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When you’re confident with whatever it is, you expect the result. You’re not hoping for it – you expect it. So you can say “hey, here’s what we’re going to do and you can just lead.” I think when you’re starting out, your confidence is more like you’re not sure what to do, and I think that is picked up on. Gary Horton
While most of the real estate market is flooding into flipping houses or wholesaling houses… savvy investors are looking at the gaps in the market where there is an outsized opportunity vs. competition level.
When Carrot client Gary Horton hit a wall wholesaling real estate in San Diego he tested out flipping vacant land… and hasn’t looked back since.
Now Gary buys and sells land all over the West Coast, from his house (or office), does 8-9 flips per month, and barely has any competition.
In this episode, Gary lays out his entire business model from start to finish. His marketing, how he targets sellers, how he sells his properties, his margins, how he does online marketing to drive consistent land deals… EVERYTHING.
Dive in and listen to Gary’s story and get inspired to go down the path less traveled.
3:20 – Gary’s backstory — Who he is and working a career that he didn’t love. 6:00 – Building confidence and credibility to leave his job and close his first deal. 9:30 – Why he decided to pivot from the truly motivated house seller market to flipping vacant land. 12:45 – Knowing your strengths and weaknesses can save you a lot of pain and time. Walking through the Kolbe Index test. 15:50 – The nuts and bolts of land flipping. 20:30 – Cracking the land flipping code — making the move and dealing with the responsibility that came with it. 23:15 – Gary’s land-buying business model: Buying Baltic Avenue instead of Park Place.
27:55 – What types of situations are the sellers going through to sell their land so cheap? And the strategy behind his direct mail campaigns. 32:05 – The leads from his Carrot website have been very good. Find out how that has helped him open the door for more investment opportunities. 34:35 – How searchers are finding his website: SEO and AdWords on a $1 per day budget. 38:25 – Find out his online stats, such as how he’s been able to profit over $40,000 and only spend $322 on AdWords.
42:50 – Building up a seller financing land business that is consistent, predictable, and low-risk. 45:20 – His rule of thumb of pulling a list and what to look for when finding a sweet land buying niche. 48:50 – Diving in deeper into what one of those land buying niche opportunities looks like: From dream communities to land buyers paradise. 52:05 – Land SELLERS: How to market your land listings. 1:01:30 – What are some of Gary’s goals he’s pushing? 1:10:30 – Why he chose Carrot and what it meant to his business.
According to the U.S. Small Business Association, only 56% of small businesses with 50 or fewer employees have a marketing plan. Almost half of smaller businesses are missing out on leads and sales.
Here are four other reasons why a marketing plan is essential for your real estate agent or investor business.
It forces you to think about where you’re going with your real estate business. Creating a common goal to drive towards.
It ensures that you’re aligned with your company values.
It serves as a foundation for your marketing activities. If you build a house, you start with a solid foundation. Same thing with your marketing plan.
Possibly the most important – it gives you a process. Without a process, you won’t have the direction you need and will likely either be going off course or starting to feel confused about your marketing efforts. The process can also act as a measure of your failures and successes.
Sample Real Estate Marketing Plan
At its basic level, a real estate marketing plan answers a series of questions that helps you define your ideal targets and craft your business’s most compelling offers into a cohesive story. It uses good distribution channels to reach your ideal targets.
Here are the questions you need to ask when making a good real estate marketing plan:
What are your goals?
What impact do you want to have on your communities?
Is your market saturated with similar offers, or is it ripe with opportunity?
How tough is your competition?
Who is your ideal target?
What are your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats?
What are your compelling offers?
How will you reach your target audience?
What is your marketing budget?
What keywords are the best opportunities in your market?
First things first: you need to set your goals and objectives.
Clearly, state what you want to accomplish for yourself in your real estate business. If you’re an investor, it could be buying 50 properties this year. As a real estate agent, you might consider closing 100 listings.
Or, in both situations, you could want to get your brand or name out more for recognition. It could be that 50 percent of your target market knows who you are. Set goals that you can quantify to record and track your accomplishments.
Develop a 10,000-foot vision for your business, such as…
Become the top producer in your area
Retire in 10 years
Control particular niches of buyers and sellers
Then quantify that vision with measurable goals. Measurable goals might include:
Obtaining 50 listings in the next year
Close 10 deals in your target market area in 12 months
Earn referrals from 50 percent of your past customers
Purchase 10 single-family rental properties in the next 48 months
What Impact Do You Want to Have in Your Communities?
You want your real estate business to be sustainable and build a good relationship with your community. How you approach and treat your clients has a tremendous impact on how your business is viewed within your market.
Your clients directly affect your business reputation, lead, and deal volume. But it’s not just your direct clients. Anyone that you interact with can be considered an indirect client. Residents, Facebook friends, your website host, employees, contractors, partners, and suppliers.
You must constantly assess your behaviors and their impact on your local community and the broader audience.
Then you can assess and find your niche within. What events to attend and who to build relationships with. Your community approach will also help you create your immediate and long-term business needs.
Is Your Market Saturated with Similar Offers?
You want to build strong relationships with your customer base. As you’re maintaining a high value and positive service for your customers, they’re more likely to spread the word among their peers.
If you’re in a competitive market and find it hard to make your marketing stand about your competition, then be sure to make your service and client experience stand out.
Marketing Strategies for Real Estate: How Tough is Your Competition?
First, you need to identify your competitors. Take into account your potential or future competitors too.
There are a couple of methods you can use to do this.
