A few years back we started this company and we decided to do it differently than my previous companies.
We said… “Everything will be focused on us living and delivering our Core Values within our team and our customers, building fun into our company, being a ‘beacon of positivity and possibility‘ for our clients and community, and truly genuinely care about people… so this company and our team can amplify those great people and great causes around us”.
Fast forward 3 years and it’s pretty humbling and awesome seeing this company grow with intention.
Last weekend was one of those times.
Over 2,000 runners and walkers set out to bring positive attention to the tragic events that happened at Umpqua Community College one year ago in our small Oregon community.
The Umpqua Strong Race 9k and 5k event was born to honor the victims and raise money for UCC foundation. The event raised more than $60,000which goes toward funding 10 scholarship programs in the names of the shooting’s victims and survivors.
YOU, the Carrot community and our Carrot team was able to raise over $6,700 for the cause and it’s a HUGE testament to the amazing community of clients, listeners, and team members we’ve been able to attract over the years.
Thank YOU.
The Carrot Team wants to send a HUGE thank you to everyone who made a pledge towards the cause! Thank you for everyone who sent prayers toward our community this past year. Thank everyone for being inspired to also “genuinely care” and be that “beacon of positivity and possibility” in your world and to pass those good vibes here to Roseburg, Oregon… a community most of you have never been to.
It means a lot.
So with that said, we wanted to write up a quick little post and share the day with all of you. You helped make a massive difference and we’re proud as heck of having you in our lives. Sorry if we didn’t get everyone running in the pics! Some of you were so fast we couldn’t find ya on the course!
Roseburg and Carrot Thanks YOU!
Most of our Carrot team and some of their families. Just missing Adrian who was stuck in Hurricane weather in North Carolina! Next time man!Trevor feeling good on the 9k as he passes someone walking :-) (NOTE FROM TREVOR: I was dying at this point… note to self, run more often than 3 times a year).Carly getting around the amazing turnout of participantsMorgan and Alex drove down from Portland 3 hours away to join us and support the community. Look like they’ve done this before.Brendan, our PPC and content expert, is our resident runner in his Carrot Orange garb. Chris said something funny right before taking the picture haha.You were a part of raising over $60k to help fund scholarships at Umpqua Community College in the names of the 9 victims of the shooting. One Carrot client, Harvey G. in California even stepped up and wrote a $3k checkto support the cause!!! WOW. Almost made us tear up at Carrot HQ.
Thank You For Being Amazing. We’re Grateful For An Amazing Community In Roseburg and With You, The Carrot Community!
I think it’s safe to say… everybody wants more traffic.
In fact, every time you hear about a new real estate agency crushing it online, I know exactly how you feel: envious, resentful … discouraged.
Why?
Because over the last decade, the internet has become a universal part of the home buying process.
Did you know? A full 92% of all home buyers — across every geographic region and age range — use the internet during their search.
What’s more, for 42% of those buyers, the internet is their very first step.
Of course, you already know all that.
Here’s the problem …
Most real estate agents and investors simply don’t know
how to generate enough online traffic to meet their lead generation needs.
As a result, we often turn to paid traffic as an answer.
But with the average cost of a single click for a location-specific phrase like “purchasing a home” sitting at $24 … paying for that life-sustaining traffic doesn’t come cheap.
The good news is paid traffic — whether from Google AdWords or social media — doesn’t have to be the cornerstone of your online marketing strategy.
In fact, it shouldn’t be.
Last year, of the 200,000+ leads our clients pulled in online, pay-per-click accounted for less than 20%.
Eighty percent of our clients’ leads — roughly 160,000 from all over the nation — came from free and organic search.
How?
Through an approach we call conversation marketing.
However, before we jump into our three-phase approach to generating more traffic and leads, let’s start with a few foundational principles.
Why You Shouldn’t Pay for Traffic If You Don’t Have To
With a subtitle like that, you might think I’m advising against using paid advertising in total.
But to generate traffic, leads, and revenue over the long term, you need to create content based on your target audience’s real needs and concerns.
The difference between the two approaches comes down to separating your traffic-driving goals into two clear groups: (1) search-engine optimization (SEO) tactics to increase organic visitors — what we’ve termed conversation marketing — and (2) PPC tactics to increase paid visitors.
Knowing the differences is vital.
Why You Should Use Both SEO and PPC In Your Marketing
Efforts For Best Short And Long-Term ROI And Consistency
Why you should use both SEO and PPC in your marketing efforts Image Credit: Investor Carrot
While it may sound technical, SEO really just comes down to creating search friendly content that your target audience will find helpful. We’ll get into the details of how to do this in just a minute. For now, it’s important to be aware that SEO takes a larger upfront investment of time and resources and its results don’t materialize overnight.
Leads come to you. You don’t have to chase them down.
You position yourself as a helper versus a “bottom feeder.”
Higher search ranking doesn’t just mean more traffic, it also means more trust.
In turn, that trust turns a higher ratio of traffic into leads into deals.
You’re not forced into competing for the same lead everyone else is after.
Over time, lead cost dramatically decreases. Best of all, the more search-friendly, organic content you create, the easier generating traffic and leads becomes in the future.
Content Marketing Versus Conversation Marketing
All of the benefits listed above come directly from an approach to online marketing known as content marketing.
Since 2012, the phrase “content marketing” has exploded. Google Trends officially dubs it a “breakout,” meaning the number of global searches for the term has increased by over 5,000%.
The explosion of all things “content” is rooted in a simple principle: add value … and add it for free.
Whether it’s in the form of blog posts, buyer’s guides, checklists, podcasts, ebooks, webinars, or email campaigns, content marketing is the leading way to provide valuable information to your target audience and increase your traffic.
However, at Carrot we’ve learned to take a slightly different approach. Instead of content marketing, our goal is to create “Conversation Marketing.”
Why?
Because ultimately, all business — online or off — revolves around human connections.
This is exactly why conversation marketing works so well. It educates and builds trust with your prospect. It gives them what they need to enter the real estate buying or selling process and complete their due diligence efforts before biting the bait.
And best of all, it connects them directly to you as their go-to source for guidance.
This sector [real estate] revolves around people and relationships, you can benefit by working with integrity.
Trust and relationships are the most valuable assets in real estate whether you’re an investor or an agent.
Couldn’t have said it better.
At Carrot, we use the term “Conversation Marketing” to define our approach to talking with both visitors and customers. Our primary aim is to talk “with” instead of taking “at”; meaning, the content we create avoids the more traditional marketing missteps of creating a one-sided conversation. This is especially important at the beginning.
What Real-Estate Conversation Marketing Is
You’re in a busy restaurant. You overhear a conversation about someone trying to sell their house they just inherited and they weren’t sure if there were other ways to sell it besides working with an agent… they wanted it to get done quickly.
Scenario one, you go over and say,
“Hi Mike. We buy houses. Lemme buy your house!”
Uh. Say what? Why are you butting into my conversation?
Scenario two, you approach it as,
“Hi Mike, it’s nice to meet you. Couldn’t help but overhear you’re thinking about selling a house you inherited. Tough process sometimes. I’ve been through that too. When did you inherit the house?
Mike: Ah, it was my dads. He passed away last year but ownership was just passed to me this month and now I’m figuring out what to do next. Was thinking about renting it but I think I’d rather have less hassle and just sell. You: Yep I feel you. In the right situations, I actually buy houses like that and have bought several that people inherited. I’d be happy as heck to show you some of the pros and cons and just help you make sure you pick the route that’s best for you. I’ll send you a short article I wrote on selling a house you inherited actually… it’ll clear things up for you I think”
Scenario one is called interruption marketing. It doesn’t provide any human connection. It “butts in” rudely. While this would never be acceptable human behavior in the real world, sadly, it’s exactly how the vast majority of real estate website present themselves.
Scenario two is conversation marketing. It’s engaging, focuses on listening, and builds itself on questions. Helps them solve a problem by delivering value and content.
Three Phases to Get More Traffic through Conversation Marketing
Over the years we’ve created and perfected a 3 part process to not just get a ranking or two… but really control the conversation around your marketplace in a big way. That’s how you dominate in SEO and content marketing.
It’s basically 3 simple steps… and in this order.
Your Brand – Control the convo so people see what you want them to see when they search for you
Discovery – Join and control the convo around questions or problems your market is hitting the web to “ask” (type into Google)
Create Evangelists – Helping your clients do your selling and content for you.
Let’s dive in!
Phase 1: Your Brand – What Are People Seeing?
The first thing most people do when they make a big financial decision is hit the web to research the company they’re about to work with.
Real estate is no different.
So when you’re sending out your direct mail pieces, or doing PPC or SEO, or even your bandit signs… people are hitting the web searching for your business name or phone number to do some research on you.
What do they see when they search your business name?
Here Are A Few Examples Of Brands Or Companies When I Google Their Name…
Notice the suggested searches Google is giving me… people are actively typing those phrases in consistently, so you should create content that ranks well and controls the conversation around those keywords.
Test it yourself…
Go ahead… Google your company name + your city and see what comes up. That’s what your prospects are seeing before they decide to work with you.
Here’s what it looks like when you’re controlling the conversation around your brand vs. letting your competitors control it for you or the internet decide who you are to your prospects when they search you.
This Company Purposefully Controls The Top 5 Spots When You Google Their Name With Very Credible And Positive Content
Here’s a company that my consulting business works with that sells $600mm/yr in flooring and we helped them control the conversation around their brand in a big way.
Notice The Videos We Created And 2 Articles That Are Ranked 1-3 For This Brand Related Search?
Before, when you searched that phrase it was nothing but a few sites where those few negative nancy’s posted a bad review on their personal blog bashing the product. When in actuality on Home Depot.com the product rating was stellar and reviewed by tens of thousands of happy customers. Those couple bad apples raise to the top in Google.
So we wrote down all of the keyword phrases that came up in Googles suggested search box around our company and created videos and articles optimized to rank well for each on.
We teach you how to optimize your posts and videos to rank well in Google in our 3 Lead Per Day Training for Carrot members.
