WS1510: Online Marketing Tools and Strategies for RE Syndicators | Paul Counts & Shreya Banerjee

EPISODE 1510

[INTRODUCTION]

Paul Counts (PC): Get everything set first so that you’re not wasting your time and wasting your money and set your foundation. It’s like a house. We’re talking real estate. And if a house has a poor foundation, it’s gonna crumble, right? So you got to start with your foundation and marketing. Otherwise, all your marketing efforts are gonna crumble, and you’re gonna spend wasted ad dollars, which, you know, as a syndicator, you gotta be careful how you’re spending your ad dollars. You know, nobody wants to know their ad dollars were misspent. So there’s a lot of things there to keep in mind.

Whitney Sewell (WS):  I’ve talked so much lately about how we’re not trained to be marketers, typically in this business, but it’s such an important part of a real estate syndication business. And I know I have struggled with this over the last many years, we produce so much content, but I often don’t know what to do with all of it. I need some help, right? And so our guests today are going to help us with just that. And it’s something I struggled, like I said, but yeah, we need help. We need help from people that are experts.

[INTERVIEW]

WS: Paul, Shreya, thank you for being on the show. This is your specialty. And that’s why I’m thankful you’re here today.

PC:  Yeah, we’re excited to be here. Thanks for having us. It is such an important part of this business. And we’re so thrilled to be here.

WS: Awesome. Well, let’s get started. I know you’re co-founders of Marketing Counts, what do you all do exactly? And let’s dive in are gonna help the guests today, you know, with maybe their marketing plan, or how they’re marketing themselves? And you’ll all help us to think through that. But what is Marketing Counts? I know it’s your business but tell us a little bit about you all, and maybe how you got there.

PC: Yeah, absolutely. So, we’re a full-service digital agency. So one of our focuses is really on helping people build their brand, build their authority. We work with a lot of influencers and experts, and really laying out marketing strategy. One of our biggest things that we love to do is teach. So, we actually have curriculum in high schools, and just the two of us have very diverse backgrounds. I come from the marketing world, and I’ll let Shreya share a little bit about her story here. So go ahead, Shreya, and tell a little bit about your background because it’s very unique. And I think it’s going to be applicable for everybody here.

Shreya Banerjee (SB): Yeah, so my background is not marketing at all. It’s actually engineering of all things. I worked 12 years in a corporate career in manufacturing. And I’m very like process-focused. I have Six Sigma Black Belt which just means I’m very good with processes. That always gets people. It gets people excited about it. So all it really means is I’m really good processes. So, when we look at marketing, we take a process approach to marketing, and say what makes sense, what doesn’t make sense. And how can we take the waste out of marketing, so you’re not wasting your marketing dollars. And focusing on the vanity rather than focusing on things that actually get you results.

WS: Yeah, I like that.

PC: Very, very important. 

WS: Yeah, figuring out where we best spend our dollars. I know, you can spend so much money in ads, and then go nowhere, or whatever it may be that you’re creating. But let’s dive in a little bit on marketing for real estate syndicators. And why is that different from other potential businesses? Or how you all look at that? Or, you know, how we build that authority? Let’s just dive in.

PC:  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, for a syndication business, it’s very much about, you know, people are investing in you right? If they’re going to do a syndication, they’re going to invest a lot of money. And so you’re asking them, different from other businesses where the average business, you know, you’re asking them to maybe buy an item on your website, right? And there’s, there has to be some trust involved. But here, you’re actually getting people to invest hundreds of thousands in some cases of dollars of their hard- earned money into you as a syndicator. So you have to really establish that trust online. And it’s very important that you really focus on the right content, that you’re putting out the right content, you’re putting out the right message, because if people don’t trust you, they’re not going to invest with you. 

And I would argue in this day and age more people than ever are going to search online to see your online presence. And so, if you don’t have an online presence, then it’s gonna be very difficult for them to want to part ways with their money, because they’re gonna go to the next syndicator that potentially has that online presence. And so we’ll talk through what some of those things are. Shreya and I have a system that we call FTE, so I’ll let her kind of lay out what FTE is.  And kind of the approach we take because it is different from what the average marketing agency is going to teach people.