1. Look at them from a customer’s point of view
If you can look at your competitors from a customer’s point of view, you’ll be able to spot some of their larger strengths and weaknesses.
It’s a fun yet challenging activity to think like a customer. Why would a customer want to use them as a real estate service? Is it because they can offer more and faster payment turnaround time, or do they have top-tier customer service? These could all be strengths for your competition.
Become your ideal client and put yourself in their shoes. Wonder why you would be more likely to deal with them instead of using your company to accomplish their real estate needs.
2. Look at them from their point of view
Next, take a look at their point of view. This can help you understand their strategy, culture, and attitude toward the market. Take a look at what assets they bring to the field and how you would use them if they were yours. Take a look at what you interpret as their weaknesses.
How could you commit to making those weaknesses into your strengths?
Ask and answer these questions before your analysis:
Before you dive into your real estate marketing competitor analysis, be sure you’re asking the right questions. Here are some common questions to get you started:
Who are your competitors?
What types of services are they using?
How much market share do they have?
What have been some of their past strategies?
Are they using the same strategy?
Are they aggressive with their real estate marketing?
How competitive are they in the market?
What are their strengths and weaknesses?
Are they a threat to you? If so, how big of an impact can they have?
Does their marketing strategy affect yours or how you do business?
Who is Your Ideal Target Audience?
Create a simple paragraph profiling your ideal real estate target audience. Create a customer avatar regarding these demographics: sex, age, family, earnings, lifestyle, and geographic location.
Ask yourself questions about your customers, such as:
Are they followers or leaders?
Are they timid or aggressive?
Are they introverts or extroverts?
How often are they likely to move?
Are they traditional and bear more of a connection to the community?
No matter your real estate market, you’ll need to define them in this section narrowly. It is an important step that will guide you as you plan your media and public relations campaigns.
What are your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats?
Performing a SWOT Analysis is a crucial step when creating your real estate marketing strategy.
The term “SWOT Analysis” sounds like a daunting task. But, it can be simple.
It’s broken down into two categories:
Your internal issues: Strengths and weaknesses
Your external issues: Opportunities and threats
This analysis will allow you to see what factors will help you achieve your objectives due to your strengths and opportunities.
It will also highlight what obstacles you must hurdle before achieving your real estate goals due to your weaknesses and/or threats.
Overall, the SWOT analysis assesses your real estate company’s strengths, weaknesses, market opportunities, and potential threats to give you insight into the possible issues that can impact your success.
The number 1 goal of a SWOT analysis aims to determine and assign all important factors that could positively or negatively impact the success of one of the categories, giving you an in-depth view of your real estate business.
Four Categories Of SWOT:
Strengths:
What are the advantages of your real estate business?
What can you do better than your competition?
What exclusive resources can you use that others can’t?
How does your market see your strengths?
What factors into you closing the deal?
What is your company’s Unique Selling Proposition?
When considering your strengths, look at your internal employees and external customers/market.
Weaknesses:
What might you be able to improve on?
What locations and markets should you avoid?
What potential clients within your market might see as your weaknesses?
What factors cause you to lose the deal?
Again, account for your internal and external clients. Do your clients see weaknesses that you haven’t seen? What are your competitors doing better than you right now?
Weaknesses can be a gut check. But stick with it and be as realistic as you can.
Opportunities:
What positive opportunities are available to you?
Are there trends that you need to know?
Some of the positive opportunities you can take advantage of are:
Changes in real estate technology. For example, recording a video testimonial and uploading it to Facebook as soon as you record it.
Changes within the real estate field. Are more real estate agents becoming investors or vice versa?
Changes in the economic status and population profile within your market.
Are there any local events you can help organize or lead within the real estate niche?
Take a look at your strengths and weaknesses as you approach your opportunities. They can provide invaluable information on what you can work harder to improve upon.
Threats:
What obstacles do you need to hurdle in your market?
What are your competitors doing?
Are there any technical issues that are threatening your market position?
Do you have cash-flow problems that you need to address?
Do you have any weaknesses that are threatening your business?
Once you have chosen your real estate business values within the four SWOT categories, you can develop a more strategic plan.
For example, once you’ve identified your weaknesses and potential threats, you can create a plan to eliminate or at the least minimize them while continuing to improve upon strategies that will make you a more robust business.
To create your compelling offers, ask yourself the following questions:
Who do you sell or buy real estate to or from? Be highly specific.
What are the problems that you help them solve?
How do you solve their problems?
Why are you better at solving their problems?
Now create your compelling pitch like this:
How [insert who your ideal client is] can [insert verb] [insert the problem] through [insert solution].
How Will You Reach Your Target Audience?
Getting your audience to engage with your content is essential for connecting with your target market online. The online real estate market is increasingly growing and vying for client attention.
But, even the investor or agent with a small budget can succeed with the right strategies.
Start by narrowing it to a highly targeted audience.
If you offer buyer and seller services, your target currently includes more people in your local market.
For example, focus on only one section of zip codes within your market city. Then expand your area as your finances and business grow.
So, choose a specific area of your market and focus efforts there. Then expand.
A second option will be to focus on the seller or buyer market if you’re a real estate investor. There are specific factors to consider, but marketing towards the seller’s market is most likely the one to go after.
Your marketing costs within major cities will likely be expensive, so media such as Google Ads might be too high unless you can target slightly out of the city.
If you don’t have the budget, take advantage of pricing within the suburban markets.
The other thing you need to do is get your website organized to target your audience. If that requires creating city-specific pages, then you need to do that.