Action Items:
Google your own company name + the name of your primary city. i.e. – “ABC House Buyers Charlotte”. Then write down all of the Google suggested searches that come up as you’re typing in your search that are related to your brand. If you’re brand new or not a big investor, you likely won’t have any suggested searches pop up quite yet that are related to your business.But common ones house sellers type in when they’re researching a house buying company are…
reviews
scam
bbb
[your main city]Type those into Google and see what comes up. Are you ranking well for any of the top 5 results? If not, you need to create content on your site that optimizes for that keyword. At Carrot, we automatically optimize your “About” page for your company name and location, so that’s done for you. But to really control the conversation you may want to create more content.
Create content and a video or two to rank for that content. Then launch it on your website and put it up on YouTube. Basically title the YouTube video the exact keyword phrase you’re going after. If you’re going after the keyword phrase “ABC House Buyers reviews” you should upload a testimonial video from a client of yours and name the video title that in YouTube.
Easy eh? Then every month search the phrases around your company name and see where you stand.
Even 1 lost deal because your client sees something online about you that makes them at all uneasy (including not finding anything about you at all) could cost you tens of thousands of dollars.
Phase 2: Discovery – What Are People Searching To Solve Their Real Estate Problems?
The best way to increase your traffic — without being forced to pay for it — is through content creation and getting that content ranked well in Google.
That content will be the backbone of your conversations.
This phase is joining the conversations and hopefully eventually controlling those online conversations as people are going online to “discover” the solutions to their problems and the answers to their questions.
The need for content is universal online is because search engines like Google will only consider your website to be an authority if the content you create (1) revolves around the keywords your ideal customers are already using and (2) that content itself is valuable enough to be shared and linked to by sites and businesses other than your own.
However, never forget the aim of conversation marketing: getting more visitors to your website by actually helping them.
This means understanding your prospect’s buying cycle in addition to your valuable keywords so that you know what type of content to create. Here’s an overview from InMan of what the typical real-estate buying cycle looks like:
The first three phases are where you need to educate and start conversations for maximum impact and traffic:
Dreaming:
This is the earliest stage of the “buying” process when the prospect has an initial thought to buy or sell a property (or note, or land, etc.).
Initiating:
The initial thought has dug in a little deeper and the prospect tentatively starts exploring online. This is where your real estate investing business can address a need, by providing content using search terms the prospect uses to search for information. Like “How to sell a house I inherited in Dallas”. They’re starting that conversation online… will you engage with them or let your competitors?
Shopping:
If you’ve already “nabbed” your prospect with value-add content in the first two phases and have their email address on your list, this is where you start reaping your rewards. Only when your company has helped educate and build trust with a prospect they are likely to turn to you when they’re ready to officially engage.
Small and large businesses alike often make the fatal marketing mistake of trying to be all things to all people.
Kind of like trying to cram everything on one site for house buyers, house sellers, renters… etc. And you shouldn’t use the same site for motivated house sellers and cash buyers for your content either (like we teach here in this article).
Instead, it’s vital to get focused on the handful of brand-defining specialties that make you stand out.
Take Business Insider’s graphics These 10 Corporations Control Almost Everything You Buy as an example. Notice that in the middle of the image are the 10 corporations that own most of the goods we buy.
However, when it comes to what you actually purchase, their subsidiaries are responsible for doing the work:
The point is obvious: while there are only about 10 corporations in the driver’s seat, each has created distinct brands to actually sell their various goods and services.
Why?
Because if they didn’t separate their brands into specific niches, they’d struggle to market themselves effectively.
Regardless of your size, the same principle is true for you as a real estate investor or agent.
Who is someone going to pick if they’re trying to sell a house they inherited?
The company where the website says they “specialize in buying inherited properties for top dollar” and where they have content that talks about selling an inherited property…
… or the company that just says “We buy any house”?
I know I’d probably pick the company that seems like it has a specialty in the situation I’m in.
That’s why the this phase of conversational marketing doesn’t involve asking yourself, “Who do I want to be?”
Instead, it focuses on the far more conversational question: “Who do I want to reach?”
In other words … your audience.
Thankfully, deciding who you want to reach and digging into what they like, love, and hate, doesn’t take divination, a crystal ball, or even brainstorming.
There are a host of online tools that can help you get to know the people you want to reach.
Where should you look?
Go after the low-hanging fruit first:
Social media sites
Question and answer sites like Quora
Forums your target audience belong to
Popular blogs in your niche
In addition to the usual suspects, Placester provides a detailed list of online resources to try out.
The benefits of identifying a single-target market — e.g., “first time home buyers with less-than-perfect credit in the Portland area” — versus trying to be all things to all people — e.g., plain vanilla “home buyers” — are enormous.
And this is true not only from a marketing point of view, but also from a service perspective.
For instance, more and more people are turning to social media channels to share their home-buying experience and provide feedback, whether good or bad.
By paying attention to what real-life people are saying within your chosen niche you can discover things like:
What are their struggles, fears, and anxieties?
What reasons motivated them to want to sell a property or buy one?
What are their dreams and expectations?
What is it that they’re really looking for in a house buying / selling service?
What do people who’ve completed their first purchase or sold their house wish they’d known at the start?
Again, the important thing with conversation marketing in the real estate investment and agent business is not to think long and hard about you and the words you want use, but rather, to pay attention to your ideal customers and the words they themselves are already using.
That point about “the words they’re already using” is massive.
Conversation marketing aims at generating organic traffic not paid traffic.
This means you have to organize your approach around specific keywords that are optimized to improve your search engine rankings for phrases your prospects are actually searching online. Conversations they’re starting.
The search phrases that drive more traffic to your website — and are easiest to rank for (i.e. less competition) — are the ones that are more specific. These are called “long-tail keywords” because they contain more than one or two words.
This graph shows that the most effective keywords for search engine purposes are long-tail
For example, rather than casting your keyword-net wide with a phrase like “selling a house,” use long-term keyword phrases that your audience is actively talking about:
“selling an inherited house”
“selling a house after a divorce”
“selling rundown house without making improvements”
Ubersuggest is another fantastic tool you can also try to spark off ideas for long-tail keyword phrases.
Example Of Using Ubersuggest To Find Topics To Write About
This was a search I did on Ubersuggest for the term “express home buyers”
Now that you’re armed with the best keyword phrases that your target audience are already using to find solutions to their real estate needs, you’re ready for the next step: creating amazing content around the keyword phrase of your choice.
However, simply having amazing content isn’t enough.
You also have to ensure that content works on a technical front. This is even more important today because search engines now judge the value of a site based on its design as well as its speed.
My suggestion is that you look for a designer or a proven website system like Carrot who is familiar with websites that perform well in the real-estate industry specifically.
This option may be slightly more expensive than the “get a website for $90” deals, but will save you from going to the trouble of setting up a website — content and all — only to discover months later that technical issues are holding you back from bringing in traffic.
Once you’ve created a base of content to address the first three stages of the buying cycle do not simply let it sit there.
Instead, repurpose it.
Repurposing your existing content is hands down the best way to create new content … without having to create new content.
As soon as a particular piece of content (like an article) show signs of performing well — i.e., generating traffic or even things as simple as comments or social shares — turn that article into a video or a SlideShare presentation. Make it the topic of a video. Pick one specific point in the article to expand on it in an entirely new post. Or even bundle together your best articles into an ebook on a landing page.
After you’ve created and repurposed your content, don’t make the mistake of thinking your conversations will take care of themselves.
Our third and final phase is the real key.
Phase 3: Evangelism – Helping Customers Do Your Selling For You
Evangelism is the last phase of the conversation marketing model you’ll need to lock down.
Simply put: creating evangelists means turning your best clients into your best salespeople.
This involves being intentional not just about sharing your content directly with your best customers — in the hopes that they’ll go forth and do likewise — but including them in that content itself.
For instance, if you spend any time at all on our website, you’ll notice there’s hardly a single page that doesn’t include a customer testimonial or case study.
On our homepage, we include three glowing recommendations front and center, right under our hero image:
On our
See how this top investor uses one of his client stories to squash the “too good to be true” thoughts going through some sellers minds. It empowers your clients to be evangelists for your brand and your company.
Here’s what happens when you help your clients spread the word about your company and service. They do the selling for you!
This happy house seller has already referred 3 people to this Carrot client
You could even make a nice “Stories” page like we have on our site and have built into Carrot websites:
And… One Of Many Client Testimonials On This Investors Site
Why all this focus on our customers?
Because we know the cold, hard truth: selling yourself is hard. Letting the people who’re already wildly delighted with your service sell you … is easy.
Ironically, selling yourself means engaging in the very marketing behaviors that inhibit genuine conversations.
Letting the people who’re already on your side sell you, that’s how you start a genuine conversation.
Video is the most powerful form of evangelistic content, so make a real effort to get your content — especially repurposed content — into video format.
If creating video content sounds daunting, it shouldn’t.
Here at InvestorCarrot we’ve produced a host of “Customer Stories,” all of which boil down to little more than webcam-recorded conversations with some of our greatest success stories:
Example Of A Simple, Low Production Video We Shot To Help Tell A Customer Story (in their words)
And you know why they work?
Because the format of those stories grows directly out of our overall approach itself: conversations not selling.
You can do the exact same thing as a real estate investor or agent.
It’s all about the conversations…
Most entrepreneurs and small business leaders are overwhelmed by online marketing tactics meant to increase traffic.
Why?
Because there are so many opinions, so many tools, and so many methods.
On top of that, your prospects are equally overwhelmed. They’ve been exposed to scammers and self-centered agents alike, both of which make it clear that they’re only interested in one thing: making a quick buck.
Conversation marketing won’t make you an overnight internet celebrity.
It takes investment, insight, patentice, and a bit of creativity.
But by following our proven three-phase method … you can dramatically increase your traffic without having to pay for it. Remember, of the over 200,000 leads our clients generated last year, less than 20% came from paid traffic… the majority of them came from Conversation Marketing.
Best of all, you’ll position yourself as a genuinely helpful resource and the expert in your area which makes it so you’re not a commodity anymore. After all, people are people and every great relationship — business or otherwise — always starts with a conversation.
