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.
Dan: All right, hello and welcome to this week's episode of the REI Marketing Nerds podcast. As always, this is Daniel Barrett here from AdWordsNerds.com. How are you? I hope you are well. I hope you are having an awesome, awesome week. [00:59.0]
Look, as always, if you want to talk to someone about online marketing for your real estate investing business, all you’ve got to do is go to AdWordsNerds.com/strategy. That is AdWordsNerds.com/strategy, and my team will help you dial in the right online marketing strategy for your risk tolerance, your market, your business, all that good stuff. Go on over to AdWordsNerds.com/strategy and grab some of that.
Now, this week, all right, this week, I am going to talk a little bit, a little bit general, about the way that we all move through the world and it's going to sound a little high-level, and that is on purpose because I am going to leave out some names, some specific people, some specific companies, okay, in the real estate investing space. [02:00.0]
I'm going to be talking about something very specific, a very specific real conversation that I have and am having over the last couple of weeks with my clients about a particular company in this space. The reason that I'm leaving their name out—and it's not like I'm calling out some kind of malfeasance. It's not like somebody is defrauding my clients or something, because, in that case, I would call out that behavior. It's not like that—what this is is a sort of systemic inability for people to tell the difference between marketing and reality. Marketing and reality.
That might sound weird because I’m a market, okay, and I love marketing and I think the best marketing in the world is up there with all the other great achievements of humanity, right? Because, marketing, you’ve got to understand psychology. You’ve got to understand behavior. You’ve got to understand motivation. There's so much that goes into it, so marketing is amazing. [03:11.3]
But marketing is not reality. Marketing is not reality and I'm going to get into this because right now there is this kind of trend in real estate investing to pick out something specific. To talk about something completely different, I might say, Hey, guys, just so you can choose, you can sort of pick the perfect employee, the absolute best person to hire someone, who's going to revolutionize your business, transform your life. You could pick the absolute perfect person. You could do it every single time by focusing in on one and only one factor and that factor is agreeability. [04:03.7]
If you can measure agreeability, the ability of someone to get along with others, that is what is going to tell you who the perfect employee is going to be. I'm going to give you a test. You can give this test to your job applicants and you will use this test to find a hundred percent of the time the perfect employee. Now, that is an example of pulling out a specific metric and focusing in on it and making that metric the end all be all of what you're trying to do, in this case, agreeability, which, hey, agreeability, it's a metric. You can measure it. You can test for it and that, my friends, is the secret to finding the perfect employee, if you are hiring [04:55.0].
Now, what is nice about that pitch, that marketing angle, so to speak, is that it is, one, and this is very critical, based in truth. It's based in truth. If I said to you, hey, the way you pick the perfect employee is by looking for the tallest person, you would know right off the bat that that doesn't really make sense. You will have had an experience with a tall person who was a terrible employee and you will immediately discount what I'm saying and not believe me. If you're a marketer, you need to be believed in order to be trusted in order for people to buy from you, or if you're a real estate investor to sell to you, right? You need to be believed. I can't say height is the thing. [05:50.8]
Now, instead of I say, oh, agreeability is a thing and instead of I say, hey, you can test for this, I've got a test for it, that starts to sound a little bit more objective. And you kind of buy it, right? You might buy that. Yeah, agreeability, that means they work well on a team. They're going to be good with my clients. They're going to listen to me. As the manager, they're going to listen to what I have to say to them. You can buy that this one metric might represent in some way how good of an employee this person is going to be.
So, as a marketer, if I'm marketing a program where I'm teaching you to hire based on my agreeability test, it's very critical, it's very critical that my marketing angle be based in truth. It's got to be based in truth.
The other thing that it needs, and this is also very important, it can't just be based in truth, it's also got to be easily digestible. It's got to be something you could take in and understand quickly. [07:01.0]
If I say to you, hey, I'm going to help you hire the absolute perfect employees for your real estate investing business, every single person you hire is going to be amazing, what this is is a five-month long program where I teach you everything you need to know about hiring, firing, and human resources, that program might be incredibly effective and it might be very, very true.
If I say that, hey, hiring is really a matter of this constellation of different personality traits and career backgrounds and professional aptitudes, and there are many, many, many, many, many different metrics and rubrics you're going to need to measure all this, that's absolutely true, but it isn't digestible. It's not easily understood, and that turns people off. [07:59.0]
All of us, as potential consumers of marketing, all of us are looking for the shortcut. We're looking for the fast solution. As a real estate investor, you know this. You know this deep in your marrow. What is your postcard say? It doesn't say sell your house at a conservative pace. It says sell your house fast, sell your house quick, get a fast cash offer. We all know this. This is the name of the game in real estate investing, speed, convenience, and this is a human universal. We are all looking to maximize our results while minimizing our effort. We are effort-minimizing organisms down to our core. All right? For this marketing angle to be effective, it not only needs to be based in truth, it also needs to be easily digestible. [09:03.8]
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Now, in the real estate investing space, I have noticed there is a very real trend among companies that do online marketing or even pitch coaching programs or whatever, people that sell to you, sell to the real estate investor, there's a very real trend among those companies to pick something simple and say, because I can track this, because it's easy to understand, and because it probably is important, that thing is the only thing you need to worry about. [10:16.0]
The only thing you need to worry about in order to get online leads is your following, is your landing page, is your ad copy, whatever it is. Whatever it is, everybody has got their thing, which just so happens to be the thing that they're good at, right? They're picking out one thing and saying, Because I can measure this, it is important. Because I can measure this and manage it and manipulate it, and because I'm good at it, this is “the” only thing. “The” only thing you need to do is Google Ads, SEO, video, podcasting, mail, whatever, whatever it is. This is just marketing 101. [11:10.6]
I am not telling anybody that this is bad or untrue, or this is manipulative or unethical. I'm not saying that at all. I'm not saying that at all. But what I'm telling you, the person listening to this podcast right now, is that you always need to remember that just because it's easily digestible and just because it is based in truth, that does not mean that is the end all, be all.