Also, get one of the most overlooked pages, your “About” or company page optimized. Be sure it includes your city or area, how you conduct your business, and your process. Spell out your strengths and why they should choose you over the competition.
What is Your Marketing Budget?
Having a solid marketing budget is integral to being realistic and will help you improve your revenue over time.
You can overspend on marketing costs if you don’t know your budget. Therefore causing an unwanted and bad experience.
Here are a few steps to help you organize your budget and determine where to spend your marketing dollars strategically.
Your first step needs to be organizing your current financial positions. You MUST be specific. If you’re too loose and choose to estimate, it creates an unrealistic budget.
This starts with getting in order your revenue information. You’ll need to know how much revenue your real estate business makes every month. Even though your income varies throughout the year, you must have a number based on reliable revenue (the minimum amount of money you make each month.)
You’ll also need to minus business expenses. Rent, materials, the cost of VA’s, etc.
Any business expense must be subtracted from your revenue before nailing down your marketing budget. Setting a realistic budget is one that focuses on income that exceeds expenses.
After you find your available disposable income, you’ll need to determine what that money will be. Although marketing is a major area to focus on, don’t forget to set aside a budget for unexpected circumstances and growth.
Separate your money based on your goals. You will invest more money in online marketing if your primary goal is attracting leads.
But, if your goal is to hire more VA’s or full-time assistants, you’ll want to put more income into your company’s growth and set aside less for marketing until you’ve been able to close more deals.
2. Determine where you want to allocate your funds
Once you have calculated what is available to spend on marketing, your next step is organizing and prioritizing your money.
There are three main elements to how you spend your marketing dollars:
Budget size
Your past experiences
Reaching the optimum target audience
Start by organizing how to spend the budget based on the amount. If you have a small, more limited marketing budget, you should probably consider Craigslist ads, Facebook ads, local citations, social media posting, and email advertising to attract new clients.
A heavier marketing budget would provide the opportunity to include direct mail, bandit signs, and Google Ads to attract an expanded range of clients.
Apart from any budget limits, don’t forget to consider and implement what strategies have worked for you in the past. You might have noticed postcards helped bring in more clients during a specific time.
Then do that same strategy again, even if you still have more budget for more expensive marketing methods.
Also, don’t overlook the marketing channels that will help you target and reach your optimum audience. For example, Facebook advertising is an effective channel for targeting motivated sellers, but you still need to create the right audiences to filter out potential buyer leads.
Facebook Ads Audience for Real Estate
Create and document very detailed customer avatars. Then, think about which media they’re more likely to consume. That is the spot where you need to be advertising.
If you’re considering testing a new marketing channel, allocate some funds for that test. Start with a small budget since you don’t know how effective the new channel will be.
For example, if you enter the Google Ads marketing channel, start with a small campaign with highly targeted keywords and a budget.
Only allocate more budget after you gain enough data to determine if it’s working for you. If it works, pull more funds into the new marketing channel.
What Real Estate Keywords Are the Best in Your Market?
How do you use real estate keywords? If you are only using them to optimize your website for search rankings, you could be missing out on other ways to gain visibility within your target market.
Get into the mindset to use your keywords in your online and offline marketing.
Here are some platforms where you can utilize your real estate keywords more:
Real estate website optimization (homepage, landing pages)
Real estate social media profile optimization (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook)
Offline marketing (postcards, bandits signs, direct mail)
Using real estate keywords should not be limited to your digital marketing efforts.
Find different ways to plug them into your offline practices as well.
For example, are you sending out flyers or postcards that take advantage of some keywords?
Are you placing bandit signs around your target market with specific messages and a phone number in case they’re sitting in a parking lot and want to write your number down to contact you later?
If you’re using this kind of marketing and not some keywords, it’s time to readjust your strategy.
Keywords hold a lot of power in online marketing but can be effective offline too. Just be careful that you’re not infringing on trademarks. If you question a keyword phrase, check it out first.
This plan assumes that you’ve got a website that has been proven to convert leads.
If you’re trying to scrape together a bunch of tips to save a few bucks on building your website, you’re doing it wrong. It will cost you much more than the monthly membership price to build what we’ve built.
There are a few things you should do first to get that website up and running, and these only take a few minutes:
Get your testimonials on the site because social proof and credibility are essential to conversions.
Make sure the copy on the site reflects your business and is in line with local laws (for example, if you or your team have a real estate license, you’ll need to change the copy to make sure you’re correctly disclosing your license… but you should make that into a benefit since a license gives you more options for sellers than someone operating without one).
Okay, so that last one might be complicated if you’re new to the business… but you need to be making sure you’re aware of the laws around you since being ignorant isn’t an excuse if you’re trying to get out of a five-figure fine for operating without a license (in some states)…
This reminds me that I need to mention we’re not attorneys or financial advisors; all of this stuff is just general advice. You need specific, professional advice on your real estate investment business…
Having a competent lawyer ensures you’re not offering something illegal without knowing it is a good idea.
There are a couple of ways to use these questions…just cut and paste them into a document and start answering them if you’re ready.
Want our help in making your real estate marketing plan?
So you’re getting ready to launch your online marketing campaign, but you’re probably thinking “Man, what type of website am I going to build?”
At Carrot, we have general credibility websites and we have targeted websites. Where the targeted websites are specific to a certain type of lead. It could be a motivated house seller. It could be a cash buyer. It could be a retail buyer. There could be a note seller or buyer. You get the idea. Those are very, very targeted towards a certain type of lead.
