Evergreen Marketing: How To Finally Get Off Of The Marketing Hamster Wheel and Convert Seller Leads 2-4x Higher

My aim with this article is two-fold:

1. My story and how I realized all leads and marketing aren’t created equal. The mainstream real estate world teaches us all marketing that is accidentally structured to keep us trapped in a never-ending marketing “hamster wheel”. Yes, it works to get leads and deals, but at what cost to our lifestyles and stress levels?
2. Show you how a shift in the way you market

It was 2011, and I was worn out.

I was running my previous company before Carrot and was second-guessing whether this “entrepreneurial dream” of true freedom & impact was real… or whether it was just something the late-night infomercial pitch masters sold to make a buck.

Financially, my company was doing great when you looked at the profit and loss statement at the end of the year, but I was tired of the “boom and bust” cycle my income and leads were on.

One month, our outbound marketing would hit and bring in many leads and sales…

… the next month, my business partner and I would take our “minimum draw” of $1,500 each.

So, we’d hop back on the “marketing hamster wheel” and crank out some more outbound marketing, get customers coming in, and the cycle would repeat every 3-4 months.

My business was successful in all of the normal metrics people would use to grade it, but it felt like the way I was doing it wasn’t sustainable and certainly wasn’t giving me the consistency, predictability, and momentum I craved.

In 2012, I finally sat down and asked… “How can I get more consistency and predictability so this business can support me rather than me support it?”

Are you tired of needing to get a gazillion unqualified leads to close a deal?

More leads = more time and expense to sift through the tire kickers.

Inbound online marketing with Evergreen content is the answer. It attracts your most qualified prospects who are motivated to solve their problem. It builds trust and credibility with them 24/7, 365 through your Carrot Lead Generation Hub.

They convert from visitor to lead between 2-4 times higher… and lead to deal closed from 2-3 times higher. Resulting in lower lead volume but more profits and less hassle.

Timeframe: 90-day period | Source: Carrot Member Site Google Analytics

Evergreen marketing is what we focus on the most here at Carrot. We then amplify it with paid marketing and even hamster wheel marketing.

We’ll also discuss hamster wheel marketing in this post and the difference between it and Evergreen. To us, it’s not one or the other. It’s both. But you want to grow more and more into the Evergreen side of things because that’s where you create your consistency, freedom, and flexibility.

You can make a greater impact with your business, but that’s where your most valuable and highest converting leads come from is from, and then we amplify it with the hamster wheel approach.

What is Evergreen Marketing?

Evergreen marketing is essentially creating content and getting online in a spot where it will be there forever, your website or your “lead generation hub” here with Carrot, and then amplifying that on social media.

Where a lot of agents and investors go wrong is they take the content and they just put it on Facebook or Instagram.

That, to us, is what’s called “hamster wheel” marketing.

If you’re creating a piece of content and you just put it up on Facebook or Instagram, it’s going to be there for 24 to 48, maybe 72 hours before it gets pushed down, forcing you to get back on the hamster wheel and post again, and post again and post again, because the life span of that content is so short.

The lifespan of that content is so short that you must be on the hamster wheel continually.

If you get off the hamster wheel, stop doing those postings, stop doing direct mail, stop cold calling or doing RBMs, then your leads will eventually dwindle to a stop, and you’ve got to restart and get back on the hamster wheel.

Now, Evergreen is another way we like to focus outside of the hamster wheel. But it does take work. Evergreen is more like picturing a stack of bricks.

Here, you see the hamster wheel, which looks amazing because it’s easy. You can hop on it. You can take a step, and it immediately gives you feedback.

It immediately gives you a result. But the problem mentioned earlier is you have to stay on the hamster wheel forever or plug somebody into the hamster wheel for you to keep giving you the result.

That’s where agents or investors get burnt. Everyone tells them, “Do this method, do this method.” But two, three, four, five years later, they get burnt out because they’re still doing that hamster wheel marketing with no end or systems to make it Evergreen.

This is where we want to help make a change.

So, each brick in the stack represents a piece of content, a page on your website, something that will be there forever. It could be a video. It could be a location page of a neighborhood you do business in.

It could be a blog post that you launched through our automated blog post system or that you wrote.

Or, a video post on our system where you can take a short video from your cell phone, upload it to our video post feature, and automatically turn it from a video into a written article that you can then publish.

So, get into the weekly routine. Pick up a brick and stack it, pick up a brick and stack it.

Eventually, you’re going to have a whole row of bricks. It was dirty. It was hard work. You might even pull back and say, “I’ve done a lot of work here, and I’m not getting the result yet.”

