of a motivated seller. Each blog post you right, you will also be delivering a sense of freshness and google will reward you for new and fresh content.
3) Social Media Presence - There are several different ways to use social media and each requires a different understanding as to how it should/can be utilized. We do not suggest that you break the bank trying to figure out Facebook advertising (although you can educate yourself and effectively utilize Facebook for leads). However, we do suggest that you maintain a social media presence - post on your pages frequently. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 23% of all time spent online, is spent on social media sites. The more people that notice your existing online, the more people who'll contact you when they decide to sell their house. Social media can be a great way to increase your exposure, build brand recognition and increase credibility for your business.
In Conclusion
We hope that we were able to give you a little insight into inbound marketing for real estate investors along with different ways to attract your first seller lead online. As we previously stated, attracting your potential client is the first step of this process. Once we attract our seller through our optimized content, we will then need to get them to sign up and also close them. Try to focus on putting your ideal customer through an online journey that will guide them through the buyers process. Think like your customer and produce content that your ideal customer would be interested in. Implementing the inbound marketing methodology has the ability change the framework of your business and bring in a tremendous amount of additional revenue to your business.
HS Property Funds, LLC
Funds to Help, Problems to Solve
(315) 516-8023
www.hspropertyfunds.com