SB:  So normally, when people think I need to go online and build a presence for myself, they think I can just post five times a day on all the social media platforms there is. And that’s not exactly what’s gonna give you the biggest bang for your buck. If anything, people will just get tired of you and unfollow you. So, what we call is a process, again, process-based, right? 

It’s FTE, the F stands for Foundation, T stands for Traffic, and E stands for Engagement. Now, engagement is the first piece people run to with their social media, because what are you doing on social media? Engaging with people, right? So that’s the last piece that we teach that, yes, we just build your social profiles. And we call it a dating profile because people come and check you out and see how you’re doing before they start deciding whether they want to do business with you or not. So if you think about it, it’s your business dating profile, really. But you have to focus on your foundation before you start driving traffic to your dating profile. Like you got to fix yourself if you want to think about it, right? You got to take a shower, you got to clean up we got to get a nice picture. So, you’ve got to make sure you have a good website. Like that’s how it relates, you have to make sure you have a good website, a good landing page somehow you’re capturing your customers’ information, your investors’ information. 

How are you doing that? Do you have a landing page? Are you building an email list? 

You have to do all that stuff in the foundation before you start driving traffic through the social media platforms and start engaging with people and posting you know, once a day, maybe twice a day, max. But you gotta do it in those orders otherwise it doesn’t work. Because we have a lot of people that say, I’m just going to just run ads because ads are hot, Facebook ads are amazing. I’m just gonna run ads. They spend a lot of money on it. They send them to their website, the website’s not right. So they just wasted all that money because they didn’t collect their customers’ information, their investors’ information, it’s wasted money.

PC:  Yeah, it really is. And if you’re gonna run ads as a syndicator, you know, in this day and age, Facebook and other platforms are very, very restrictive on real estate industry. And so whether you’re selling real estate directly, or not, which in a lot of cases, you’re just selling syndication, they’re gonna pick up on those terms like real estate, and this and that. And so they’re gonna automatically put your ads underneath the microscope. And so you’re gonna already have that uphill battle. So what you need to really focus on just like Shreya was talking about have a solid landing page or your website needs to be set where the first thing people see when they look up your website is what is the strong call to action. Why should they do business with you?

And typically, that comes from giving away something of value, maybe it’s a market report for the area that you’re syndication is in. Maybe it’s details about who you know, maybe it’s the top five things everybody should know before they invest in apartments, or before they invest in multifamily, before they invest in real estate, you know. So, maybe it’s, it’s that approach, but you need to give away something of value to get people onto your email list. It’s how you start to capture their attention. Once you have their attention on your email list, you can then send those people to your YouTube channel, you can send them to your YouTube videos. You can let them know that you’re about to go live on social media, you can share those things. 

But once you capture that data, and that’s where we work with high school students we work with. You know, we actually have curriculum in high schools. And this is something that our high school students even get so frustrated about. And we’ve worked with a lot of syndicators and we have a lot of pushback on this too, because they all want to go towards the social media. Like I want to look good. I want to look good out there. Like you can look good, but look good later. 

Get everything set first so that you’re not wasting your time and wasting your money and set your foundation. It’s like a house. We’re talking real estate. And if a house has a poor foundation, it’s gonna crumble, right? So you got to start with your foundation and marketing. Otherwise, all your marketing efforts are gonna crumble, and you’re gonna spend wasted ad dollars, which, you know, as a syndicator, you gotta be careful how you’re spending your ad dollars. You know, nobody wants to know their ad dollars were misspent. So there’s a lot of things there to keep in mind.

