JP here, and I want to talk to you again about one of my favorite topic..s.
Marketing.
Why?
Because it’s the lifeblood of any real estate business, no matter what niche you’re in.
And specifically, I want to tell you about the top 2 things to key in on while you’re working to become a good marketer:
- Focus
- Traction
Out of the gate, most new investors start throwing a bunch of stuff against the wall to see what sticks. On the surface, it appears to make sense and be a prudent course of action.
But what I’ve seen happen far too often is that a new investor will send out a big mailing, or put out a couple of hundred bandit signs, or spend some money on a fancy website… and not see any success.
So they’ll abandon what they were doing and go on to try something else.
That’s exactly the wrong approach.
Why?
Because any marketing approach that you try needs to have time to get some traction.
Let me give you an example…
Of the 4 marketing approaches that I use, my primary focus is direct mail. And within the direct mail space, I focus heavily on probates.
I have a system that works well in my local market, and a while back I decided that, rather than learn how to mail to different lists in my local market, I would attempt to copy what I was doing in my local market to other markets around the country.
What I learned was surprising: It can take a number of weeks to get traction in a market.
It was surprising because I contact a completely new batch of people each week. So the people I mail to this week have absolutely no relationship with the people I mailed to last week.
In one of those markets, my business has grown to be about 50% of the size of my local market.
Yet it took 6 weeks before I got my first calls. So, had I quit after any of the first 5 mailings, I would have left a ton of money on the table for someone else to scoop up.
It was a forehead slapper for sure.
The cool things is… now that I know it takes time to get traction, whenever I try out a new market, I plan my marketing for a set number of weeks. And while I, of course, am concerned with the results, I don’t even think of quitting until I’ve made the last mailing.
Then I can make an educated, data-driven decision to exit a market. Which is exactly what I have done in 3 of the markets I’ve tried.
Does that make sense?
The best part about this approach is that it takes all the emotion and worry out of a campaign. Because it becomes all about the data and results over a relevant period of time.
This goes for any type of marketing you try:
- direct mail
- bandit signs
- bird dogs
- Facebook ads
- whatever…
Doing something once and abandoning it is never the right option.
The second point that I wanted to drive home was focus.
I don’t know anyone who has an unlimited marketing budget. So, my strong recommendation when you’re getting started is to focus on 1 marketing approach at a time.
So you can really focus on it.
I broke my own rule on this a couple of years ago, and it took me quite some time to dig myself out.
The first weekend in January that year, I added 2 new marketing approaches to what I was doing. I expected each to take some time to percolate and get traction.
But instead, they both took off and started generating a good number of leads. One about a dozen a week, and the other was throwing off 6-8 new leads per week.
Either one I could have handled fine. But both together buried me because I wasn’t prepared.
I know you’re probably thinking that it would be a good problem to have… but it’s not.
I ended up with such a big backlog that I literally had to shut them both down while I tried to get caught up. The sad thing was, it took me so long to get around to everyone that around 30% of the leads got “stale” and went to work with someone else.
It was a painful lesson. My lack of focus left a lot of money on the table for someone else to scoop up.
So, my advice is to focus on one thing until you get traction with it, or until you don’t. Then move on to something else.
Focus. Traction.