You're listening to the REI Marketing Nerds podcast, the leading resource for real estate investors who want to dominate their market online. Dan Barrett is the founder of Ad Words Nerds, a high tech digital agency focusing exclusively on helping real estate investors like you get more leads and deals online, outsmart your competition and live a freer, more awesome life. And now, your host, Dan Barrett.
Alright, hello everybody and welcome to this week's REI Marketing Nerds podcast. As always this is Daniel Barrett here from AdwordsNerds.com. How are you? If my voice sounds a little throaty or low this week or whatever it is, sorry about that I definitely got sick as I came back from a trip with my family but I'm going to power through. [0:01:03.8]
I'm going to make this one a little short because I want this to be immediately actionable for you and I want this to be something that you can immediately turnaround and think about and use. That's about getting back to the basics and thinking about your numbers. Now investing is obviously a very number driven game. You got numbers from the very beginning when you think about acquiring a lead but then of course you got the cost of the deal and the cost of the renovations and what you're going to sell it for – it's all about understanding the numbers and the relationship those numbers have with each other. But I think it's something that a lot of us do because even if we check a lot of our marketing numbers early on, we forget to keep updating those numbers and keep refreshing our understanding of what's working. I'm going to tell you a story from my personal life. This is what kind of prompted me to do this episode. [0:02:00.4]
I have a whole lot of marketing things going at any given time. I've got a lot of different ways of reaching out to investors and a lot of those have been really great for us. But what ended up happening was because they were doing great, I kind of forgot to keep checking on them, and so I went back today and actually redid all my numbers. I went back and I did my numbers for the entire year. I found how many people were seeing my ads, how many people were clicking, what that cost me, what that cost me in total, what it cost me to convert them into a lead, how those leads performed. I actually found out that though the marketing that I'm doing is still working, it's still great. The stuff that is actually doing the best and spending the most and performing the best wasn't what I thought it was. That's really going to cause me to change my approach. Now as an investor this same kind of ownness, impotence – whatever you want to call it, is on you when you're thinking about acquiring motivated sellers. [0:02:59.9]
If you for example launch into a market with Google Ads or you launch into a market with SEO and you acquire deals that are profitable, that's awesome but you cannot rely on that to always be the case. Remember that online marketing is very much like the stock market. The stock market can make you a ton of money one day and lose you a ton of money the next day. So you have to stay on top of it. Now if you're working with a manager like you're working with us over at Adwords Nerds, you're working with a variety of different people that do this in this space now, that's their job to stay on top of it. If you're doing it on your own like if you came through my Search, Click and Convert bootcamp or you learned how to do this on your own, you primarily do your own marketing that's on you. I can be a little bit exhausting. Honestly, it can just be a lot of work to stay on top of it. I will give you kind of my strategy for staying on top of your numbers. [0:04:00.5]
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The first part of this is to really just boil it down to a few numbers that are really important to you. For me, this tends to be impression which is views on any ad. It tends to be clicks. It tends to be total cost. It tends to be conversions and cost per conversion. Now those are like some relatively limited numbers that I can look at and get a sense of what's happening. I can look at impression and say how many people am I getting in front of? [0:05:00.1]
I can look at clicks and say how am I appealing to the people that I get in front of, are they interested? I can look at conversion and I can say how good am I doing or how well I am doing at turning those people into potential leads? Then finally, what does it cost me on average per lead to do that? If I know those numbers, I'm going to know pretty much everything I need to know to fix problems as they emerge or to change my strategy as the market shifts. It's really critical. Your numbers might be slightly different but for me those are the numbers that I like to look at. Now once I have those numbers established, I will typically establish a baseline. My baseline typically is going to be like what's the average over let's say the calendar year or the last 365 days if you've been running it that long. So you establish the average for all those numbers over the year, you say cool. This is the baseline. This is how we've done on average. Now once a week, I'm going to pop in there, I'm going to figure out those numbers, I'm going to pop into like a Google sheet or a spreadsheet or something like that, and I'm going to look at those numbers and say, how do they vary from the baseline? Right? [0:06:12.4]
I'm improving? I'm declining? Where am I declining or improving and why might that be? The reason I do this once a week is that I find that to do it once a day, there is a lot of fluxuations that it's a little confusing or it can cause you to feel a lot of anxiety when you don't really need to, and it's what fits into my schedule. So again, setting those baseline of those basic numbers that you know that you need to check, setting your baseline for the last calendar year or 365 days to understand your average and then once a week checking in and saying where am I according to my baseline – am I better or worse and why? This is going to put you in the driver's seat of your own marketing and it allows you to respond to market changes without being completely tied to the numbers in a way that's going to make you feel anxious and crazy and all those things. [0:07:08.9]
This is the kind of methodology I use in my own marketing. I highly recommend that you use it in yours. If you're working with a manager like you're working with us at Adwords Nerds, we already do this but it's always good to know your own numbers even if you're working with someone. Right? It's good to know what's going on with your ads. I have a Facebook ads person. Mostly because even though we have Facebook ads people on our team that do this full-time for our clients, I just don't have the time to do my own ads. You know it's a classic – the cobbler's son has no shoes kind of situation, right? It's always harder to do your own stuff. So I hired somebody to be on top of that full-time. He takes his own numbers but I watch my own numbers because I want to know what's going on. I want to be able to judge how he works and his performance and I have changed ads people in the past based on that. [0:08:01.5]
So again just to back this up, think about this for a second because I want you to be able to turn off this episode and do this right away. Figure out what your core metrics are – for me it's impressions, clicks, the cost, the total spent, the amount of conversion and that average cost per conversion – those are my numbers. Yours might be slightly different but figure out your major metrics that you're going to check. Two, figure out what your baseline average is. So look at the last calendar year or the last 365 days or however much time you've done it – right? If it's only a couple months, take the data from a couple of months. Establish your baseline so you know what your average performance actually is and then finally three once a week check in, update a spreadsheet with those numbers and ask yourself – am I better or worse than my baseline; where am I better or worse and why? If you can do that you're going to have a ton of power to change and adapt with these pretty wild time that we are in right now. [0:09:01.4]
So thank you so much as always for listening to this episode. You can get all of our past episodes at AdwordsNerds.com/podcast. If you're not in our free Facebook group, you really need do that. It's our REI Marketing Nerds Facebook group, you can get there by going to AdwordsNerds.com/group or you can just go on Facebook and type in REI Marketing Nerds and you'll find us. I will see you the next episode. Thanks everybody and I'll talk to you soon. Bye.
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