WS:  So that foundation, Chris, we’re talking about website, we’re talking about maybe some email campaigns or that lead magnet kind of thing, like, give something away of value, right? That takes some time, doesn’t it, to establish those things? And that’s what we don’t want to wait on? It’s going to get some people in here somehow. But, you know, it’s like letting the house down but it was built on sand and it falls, right? So, that’s awesome. Yeah, well, what about some methods in okay, you know, we got the foundation set up, maybe we’re getting some traffic, engagement. What’s next? 

PC:  Yeah. So, once you’re really getting some traffic, you get the foundation set. The next thing is part of the foundation is to really get your SEO set, you know, and that’s your search engine optimization. That goes back to the platforms that we really focus on are called problem-solving platforms. Like, that’s where you’re going to find somebody that’s more of a quality potential lead. Whereas, again, we’re going to talk about social media, but it’s not till the very end, because everybody starts there. That’s not where somebody that’s got $100,000 ready to spend. They’re not hanging out on TikTok. 

These are people that are going to, you’re going to find through other avenues that are on YouTube, that are actively researching “how do I invest in real estate?” Or “how do I make more return on my investment?” These are people on Google, these are people that are on Pinterest. These are platforms where there’s really good information that can be said, but they’re searching for it. And so we liken it to, I would rather have somebody that’s searching for us than somebody that stumbles across us. And on social media, they stumble across your content, they stumble into your content. But on Google and on YouTube, they’re searching for you. So, we establish your SEO and that comes from doing your keyword research properly. And the simplest way to do that, and Shreya, will let you kind of share, is with Google and YouTube because they have the tools to do the keyword research.

SB:  Exactly. It’s super simple because they have this feature, and we’ve all done it, we just never thought about it this way. The auto-suggest feature where you start typing and it tells you what people are searching for and those are the keywords that you want to focus on. And we call them problem-solving platforms ’cause if you think about it, anytime you have a problem, those are the two platforms you probably go to to find an answer. You don’t log on to Facebook and say, let me scroll through this and see if I can find a solution to my problem. Now, you might say that to your phone five times, it might give you an ad on that. But, the first place you go to logically is Google and YouTube. So that’s where your investors are gonna go to to learn more about and how they can invest more.

PC:  Yeah, you just use the auto-suggest for the keyword ideas. So sorry, go ahead.

WS:  No, that’s interesting. You’re talking about say that to your phone five times and all of a sudden it pops up. That’s kind of scary, right? We’re being listened to that much but no doubt, like what you said too, Paul, you said, I’d rather have someone searching for us versus someone stumbling upon us. Definitely different lead, right?

PC:  Way different, way different lead when they’re actually actively seeking you out. And at that point, once they get to your website, because you’ve done your SEO, and you’ve optimized yourself, and you’ve put out good content on YouTube and other things, that’s where having social media fits in really well. Because that’s where people are going to go to your website, they’re gonna naturally click on your social media, they’re gonna see the content that you’ve posted for the last five months, five, you know, they’re gonna start to see that show up. They’re gonna start to follow you, they’re gonna start to engage with you. And you know, instead of the other way around, a lot of times, syndicators feel like they want to get that mindset of like, let’s hit them on social media. But then that’s a longer path to get them to become a potential investor. Yeah, that’s a very long path.

SB:  And the engagement is slow.  The engagement is slow if you go that way because people think that you’re scamming them. Or, you know, why do you keep messaging the same thing? Versus if they, you answered them, they were looking for something, you answer their question. They’re coming from Google, they’re coming from YouTube. And then they connect with you on social media, they’ll say, okay, this person is helpful. I want to follow it, I’m gonna put good comments on there. I’m gonna like their posts or put comments on there, engagement is much different.

WS:  Speak to getting them, again, I just want to highlight getting them to search for us versus stumbling upon us, like, how do we get them to do that?