Today is a pretty big deal. Why you ask? Because we just rolled out 3 major updates to the InvestorCarrot platform (Carrot V2) that are going to make your life easier, more effective, and be an amazing platform to house our future inbound marketing tools and features.
It’s funny how things work out. For the past 6 months we’ve been working on some big projects here at Carrot and several of them just happened to wrap up around the same time. So we decided to do one big release (after a bunch of testing) this morning of those 3 major updates.
More under the radar, we’ve also released dozens of other smaller updates this year and have other big updates rolling out over the next several weeks (like Land Buying / Selling websites, and more).
But let’s dive in to what’s new in your InvestorCarrot account as of today!
NEW: The Carrot Dashboard: The Foundation For The Future
Our vision here at Carrot is to build the single most effective and simple to use tool for high achieving real estate investors (and soon to be agents as well) to attract more high quality prospects online and convert more of them into profitable leads. With tens of thousands of leads per month being pulled in through our platform by our members every month already, we’re proud as heck of what our members like you have helped us build over the past 2.5 years.
But, to make room for the amazing features and tools we have planned for the rest of 2016 and into 2017, we decided to redesign your user dashboard from the ground up.
More simplified dashboard showing your websites in a more compact space
We’ve brought many of the settings for your websites out of the confusing WordPress interface and into a simple and intuitive custom dashboard. Want to add tracking codes to your site? Attach a domain? Great, it’s just 2 clicks away now :-)
More robust website stats! (more on that below)
Better organized way to display the different types of websites you can setup in your account
Having quick access to your basic website stats is important to knowing what’s working and what isn’t. So we decided to bring more useful data and fancy graphs right into your dashboard for each website.
This will help you save time from having to learn Google Analytics and it’ll deliver you the essential traffic data that you need on a continual basis. You’ll notice more changes to your stats to come as well so be on the lookout!
Now See Robust Traffic Stats (more to come!)
NEW: Fresh Website Styles Rebuilt From The Ground Up For Desktop And Mobile = Beauty + Performance
At Carrot, all of our website design decisions are based on performance. Will these changes improve the conversion rate and overall ROI for our clients or not?
Over the past year we’ve had countless requests for “new site designs” so you can even better stand out from other’s in your market. After all, you already know that Carrot is the most effective tool for SEO and conversion in the industry (which is why more Carrot websites control more top 5 Google rankings for search phrases that matter than any other REI platform)… but you still want more options to look a bit different.
But because we’re committed to high performance we decided we weren’t going to just roll out some pretty designs and call it a day.
So we embarked on what became a 10 month journey of split testing over 20 designs on over 100 websites to tens of thousands of visitors to find some other “styles” that perform at least as well as our current high performing style you’ve come to recognize and love.
A Screenshot Of Just One Of Our Tests…
A screenshot of a “winning” test we ran last fall on a site as a part of our massive effort to roll out fresh designs that perform up to our standards.
And after all of that testing, we found 4 fresh styles that perform up to our standards and give you that design flexibility to look different.
Then we started from scratch and completely rebuilt our entire code base around our websites from the ground up so every part of our websites perform even better on mobile, look more clean, are easier to use, and use our new “Site Customizer” to make editing your appearance settings a breeze.
IMPORTANT NOTE:I know I know, you’ve had a website up with us for a while and you’re chomping at the bit to move over to one of these fresh styles. I would be too. But for now, these fresh styles are available only for new websites launched from today moving forward. We are working on a migration tool to move existing websites over to these fresh site styles for those who want to, but we didn’t want to make you all wait another couple of months to leverage these designs for your NEW sites.
Also, our original site style in use on all existing websites before today is still our highest performing design in aggregate and one we’re not abandoning anytime soon. It’s still a beast. These fresh styles just give some more design options without sacrificing performance because they’re all tested, proven, and built with our Carrot Conversion methodology at the core.
With that said, take a quick peak at our new site styles below. We’ve just used motivated house seller websites for these examples… but these styles can be used on any of our website types on websites launched from today on.
Each style is named after some of our favorite Oregon trees. We love the outdoors and LOVE our home state of Oregon and want to spread some Oregon love.
The Madrone – Clean, Re-Imagined Header, Striking Image
With the Madrone style you’ll really be able to leverage a local image and our eye catching “action bar” at the top of your website. This looks even more amazing on mobile.
The Douglas – Our Original Mainstay Design Modernized For The Future
The Douglas Fir is the most popular tree in our county and the mainstay of our local timber industry. So what better name for the most popular and productive site style in use by Carrot members today. We refreshed the design a bit, added new features such as social media icons as an option in the header, our new site customizer, and more.
The Cedar – Simple And Striking
The Cedar leverages our same proven conversion elements we’ve honed over the years and wraps them around a new visual. You’ll notice the full height hero image, no black box around the call to action text, and transparent header. This style looks amazing on mobile and retains the high performance we demand.
The Juniper – Draws Your Eye Straight To The CTA
If you know anything about Juniper trees is that they suck all of the water out of the ground they are growing in. When we tested this design (we originally called it the “Stacked Hero” internally) we ran the test on 20+ websites all across the country at once… and it consistently sucked more leads out of the web than most everything else we tested. Some markets it converted considerably higher, most it was right on par with our original style, and a couple it was slightly lower. But in aggregate it was our highest performing of the fresh site styles.
Just login to your account, launch a new website, then click “Design” in the settings area. Then you can browse the fresh new styles, preview, and activate all in a few seconds.
And as a reminder in case you missed it above,these fresh site styles are currently available for new websites launched from today on forward. Any existing websites we recommend you stay with the original (as it is still our highest performer as far as lead volume goes) until we complete our “Site Migrator” to help those who want a different visual look for their existing sites over to one of the new styles above.
NEW: Simplified Way To Adjust Settings And Branding
One of the biggest pains in the butt when you’re editing the design settings of most websites including Carrot is you couldn’t immediately see how those changes would impact the look of your website without saving them… and going to your actual URL and refreshing your website. Pain right?
Well we’ve solved that with our new robust Website Customizer.
We’ve consolidated many of the most important settings in the Customizer and also added some amazing new features to get you from “idea” to “launch” more quickly with less headache.
Some of the biggest changes in the customizer are…
Preview your design changes in real time right in your account
Build a professional and clean logo in the app if you don’t already have one
More easily and quickly brand your site (no coding required)
Adjust your navigation menus and sidebar content right there too!
… and other new features (go explore and find ’em :-)
Now Preview Your Design Changes In Real-Time!
Quick And Simple Logo Builder + Brand Center
Innovating For Your Future
Behind the scenes we’re working our butts off to keep you at the cutting edge as far as inbound marketing goes for your real estate investing business.
Mobile
We continue to focus a ton of energy and resources on innovations on mobile design and performance. Be on the lookout for even more improvements in the coming months to keep you ahead of the mobile curve.
Performance
Performance and ROI are at the heart of why so many people are switching to Carrot and getting better results from Carrot than any other platform they’ve tried (even their custom websites). We’re currently testing tools that we plan on launching as “apps” within your Carrot account to help you squeeze out more gains on your websites… including our “Campaign Tracker” and more robust lead manager that are next on our development timeline.
SEO
The Carrot community holds more top rankings than any other website platform for investors, but we want to build out a full “front to back” inbound online marketing tool to help you identify good keywords to target, track the ranking of those keywords, tracking your competitors, and more.
Support
Often times the “unsexy” part of why our customers succeed is our support structure. Our team here at Carrot, Mastermind calls, and trainings. So we’re investing even more into that team this summer and into new services and trainings that we’ll make available only to Carrot members.
In the end, if you LOVE Carrot now, you’re going to really love it each and every month as our product vision unfolds.
Hit me with your thoughts on some of these features below in the comments section and go out there and crush it with these new features!
You know all of those sellers, buyers, and tenants who land on your real estate website but never fill out a form or give you call? (i.e. – most of your visitors) They bail from your site to never return. What if you could “fetchback” a healthy percentage of them and turn them into a lead and deal after they leave? Well, you can (and we have been) do it with retargeting… especially Facebook Retargeting.
Follow along with us as we walk through the steps to create a simple Facebook campaign to fetch back your lost leads.
So put on your big boy (or girl) pants and roll up your sleeves for this really really detailed guide on getting your first Facebook retargeting ad launched today. It’s a doozy so hold on tight :-)
So, What Exactly Is Retargeting / Remarketing Anyway And Who Should Use It?
Raise your hand if you’ve ever visited a website (looking at shoes or even our site) and then magically you see ads on Facebook and other websites you’re on for that exact company or product?
Ya, I think we all have.
And retargeting ads return the best ROI that we see in any of our own marketing.
Retargeting basically drives potential leads back to your website by targeting the users who have previously visited your website with ads on other websites… like Facebook… but didn’t opt-in or take a specific action.
Once the visitor leaves your website they can be displayed customized ads as they move around the Internet. These ads bring your brand back in front of them, often generating the highest click-through and conversion rates of any type of online advertising.
How Retargeting Works In Simple Terms
Retargeting can be one of the highest return on investment paid advertising channels real estate investors and agents can use today.
As far as what types of real estate investors or agents should be using retargeting / remarketing on Facebook in your business, if you’re doing any of these types of marketing actively below you NEED to be using retargeting.
Are you actively marketing and driving traffic to your website right now using any of these?
Direct mail – If you include your website or if people search on Google and land on your site, retargeting is a must.
PPC Marketing – If you’re driving people with paid clicks through PPC, retargeting is a must.
SEO – Working your butt off on that high ranking that’s generating traffic? Retargeting is a must.
Craigslist – Yes, Craigslist is free, but may as well fetch people back who visit your site but don’t convert right away.
TV / Radio – People are likely hitting Google to research your company name or phone number and landing on your site. Retargeting is a must for you too.
Buying Leads – After you call a lead you bought, they’re hitting the web and researching you. If they land on your site, keep your name in front of them with Facebook retargeting
If you’re doing any of those actively and investing money and time into them, retargeting will help you fetch back more of them who visit your website and turn them into more leads over time.
