Before even getting started on a project, one of the biggest tasks a real estate investor has on their plate is marketing their business to their lists of prospects. It may not seem like it, but this is a critical part of the sales process and can make or break your real estate investing business.
For real estate investing, marketing means communicating your business’s services to a specific audience of prospective clients. This communication can happen in several different ways and mediums. An effective marketing campaign has a consistent message and look over several channels.
You may be wondering where you should start. The first thing an investor must do is to get into the marketing mindset! Going through the processes and details before you assemble your campaigns will ensure you are using your time effectively.
Pro Tip: Check out our FREE GUIDE for lists that netted more than 10M in off-market deals.
The Marketing Mindset
Before you start marketing to prospects, you must be in the marketing mindset. Marketing is a skill you will develop over time, but you can shorten that journey by understanding what you are doing from the beginning.
So before you start building a campaign, make sure you go through each of these facets of the marketing mindset so you are set up for success before you even press send.
Be Consistent
Maintaining consistency is one of the essential things in any form of marketing. To craft a successful marketing campaign, you must ensure that you send out a consistent message and branding on a consistent schedule.
A big part of any marketing strategy is to try new things and measure their results to see if they are effective. If you create a campaign and then keep changing it, you cannot measure those results accurately. To create even more effective campaigns in the future, you need to be able to measure your results and find what works to incorporate them into your future campaigns.
Even if you create a campaign that isn’t very good, it is crucial to stick to it for a while to get measurable results. Once you know how it performed, you can make changes and have a metric against which to weigh future results.
Consistency also comes down to how often you send your marketing messages out. Once you begin a campaign, it should be sent in a structured cadence until completion. Don’t stop and start or send out one-off messages expecting them to convert. Prospects need to get to know you and your branding over some time before they are likely to convert. If you create a schedule, you can build that rapport over time. In this kind of marketing, it isn’t until six touches were you see a jump in the quality of responses. That means you have to stick with it to reap the rewards!
PRO TIP: Now is the time to get into real estate investing, and experienced real estate investors use Invelo to find prospects, manage leads, track deals and run marketing campaigns.
Establish Balance
Before you can begin marketing to prospects, you must evaluate what kind of time vs. money balance you can devote solely to marketing activities. Of course, this kind of balance is different for each investor. For example, if you are new to the world of investing and still hold a 9-5 job, you may be very short on time. On the other hand, if you have been in the business for a while and have many projects and a team, you may have more time and money to devote to more time-consuming things like cold calling and door-knocking.
Even if you need more time and money, there are still many great marketing options for you to use to grow your business. A great way to save time is to automate everything possible to get that time back.
With Invelo, you can automate not only your list building but also your marketing campaigns. As part of an Individual or Professional subscription, users get access to the records auto-add automation, automatically adding prospects that meet specific requirements to your prospect lists. From there, your newly added prospects can be automatically added to your ongoing marketing campaigns, so you never have to lift a finger! Next, you create your campaigns, which are sent continuously as more records meet your requirements. This can be a game changer for a busy investor and can save you both time and money down the line.
Track Results
While developing your marketing strategy, you want to think about how you will measure success. There should be some key metrics you land on that you can use to measure just how effective a marketing campaign is.
Starting a campaign without any tracking established is not a great way to market to anyone. Without hard metrics, you don’t have objective evidence of whether a campaign is successful. Without that, how can you create effective campaigns in the future?
You need to know how much money you spent, how many messages were sent, and how many of those led to conversions or conversations. It is fine to have some anecdotal evidence, but you shouldn’t rely on that to make decisions.
If you are using Invelo for your marketing, all that information will be on the platform! In addition, you can also see marketing sends and activity on a record-by-record basis if you want to determine who you see the most success with.
Tracking results is a must if you want to optimize your marketing efforts and grow your business.
Stop Comparing Yourself
It might be tempting to look at what another investor is doing and try to emulate them. In some areas, this might work well, but it is best to stay on your own path for marketing.
Every investor has different strengths and weaknesses at different points in their career. You may not have the time commitment someone else does, so copying what they are doing will wear you out, and you will fail. Additionally, every investor isn’t going after the same types of properties! You don’t want to base your whole strategy emulating an investor who is going after high-end properties to expand while you are looking for properties nearing foreclosure.
Your best bet is to research, learn, set out on your path, and stick to it. Of course, you can learn from others, but emulating someone’s specific plan might not get you the desired results.
Consider Responses vs. Leads
When you set out on any marketing campaign, you will calculate many different values to determine if your campaign has succeeded. Two of those variables will be your response rate and your lead rate. It’s essential you understand the difference between these two metrics so you can evaluate your campaigns accurately.
A response rate will show the number of responses against the number of marketing messages you sent and the number of prospects marketed to. This will always be larger than the number of leads you receive. A response is anything from “this seems interesting” to “Leave me alone.” This metric only shows the rate at which prospects responded to your campaign.
Your leads, on the other hand, will only be the responses you get that lead farther down the sales pipeline. Anyone who wants more information or is interested in speaking further would be considered a lead because they are interested in your business. This is a much better metric to track across campaigns because it is the one that can show you if your campaign is resonating with your prospects. You may get many responses, but if they are all bad, that doesn’t help your business.
Think About Demographics & Seasonality
You are almost ready to begin marketing! The final part of the marketing mindset is focusing on the demographics and seasonality of your prospects.
When you are crafting a marketing message, the location, demographics, and season will significantly impact your messaging. You want your marketing to resonate with your prospects, so you must tailor it to them and the area where they live.
The season has a significant impact because it has a considerable effect on the real estate market in general. Do some research to see the oscillations in the market in your farm area to plan out your messaging. If few people buy and sell in the winter, you will want to know that so you can plan your messaging accordingly. If you know when you might see a dip in responses, you can anticipate that.
Set Yourself Up For Success
Marketing can make or break a real estate investing business. Putting yourself in the marketing mindset is the best way to ensure you make fewer mistakes and waste less money and time. If you invest thousands of dollars in marketing your business, you want to ensure you are set to go in the right direction!
Once you are in the marketing mindset, make sure you plan your campaigns for at least 4-6 months. This may seem like a long time, but campaigns need time to show effectiveness!