PC: It’s always gonna start with the keywords, that’s the starting point. Understanding what your audience is looking for is the number one thing. And again, go to Google. I’ll tell you, I’ll tell everybody a simple tip here too. Everybody who has a website that’s listening to this, go pull up your website in a browser, and look at the browser tab, which is directly above where the address bar is, and just put your mouse over it and see what you see show up there. And a lot of cases, a lot of cases, businesses will, it will say “home”, or it will say “about us”, or it will say their business name. And that’s it, or it says their name up at the top. And that’s the title tag. That’s the number one most important thing that’s kind of like, if you’re writing a report for school, the first thing you’re going to title is, you’re going to title your article that you’re writing for school or your paper. And so you’re going to put the title at the top. You have to tell Google, what is your page about. 

So, a lot of times we go to website and we see our business name, we see our personal name, that only works if you’re a household name and you’re a larger brand. As a syndicator, you’re starting out in your region, you need to put in things like “Dallas Texas Multifamily”, “Dallas Texas Multifamily Investment Properties”. Those types of keywords that are going to get people to find you. So, think about geographically, what area, what region are you focused around. So let’s say you’re in the Tampa Bay market, you know. You’d put “Tampa Bay Real Estate Investment Opportunities” or something. So, you’d come up with those keyword parameters. Obviously, Google is going to tell you what people are searching for, because you just type into Google, Tampa Bay Real Estate Invest. And all of a sudden, Google’s gonna say here’s 10 other suggested keyword phrases. And if you go to the search results, and you scroll to the very bottom, there’s actually a nice section down there at the very bottom of the search results that actually says “people also searched for” and they list out all these keywords. That’s Google telling you, the business owner, they’re telling their users this is what people also searched for. But they’re also telling as a business owner, that’s where you pick up that info and say, oh, people are also looking up St. Petersburg real estate and that’s got a lot more traction or something, you know. 

So, those are the free ways to find keywords. We use a tool called Semrush to help us automate that because every business has tools. But you know, for those that are doing this, just to get going, Google. Google is gonna be your friend there. It’s going to tell you everything you need to go. Now, Google and YouTube, they do the exact same thing. And they’ll tell you what topics people want to know about.

WS:  What did you say to hover over?

PC:  So, you’re gonna hover over the browser tab in the top.

 

SB:  The top tab. 

PC: Yep. It’ll have your little icon on it. It’ll have your business devicon.

WS:  Yeah, alright. I just want to make sure I understood that and that listeners did as well. Interesting, keywords, so important. And I guess too, you know, even as we think about, you know, strategies to move forward, like we’re taking all that into account. All these keywords and what we’re learning, go ahead.

SB: Every page on your website can have a different keyword. So, not just your front page, but your “about page” shouldn’t just say “about”, it should have a different keyword that you can start driving traffic to. So, every single page can have a different keyword that you’re driving traffic from.

PC: And that would be niche specific, too. So, you know, sometimes it can be tempting to say, I’m going to do multifamily apartment investing. Well, that’s competitive. Think about the region you’re in, and geographic go that way. Because a serious investor, they’re gonna be like, hey, I want to invest in Texas. I want to invest in Arizona, whatever it is. They might be in that region. They might have heard something about it, whatever the case may be, but they’re going to look up Santa Fe New Mexico multifamily investing, That’s very SEO. If that’s your region, put that. Don’t try to bring the whole, the US together. Start small because SEO is a game where you have to have those micro victories. You’re not going to rank for real estate investing like out of the gate. Like, you may be able to, Whitney because you have such a huge amount of content and things, but somebody brand new will not.

SB: But the best results also come from those specific ones because they know exactly what they’re looking for, and they’re ready to invest versus someone who’s just diving into and trying to learn a little bit more,

WS:  I would imagine that’s typically gonna be your bigger investor, as well as more experienced investor. They know they want to invest in the west or in the east or whatever, especially if it’s state-specific or market-specific like you’re talking about. Alright, so what are some other strategies that we need to know? What will we be next?