If you convert just 1 more deal every year because of retargeting isn’t it worth it? I’d say so.
Why Use Facebook Retargeting Specifically As A Real Estate Investor Or Agent?
First off, marketing 101 is to deliver a targeted message to your best prospects where they already hang out.
That’s why bandit signs can be so effective… because you’re putting your message in front of your prospects where they’re already driving.
With retargeting on Facebook, according to a study, over 20% of all time spent online around the entire world is spent on Facebook. The average American spends on average 20 minutes per day on Facebook. So after your house sellers, buyers, tenants, lenders, etc. visit your website from your other marketing…
… odds are they’ll likely be visiting Facebook sometime in the next 48 hours. This makes Facebook a great place to get in front of your best prospects where they are already hanging out.
Like this…
On Mobile And Desktop Retargeting (or remarketing), Ads On Facebook Get YOU In Front Of The Website Visitors Who Left Your Site.
By using Facebook retargeting ads, you get another chance to turn that visitor into a lead. Plus, because you already attracted them once to your site, you know what they are interested in and can more easily create ads that speak to their needs. This creates more engagement, more likes, and higher conversion rates.
Let’s Get Your First Facebook “Retargeting” Ad Launched Today
Retargeting can be very powerful for entrepreneurs and their businesses.
But, most real estate investors and agents we talk to:
Launch a few Facebook campaign on their own and don’t see success, so they quit.
Attempt to set up a campaign, but get too confused by Facebook’s ad platform.
Don’t have time to educate themselves on how to do Facebook ads correctly and even try.
Don’t keep it simple stupid and over-think the process. Remember Facebook must make it simple enough for the everyday Joe to figure out.
So if you’re ready to dive into it and get your hands dirty, by the end of this step-by-step guide you will be running your first retargeting campaign and turning all of those one-time site visitors into converted leads and closed deals.
You’re going to have to roll up your sleeves and get a bit “geeky” with us. Cool?
Setting up Facebook retargeting means you are going to have to handle a little bit of code, but not to worry, you don’t have to be a programmer to set this up yourself.
So, what is this code you’re going to have to use?
Facebook calls the code they require you to use “pixels”.
How the New(est) Facebook Pixel Works
There is one pixel per account.
The pixel tracks website visits from your site back to Facebook so you can advertise to them (the whole point of retargeting).
Then you can create a number of conversion events, “Custom Conversions” so you can track when a goal is reached.
An example of a goal could be a lead opt-in or for someone who signed up to your real estate investing newsletter. You can create multiple conversions. That gets kind of advanced so let’s get the easy part out of the way first.
IMPORTANT: You need to not only install the pixel but also set up what counts as a conversion. The following guide may look scary but it is actually pretty straightforward. Just take your time moving through the steps.
Step 1: Get Your Facebook Pixel On Your Website
The pixel is a very important piece to any retargeting campaign. This is because Facebook can only track your visitors when the pixel is on your site, so every day it isn’t installed means you will have fewer people to advertise to when your ads go live.
The pixel should be placed between the <head> tags on every page you want to be tracked (usually, this means every page, as you can always get specific later). If you don’t have access to a programmer, you should be able to place the pixel yourself!
If you’re already an InvestorCarrot member, it’s crazy easy to do yourself (takes about 20 seconds) OR you can just reach out to us and we’ll help you paste the code in and be done with it.
Let’s get that Facebook Pixel.
Go to your Power Editor in Facebook (or business.facebook.com for your business Facebook account) and click on “tools” and on “pixels” If you have already installed the pixel in the past, Facebook will automatically show the new pixel. Otherwise, Facebook will ask you to create a pixel and you can simply follow the brief instructions that show up.
Next, let’s put it on your website.
If you have a non-InvestorCarrot website reach out to your web guy or dig around in the website code to find the <head> section of your code and put that pixel code on any page you want to retarget visitors from. We suggest putting the Facebook pixel on every page on your website.
If you’re a Carrot member, to add the pixel code to your site simply go to your Carrot “Manage Site” dashboard and go to Settings then Analytics & Scripts. Then paste that code in the big “Additional Sitewide Tracking Scripts” box (shown below). Hit Save and you’re done!
Great!
Step 2: Create A Custom Audience
Now we need to tell Facebook who to serve up the ads to and to do that we need to create what they call a “Custom Audience” for those people who visit your website.
To do that head back up to “Tools” and click “Audiences“.
Then click “Create Audience” and choose “Custom Audience“.
Next, choose “Website Traffic“…
Next, we’re guiding you on the simplest way to launch a campaign so choose “Anyone who visits your website” then set the “In the last” for 120 days… meaning you’ll show ads to anyone for 120 days. The reason we do that is because it enables you to stay in front of them for several months in hopes that the timing will be right for them sometime during those 3 months to work with you.
Great! Your custom audience of your website visitors is setup and you should see it in the list. Now click that and let’s launch some ads.
Now it’s time to start creating your ads!
Advanced Tracking: Creating Custom Conversions So Facebook Can Tell You If Someone Turns Into A Lead
If you’re using ads to drive people to your motivated seller page or other lead capture page, then you’ll need to use Custom Conversions.
Create A Custom Conversion Using The Power Editor
Click Tools from the top menu
Click Custom Conversions
Click the “Create Custom Conversion” button at the top left and you’ll see something like this…
We are trying to help Facebook determine if a user who visited our website ended up converting.
Under the rule, you’ll have three options…
If you’ve created Website Custom Audiences before, you’ve seen “URL Contains” and “URL Equals” before. You can create a rule, for example, to help Facebook determine who filled out your Carrot step-2 form
URL Contains: step-2/ OR
URL Equals: www.buymyhousecompany.com/step-2/ (it’s not required to use http:// or https://)
You won’t need to include both contains and equals.
Next, select the conversion your category. For real estate investors, “Lead” is the most common category.
Options include:
View content
Search
Add to cart
Add to wishlist
Initiate checkout
Add payment info
Purchase
Lead
Complete registration
Other
Now you can name, add a description, and set a conversion value for your custom conversion. Once set, click create.
Using Custom Conversions is a whole lot easier than using the old tracking pixel that was placed on all of your success pages. In the past, you had to manually copy and paste a unique code to the header of each page.
Now, you don’t need to do any of that. Your code is already on the site. Simply tell Facebook what a conversion is and create it. It’s now that easy!
BE AWARE: You can’t edit or delete a Custom Conversion once it’s been created. You can edit the name, but that’s it. If you have duplicate Custom Conversions, it might throw off your reporting.
How do you know the conversion pixel is working?
Facebook makes it easy by placing a little green dot with the word “verified” next to your pixels when they are up and working. In order for them to register as verified, all you have to do is visit a page where they are placed and then check again on Facebook. As long as someone has visited a page where your pixels are placed within the last 24 hours, they will show as verified when you’re in the pixel section (audience or conversion) of Facebook.
This is where the rubber meets the road. Getting ads created and live.
To do this you’ll go back to that audience you just created and click “Create Ad“.
Now let’s select the objective of the ad. We like to choose “Send People to Your Website” or “Increase Conversions To Your Website“.
Now let’s set your basic ad delivery settings and your budget.
We suggest you start with $5 per day and check your results every day for the first week or to and adjust your budget accordingly. Also, select the settings as we have them below.
Last, we need to tell Facebook where we should serve up ads. Since they own Instagram that’s now an option. We usually exclude Instagram and the Audience Network as they haven’t been as effective for us. But for sure INCLUDE mobile as 80%+ of the traffic you’ll get from Facebook will be from mobile devices (which is why it’s important as heck to have a high performing mobile responsive real estate investing website).
Scroll down and click “Choose Ad Creative” and let’s make some ads!
There Are Two Main Parts To Each Ad
The copy (text) and the image.
Notice the big image + the text of a Facebook ad.
We like to focus on 3 types of ads:
Social proof – Testimonial ads or things showing “others have been there before” and worked w/ you successfully
Straight to the point – Like the ad above, we’re going straight to how we can help them or their problem. We’ll use these the most
Attention grabbing – So people don’t get blind to your ads over time, we like to make some that are quirky and attention grabbing
In this blog post, we’re going to just focus on getting an ad up and we’ll focus on the straight to the point ad.
Writing Facebook Ad Copy
With your ad copy, being clever is much less important than keeping things simple, intriguing, and to the point.
Even if you don’t have experience with creating ads, you should know exactly what speaks to your market audience.
You know what fears they have, what their biggest problems are, and what some solutions to those problems might be.
You should know all of this because this is you seller or buyer personas. With this information, you have what you need to get started creating ads.
This post going to focus specifically on news feed ads since they look just like regular Facebook posts and are the simplest place to start.
There are 3 elements to the copy in a news feed ad:
The main text that appears above the image
The headline that appears directly below the image and in larger font
The tagline that appears under the headline in smaller font
For the main text, try starting with a question that eliminates anybody who wouldn’t convert anyways. This way you eliminate as many clicks that don’t convert as possible since you will possibly be paying for clicks.
Examples:
“Are you struggling to find a way to sell your house?”
“Do you get stressed out by being behind on house payments?”
“Do you always hear about how effective selling to a Real Estate Investor can be
“Is it time to sell your house?”
A Simple Example
And Another. Notice The Simple But To The Point Copy
Your goal that if anyone answers the question with a no, they immediately move on and don’t click your ad.
This reduces unnecessary traffic and makes everyone who does click much more targeted… which reduces your cost.Everyone wins.
Additionally, try testing different message lengths in your ads. Have some be short and to the point, with just one main point or benefit mentioned. Try others that are much longer to point out more benefits. You won’t be sure what your audience responds best to until you test both.
For the headline, make the benefits people will receive if they click on your link rather simple. Are you looking to buy their house fast? Spell it out with the headline so it’s impossible to ignore.
The tagline portion of the ad is less important than the main text or the headline, but try driving a little more detail about what people are getting and tease them with some additional info. This way they feel the urge to at least click the link to learn more about the offer.