We get a lot of our clients asking us, “Why can’t I focus it all into one general credibility site?”
Or, “Is a general credibility site going to work well or perform as well as a targeted site specific for, as an example, motivated house sellers?”
Well, this video and post are going to walk you through the data and what the actual results are and what you should do depending on the type of lead you’re looking for.
So, first of all, we’ve got the general credibility site. A general credibility website is mainly focused on, just that, building general credibility for your company.
So, it could be trying to get people there to show them who you are. What types of things you’re doing. What types of things you’re doing in real estate. And it could be multiple things.
Saym, we’ve got this real estate fund and we’re flipping houses, so we buy houses. But we also sell houses and oh, by the way, did you also know that we do rent a home?” So it’s kind of “here’s who we are as a company”, and build that credibility.
You could be looking for private lenders on that website. You could be building a cash buyer list on there and selling properties. That works really well on a main company credibility website.
But it’s a lot of general stuff. It’s not really focused in on any one particular message. And it’s a split message.
Your home page might say, “Hey, we are a real estate investment solutions firm. We buy, sell and rent houses.” But you’re going to be talking about all of that stuff if you’re on the homepage.
So there’s no one focused message if you’re doing direct marketing toward that.
If you’re driving a house seller there, they’re then going to get distracted by other messages. They’re going to get distracted by the message about investments. They’re going to get distracted by the message about looking for cash buyers and private lenders.
If you’re doing direct marketing and paying money to drive people there, you don’t want to distract the message.
But the general credibility website serves a very specific purpose.
If you’re networking at your local chamber of commerce or rotary, you’re probably going to hand them the business card that drives them here. This website is then going to drive people toward your other specific target websites if you’re doing multiple things in your business.
So you might have a link that says, “Sell your house.” And it’s gonna drive to your house seller specific website, ideally. That’s what the data shows works the best.
General Credibility Website
Real Estate Website Design: Targeted Credibility Sites
On the other side, you have the targeted website. So, when we suggest that you focus on using a targeted website, it’s any time you’re actually going to be actively driving people to that website to convert as a lead.
These websites are set up for conversion.
The general credibility websites are not particularly set up for conversion. They’re going to be great on mobile and there will be landing pages on there that are set up for conversions.
But the overall path is not set up to convert at a high, high rate. It’s set up to build credibility for you.
These targeted websites are set up to convert at a high rate for one particular type of lead.
You can see the eye directors on our Carrot websites, the big buttons. The very, very focused message. If you land on a motivated house seller website with Carrot, or if you’re building one, it should be very focused on that motivated house seller. Not on cash buyers, and then rent-to-own tenants and private lenders.
Your entire website should be focusing on how you can help that seller. And that’s what will perform the best for you. It doesn’t distract them away from your messaging.
Motivated Seller Targeted Website
The website is specifically set up to convert one type of lead ideally.
So, if a motivated house seller website speaks to the seller, it’s going to convert them.
If you want to list properties for sale, then you set up another website for that to speak toward that. “Hey, we have discount properties. Join our list or see our properties here.”
Or, you can fit that into the main company site too. You can kind of pull double duty with the main company and cash buyer if you want to.
Buyers Lead Website
Pay-Per-Click Traffic
Lastly, your targeted websites are where you’re going to send all of your paid traffic.
Please do not send paid traffic to the main company website. It’s unfocused. It’s untargeted. It’s building good credibility. But then it has all these rabbit holes that your prospects can dive around and they might go down the wrong rabbit hole and not become a lead of yours.
So, they’re focused on conversion, specifically set up to focus on one type of lead. A very focused message on one type of prospect and how you can help them.
They’re sites that are optimal for paid marketing. If you’re driving paid marketing to a main company credibility website, unless you vastly adjusted it, you’re probably wasting some money.
Ending The Debate Of Credibility Sites Vs. Targeted Sites
So that’s what we would do. That kind of hopefully ends the debate, credibility site versus a targeted website and what you use in certain circumstances. Ideally, if you’ve got your main credibility website and you’re looking to generate any leads online, you’ve also got at least one targeted website for your actual marketing activities.
Join us on our other episodes of the Carrot strategy sketch because we have a lot of other topics to dive into and most are under 10 minutes. They’re going to help you get light years ahead of your competition and shave off months, if not years, on your learning curve.
Also, be sure to check out the CarrotCast, which is our weekly podcast. Subscribe to our YouTube channel so you can see all of our videos before anyone else can. So, check us out and be sure to hit us up with comments and questions.
Frustrated by the slow drip of leads? As a real estate investor, you know time is money. Waiting months for a trickle of potential deals can seriously hinder your growth.
This blog post is key to unlocking leads in just 90 days. We’ll unveil a data-driven real estate marketing plan designed for 2024, helping you attract motivated sellers and generate more deals faster.
Demo Carrot: How many deals are you losing to your competitor’s website?
We all had it at one point, and you’ll probably have it if you don’t have it right now. I will walk through this Carrot whiteboard strategy, a suggested path in your first 90 days with your online marketing strategy in the real estate industry.
Real Estate Marketing Plan: Our Simple 90-Day Lead Generation Strategy For Sellers and Buyers
If you haven’t set up your website yet, the first thing you’ll do is, of course, get one. If you need a website, check us out at carrot.com. If you’re not a Carrot member, you can also check out biggerpockets.com or Facebook forums to see how our clients perform. That’s great! We’ll roll with whatever you have going on now.