PC:  Yeah, absolutely. So, the other one is to understand and harness the power of repurposing content. So really, what that means is, anytime you are doing an interview, anytime you’re out there, like, one of the things we share with our people that we work with in this space, is we tell them,  talk for, riff for 20 minutes on your industry, and what it is that you’re talking about. Pull up a video, pull up a Zoom meeting, and just talk. And then talk about your market, talk about why they should invest in that region. And then we use a tool called Temi, T-E-M-I, to transcribe it. Zoom now does transcriptions. We’re transcribing right now. So, that’s an idea and you take that transcription, and then, you have somebody edit it or you edit it yourself, or somebody on your team can edit it. And then that becomes a 20-minute conversation which could easily become three to four different articles on your website. 

You can pull up those ideas if you’re struggling with, well, what do I talk about? That’s great, what do I talk about? Google. Go back to what Google just told you. Here’s the 10 keywords. There’s your next 10 short little videos. And now those videos go up on YouTube, those videos are optimized for your keyword, and then they’re on your website. And then you embed that video onto your website as well, because Google loves that videos as well. Now you’re having two different platforms, then you make a nice picture in Canva. Canva has tons of templates. And then now you can have that put out on Pinterest. Pinterest is another problem-solving platform. So, now you’ve got three different sources of content. And then Shreya, what’s the other thing we do? Talk about the tool we use for social media videos. 

SB:  Yeah, we use this tool called Headliner, headliner.app. And it creates amazing videos like Gary Vee, or you know, like really cool videos that you put the sound waves on, or it puts the caption on while you’re talking and auto-generates the captions as well. So, it’s really cool, you know, one of those cheap tools that will become a very good tool in your tool set of social marketing. 

PC:  Yeah. You take the long videos and cut them up into short, 60-second sound bites is what we’re saying. Headliner does all that for you, automates that process, makes it very easy.

SB:  One thing I wanted to add to that was to work toward your strengths. I always say you know, focus on your strengths and manage your weaknesses. So if you’re not a video person, write it. There’s so many tools to change the way you’re providing information. If you’re a video person, sit in front of a camera and talk. If you are a writer, then write and type it out and someone else can create a video with stock videos behind it, with your stuff on it right? If you’re an audio person, talk. But don’t be afraid and don’t hold yourself back. Because you’re like, I don’t want to be in front of a camera. There are ways to repurpose that content, but do whatever feels natural to you.

WS:  So, not everyone should start a daily podcast, is that what you’re saying? Just kidding. I wouldn’t recommend it to most. So, no, that’s good. And so a couple questions for you. Before we run out of time, I want us to, a couple of things. How many do you work with? How many syndication companies or operators that you are helping? You know, somebody in house is helping with marketing too or is most hiring out? You know, third party like yourself? Are you mostly consulting with somebody that’s working in-house on marketing with groups? How do you see that work the best?

PC: Yeah, it’s kind of been a mixture. So we’ve had both where they had larger teams of people. So, we actually helped them kind of harness that internal team that was kind of doing marketing. In some cases, you know, that it worked well, where we actually steered them in the right direction, provided that strategy. And then a lot of cases though, they weren’t doing any marketing, other than they had a website, They’re like, we have a website, we don’t know what to do. And they had no team dedicated to marketing. So we actually help them hire a team. And we use Upwork for that. So, we go out, we place people in, you know, that do specific tasks. And I’ll let Shreya speak to how we hire those teams, because that, to me, is very unique. And a lot of people want to find that unicorn employee or that unicorn VA and they just don’t exist. So, I’ll let her share kind of the way we do it.

SB: Don’t fall for the $8, $5 VA trick. Just don’t do it. The way we structure our teams, it’s more of the Toyota car-making way where each person is very specialized in putting a door on or doing I mean, I come from a manufacturing background, right? So that’s how the team is structured where if you’re hiring a social media person and let them just do that, if you’re hiring a person to write an article, hire them just to do that. That way you’re not spending time to train them. They already know. You can tell them and give them guidance, but they know the basic task rather than hiring that one person who, you know, knows everything, and we call them a unicorn employee. And a lot of people also get stuck up on having a full-time person. We promote FTE, which is Foundation, Traffic, Engagement, but we don’t promote full-time employee because it is a gig economy, you got to start thinking that way. And if you hire like five people that are super-trained and good, maybe the cost might be a little bit higher, but they will get the job much faster, done much faster, rather than having somebody who you know, is that person that’s not trained, that $5-employee.