Creating Ad Images
While being an awesome ad designer can help, if you focus on creating images that stand out, you will still be way ahead of the game. Instead of trying to create an image from scratch using lots of graphics, use an interesting photo of yourself in action with bold text overlaid. Or even just an interesting real estate deal image. Images that look appealing will go a long way towards grabbing your audience’s attention.
Notice This Simple But Eye-Catching Image
You don’t need to get fancy with your images, in fact, the simpler the fewer the words the more effective usually.
Here are three sources to help you find images. Both free and paid.
Just be sure when using text on your images that you follow Facebook’s guidelines of not having more than 20% of the image contain text. You can use Facebook’s free grid tool to see how your ad measures.
Make Multiple Variations Of Your Ad To Test
Just so you can see which ad is working better, make a few variations of your ad to run on the same campaign at the same time. We’ll usually just swap out the picture and come up with a second variation of the text. Again, start simple with 2 versions of the main text and 2 images. This will create 4 total ads.
Now you have a simple A/B test to start your campaign.
A good rule of thumb is to let your ads run long enough to get a decent traffic before you make any decisions.
Try to get at least 500 impressions, but even better if you can wait until 1,000 impressions before pausing the ad that isn’t performing. We’ll go in more detail how to optimize a Facebook retargeting ad campaign in another future post.
Once you find a high performing ad, having both good click-through and conversion rates, start to create different versions of that ad. Test them all again to improve upon the best result.
Then, just keep repeating this process and ads should continue to improve over time.
Your total time each week to maintain your ad campaign will be literally less than 10 minutes once you get it launched.
Step 5: Make Sure You Have Great “LeadSource” Tracking In Place On Your Website
With InvestorCarrot we have built in “LeadSource” tracking on every Carrot website so you can tell where all of your leads came from.
With InvestorCarrot We’ll Show You Where Your Leads Came From. Cool Eh?
But if you’re not an InvestorCarrot member, chat with your web guy or setup lead source tracking in your Google Analytics account. It’s not all that easy but you can totally get it done.
Tracking where your leads came from is crazy important so you know which marketing is working well and what isn’t working well. As you can see in the image above, just in that one week period this Carrot client got 2 leads from his Facebook retargeting campaign… so he can tell it’s working and track it all the way down to exactly which leads came from Facebook.
Is Your Ad Performing Well? Here are A Few Benchmarks
Benchmark number will depend on the real estate market in your location. So, there are no 100% benchmarks to follow. You’ll gain a personal benchmark number over the time of your campaign.
But, you can get general targets to help you set some goals in order to tell if the campaign is working.
Click-through-rate for desktop news feed = 1%
Click-through-rate for mobile = 2%
Click-through-rate for sidebar = 0.1-0.2 %
Cost per opt-in: $1-$3 (although if you have done the math on how well your lead funnel converts, you should know exactly what a lead is worth to you)
Cost per lead: Start by aiming for a 2X ROI. For example, this means if you make a profit of $3000 on a deal, you should be looking to spend no more than $1500 in getting leads.
Get Your First Facebook Retargeting Ad Rolling Today!
Now you have the “why” you should start a Facebook retargeting campaign and how to get started with your first one.
You’ve already attracted motivated sellers once to your site, so you know what content and images will attract them again.
They are much more likely to click on your ads and to convert into a lead, compared to first-time visitors.
A retargeting campaign is a perfect addition to your current marketing campaigns. It basically, enhances the work that you’ve already done.
For easy access and to recap, below is a checklist of the exact steps you need to take in order to get everything running. Use this checklist when creating your campaign and start turning those visitors that leave your site after one visit into long-term customers.
Download this Simple Facebook Retargeting Checklist
[Free Download] Use this checklist as a guide when creating your Facebook retargeting campaign.
Need More Online Leads For Your Wholesaling / House Flipping Business?
Generate More Real Estate Investing Leads and Cut Through The Marketing Clutter In Your Market. Download out FREE Marketing Toolkit: Get Access To This Content Marketing Toolkit + Training For Real Estate Investors here!
And take a Demo of InvestorCarrot today to leverage the same system 1000’s of other investors use to generate his online leads and deals each and every month.
So you’ve heard people say you can’t generate consistent deals with SEO? Tell that to Jack of Jack Buys Houses in Orlando, FL… he closes 3-5 deals a month in Florida almost exclusively through his search engine optimization efforts. See how…
Are those results typical? They’re not… but Jack worked his butt off and continually hounded us on our weekly coaching calls (we say that lovingly because we love it when customers do that!) for months with questions and advice that helped him crack his Carrot website from page 2, to page 1… to the top spot in his market.
We had a chance to sit down with Jack recently and have a conversation with him about…
How he got started in real estate investing
How he closed his first deals and why he dove into wholesaling in his market when others were heading the other direction
What makes his online marketing strategy so effective for him in his market
Hear Jack’s Story + Learn How He Incrementally Grew His Google Rankings To Turn 3-5 Deals A Month
This case study is a full-length deep dive into Jack’s story and how he’s built a very successful wholesaling and investing company over the past 2-5 years and his exact strategies on how he cuts through the clutter online in a sea of other competitors trying to find active cash buyers in his market too. Click play and dive in!
Start – 4 mins talks about how he went from a Target executive to doing short sales and now 4-5 wholesale deals a month
3:40 – What he learned from Warren Buffet that helped him leave his day job in 2009
8:25 – Why he dove into short sales first + his business strategy that helped him crush it (personally did over 350 short sales)
12:20 – How he took the leap into rehabbing and wholesaling in 2012 and why most wholesalers are doing it wrong
12:45 – Currently do approx 5 wholesale deals a month (over 100 deals so far!)
17:15 – What 1 DEAD SIMPLE thing gives him an edge on deals (that most wholesalers drop the ball at)
21:00 – Started marketing w/ direct mail first, didn’t get solid results then decided to get a website up. Found Carrot and “Just did what you guys said to do and the rest is history. I haven’t done direct mail in a year. Every one of my leads come from Carrot”.
“I found you guys, and I’ll be honest w/ you. All I did was this Trevor. I just did what you guys said to do. Because everything is pretty much done. You just pull it out of the box. A few things you have to do on the backend. I just did what you told me to do. And the rest was history. I’ll be honest w/ you… I haven’t done direct mail on over a year. All of my leads come from Carrot. I don’t do bandit signs, I don’t do direct mail, I don’t do postcards, I just do Carrot (closes 4-5 deals a month)”
24:10 – How he generates his leads online (and more importantly, what he doesn’t do and why)
28:30 – Trevor walks Jack through a couple ways to ramp up his leads even further in his market in a big way (“PPC Stacking”, City Specific Landing Pages, and swiping more Google real estate, and retargeting)
35:20 – Jacks biggest surprise working w/ Carrot was the results. He assumed he’d get a certain amount of leads but he didn’t think he could build his business and do the deals they’ve done just through Carrot.
“My biggest surprise is that I didn’t think that I could build my business and do the deals we’ve done just through carrot and not do anything else. But that’s been the biggest surprise. The amount of results our sites get. Our selling site gets hundreds of visitors a month and we sell a lot properties” – Jack
37:15 – His “Big Why”… why he does what he does
40:00 – What 2 powerful pieces of advice Jack would to give someone just getting into real estate
42:40 – Our average wholesale profit right now is $13,700 per deal and we do 4-5 deals per month.
43:15 – Jacks advice to wholesalers about using InvestorCarrot for your own business.
43:36 –“The decision to use investor carrot is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made to be honest with you.. and I’m not just saying this because you’re a good guy. it’s the truth. it’s the best thing that I’ve done. you have to use carrot. there’s nothing else like it.”
Here Are Some Related SEO Resources Here On Our Website
Looking to ramp up your SEO for your real estate flipping / wholesaling / agent business too? Well we know a thing or two about that :-). Just dive into some of the free resources here on this website today!
We call them “doses of awesomeness” in our company whenever someone does awesome things and reports back to us. So let’s throw Jack some awesomeness below to congratulate him on his successes! Pop a comment below in the comments section on your SEO questions (or what your goal is) and some encouragement for Jack on his goals!
So, you already know your website needs to be “mobile optimized”… right? In fact, 64% of our motivated house sellers, cash buyers, and rent to own tenant leads were from mobile devices last month. But what the heck does that mean and why is your “mobile optimized” website likely losing you tens of thousands of dollars per year in lost leads and lost deals without you even knowing it?
If you have the choice of a higher-performing website vs. one that loses leads… which would you choose?
You may be asking the question…
Does A Higher Conversion Rate On Your Cell Phone Visitors Really Matter?
Even if your mobile website for real estate investors is not responsive, it may still not be geared to convert visitors into qualified leads at a high rate. That’s a whole different ballgame.
You’re investing a lot of time, energy and money with PPC, Facebook, and SEO. You want to get qualified leads to your websites without any technical deficiencies. No mobile deficiencies.
Your Website On Mobile Is Perhaps More Important Than Your Desktop. Here’s Why…
Through Quarter 1 and Quarter 2, 2020, our Carrot members pulled in over 142,136 buyers, sellers, and tenant leads all through mobile devices (cell phones and tablets).
That number doesn’t include any leads that came through on desktop computers or any phone call leads (which according to our surveys is as much as 2x more than the online opt-in leads).
A full 64% of our member’s leads came from mobile devices last month. That’s a lot.
This is why internally we started making it a point to make it an everyday practice to spend as much time using our cell phones on our customer’s sites so we can continually improve the mobile experience and conversion rate.
Here’s an interesting stat for you…
The visitor to lead conversion rate on our Carrot websites is a full 3 percentage points higher on mobile devices than on desktop computers.
Why?
Because most real estate investor websites look really bad on mobile and aren’t set up to perform well on mobile… so a web searcher bounced off of those sites… back to Google… finds a Carrot site (which is streamlined to generate leads on mobile devices) and engages in the Carrot site… becoming a lead.
We feel right now anyone with a really well-optimized mobile responsive website design has a big edge on those who don’t.
As we’ve really shifted a lot of our focus over to mobile (we believe in getting ahead of the curve vs. following it) we’ve seen some really interesting patterns in the way people use their different devices to find information online.
Here’s a graph below that shows when people are using different devices during the day.