The first 90 days are the foundation. So, many people have unreal expectations in their first 90 days of any marketing, but primarily online.
Online marketing takes some time to develop, so if you’re looking at SEO, PPC, or something similar, your first 30 days, especially, are spent getting things going and refining things.
Even if you’re doing PPC, your campaign won’t be optimized in that first month. So, have realistic expectations about your first 90 days. This is your foundation setup, and you will scale up after that.
One of the biggest things is you need to have patience in these first 90 days because if we expect the world to change in 90 days, you expect a flood of leads to start coming in, but you’re not putting a flood of marketing out there; then you’re probably not going to get the results that you expect.
I’m not saying that you can’t get a flood of leads in the first 90 days; you totally can, but you have to put a flood of marketing out there to capture that, and we’ll show you how to do that.
So, one thing I want to ensure that we all do in our marketing and our businesses is to keep your marketing simple initially. You see many different marketing methods and must explore them all at once.
But that isn’t the path you need to follow. We’ll often look at companies and go, “Man, that company is exactly where I want to be,” but they didn’t start there. They slowly stacked things onto their business, and over time, as they found out something worked, they made it good; they made a process. They systemized it and said, “Let’s stack something else on there.”
That’s how a real estate investor goes from doing their first deal to 2,000 deals. It doesn’t happen overnight. It happens by stacking marketing methods and systems, one by one, as they perfect each of them. So have patience and stack your efforts.
Conquer Online Marketing in 90 Days: Start with a High-Converting Website on Carrot.com
Forget chasing trends or endless social media strategies. Here’s a fact: Your website is the foundation of your online marketing success.
That’s why experts recommend launching a high-converting website as the first step in your online marketing journey. But building a website can feel overwhelming. Don’t worry, Carrot is here to help!
Here’s how Carrot makes creating a powerful website fast and easy:
1. Choose Your Winning Template:
Carrot offers a variety of website templates designed specifically for real estate investors, each optimized for mobile responsiveness and high conversion rates. No hosting or coding necessary!
2. Customize Your Brand:
Make your website your own with a user-friendly editor. Add your logo, colors, and images to create a professional and cohesive brand experience.
3. Leverage Built-In Marketing Tools:
Carrot equips you with powerful tools like lead capture forms, call-to-action buttons, content tools, and SEO optimization to attract and convert leads from day one.
4. Focus on What Matters Most:
Carrot websites are designed to prioritize clarity and user experience. This means your visitors can easily find the information they need and take action, maximizing lead generation.
Stop wasting time on online marketing that doesn’t deliver results. Get started with Carrot today and launch a website that converts visitors into leads and fuels your online success.
Ready to dominate your online presence? Head over to Carrot.com and get started on building your high-converting website in minutes!
Personalizing Your Website To Cut Through The Clutter
Within the first 48 hours, you will want to do some basic stuff. Launch your site, tweak your content, personalize your content a little bit, post your story, and fill out your “about” page so people can connect with you.
You want visitors to see a real face or person behind the brand, not a nameless, baseless entity. As we’ve discussed in content, in our CarrotCast podcasts, and in our coaching calls for our customers, it’s a cluttered market. Hence, you stand out by telling your stories and connecting personally.
So, ensure you personalize your content within the first few days of launching your website. You have to reinvent the wheel. If you’re a Carrot customer, take our content and look at one paragraph, read it, see what’s in it, write it in your own words, and then delete ours. So adjust 20, 30, and 40% of that content.
Add Lead Tracking So You Know What’s Working And What’s Not
The next thing you must do is put tracking in place as soon as possible. If you’re a Carrot customer, you already have tracking in place, but if you want to get more advanced, and you want to use your own Google Analytics account, or you want to put your Facebook pixel, I would do that the first couple weeks of getting your website. Or, we can do it for you if you’re a Carrot member.
You’re going to need to start tracking that traffic right away. That way, you can begin to retarget people.
Hone Your Unique Selling Proposition
Next, you must ensure your unique selling proposition is nailed within those first few weeks of your online marketing.
What about you and your company standing out, giving people a reason to work with you?
Find Leads With Facebook Ads – First 30 Days
So we launched the website, got our tracking in place, personalized some content, had our “about” page up there, put a picture of you on there, and swapped out pictures. Hence, they’re local to your area, swapped out some content, so it’s unique to you and your area, and built-in that credibility, testimonials, things like that, and then we start some Facebook Ads.
Start Facebook Ads a week two or three after launching your website.
Facebook is fast, quick, and free. If you do it correctly, you can have leads and traffic coming in that day. Our blog has some great resources and a Facebook Masterclass.
Start by running a couple of ads targeting a motivated seller audience, then scale it up over four to six weeks to where you have a couple of campaigns with 3-5 ads within each.
Launch And Build Up Your Pay-Per-Click – First 30-60 Days
Next, once some Facebook Ads are going, your website is optimized with great content, you’ve personalized it, you’ve built credibility, and you’ve built a great “about” page, then you start to do some Google Ads if you have a budget.
If you have $500 to $3000 monthly and are in specific markets, you can start some small-scale PPC marketing and ramp it up.
Sprinkle Credibility Into Your Real Estate Marketing Plan
In month two, you have some momentum going. You’ve got your website; you can always tweak it later, add more credibility, or add your Better Business Bureau logo later. We always look for progress, not perfection, so get that site out the door in the first two weeks, build some basic credibility there, and then continually refine it from there.
If you’re unsure what to do on your website to build credibility, contact us or check out our content on credibility building.