That one row is not a wall.

What would happen if housebuilders stopped building a brick house in the first row? They were like, “Man, that was a lot of work. My hands are hurting. It’s not a wall yet; I’m just going to quit.”

Well, there wouldn’t be a house.

That’s where most people quit Evergreen marketing. They do a few actions and want instant gratification, as hamster wheel marketing gives them. But they didn’t shift their mindset to the long-term momentum-building mindset.

So instead, get on the hamster wheel, get some leads and deals coming in, but then go back and stack bricks.

Get into a routine of creating content. Another piece of content this week, another piece of content next week, a blog post next week, a video post, a video post, a location page, and eventually, you’ll have a brick wall that does all the work for you.

Remember, it will be slow going in the first three, four, five, six months potentially.

But as long as you’re consistently stacking bricks of quality content that answers real questions from your market, you’re entertaining in your way; you’re going to start to pick up that momentum.

Hamster wheel marketing, you get a quick result, but then you get off of it, and it goes down. Then you got to go, “Shoot. I got to get more business.” You get on it, get off, get on it, get off. This creates stress.

Evergreen marketing creates freedom.

Freedom or stress. You pick which one you want.

So, how long does this take to work? This little graph will show you—essentially the time and the results that we want to have you expect.

Evergreen Marketing Time to Results

The first one to two months is when you’re really going to be dialing things in. By now, you should have already had your website or lead generation hub created.

Dialed means you have your logo on your site, changed some of the content, and got some of the location pages created. Once you’ve got that dial, then this is where you’re ready to start to bring traffic to your website. Dial it in those first couple of months, add credibility, and get your content started.

In months two to five, two to six or so, that’s when you want to start some of that short-term marketing. Paid marketing, quick traffic methods, and things like that. And months five to 12 is when you really start to see this Evergreen content marketing pickup and get momentum.

So, in the early months, that’s when you will be doing a lot of work on the Evergreen marketing but may not see the highest level of result that you see over on a hamster wheel.

So, in the short term, once again, this Evergreen marketing works in tandem with short-term or quick-result marketing. In those first three months, execute things from that short-term marketing to get traffic and leads immediately.

While you’re executing short-term marketing, you’re going to want to be building the foundation, executing the long-term momentum-building Evergreen marketing, which is simply creating content on your website consistently that Google likes to answer questions for people’s problems.

A Shifting Real Estate Industry

With the shifting real estate industry, there must be a marketing shift that has to happen in the tech disruption in general.

We will talk about this shift, what Evergreen marketing is and what it is not, and how you can really start to like it.

If you implement, stay consistent, and have patience, you’ll be able to get more consistent, more predictable, and high-quality leads.

People will be reaching out to you rather than you having to contact them. No longer will you need to rely on posting on Facebook 18 times a day. Instead, let’s get you to where you publish a piece of marketing today, and it works for you in six months, in a year, in three years, in five years.

You might say, “Yes, I want that, but what is it?”

We’re going to walk through what that is and show a couple of examples and case studies to really connect you to how it works for buyers and how it works for sellers.

We aim to get you to shift your marketing mindset into what will work amazingly well in the market ahead.

The industry is shifting, and you can see with the industry shift, there are two parts to the industry. There’s the retail side of the industry, and then there’s the wholesale side.

The Shifting Industry

The retail side is working through the MLS, working with real estate agents. On the wholesale side, of course, just like any industry, the auto industry and the grocery industry all have retail and wholesale sides.

Both of them serve a great purpose. Some people want to buy properties at a discount for investment, and they don’t want to pay retail. In contrast, some people want to sell properties at a discount in exchange for speed and convenience in solving their problems. And many real estate agents don’t tread into the other side very often. Many wonder, “Why would that seller sell at a discount when they can sell it over here for a higher price?”

Well, oftentimes, the seller wants to sell because of many reasons. They need to move fast, or they had a bad experience selling it traditionally before, or they want cash quickly, and they need it within 30 or 60 days, and they don’t want to have to put up with showings and people going through and making offers and backing out or a variety of other reasons.

It’s a big market over there, and it will keep growing with the iBuyers. iBuyers like Opendoor, Offerpad, and Zillow fall between retail and wholesale.

The big tech giants are starting to say, “Hey, I think we can do a little bit of what agents do a little bit better, and I think we can do a little bit of what house buyers and professional house buyers do a little bit better. And we will bring in better branding, better marketing, huge budgets, and try to shift the overall industry towards direct selling.”

Now, I feel that there will be more and more sellers selling directly to an end buyer through an investor or an iBuyer service like this.