Basically, people are using mobile devices the vast majority of the time in non-work hours. And these tend to be the times that more leads come in on mobile devices by far.
In fact, digging into our own data… we found the same exact trend in fact.
Percent Of Leads By Time Of The Day From Mobile And Tablet
Notice how the mobile leads on our system correlates in a big way with the mobile usage patterns… but also see the importance that mobile plays when people are at home.
It’s a big deal.
So We Know That Mobile ISN’T The Future, It’s The Dominant Force Already…
Below we’ll dive into how your real estate investing website or agent website should be designed to maximize your chance at converting your visitors into qualified leads.
In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say… if you don’t nail the mobile experience and focus a lot of energy into it… in 12-24 months your website will be left in the dust (it’s already happening).
Will you catch up or be left behind?
If you lose just 1 deal a year because of lost leads from a suboptimal mobile experience and you average 10k in profits, is that money you’d rather figure out how to keep?
If you’re driving traffic to your website right now, and not implementing proper mobile techniques, then you most likely have a leaky bucket. Phantom expenses stacking up and taking money out of your bank account.
If you don’t stay ahead of the curve searching in mobile, you’ll end up getting trampled by your competitors. Attract mobile customers and turn them to lead. Save yourself at least one deal a year. That’s way worth it for the time it takes to get mobile optimized.
Here are some tips to help you better optimize your website for those mobile visitors.
1. Get Your Real Estate Investor Website Google “Mobile Friendly” + Responsive
Google’s stance on mobile is to create a responsive website. It’s likely that responsive sites get an edge in searches from a mobile device. Google also started penalizing sites in mobile search that aren’t mobile-friendly.
What do you need to do to make sure your website mobile friendly?
Basically Google is looking for things that make it easy for your web visitor to read and engage with your website. Things like…
Font sizes big enough to see on a mobile device
Tap targets that are big enough for your fingers to use
Making the website just the width of the mobile screen so you don’t have to pinch pan and zoom (responsive)
… and more
Here is what Google recommends your font sizes to be for your mobile responsive version of your website.
You’ll See Something Like This If You Pass The Test!
What You See If Your Website Doesn’t Pass The Mobile Friendly Test
Once you get your site “Google mobile friendly”… don’t stop there like most of your competitors are.
Now we need to make sure your website is also set up to convert mobile visitors into leads at a high rate as well (which 9 out of 10 investors aren’t doing).
Next, Consider Moving To A Mobile Website For Real Estate Investors vs. A “Mobile” Website
If you have “mobile” website (usually indicated by your URL being “m.[yoururlhere].com”… consider switching over to a mobile responsive design instead (which Google prefers).
A responsive website is basically where you don’t take people to a separate URL if they visit with a cell phone (like mentioned above) but your website adjusts to look great on any screen size or device. Like this.
Here’s a real-world comparison of a website that isn’t mobile responsive and one that is.
See How This Carrot Site Reshapes Based On The Device It’s Being Viewed On
You can test your own web page for responsiveness. Just grab the side of your browser and move it to the side. A responsive page will adjust and shrink down. If the page is not mobile responsive, the shrink will hide parts of the page and force the visitor to pinch, pan, and zoom around. Which will most likely cause them to exit the page.
Want to see what your site looks like on mobile? GO TO the InvestorCarrot built mobile tester. Just type in your URL and press enter. It’s that simple!
If your website is not responsive, you’re probably a year and a half behind the curve.
Here’s A Short Video Showing The Difference Between a Mobile Responsive Investor Site And One That’s Not
2. Design For The Touch, Not The Click
Most web guys, do it yourselfers, and low-end website builders design their websites for the click on desktop computers.
But we have to remember that we usually use our THUMBS on our cell phones to “tap” parts of the screen rather than clicking.
It’s really easy to tap the wrong thing with your thumb on a cell phone screen… so we need to really design our pages with that in mind.
How do we design for the “touch”?
Look Where It’s Easy And Hard To Engage With… And Design Accordingly
The higher up the screen the harder it is to tap with our thumbs.
Not saying people won’t do it… I know I do… but whenever we can put the parts on our website we want people to engage in right below where their thumb already is… we make it easier for them and performance goes up.
We took that concept and overlayed a “tap map” over the top of some websites.
Check them out.
Notice The Important “tap” Elements On This Carrot Site In The Green Zone
That site above makes it really easy for the person to tap the form fields (they’re HUGE) and the orange opt-in button (it’s the full width of the screen and large).
On the flipside…
Notice The Very Small Form And It’s Trapped In The Red “tap” Zone
Also… it’s not just your calls to action and forms that you need to design for the “tap” to make it easier for people to engage with using their thumbs.
Look at this website below at how small the text is (not Google mobile friendly per tip #1 above) just to navigate the website. Tons of small links all crammed next to each other are a sure bet to sending your mobile visitors on a wild goose chase.
So what do you want to make sure you’re doing on your website for your mobile visitors?
Make your form fields large and the width of the screen
Make your opt-in buttons large, clear to read, and the width of the screen
Add space between your form fields so people don’t accidentally tap the wrong one
Don’t cram a bunch of links close together. Give them space and the thumb room to roam
Keep important “tap” elements out of the upper left of the screen if possible
Alrighty? Always remember we’re working with thumbs here… so design for the thumb.
3. Make It Easy For People To Engage With You (both opt-in and phone)
The main reason you have a website for your real estate investing business is to attract and convert prospects into leads.
So we want to make it as easy as possible for people to engage with you on your website.
If you’re making people hunt for your phone number or making them scroll down the page too far, you have likely lost them to that funny cat video in that other tab on their cell phone.
Here are some simple tips to help people engage with your website better on their mobile devices.
Make sure the phone number is at the top of the page on mobile.
Don’t make it hard for the visitor to find and click to call your number. Visitors should immediately see the “call us” hyperlink. Don’t put your phone number in an image. Cell phones can’t recognize that the number is in an image, so it won’t be a clickable link. Make it really, really easy for your mobile visitors to call you. With Carrot websites, this is already built-in.
Make It Crazy Easy For Them To Contact You… And Put It At The Top Of Your Site
“Calls are the natural conversion path from smartphones and the single most effective vehicle for driving engagement and revenue across marketing channels. Inbound callers are almost always the best lead: studies show that phone calls can convert to revenue 10 times more frequently than web leads, and that calls are the lead type most preferred by sales managers” (BIA/Kelsey, 2015)
Where Do I Easily Contact You? Hmmm… Let Me Search… Ahhhhhh! I’m Out
If a mobile visitor lands on those sites above, they’re making it really hard to engage with you. So they back out of the page and find the next one down the Google rankings.
4. Get To The Call To Action Quickly
Just because you have WordPress doesn’t mean your website is going to perform.
You might have a mobile responsive that was quickly created, trying to save money, but that website might be under-performing. How many lost deals does it take?
Do yourself a favor and add a call-to-action and phone number to the top, and take the picture out – it’s wasting valuable space.
Don’t force the visitor to scroll down the page and risk losing to the competitor.
Let’s take a look at it done right.
With this InvestorCarrot site (this is a sample website of one of our designs coming out) you can see how quickly we get into the call to action. Phone number right up top and we immediately get into the very simple and quick form. No scrolling to get there. But if they’re not ready to opt-in… they can always scroll down to learn more and engage in the site further down the page.
Getting To The CTA Quickly
Getting To The CTA Slowly (making the visitor hunt and scroll)
And here’s a website selling investment properties that really makes the visitor hunt for a clear call to action…
The more efficiently we can get the mobile visitor to your call to action the better. Don’t make them hunt and click through a few links to get to the spot where you can best help them.
5. Don’t Use Too Many Form Fields
We’ve run many tests on the number of form fields and how it impacts the number and quality of leads you generate through your real estate investing websites.
And we’ve found that between 3-4 form fields are the ideal number for motivated sellers, cash buyers, tenants, etc. Then we pass the lead through to our “Step 2” page next to further qualify them (which works insanely well as we published on this blog post). Having fewer form fields has also been tested tons of times and verified by others as well.
But this is important especially on mobile devices. The more form fields on a cell phone the more likely you are to say “I’m not gonna fill that out!”.
See this example below… which would you be more likely to spend the time to fill out on your cell phone?
Long vs. Short Opt In Form
It’s easy to see Image A has too many form fields. Resulting in potential lead loss and a phantom expense. Image B (an InvestorCarrot site) keeps it simple with only 2 required fields.
A lot of the time the biggest thing real estate investors can do to make their website perform better on mobile is just making it easier for people to use their contact forms.
This one below we found on a motivated seller website is making it almost impossible for a house seller to engage on the form on their cell phone (possibly losing this investor 20-30% of his lead generation potential).
Ouch! 29 Form Fields :-(
Here’s a way that we borrowed from the big sites like Trulia and Zillow to reduce the number of form fields we ask on motivated house seller websites and make it easier for someone to give us their full address on a cell phone (this feature was just released last week).
Autofill Address Fields On Motivated Seller Sites… Like This
(we grab the data directly from Google’s address database. It’s a feature built into every Carrot website that you can turn on if you want)
A new built-in feature to our InvestorCarrot sites.
Make it easy to opt-in!
Visualize a form that looks like this screenshot. It takes 14 different items to get an offer from this company. Huh! Can you imagine your sellers filling out that many fields? Nope, they’ll say no thank you and move on to search for a different buyer.
A 2-3 form field is ideal for the first form. Then, pass the visitor to longer step-2 form AFTER the initial 2-3 questions, to further qualify the lead.
Also, make your call to action button LARGE and very clear. Don’t make the searcher struggle to tap it.
6. Sandwich Your Call To Action Areas… One On Top And One On Bottom
Visualize you’re on a web page to reading information, you get to the bottom of the page on your phone and all it does is put you into the footer links. Optimize your page by adding a phone number and a second form to the bottom of the page.
Don’t make the visitor have to scroll back to the top of their screen to opt-in or call you.
Always keep a call to action very close to their browsing path (mobile users have a short attention span so don’t make them work for it.)