Time To Work In SEO – 30-90 Days
Shift your focus to SEO and Evergreen Marketing. Pick two to three high-leverage keywords to focus on for your market. We discuss it in some of our resources and start setting that foundation.
Then, if you have a tool to track your rankings, maybe start putting those keywords in there to see how your rankings are going. We have that built into Carrot, but other tools can track your rankings if you’re not a Carrot user.
One of the biggest contributors to SEO is content. Ensure you have a good blog post strategy and plenty of real estate blog post ideas to work from!
Begin To Adjust Your Pay-Per-Clicks
Now, it’s time to adjust your PPC because you can’t set it up, forget it, and not adjust it. So, in month two, you will adjust and refine your PPC campaign. If you have enough traffic, you will also turn on retargeting.
You’ve put your Facebook retargeting pixel on, which we teach you how to do in a blog post on our website. Then, in month two or three, we will start turning on retargeting ads on Facebook, and the same thing happens: we teach you how to do those in those other resources, so check them out. Also, keep your Facebook Ads going.
Finally, to wrap out your foundational first 90 days, you’re going to be tracking and refining your SEO. You’re going to a coach or someone you can go to to ask them for advice on improving your SEO, building some backlinks, and social media signals, and this time, you’re probably going to get some citations.
So, get your website listed on Yelp, Yellow Pages, and all those citations. We suggest starting between 20 and 40 in the first 90 days. We can do it if you’re a Carrot member; check out our marketplace. If you’re not a member, check out our how-to build citations for real estate blog post.
After you refine your PPC, and only at this time, start thinking about a CRM. Way too many people started thinking about a CRM for tracking their leads in month one. If you don’t have any leads coming in, you have no leads to manage in a CRM. It’s like having gas without a car to put it into.
So make sure you’re focusing on getting leads first, and then you get your CRM to manage your leads once you start getting enough lead flow that you can’t manage. If you do it correctly, you scale up.
Wrapping Up Your Real Estate Marketing Plan: First 90 Days
Once again, contact us for those resources if you are a Carrot member. It’s just a quick run-through. We have many other resources, coaching, and guidance to help you crush it, just like we do with thousands of customers. If you’re not a Carrot member, keep returning to our CarrotCasts or free resources to help you grow or join the fold. Join the Carrot community.
We will be learning new, amazing things every week with great experts, great marketers, and our Carrot team to teach you how we do what we do and how you can make a bigger difference!
2016 was a banner year here at Carrot and our customers. Here’s a brief snapshot at some cool things that happened in 2016.
It was an outstanding year for our Carrot members and another amazing year of growth for our team and company. We’ve been able to grow and add exceptional team members so we can focus on YOU. Amplifying our members to get more out of their business, so they can do more of what makes their heart sing.
Let’s recap some of the cool stuff in this quick post!
So, What Happened In 2016 Here At Carrot???
Clients crushed it generating leads
14 awesome new features released
Customer Success team worked their tails off
Our team grew and had a blast
… and more!
Here we go!
Hundreds Of Thousands Of Leads… You’re Crushing It!
You guys made another forceful charge in 2016. With over 200,000 leads coming in this year (when you DON’T count phone call leads… which we can’t track in Google Analytics currently) you’re pulling in more PPC, SEO, and social media online leads as a collective group than any other real estate investor lead generation platform… by far. Keep crushing it!
52% From Mobile Devices
Which States Converted More Leads? Well…
9 Major NEW Features Launched
Another Core Value of ours is “constant never ending improvement“… and both our members and Carrot continued to push this value. In addition to the features, we released in 2016 to help our clients spend less time hassling with tech and marketing issues and to pull in more and better track leads…
New Innovative Features we rolled out in 2016 include (but not limited to)…
And here’s the latest new feature we launched just in the past few weeks… at NO extra cost to you.
Enjoy :-)
400+ “Doses Of Awesomeness” From Clients
Changing Their Businesses And Lives!
We LOVE those! And those are just the ones we get each week… not counting the hundreds that happen that we never hear about!
Our Team: Bigger, Tighter, More Awesome
2016 brought a lot of changes, growth, fun, and challenges with our team here at Carrot. But I can say that we fully lived and breathed our Core Values each and every day. How?
Well to name a few…
The Carrot Community And Our Carrot Team Was
Able To Raise Over $6,700 For A Cause
When we started Carrot 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”.
October was one of the times that we had the opportunity to give back to a very special cause.
2,000+ runners and walkers brought positive attention to the tragic events that happened at Umpqua Community College in 2015 in our small Oregon community.
The Umpqua Strong Race 9k and 5k event was created to honor the victims and raise money for UCC foundation. The event raised more than $60,000 which goes toward funding 10 scholarship programs in the names of the shooting’s victims and survivors.
It’s a HUGE testament to the amazing community of clients, listeners, and team members we’ve been able to attract over the years that we were able to raise over $6,700 for the cause!
19,000+ Live Chats With Clients (4x the 2015 total)
This is a testament to our members and our AMAZING Carrot support staff. You guys were busy and we’re here to help you succeed. Our team helped our Carrot members through the many, many difficult spots in 2016. We process hundreds and hundreds of tickets and live chats per week and we’re humbled by the ratings you gave our team during your interactions with us.
We work very hard so you can spend less time working with our software and more time closing deals.
World-Class Net Promoter Score
(up there with the big boys!!!)