PC:  It’s the way to go. Yeah, it really is the way to go. And the biggest mistake we’ve seen, and we’ve witnessed this with syndicators, where they go to one of those jack-of-all-trades type VA companies. And because they’re like, alright, I need help. And those companies force you into 20 hours a week, well, those VAs are not trained. They’re just, you know, and there’s nothing wrong with that, like, they can do some work for you. But they’re not going to be able to do specialized tasks. So we say, okay, we just talked about SEO, go out on Upwork and look for somebody that does SEO. They will do that for you for $10, $15 an hour. And that’s all they’re going to do, they’re not going to do everything else. So and a lot of times you’ll get caught up and like Shreya was talking about that $5 to $8 an hour and it’s like a badge of honor, like my VA’s $8 an hour like, no, it’s, that’s okay, like, it’s okay to have VA’s that are slightly more expensive, because if they’re good at what they do, you’re not going to spend that much time, you know. 

And then go hire that video editor. Like we have somebody that for about $15 an hour putting together incredible videos for one of our syndicators. I mean, just awesome highlight videos where, you know, they did an open house at one of their areas, and they had drone footage and all this other stuff. They made it look incredible, they took it and just made it to these short highlight videos. Well, you’re not going to find that with a traditional VA. So you need to really look at that specialization when you’re hiring. And a lot of times these people work five hours a week, that’s the max. And so yeah, we might be getting 20 hours a week, but we’re getting five hours a week out of four people that are very specialized so they’re good at what they do.

WS:  It’s very different when you have somebody that loves what they do. And they’re very focused on this thing that they’re really good at and love what they do. No doubt about it. That’s the way we’ve grown, not marketing as much. But I just mean the business, right? It’s like finding people that are better at the things when I was doing everything. Well, I had to find people that were better at all these things. And now they’re all doing it better than I was doing it or ever could have done those things that they’re good at, you know, so no doubt. So, very similar technique and love that. So what about, you know, somebody’s on unlimited budget ’cause I know some of the listeners are getting started. And they’re thinking about, they got maybe a few $1,000 to get marketing started. Maybe give them just real quick, best way to allocate that.

PC:  Yeah, absolutely. So I would say something like, the quickest things they’re gonna want to do is make sure that they invest in a website, if they have not yet. And as far as like, the website goes itself, you don’t have to get crazy. Like you can use Bluehost as a web hosting company. They provide you a very simple website, using you know, for $65 for a year, you can get your domain for another $20, there’s 80 bucks. Now you’ve got your domain, your website set for a year. Go find yourself a premium WordPress theme for free, it won’t cost you anything, install it and then watch the tutorial videos on how to do it, if you want to do it yourself. If you want to outsource it, go out to Upwork or Fiverr and say, I want to install a WordPress site and I want it customized. Usually for $100, $200, you’ll get somebody that will do that for you. So, your website is set, your foundation would be set meaning like you’re gonna have to put some effort in and write content, but that’s you know, that’s about it. Then your website’s can be set, you only need three to four pages to get going. You don’t need tons of stuff right out of the gate. So, start there. 

PC:  We recommend a tool called AWeber, which we use to capture emails. It’s free to get started, your first 500 subscribers are free. So, there’s no excuse not to get started with that, won’t cost you anything. So, AWeber’s an awesome tool. Then from there, now you’ve got your foundation set. And then as far as traffic goes, I would invest a little bit into somebody that is going to do your SEO, and, or you do it yourself. But invest a little bit because that’s a long-term game. SEO will not benefit you next week, two months from now. It will benefit you six months from now, a year from now, two years from now. That’s what we love about SEO though is, you do the change now, it’s going to impact your business for a long time in Google. And that means it’s traffic you’re not paying for. So you need to hire that person that’s going to do your initial keyword research. Or you can do it yourself following what we just taught. Get that part done, then go invest some time into jumping on Zoom, invest in Zoom, if you don’t have it yet, and do some recordings. That’s gonna be a simple way to go. Now you’ve got your video, now your videos are done. 