7. Don’t Rely On Video To Be The Primary Call-To-Action
A common misconception is that video makes your website perform better.
In the real estate investor industry that isn’t necessarily true. Video is amazing on mobile, but not always when you’re trying to convert a visitor into a lead.
When you launch a video on mobile, it opens up into a full-screen view, and some mobile devices still don’t play certain video players well. Put video further down the page, not at the main call to action area.
What happens when you tap a video on your cell phone?
Up pops the video into a full-screen player and takes them away from their web browsing app
There is no “tap to call” function inside a video if you put your phone number in there but not on your site
Once the video is done most people forget to turn off the “related videos”... and you may be displaying your competitor’s videos. At Carrot all YouTube videos you add to your Carrot site we automatically strip out the related videos for you
To get back to your website they have to exit the YouTube app, go back to the browsing app, and re-engage back in your website
Every step we take our visitors away from our site the more easily they can be distracted and not give you a call or opt-in as a lead.
This applies to cash buyers, motivated sellers, tenants… you name it.
What happens if they don’t watch the video? They don’t get the call to action and when the video is done it goes to the YouTube app. The searcher will have to go back to your site to convert. They’ll most likely leave. Not saying don’t use video, just make sure it’s down the page and use that valuable top page real estate for your hook.
Always Do A Final Run Through With Your Own Thumbs On Your Site
A final piece of advice is to start using your cell phone to look at your website and navigate it as much as possible.
Get your thumbs on your site and see how it works. You just may find some things that aren’t as simple or smooth as they could be.
As we walked through… mobile is crazy important these days.
And getting more important every day.
Don’t fall behind the mobile curve.
Ideally, take advantage of the different forms of content. For example, if you find that your visitors don’t engage, make sure you put your phone number at the top of the page. Don’t hide it in the content or in an image. Switch to 2 or 3 field opt-in forms, quickly get to your call-to-action, and don’t use videos for the main call-to-action areas.
You can implement all of these yourself or simplify your life and let Carrot start leveraging technology to grow your business.
If you’re not a Carrot member yet… see how we’ll take 100% of all of the mobile worries off of your lap forever.We focus on keeping you ahead of the mobile performance curve so you can focus more on what you are great at.
Check out our “mobile” feature page to see how we have built-in everything (and more) on this page to your Carrot websites automatically.
As we wrap up another month in 2016 we are ready to bring you InvestorCarrot’s lead data for February. Despite being the shortest month of the year, the lead volume was right on pace with December and January.
InvestorCarrot members generated 14,178 online opt in leads last month (this doesn’t include the tens of thousands of phone call leads). Which is very close to the 14,212 leads that were generated in January. Consistent lead flow is a great asset for a business. If you are driving traffic on a consistent basis it can make your marketing dollars stretch when you know which channel are your most profitable.
During the month of February, InvestorCarrot members generated 14,178 leads across all of their sites.
Thanks to everyone who took our 2016 survey last month! The survey gave us great insight and data
We ran a survey in February to get a little more information about how many deals members were closing from their leads, and to get some feedback on how we can make improve Carrot even more in 2016 (we have exciting news on the horizon).
The general consensus among our team after conducting this survey was…we need to do these more often.
We got a ton of great feedback from our members and got a lot of great questions from the form.
We read through every single submission, suggestion, and question. After talking with our team, we wanted to put together some answers and share some of the data we gathered from the survey.
Our hopes in sharing these results, is it answers a question you have, shows you where you are at in comparison to other Carrot members, and gets you excited about some of the changes we have in store for Carrot.
So let’s get started with some data and insights we found from the survey.
1. 74% of our members primary investing strategy is either Wholesaling or Fix & Flip
This isn’t a huge surprise to us, but we were curious if members were using their Carrot websites for investing strategies that were new and creative. We did find a few note buyers and commercial real estate investors.
The breakdown wholesaling came in at 43% and fix and flip was 31%.
2. 34% of our members have closed between 1-5 deals in the past 12 months
We are always curious about how many deals our members are closing from the leads they generate on their website. Tracking that data would be difficult and is often left to us reaching out to customers and hearing about their success. With this survey we were pleasantly surprised when a lot of members shared with us how many deals they have closed.
Closing 1-5 deals is a huge success and we are proud as heck that our members are turning leads into revenue. Nearly 29% of Carrot member said they have yet to close a deal from their Carrot websites. We are constantly working on ways we can improve Carrot to help bring this number down.
9% of Carrot members said they closed over 20 deals in the last 12 months.
These members tend to be leveraging a lot of different marketing strategies and are driving a large amount of traffic. If you’d like to learn about ramping up your marketing budget and leads, consider investing in an SEO firm or a PPC campaign. Talk with us today about how we can help.
3. We asked about what content you wanted us to write…the answer was overwhelmingly SEO
We were curious what types of blog posts, training’s, and featured content our members and prospects wanted to read from us. Within our company, we all had our hunches, but we asked, and you answered. The highest ranked topics were SEO, Pay Per Click, and Content Marketing.
This data excited us because those happen to be what we are great at and have a lot of data on. To better help our members with SEO we will be retooling some of our content to give more in-depth SEO advice, better PPC information, and make content marketing even better for you in 2016.
4. The most common frustrations, plus their answers
Probably the most important question we asked in the survey was “What is your current biggest frustration?”
We heard a lot of great feedback and were able to quickly resolve some of the frustrations with a simple tutorial or website tweak.
Here are a few of the top frustration Carrot members are having.
Frustration #1: Standing out in a crowded market
One of the recurring questions/concerns we saw on the survey were members saying they are seeing more and more Carrot members pop up in their market.
First of all, we view this as a huge benefit. You have the same tools and resources that others do and seeing other Carrot members appear means something is working. Even Starbucks has multiple storefronts operating on the same block. So how do you stand out in a crowd? The answer is easy. Brand yourself with your unique selling proposition, buildcredibility, delivervalue, and make your site look different.
Carrot can help with the last one. We are constantly testing website elements and will have new features that allow you to make changes to your site.
Frustration #2: Getting leads to return phone calls
This one is tricky. You can only help people who want to be helped (or so the saying goes).
But you have to put yourself in the leads shoes. There is a good chance the leads are submitting their information on a few websites. They do this to get an idea if other investors will offer more than what you can offer.
The key to getting a lead on the phone is calling them as soon as they submit a form on your site. You MUST do this because they are in the state of mind where they WANT to hear an offer, and calling them back shows you are quick, professional, and have your business running efficiently. If you don’t have SMS text notifications turned on your Carrot forms, read more about them here.
Frustration #3: Having someone write unique content
We understand that writing 100% unique content takes time. Someone on our team is writing every single day and you know what, we know it’s hard and not everything you write turns into profits.
If you are too busy to write content, but want to hire a professional copywriter that understands real estate investing, hang tight…
We are actively working on a solution that will allow you to purchase content for your Carrot site within our marketplace.
Some members are unaware, but if you are a Content Pro member you have access to our content packs. These are pre-written, SEO optimized blog posts. Each month our team writes 12 new articles that our software spins them to be localized for your area to give you a jumpstart. In literally 3 minutes you can schedule your blog content for an entire month. Learn more here.
Content marketing takes time. In fact, if you are expecting to see results from content marketing immediately, you should shift your traffic strategy something that delivers results faster (like PPC or YouTube marketing).
At the very least it can take a couple weeks (if not more) for Google to crawl your site and index the new content. So putting out 100% custom content is only half the battle. You need to find ways to get that content in front of people who are asking questions. This is where conversation marketing comes into the mix. If you have never heard of conversation marketing, drop what you are doing and go here to learn all about it.
Plus, we’re rolling out a full copywriting service in our marketplace in March where you can have our “hired gun” copywriters write custom content for your website for you! Be on the lookout.
Frustration #4: Not knowing what to do to get the highest ROI
This really is the million dollar question. If we knew the answer to this, trust us, you would know.
The thing is… it can be different for every investor depending on lots of variables.
We love sharing data with our members to help them succeed. The honest answer to this question is it depends. Do you have time to learn and implement marketing strategies? If no, then hire someone. Do you have a marketing budget to pay for someone to manage a pay per click account or your SEO? If not, you will either need to learn or close a deal to then bankroll your growth.
You might not think you have time to learn SEO or other marketing strategies, but at the very least you should understand their basic concepts. If you are looking to hire someone you should make sure to ask all the right questions and have a good idea of what they will be doing on your website.
If you are interested in learning more about SEO, Pay Per Click, YouTube, Backlinks, and a lot of other marketing strategies then consider our 3 Leads Per Day training. This training is the single best resource for real estate investors looking to market online TODAY.
Be on the lookout for great new training and massive software upgrades in 2016 based on the feedback.
Keep sending in your feedback and go out there and crush it. And when you need help… just reach out to us! We’re always here for you.
We heard a lot of great feedback like we mentioned. We took all of it to heart and will be incorporating it into the new features, training’s, and tools we roll out this year. We sent some personalized emails to members answering the questions we could quickly help them fix on their site.
If we didn’t answer a big question you have about Carrot, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We welcome all feedback and would love to discuss how we can make Carrot better for your business in 2016.
Don’t you wish you could listen in while a 6 figure per month wholesaler talks to a motivated seller? Many real estate wholesalers focus so much on “getting the lead” that they forget that a huge leverage point in closing more deals in the first 3 minutes on the phone with a motivated seller.
Bryan Harris, the CEO of Homes For 10k, a 6-figure per month investor and Carrot member from Memphis Tennessee hopped on and walked us through 6 of his most important questions he asks during the initial motivated seller prospect call.
But first, Bryan wanted to stress the importance of perhaps the single most important (yet simple) thing that most investors just flat fail at that is costing them deal after deal without them even knowing it.
Did You Know, You’re…
Talking with Bryan and several other real estate wholesalers and flippers who do $100k/mo in different markets around the country they always say they’re amazed at how few of their “competitors” call back the leads they get quickly.
As InsideSales study said…
‘It’s like taking all of that money you spend on marketing and setting it on fire.”
The bottom line there is a lot of competition, so call back your leads as soon as you get them in.