I still feel that real estate agents will be the backbone of house sales over the next several decades. But, there will be a change, and we want to ensure that agents are not becoming a commodity.

We want to make sure that your commissions and your profits as an investor or agent are not being compressed. We want to make sure that you don’t die a slow death in your career because of this shift and get left behind in this shift.

So the next question is this: how do you stand out in this market? How do you stand out when there are a lot of agents, when there are a lot of investors, and these iBuyers and tech giants are coming in to try to disrupt the industry?

You stand out, not by creating fancier CRMs and fancier automation with text and email. That stuff is fantastic. That stuff amplifies what you’ve already got.

The way that we actually stand out is by becoming an authority.

It’s an authority on a topic, on a neighborhood, on a specific type of a seller situation, in the area-owned real estate, whatever it is, becoming an authority that people look to, to say,

“Wow, that person knows a lot about the subject. I trust that person, and I feel less risk in taking care of better if I work with that person with this type of transaction.”

With the authority scale, it goes from the very bottom of the tactician.

Tacticians know:

• How to take the steps.
• How to do the basics of a transaction as a real estate investor or agent.
• How to close deals, but their earning potential will be very, very low.

The tacticians’ influence will also be very, very low on those clients in that industry.

So to raise your income and become more stable as an agent or an investor, you need to start taking steps to become an expert.

Experts are:

• Well beyond just knowing how to do the tactics, shuffling the paper, knowing how to do the transaction.
• They are experts in niches such as experts in a neighborhood or neighborhoods, in a type of a buyer, a type of a seller, certain types of transactions as an investor, or if you’re an agent, you’re an expert in commercial property, investment properties and you’ve put in the time to invest into learning the expertise in that.

These things are going to increase your pay, and it’s also going to increase your ability to influence your market to work with you so you can serve them better.

But, you need to move to be an authority to really win

There are going to be a lot of tacticians in this next phase of the real estate industry that are going to get pushed out of the market. Technology is going to gobble up those people.

Experts are great, but the difference between an expert and an authority is an expert that many people know is an expert. An expert is just someone who knows a lot of information, but no one may know who you are.

How do you get to have people know who you are?

The more people who know who you are and are an expert on this topic, the more people will know you. The more people will be attracted to you, the more sustained and consistent that business will be.

The way to bridge that gap between expert and authority and increase your pay, decrease your risk in the market, and increase your ability to stay and thrive in this market change while these two segments, tacticians and experts, have a tougher time and they start to go downhill is you need become an authority.

How to Become an Online Authority

What is the only way to become an authority?

The answer is CONTENT.

What is content?

One way to do it is with your cell phone. You can record a video and upload it on Facebook. You can also take that video and upload it to your Carrot site (if you’re a Carrot member) and turn that video into a written blog post using our Video Post feature. That’s content.

When people see your content, and they see your expertise and personality, they see your authority on that subject, especially if they see it over and over again.

It could be a written piece of content. It could be you in front of a chamber of commerce meeting. That is content, even though it’s in person.

If you’re attending those networking meetings or meeting one-to-one at a coffee shop, that’s amazing, but you can only scale that so far. What happens during situations that pandemics, like America and the world, have been through in 2020?

You can no longer show up to those big networking meetings. You can no longer go to the coffee shop and shake someone’s hand.

But what you can do is create content so people can find you online. Online is only going to get bigger and bigger. More and more people are going to the internet to make Google searches, and that’s where we want you to be.

We want you to be rooted in this authority or eventually branch up to the “celebrity” authority in your market.

How do you do that?

This is where Evergreen marketing steps in.

Evergreen marketing is so amazing; that’s why we’ve gone all-in on Evergreen marketing; it’s what we’ve done since day one of Carrot.

We’re not a company that started out doing X, and then we realized this opportunity, and we’re shifting our strategy. We’ve been doing Evergreen marketing since day one. It’s what the entire business has been built on since the inception of Carrot at the end of 2013.

Millions of leads have been brought in through our system, mainly motivated sellers, but also a ton of buyers, a ton of tenants, land sellers, land buyers, mobile homes, retail listing houses, you name it.

How Evergreen Marketing Works And Examples Of Carrot Members Who Have Been Highly Successful Using It

You’ve got to start shifting some of your patterns, start shifting some of your thoughts on what marketing is for you. Shift some of your hamster wheel efforts into Evergreen efforts, and then you start to stack more and more content pieces onto your website.

Once again, the strategy in your first two to three months will be the most work. That’s probably where you’re going to be putting three to five hours a weekend into creating the content getting your marketing plan created in that first month or so.

