Carrot Success Story: How Carter Steph Grew His Investing Business To $2 Million In Revenue

How Carter Steph’s closing rate skyrocketed from 7% to 20% within a few months after switching from a custom website to Carrot.

Carter Steph has been a licensed broker for 20 years. In 2016, he purchased the real estate investing business he now runs in Oklahoma City.

Snapshot:

• Industry: Investor and Agent
• Location: Oklahoma City
• Clients Served: 1000+
• Year founded: Co-owner since 2016

What I didn’t expect after switching to Carrot, is my lead to close ratio increased 50% on my offline leads!

– Carter Steph

Carter Steph is a real estate investor since 1992 and is also a licensed real estate broker in Oklahoma City.

He’s also a practicing attorney for almost 20 years and has been the General Counsel at 1-800-2SellHomes since 2014 and co-owner since 2016. He’s no newbie to real estate. He and his team consistently generate seven figures per year in net profits, while closing on about 20% of their leads.

The growth is steady and predictable.

“You ask anybody in town, and they know us,” he said in a CarrotCast interview.

Read the tips below, taken straight from Carter Steph’s 7-figure growth strategy.

The tools: Carrot features

For Carter, Carrot is the central hub that brings all of his marketing efforts together. He’s running PPC ads to drive traffic to his site while leveraging Carrot’s easy content marketing tools and strategy to build his SEO for long-term lead generation.

Since he’s driving traffic from all of his marketing efforts to his Carrot site, he can track performance across all campaigns and channels, giving him the clarity needed with his marketing strategy.

Here’s how Carter is using Carrot as the central hub to tie together the marketing efforts they were once doing on their own to become the authority in their area:

Switching from a custom website to a Get a high-converting website
Before Carter Steph went on his journey to $2 million in revenue in 2018, he was doing some things very differently with his website.

In fact, with the powers of technology, I was able to dig up his several-year-old website for all of us to look at.

Believe it or not, that custom website cost Carter and his business $5,000 upfront and $700 per month for hosting fees.

That’s quite expensive.

And it’s even more expensive when you find out that it had a terrible conversion rate and almost never generated any leads for Carter’s business — the leads it did generate weren’t very good quality and Carter’s close rate was only 7%.

For that reason, they were spending $1,500 on PPC every month but $30,000 to $40,000 on TV ads.

Then they switched to Carrot.

Carter said the difference was immediate. After just two days, their new Carrot site generated its first high-quality lead. Within a few months, their close rate skyrocketed from the previous 7% to 20% because lead quality increased.

After Trevor and Carter ran some estimations on the CarrotCast interview, they determined that Carter is saving between $20,000 and $50,000 every single month in lost lead-gen closing potential after switching from their expensive custom-made site to one of our Carrot sites.

Wow!

Now they close 20% of leads, their PPC budget is $8,000 per month (because their website is converting as it should be), and they’re growing like crazy. Sometimes, the small changes make a big difference. And at Carrot, small, iterative, conversion-optimization changes is exactly what we’re focused on. ;-)

Evergreen Marketing
In marketing terms, Evergreen is marketing you do once, and it works for years… not hours, days or weeks. Content relevant for a long time, that serves your best prospects, and gets in front of them where they’re searching online.

Carter has organic leads grow over time using this exact marketing strategy.

Automated blogs
Content marketing is huge for businesses trying to establish themselves as an authority in their market. In order to do this, you have to create a lot of content, and Carrot makes it easy by providing pre-written automated blog posts that require very little time on your part!

SEO Keyword Tracking
By using our keyword tracking tool, Carter can readily track the search engine rankings of his web pages. We make it easy for you to quickly gain insight into which keywords are rising and falling in Google’s results pages so that you know where your web page stands relative to other sites on similar topics.

The results:

Carter added $20k/mo in new profits by shifting from a fancy custom website into an
“Authority Hub”

“We couldn’t be happier with the site so far…What we have seen is a DRAMATIC increase in web leads.  Since switching to Carrot, the leads we are getting are converting to purchases at a MUCH higher level.  

Things have been moving so fast that we haven’t had the opportunity to accurately determine the lead to purchase ratio, but I would estimate it is in the 25 to 35% range, which means the leads we are getting are significantly better than our historical average.

Thanks for everything and we are now looking at expansion because of the success we have had in such a short time.”

– Carter Steph