There’s no such thing as too fast. Online leads can be a very impatient bunch. Competition can be Fierce. Leadshave many other investors to contact, so they expect a very fast response to their inquiries. Ideally, you will respond to them with a phone call within a few minutes. Always be prepared to respond. Have your questions ready to go.
You can be the best negotiator in the world… but if you’re not following Bryan’s advice above on calling back your web leads immediately… you’re competition could be grabbing deals out from under you before you even get the chance to call the seller.
Quick Tip: Have your web leads instantly sent to your phone with a text message!
This feature alone could possibly save you from losing a deal or more every year and pay for your Carrot membership for years and years and years.
Not A Carrot Member Yet? Take a demo to see why the top investors are all switching to Carrot!
6 Simple High-Impact Questions to Ask Motivated House Seller Leads When You Call
So, you got a lead that came in over the web, GREAT! You already know that you NEED to call them back immediately and that every minute that passes your chances at turning it into a deal goes down.
Now, let’s dive into what Bryan Harris, a 6 figure per month wholesaler in Memphis says on the phone when he talks with motivated house sellers.
Now let’s turn it over to Bryan!
Brendan: Bryan, it’s all, you man!
Bryan: Awesome, I’ll just go ahead and dive in!
Ok, so when I call back a motivated house seller I like to start the phone call very much like I’d start a call with a friend of mine. You don’t want to go straight to the numbers and the deal.
I’ll dive into my basic structure for talking to motivated sellers in this post. I’m not really going to give a “motivated seller phone script” mainly because I feel that when you use scripts things don’t come off as authentic and real.
So I’d be doing a disservice to you if I told you to “grab my script and just use this”.
I know you’re probably thinking, “Really? That’s one of the 6 questions?”. But it’s an important one. I ask this because I’ve found that people don’t care what you know until they know that you care.
This question is about the RAPPORT building, that is a must when talking to sellers.
You have to remember that there are hundreds of thousands of people doing exactly what you do, WHAT SEPARATES YOU FROM THE REST OF THE OTHER PEOPLE THAT WANT TO BUY THEIR HOUSE?
People tend to do business with people that they like and a simple THOUGHT FELT QUESTION like “How is your day?” can separate you from the pack.
One particular deal that comes to mind is the one that we recently obtained.
A $170,000 property for $22,000 here in Memphis.
That’s not a typo.
The seller told me she was bombarded by wholesalers. I asked her what stood out about me and our company and she said, she was about to lose her house to foreclosure and it seemed like I was the one who “cared” the most.
Needless to say. $120,000 profit later CARING IS SHARING…lol.
Question #2: “What’s your reason for selling?”
Knowing the motivation of your sellers is, of course, a big deal.
I ask this question to determine motivation. If the motivation isn’t there, when you present your low offer, you have no purpose to reference.
Motivation factor: The dire need for money to pay for college tuition that costs $5500 this semester.
As an example a conversation may go something like this:
Mr. Seller, I know you were asking for $29,000 and you may have others that have promised you more, but I can have $7,500 cash in your hand in 7 days and with that cash you can PAY FOR YOUR TUITION AND have $2,000 left for spending money
And school starts in 3 weeks. I can close by mid next week so that you can MEET YOUR REGISTRATION DEADLINE.
Too many investors discount the value they bring to the table with sellers and buyers and talk themselves out of a great deal. Find the true motivation and biggest pain point that the house seller has, and help them reach that goal as easily as possible. It could be a huge win-win for everyone.
Finding the motivation allows you to take their minds off the low offer you have presented, and focus on being the SOLUTION to their problem.
Question #3: “What is your name, number, and email?”
Did you notice this isn’t the first thing I asked for on the call?
A lot of people dive right in and ask for the contact info but what I’ve found is people can see it as threatening and putting the cart before the horse a bit. By this time I of course already have their phone number, but I’ll also confirm if this is their BEST phone number.
The importance of this information is because the FORTUNE IS IN THE FOLLOW UP.
TIP: EVERY SELLER NO MATTER WHAT GETS AN EMAILED CONTRACT OFFER FROM ME. EVERY SINGLE SELLER, EVEN IF THEY REJECTED MY OFFER.
And for the next year, they will receive an automated email and text from me monthly.
Most people do business with you on the 5th through the 12th contact. So by you following up with leads, you OUT PERFORM 98% of your competition.
Use automated systems such as AWeber or MailChimp for drip systems or do follow up emails for later dates. Or, Callfire for text deliveries. Find a way to automate your follow up and your life will be much easier.
InvestorCarrot integrates with Aweber and Mailchimp directly and makes it easy to get my leads into Callfire too.
Question #4: “Are you the decision-maker?”
This is a really important question.
The last thing you want is to get down to it and the person you’re talking too can’t really make the decision on selling their house alone.
I like to always double-check to make sure there isn’t anyone else on the title that need to sign in order to sell the property. If there are, find a time to discuss their options with all of the decision-makers present.
This helps you avoid the “let me talk it over with my (fill in the blank)”
Knowing if you are speaking with the decision-maker is very important information needed upfront.
Question #5: “Are there any mortgages, back taxes, liens etc.?”
In addition to just the obvious reasons, this keeps down surprises… this question is a really great one to continue to build rapport.
You may have made an offer based on the house being free and clear and not knowing there was a mortgage attached, you get to the closing table and find out there is an outstanding lien and the seller says, you didn’t ask that question.
Always find out all of the details on the house so you don’t have any last-minute surprises when it comes time to close on the property.
You’ll thank me later for this one.
Question #6: “How did you hear about us?”
This question is so so simple but very powerful.
How many sellers have you asked this question recently?
Not only does this question help them dig through their brain bank to remember what stood out about us… which helps validate their original decision to reach out to us… but this helps me spend my marketing dollars where I am getting the most bang for my bucks.
Knowing where my leads come from is crucial information for any business.
The vast majority of my deals come from my Carrot websites and PPC marketing
If this question is not asked, you will need to review your business weekly. The majority of your leads may be coming from one specific source and the only way to effectively know is to ask this question.
Now Get Busy + What Do You Ask Sellers When You Call Them?
First, if you have some other things you talk to motivated house sellers about when you’re on the phone with them… let us know in the questions panel below!
Bryan! Thanks for dropping in here and passing along some simple but awesome advice for the newer real estate wholesalers and flippers out there looking for a script and questions to ask for motivated house sellers! We appreciate it and look forward to bringing you back and diving into even more advanced stuff next time!
But for some inspiration, here is a Facebook post that Bryan recently posted that should get you fired up to achieve at a high level and to focus on what you do best and align with the people and systems that can help you succeed.
So, given today’s challenging real estate market, you want to treat lead inquiries like diamonds.
When you call your sellers…
Build rapport at the start
Find out their motivation for selling
Get their full contact info for followup
Dig out any hidden details about the property / mortgage before they bite you
Find out how they found you
I’m sure there are many more questions you could ask, but these 6 should get you started.
Download This Simple “6 Seller Questions”
Checklist For Your Next Call
[Free Download] 6 Initial Questions to Ask Motivated Seller Leads Checklist.
Keep it near you for an easy reminder of the initial questions to ask.
Need More Online Leads For Your Wholesaling / House Flipping Business?
Generate More Real Estate Investing Leads And Cut Through The Marketing Clutter In Your Market. Download our FREE Marketing Toolkit: Get Access To This Content Marketing Toolkit + Training For Real Estate Investors here!
And take a Demo of Carrot today to leverage the same system that Bryan uses to generate his online leads and deals each and every month.
How much should you invest in search engine marketing in 2016? This includes SEO and PPC. Well in this post we’ll dive into the 3 things I consider when I dive in to create an effective and high ROI SEM (search engine marketing) budget for myself and the clients that we work with in the real estate industry.
If you’re feeling beads of sweat drip down as you try to determine where to spend your marketing dollars to get more real estate deals for the highest ROI, don’t fret. I have three top tips to help you make smart decisions.
1. Dig Into The Long-Tail Keywords, Not Just The “Broad” Popular Ones Your Competitors Are Using
Long tail keywords are easier to leverage and often times bring a high quality visitor to your site.
Why?
They’re very specific – often three to six word – keyword phrases (also less competitive than more general keywords). Long-tail keywords became more important to online marketers with the advent of Google Hummingbird, Google’s major algorithm update in 2013, which gives preference to the long tail keyword.
With a recent surge in voice search via platforms such as Siri and Google Voice Search, there’s no question: long tail keywords are more important than ever.
People are searching just as they speak, so it’s time to pay even closer attention to real estate investor keyword phrases like, “How to sell my home fast?”vs. just “sell house.”
But even if you’ve mastered the art of conversational dialogue and are pretty certain you know how people might search, there’s a science to figuring out how to get ranked for the right long tail keywords with the least amount of effort / cost (relatively speaking). So working with a good SEO agency to ensure you have a solid long tail keyword strategy in place is definitely going to be vital to online marketing success in the coming year.
Here is an infographic that dives into the key differences of long-tail vs. short-tail (or broad) keyword phrases.
2. SEM Done Right Is Always a Worthwhile Investment
There are certain online marketing tactics that are a sure-bet for a long time to come, and SEM is one of them.
Overall, U.S. marketers will spend more than $103 billion on search, display, social media, and email marketing by 2019 — growing at a 12% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) — but search will remain the largest share of interactive spend. (MediaPost).
Based on our experience, when doing SEO or PPC, businesses are likely to get at least three to four times their money back. That’s being conservative!
Having the right mindset is crucial when planning your marketing budget. Many real estate investors make the mistake of thinking in terms of costs rather than returns.
While costs are an important consideration, ultimately, your objective is to “move the needle” and get a return on your money.
Take a demo of Carrot today or reach out to us if you have questions about how to plan your 2016 Search Engine Marketing budget in the comments section below.
Fast forward 3 years and it’s pretty humbling and awesome seeing this company grow with intention.
So you’ve heard people say you can’t generate consistent deals with SEO? Tell that to Jack of Jack Buys Houses in Orlando, FL… he closes 3-5 deals a month in Florida almost exclusively through his search engine optimization efforts. See how…