As a real estate investor, when you go to look at a property, you don't just look at the roof and say, I make my offer based on the roof. You don't just look at the neighbor's house and say, I'm going to make my offer based on the neighbor's house. You look at all sorts of different things, different variables. What is the neighborhood like? What are comps like? What is the housing market doing? How much money do I have in the bank? How many deals do I have in my pipeline? [12:15.7]
All of these factors, all of these variables influence your decision because, because, reality is not easily digestible. Reality is complicated, and, look, I wish it wasn't the case. I wish it was simple, but reality is it ain’t simple. It's complicated.
Maybe your dad said this to you. My dad always said this to me. If it was easy, everyone would do it, and that has remained true my entire life. No matter how many times people have tried to tell me in their marketing, Hey, this time I’ve made it really simple. This time we've made it really easy. Every time I hear that, I think I hear my dad's voice in my head. Every single time, he says, Hey, if it were easy, everyone would be doing it. [13:13.3]
Here's why I bring this up. Here's why I'm really harping on this point, because, look, I know you can tell the difference between marketing and reality. You're a real estate investor, your marketer, and the real estate investing is a marketing and sales business, so you get this, right? But the reason I'm bringing this up is I have had this a couple of times now. My clients, we will run tests for them. I will drive traffic to their website, drive traffic into their follow-up process, drive leads into their sales pipeline, and it doesn't work. The website doesn't convert. The follow-up doesn't get them on the phone. They get them on the phone and they can't close it. [14:00.7]
And I say, Hey, this isn't working. We need to try something else, and what they say is, No, I know this works because I’ve heard other people are doing it successfully. What this is saying, what these people are saying is reality must be wrong because it doesn't match the market. Reality is wrong because it doesn't line up with my marketing, with the marketing that I was exposed to, with the sales pitch I received and believed in.
I'm not even saying, again, I'm not even saying that sales pitch was wrong. I'm just saying that, when reality and marketing disagree, you’ve got to go with reality. If you test something in your market with your traffic and it doesn't work, it doesn't matter if somebody on the other side of the country or someone down the street did the same thing and said that it works gangbusters for them. [15:10.4]
For one, people lie all the time. People lie all the time. I mean, your big fish story is a thing for a reason. But the other thing is, even if it really does work 99 percent of the time, that means one percent of the time it doesn't work, and it doesn't matter if it worked for someone else if it doesn't work for you.
Paleo might be the best diet in the world, but if you can't stick to it, it doesn't matter. High-intensity interval training might be the most effective exercise methodology in the world, but if it doesn't work for you, it doesn't matter.
When the marketing and the reality disagree, you have to align your behavior with reality. That's how you make money. That's how you get deals. That's how you close more deals, not by thinking, What did the marketing guy tell me? but by thinking, What is working for me? [16:11.8]
And, look, I am a marketing person. I market to get my clients. This podcast, I hate to break it to you, it's marketing, right? I gave you my website at the beginning. It’s marketing. Everything I do is marketing. I do marketing for my clients. I'm doing marketing now. You get it. But what I'm telling you is no matter what the marketing sets, regardless of whether the marketing is true or not, accurate or not, what matters to you is your reality on the ground, your deals, your leads, your market, your business, your risk tolerance. Not theirs. Yours.
If you run a split test and it tells you that in your market, your situation, your current day, this minute of this week in your situation, that thing doesn't work, don't rely on the marketing and decide the test was wrong. Rely on the test and figure out what works for you. [17:22.2]
I hope that makes sense. Bit of a nerd rant this week. I'm going to be honest, I got a little fired up, but, look, guys, guys and gals and everybody that's out there, I want you to know, and this is my promise to you. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you've heard me go on a number of these. This is my promise to you. I am never going to blow sunshine wherever, up hoo-ha there. I'm never going to blow sunshine if it isn't warranted. I am going to give you as close as I possibly can to the straight truth, regardless of what it means for me or my business or whatever. That is what I'm doing on this podcast and I hope you get some value out of it because I definitely appreciate you being here. [18:08.0]
Look, if you are into this stuff at all, we would love to have you in the REI Marketing Nerds Facebook group. You can get there by going to AdWordsNerds.com/group. I'm in there every single week, posting live videos, putting a bunch of content in there. We're going to put free tools in there and stuff. It's awesome. Plus, a bunch of awesome investors, one of the best investing groups on the internet. So, go to REI Marketing Nerds on Facebook or you can go to AdWordsNerds.com/group, and you can find us there.
As always. I appreciate you being here. Thank you for listening, and I will see you next time. Cheers.
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