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 AdWords 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. [00:33.5]
Dan: All right. Hello everybody, welcome to this week's “REI Marketing Nerds” podcast. As always, this is Daniel Barrett here from AdWordsnerds.com. How are you wonderful people? Now I do want to take a minute right in the beginning of the show and say, look, it is a very weird and uncertain time and a lot of investors have questions and want to know kind of what's going on in their market? What other investors are doing? If you want to talk to somebody about your marketing and you just want to get some feedback and some advice and you want to see what we are seeing because we have a pretty large dataset about what investors are doing out there. You should go ahead and hit us up. You can go to AdWordsnerds.com/strategy that's AdWordsnerds.com/strategy set up a call with our team and we'll be happy to help you out. [01:34.5]
So get that out of the way right up front, because we have a lot of people kind of interested in that and asking about that. So I want to make sure I throw that out there. So this week I want to talk about buyers and look at AdWords Nerds as an agency has focused on sellers for a very long time and really that's been our bread and butter. But we do, do buyers campaigns and as we're kind of heading into this whole, you know, sort of post pandemic economy, I know that a lot of investors are really concerned about getting buyers and building buyers lists and getting buyer leads. So let's talk about buyers and I'm going to break down kind of some general principles that you can use to set up your own buyer’s campaigns and actually go out there and find buyers, even in situation like ours where the market is pretty wild and uncertain and you know, no one really knows what's going on. So let's get into it. [02:33.3]
Now, first things first, I actually want to throw this out there, right? And I've seen a bunch of people saying things like posting things on Facebook, they are like, “Hey, you know, you want to know how to grow your business?” You know, “even during the pandemic, you know, like opt in for my thing.” And I want to be clear about this—nobody knows that. I mean, who are these people, right? It's like I've never lived through a recession in many cases, much less a pandemic, much less one, like the one that we're in right now. This is the pure hubris of this completely drives me crazy. So what I'm going to tell you is what has worked to find buyers and what's working for us right now isn't going to work perpetually in the future. You know, just, but you know, no matter what happens, I don't know. I really don't know. And I want to be clear about that, because one of the things that really drives me up a wall about this whole situation that we're in is that there are so many people who get out there and project certainty that they haven't earned to have confidence they don't deserve. [03:31.7]
And I'm not saying like we need to panic, we need to be afraid and we need to be anxious, I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is we need to be rational and we need to be honest about what we don't, what we know and what we don't know. Pretending that you know what you don't know is really good recipe for getting punched in the face and I don't want to do that to you, right? So what I'm going to tell you right now in this podcast is what's working for me right now for finding buyers and what's worked for me in the past for finding buyers and like anything else, as the environment changes, as the internet shifts, as channels go away and come into and come into existence and all this stuff, we've got to test and learn and adapt. [04:12.0]
So again, make sure you take all that, with that understanding in mind. How do you find buyers? Now, look I run an agency called AdWords Nerds, you may think that I think Google ad words is the bee's knees’ and therefore bee's knees’ is how I typically find buyers and I should say Google AdWords is how I typically find buyers and look like, you can find buyers via Google AdWords. Okay? You absolutely can, but it is not my primary channel for finding buyers. It's not even my secondary channel for finding buyers. And the thing you got to keep in mind is Google AdWords is an intent based platform, so you've got to have someone that knows they have a problem and they're going to solve the problem by typing something into the search bar in Google, right. Now for buyers, it's not quite like that. What you're looking for very often as a type of person, right? Somebody who wants to invest in real estate or somebody who's already doing that, but they're not going online most of the time I should say and typing in. I really want to buy some properties like where do I do that? [05:10.59]
If they are, they tend to be searching for kind of general real estate investing stuff and it's a little bit hard to kind of pry those people out from that larger market. So for me, for my money finding buyers is mostly a game that depends on Facebook. Facebook is this channel where you can get in front of people based on what they like and what they're kind of doing in the moment, but not necessarily what they need and are typing in to someplace like Google, right? Facebook isn't search based, it's not really intent-based, it's more psychographic space, it's more demographic space.