One of the most effective ways to gauge the happiness of your customers and how well (or bad) you’re doing is with something called the “Net Promoter Score”. It’s basically a question (like the one above) that asks how likely you are to recommend Carrot to a friend or colleague. With 500+ responses in the 2nd half of 2016 alone… the vast majority scored us a 9 or 10… leaving us with an impressive NPS of 73.
Now to put that into perspective… here is what some of the most respected companies in the world have scored for their NPS:
Yes, we’re still early in our implementation of Net Promoter Score, but you can better believe that we’re striving in 2017 to make our clients even more happy, successful, and to change the way people expect companies to serve them in the future after they experiene the service the “Carrot Way”.
Over 100,000 YouTube Views, 1k + Subscribers
And Climbing!
Our First Carrot Team Retreat + A Growing Team…
4 years ago, Carrot was a one-man show… then we quickly added our CTO, built out the Customer Success team. Now the team is continually growing to stay ahead of the curve so our members can also stay ahead of the curve from their competition.
We’ve been proud to add 3 more full-time members to the Carrot team. We’re also super excited and humbled to have the opportunity to amplify our members lives as well as our team and their families.
Carrot Office Expansion Of 2016!
As our team grew, we took over more of theLoft Entrepreneur Co-Workspace that we run here in Roseburg, Oregon… quadrupling our square footage and adding a kegerator (which every office needs right?). We added a new content studio, a nice spot for our customer success team to crush it everyday, and more!
Trevor’s Office…
New Kegerator
Shaun Working Away
Customer Success HQ
Where The Magic Happens
Annual Ping Ping Tourney
New Podcast Studio
New Video Studio
Carrot Buds Hanging Out
We Launched The CarrotCast Podcast!
This is why we do it…
Finalist In The Oregon Entrepreneur Network
“Entrepreneur Achievement Award” 2016
We didn’t bring home the award, an amazing company won but we were thrilled to be nominated and made it to the final 3… which is a HUGE compliment to what we’re building here at Carrot.
Carrot Members Christmas Carrot Love (gotta love that!)
“Hey Trevor and the Carrot team!
Thank you so much for the books!!! I’m overwhelmed by all of the knowledge in front of me right now! This is the best gift any company has ever given me. Thank you so much!!! It really means a lot. I’m a Carrot fan for life! “Tim Oppelt
Hundreds of Carrot Bud shots from around the world were sent to us throughout the year…
What An Amazing Year. And We’re Grateful To Have You On This Journey With Us. How Was Your Year?
So, how was your 2016? Let us know below in the comments section. The good, the bad, and the ugly :-)
Also… looking to get a jumpstart on 2017 and get momentum building?
These 2 resources are the most shared and commented we’ve ever made. They can change your life…
This has to STOP… Obviously, you want more traffic and leads, right? We’ve all struggled to increase website traffic, and every lead guru has a big bag of tricks they’re eager for you to try. But… it’s a heck of a lot simpler than that.
All you need to do is fix these 4 common reasons that are often neglected by real estate website owners either because they don’t understand their importance or because they are not sure how to approach them.
Hey guys and girls, Trevor here coming at you with another whiteboard strategy sketch and these are getting really, really fun.
I don’t know how many we have done so far but we have a lot more in store for you guys and keep the questions coming because the way that we come up with these things right here is from questions directly from you guys. Send them to us at support@oncarrot.com, through the comments section below or go to oncarrot.com and check us out.
On this particular video, we’re going to address one of the most common “problem” questions that we get…
“Why am I not getting the real estate leads online that I want or I’m NOT getting any leads?”
Because in order for you guys to get value out of leveraging the web with your marketing, you got to be getting leads in some way whether it’s phone calls, whether it is people submitting forms, whatever it is. Leads have to be had, otherwise, you are not getting the value out of it.
We boiled it down to just four reasons that you are not getting the number of leads you want. As you are going through this particular strategy sketch, make sure that you are identifying which one or ones of these you need to tap on next.
Okay?
If you are not getting leads you want, you need to be doing one of these things better or more.
Why Your Not Getting Real Estate Leads Online Reason #1: Traffic
The first thing you want to look at is your traffic. That’s the most obvious thing, right? Because you can’t get a lead if you are not getting people to land on your website.
How do we get more people to land on your website?
The first thing we’d like to see is that you are getting at least 25 visitors to your website per month and we are saying at a minimum because on average let’s say it’s a motivated house seller website… you might be converting three, five, six, seven, eight percent,10% if you are doing really well, into a lead.
If you are converting at 10%, which is a really high conversion rate in this type of market, you are only going to be getting about two to two and a half leads per month. Now that is not a lot of leads so that is your issue.
If you are getting less than 25 people to your website a month, then that’s probably the first thing you need to focus on.
If you are getting 50, 60, 70, people to your website a month and you are still not getting very many leads, let’s say it’s converting at less than 1%, we are going to move on to the next thing.
Why Your Not Getting Real Estate Leads Online Reason #2: Quality of Traffic
The next thing is the quality of your traffic. First off, if you have traffic coming in and you are getting 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 100 people to your website a month but you are still not getting very many leads, you are getting less than 5% or less than 3% of them becoming a lead, it could be a quality issue.
You need to ask yourself some questions. It could be, where are these people coming from? Are they coming from good marketing channels? What is the message that you are delivering to them to get them to your website?
Often times we’ll see people using Google pay-per-click or Facebook ads or something and they are getting a lot of traffic from Facebook for motivated house sellers but the problem is, those people are not very targeted. So you don’t want to be driving motivated house sellers from a random Facebook campaign to websites and expect to really have a conversion rate.