After that first six months, it will probably be more like an hour a week, and that’s your weekly marketing commitment regarding your content.

Here’s a case study of how Brian Rockwell, an investor down in Dallas, Texas, is getting sellers through Evergreen marketing. There’s a full case study. We will link it up below on how Brian Rockwell has done that.

Brian went from school teacher to a multi-million dollar wholesaling and house flipping business and multifamily investment company just from Evergreen marketing and amplifying it with paid marketing.

Let’s look at a real estate agent G Team, for buyers—North Umpqua River homes for sale. Anyone who types up that phrase in Google now takes about four to five months of doing the process, putting their heads down, and doing the work, or you can hire our services team to do some of this work for you.

They’re ranking above Zillow and Realtor.

What does that equal? It equals leads. The G Team gets leads every single day from that one page.

Now, imagine if you started to stack on more of those pages, you get three leads from this one every month, two leads from this one and 10 leads from this one every month, and three leads from this one, none from this one, but six from this and three from this, you get the idea.

Here’s another example. So, the niche seller leads. Let’s say you’re going after sellers who are in tight niches. They have a problem. They’re searching online. I want to sell my inherited house in Detroit, or sell my house in a divorce, or sell my luxury home, or how to sell my house without a real estate agent, or how to sell my house with a real estate agent, phrases like that.

What if you were ranked really high in Google for that phrase, just like these Carrot members are, and they’re ranked in front of those clients, what does it turn into? Well, it turns into leads.

This one came through Steve’s Carrot website. He put Evergreen content up there. That was a blog post that he used for an automated blog system, and he used one of our plays in the playbook to modify those to give it a better chance to rank well in Google.

And you can see this one came from Google search, and this one came in at 7:33 PM. Carrot is working while you are eating dinner, while you’re hanging out with your family, or while you’re sleeping, Carrot’s working. That is what Evergreen marketing is. We want it to give you freedom.

Lastly, the whole thing with the strategy of Evergreen marketing is that it is a fundamental shift in the way that you do things.

If you want to be on the hamster wheel for the next five or 10 years and grinding away in five or 10 years and having to continue to post and continue to do things and continue to work five, six, seven days a week, then keep on doing hamster wheel marketing as your only marketing method.

We want to start to have you shift things over to Evergreen marketing, but it’s going to take work.

It’s going to take focus. It will take effort, but in 12-24 months, you will say, “Oh my gosh, I’m so glad I made this shift in my business because now I have freedom. I have flexibility. I’ve got this machine and lead generation hub that is continually attracting the right prospects that convert the best that want to work with us.”

And this is what your site is going to look like essentially.

You have got your core homepage or Lead Generation Hub. Then there are “core conversion” pages, niche/location pages, and the authority content.

Let’s dive into those a little deeper:

1. Core Conversion Pages: 
   1. Purpose: To convert visitors into leads and deals at a high rate
   2. What: Your home page, primary nav pages, reviews, About, FAQ, How it works, etc. 
   3. All geared to guide people through a specific set of content to answer questions, squash objections, and convert a visitor into a lead and deal.
   4. Frequency: You create these one-time but then update them as needed.
      
2. Niche / Location Pages:
   1. Purpose: To attract new prospects who are searching for localized phrases. 
   2. What: Pages specific to a location and/or niche that are created to rank well in Google for those localized searchers. 
   3. Seller: It’s best to duplicate a motivated seller lead gen page and localize it for each market. This may be a home page on our motivated seller sites or a seller page on an agent site. 
   4. Buyers: Use the Locations page tool so we can populate properties. And each location is unique, so it’s harder to duplicate a page. These pages take more heavy lifting. 
   5. Frequency: Ideally, 5-10 per quarter. 
      
3. Priority “Authority” Content: 
   1. Purpose: To build ongoing trust, credibility, and authority through small but hyper-focused pieces of content. 
   2. What: Automated content pack blog posts, video posts, etc. These may be market updates, video posts answering common questions, etc. 
   3. Frequency: Weekly. Ideally, 1 automated post per week and 1 VideoPost.

Conclusion

That’s it. That’s publishing one authority content piece in under an hour a week, every single week. Then, take your “Lead Generation Hub” and amplify it by sharing it on social media and or paid marketing.

Over time, you’ll see these stack up in Google and start to bring you traffic.

Eventually, you can start to get off of that hamster wheel, and you can start to stack those bricks and get that freedom you’re looking for.

Hopefully, your mindset shifted around what to do. You understand what Evergreen marketing is now to crush it, gain that freedom, gain that flexibility, and grow momentum.