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So in any case, Facebook tends to be the place to do this and it's actually relatively easy to get in front of real estate investors on Facebook if that's what you're trying to do. I mean, obviously this is in a very large extent right, how AdWords Nerds find clients. We used to find most of our clients on Facebook. There actually isn't the case anymore using Facebook ads, but we used to run a lot of Facebook ads to real estate investors. So how do you do that? Well, you can target by interest. So you can say, Hey, I want people that are interested in bigger pockets or I want it people that are interested in you know, real estate investing or real estate investing trusts and stuff like that. So you and you can just start typing in words and see if it comes up as an interest in Facebook and you can create a whole large audience out of this, and this is probably the way that most people go around finding investors and to a certain extent it is successful. [07:11.3]
It tends to be a little more expensive than I liked doing it this way because this is typically how everybody targets and kind of one of the golden rules of any kind of auction based marketing is that the more people that target a certain demographic, the more expensive it is to target that demographic, right? It's like an auction, right? If everybody wants a painting and everybody is bidding on it, the price of that painting is going to go up in general. So it makes sense. So you can absolutely do that. Now the longer term play, in terms of finding buyers, and I'm not saying this is necessarily the best way to do it, but I think if you want to find a large audience of buyers or a really consistent audience of buyers or you really want to, you know, for example you want to do something where you're matching up buyers and sellers, you want to go broad, get a lot of buyers. The way to do this is to build your own audience and there are many ways to do this. I'm going to give you kind of a quick breakdown of a strategy that you can use. [08:07.9]
It doesn't have to be the only strategy, not saying that at all, but I am saying it's, it's an interesting one that I think you should maybe think about pursuing. If you think about this really broad interest based audience, well you can start to do is sort of siphon people off from that. So something that you could do for example, is target this kind of big interest based audience? So we talked about before a big audience of real estate investors, but just show them content about the types of houses that you sell, that kind of thing, and then build retargeting audiences based off people that watch the video. So again, I'm not sending them to a website, I'm not asking them to click on anything. I'm not even trying to get the lead. What I'm doing first is leading with value, just saying, hey, let me educate you on this… Let me teach you this; let me show you how to do this. And if they engage in that, they watch that video, they start to engage with your content, you can break them off as an audience and say, now I want to show those people, for example, an offer to get on my list or maybe download a white paper, something like that, right? There are a lot of ways to skin this cat. [09:08.0]
There are a lot of ways to approach an audience right, when you want to get in front of them. But I've found that one of the most effective ways is just to provide a ton of value up front. Because people get used to listening to, and if you put up the barrier of saying, Hey, you got to opt in to get this information you know, some people will, some people won't, but a whole lot of people that would have aligned with you and would have wanted to be part of your audience, they're not going to get past that hump too early, right? It's like, you know, everybody uses this dating analogy, where it's like he go out on your first date and then you ask someone to marry you, right? Where it's like, huh it's kind of a hard pitch, right? You've got to kind of get to know somebody, you've got to warm them up a little bit, and so you know you want to give value first and then kind of siphon that audience away. That's a really powerful way to get buyers, right? If you just sort of build this big audience, then what you can do is you can start to magnify that audience. You can use lookalike audiences and custom audiences based on; lookalike audiences I should say, to say, Hey, I have this audience of all these people that watch my videos, show me an audience, just like them, but it's like a million people large. [10:13.6]
And you can do that relatively quickly in Facebook. And what you'll find is that when you start to get buyers that way, they start to think of it as your target the interests, right? Primarily to build your own custom audience based off people who are viewing your content. Then, you show that audience your offer, right? Jump on my list, become one of my buyers. But you can also take that on in to turn them into a lookalike audience and do the same thing. And what ends up happening is that your number of leads goes up while your cost per lead comes down. And look, I'm not saying this is the only way to go out and find buyers, right? Absolutely not! But what I am trying to show you is that there's a number of ways to do this. And when you're, you know, on Facebook in general and you're going after an audience that's, you know, they're not, you know, immediately super-hot to come get you right. You've got to win a mover a little bit. Got to convince them a little bit. Doing it in a way where you provide value first to build an audience of people that know, like and trust you. [11:12.1]
That is an absolute key and secret to that method and basically you can apply it across any marketing channel and you're going to use, but man, does it work really well when you can get it going. That's it for this episode of REI Marketing Nerds podcast. Look, as always the Facebook group, the REI marketing nerds, Facebook group is where we hang out every single week, where we post content, where we post interviews, where I update people on what we're seeing in the marketplace and more so if you want to be a part of it, it's free. You can go to at AdWords nerds.com/group that's at AdWords nerds.com/group or just go on Facebook and type in REI Marketing Nerds and you will find us, I hope to see you there and I hope that you and your family and your friends and your employees are staying happy and healthy and safe. And I'll talk to you next week. [12:02.5]
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