The quality of those visitors is going to be lower. The quality of the Craigslist visitors will be probably a little bit lower, the quality of an SEO lead is going to be way higher. If you are not getting very many leads but you have a lot of traffic, see where your traffic is coming from. Is it coming from a high-quality source where they are very targeted and you can help them specifically? What message do they see before they land on your website?
Did your ads say, “Sell your house.”? Then your website now says, “Sell your houses quickly, we buy houses.”. They are just looking for a real estate agent and you are offering a completely different service. Look and see what your ads and your message says.
If you got the traffic nailed, the quality is perfect and that’s nailed, and you got a lot of traffic coming in and you are still not getting the leads you are looking for, what do we look at next? We look at performance next.
If you would like for your website to convert more leads, then this webinar replay might be for you. It is a long call but packed full of valuable information. Give the webinar a view and then download our 16-point real estate investor conversion checklist.
Why Your Not Getting Real Estate Leads Reason #3: Website Performance
We talk a lot about performance here at InvestorCarrot where performance is one of the things we specialize in.
It’s helping your websites perform at a higher level which means convert more of your visitors, more of your quality traffic into a lead. The performance side is your website. Have you gone through some tutorials on this website? Have you gone through our other whiteboard strategy sketches to see how you need to structure your forms? Have you gone through some of our mastermind calls, things like that? Make sure your website is built to be high performing.
If you are a Carrot member already, you got this one nailed. You don’t have to do anything there unless you jerked up the design that we have given you. Make sure you are sticking with the design, then just personalize it with your own content, tweaks, you personalize it with your branding and credibility.
If you are not a Carrot member, make sure you are really focusing on the design of your website so it’s performing at a high level and like I said we have a lot of resources you can check out. Go to oncarrot.com/resources and we have an entire video and an entire checklist on how to create a high performing website.
If you’ve got your high performing website set up, you got quality traffic coming into it, and you’re still not getting enough leads, what we want to do is look into credibility.
Why Your Not Getting Real Estate Leads Online Reason #4: Credibility
You can have the best website in the world that is set up with all the cool things to get someone to convert into a lead, but maybe you haven’t built credibility on the website. Maybe people aren’t believing that you can truly help them.
Maybe you’re not really building that connection with them enough to where they are like, “Man, these people seem like real people and I want to work with them.” You need to nail the credibility.
What do you do to really build great credibility for any business?
It could be business selling microphones or a business selling whatever it is. You need to be building credibility and you do it the same way. You have a really good about page.
We found in our data, the number three most visited page, sometimes the number two most popular page across all of our thousands of InvestorCarrot members websites including our own sales websites is always the about page because people are looking to prove or disprove the preconceptions in their mind on why they should or should not work with you.
If they go to your about page and it’s basic, it’s generic, it doesn’t have anything about you, they aren’t building that connection with you. They are probably going to bounce out of there and possibly go and look at your competitors. The ones that they connect with more, are going to be the ones they choose to work with.
Make sure your about page has a little bit about you. Kind of tells about why you want to help people, your mission, and list maybe some of your team members in there. Don’t be afraid to put your face on the website because your face is going to have to go in front of your client eventually.
Number two is social proof.
Do you have things on your website that show that other people have worked with you before them that you helped that have been in similar situations?
It could be a testimonial, it could be videos, it could be case studies on deals you have worked with, it could be people who you’ve sold properties to who have gotten great returns now and they had a better experience working with you. It could also be the Better Business Bureau badge.
Things like that help to build social proof, reviews on your Facebook channel, things like that. You just want to show other people have worked with you in the past or attest to your character, that you are the type of person that they would want to work with.
The last thing is clear and honest branding.
We found so many websites that nail the about page, nail the social proof, they got the traffic coming in but their logo up top looks like it’s been made in Microsoft Paint in 1998. It’s pixelated. The words are hard to see, and the very first things we often times look at on a website is the upper left of that website which happens to be where logos often times are or at least the top of the website.
So make sure you have very clear honest branding.
I didn’t say you have to have a fancy logo, that’s a completely different thing. Some of the best websites that we have found that generate the most leads, had the simplest logos out there. They didn’t spend a bunch of money on them.
Reasons You’re Not Getting Real Estate Leads Online
If you nail these four things; nail your traffic, the traffic is high quality coming from great sources with a very clear and defined message that matches your website, the website is set up for performance and not just a couple of things but set up everywhere on every single page to perform at a high level, follow what we do and model it.
Don’t copy what we do, but follow and model what we do or if you are a Carrot member that’s already been done for you.
On the credibility side, have a great about page. Look at our about page and see how much you connect with us. We have our core values that we tell about our start-up story, we tell about our team, and you get a chance to connect with us at a better level. It becomes real people then, and it’s easier to work with people than work with a kind of an ominous company.
Get your social proof nailed, get clear on honest branding and if you still don’t have a stream of leads coming in from there, I would highly suggest then you go back up to number one and ramp up your traffic using other methods.
Go out there and get your leads flowing upwards, get your leads flowing in and make them consistent and predictable so your business can grow.
That is why we are all doing this so we can have a consistent, predictable business that really fuels our lifestyle and helps a lot of people.
If you are not on our YouTube channel, but you are on our website, subscribe to our blog or check out the webinar that we have going and you can probably find someone inside or on the website somewhere and see how we can help you grow your leads and leverage the web better.
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 participants
Morgan 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!
Fast forward 3 years and it’s pretty humbling and awesome seeing this company grow with intention.