PC:  And now from there, start going out there. And just like if you’re going to invest in any kind of advertising, like I would go towards Google ads. I would be very specific because Google ads is people actually searching for it. I would not try to go the route of Facebook ads right out of the gate. Targeting is very difficult on Facebook, it’s very expensive, especially for somebody brand new. And Facebook’s, they have the iOS update that hit, there’s all these things where you can’t target like you used to target. They’re very much against real estate. So we say, focus, if you’re gonna focus on any ad spend, spend a few $100 on Google ads, and Bing Ads. That’s going to drive you some different leads. And typically Google and Bing Ads together, they both have promotions running where you’ll get $500 free, you’ll get $200 free ad credit. So you can kind of get started on the cheap that way. 

PC:  So, those would be some of the things that I would focus on. And anybody listening, that is, let’s say, not necessarily a syndicator. But let’s say you have storage units, you have facility, you have local business concerns, like let’s say you have real estate apartments that you’re trying to lease or something, set up a Google business profile. Like that’s going to be the best thing you could do for your business. Set up a Google business profile, absolutely free. If there’s a spot to put an information, put in information. Like I mean, it’s pretty basic, but pictures, updates, those kinds of things. So hopefully, that kind of gives them an idea of what to go with, you can do all that for under a thousand bucks that I just talked about. It’s just a little bit of elbow grease. 

WS:  I wish somebody had told me that a number of years ago, you know, like getting started and thinking through some of this marketing stuff. And just some basic steps like that to focus on at least. You just have, felt like, you have nowhere to go, you don’t know what direction to go in, especially in the beginning, even sometimes years in and on the marketing side, still don’t know what direction to go in. And so, you need somebody you know, like yourself on your team. Well, Paul and Shreya, what are some of the most important metrics that you track? And I would say that can be personally or professionally or specific to marketing?

PC:  Yeah, Shreya, do you want to cover that?

SB:  Oh, if you’re running ads, right, we definitely look at the conversion. And we look at the click-through rate. So a lot of people, when they run ads, they look at impression numbers. And a lot of agencies that do promote, they say, hey, look, we can give you you know, half a million impressions and people get so excited about that impression. All it means is, someone saw your ad, doesn’t mean they clicked on it, doesn’t mean they interacted with it. So don’t fall for that trap, look through the click-through rate. We’ve done this with insurance agents quite a bit, you know, where their cost of a click is $200 to $300 a click.

PC: For one click.

SB: For one click and that doesn’t even mean that they became a customer. They just clicked on the ad. So, be careful when you’re hiring out and getting somebody to do the ad, that you’re focusing on the click-through rate. And then you’re also focusing on the conversion engagement. Just because you have a page doesn’t mean you can’t move things around, change your headline, change the call-to-action button on your website. So look through all of those things through that.

PC:  Yeah, conversions are number one, paramount and all the time.

WS: What are some daily habits that you all are disciplined about that have produced the highest return for you?

PC:  I love it. The daily habit on our side is tweaking, constantly tweaking and looking at running split tests, that’s a big one. So you can go as complex as I’ll give a tool that we use that we, it’s kind of our secret tool that we use, it’s called in Spec Lead. And it’s a free tool for your first 2000 subscribers, you can actually install it on your website. And it actually records a video of the website visitors. And actually, well not them on their screen, but it shows their screen of what they’re doing. And you actually see how they’re interacting with your website. So, we look at things like that, that’s probably one of the best things we do is we watch some of those videos so we see where they’re stopping, where are they exiting our page from. So you can see like how far they scrolled down, you can see the hotspots, all that stuff. And it’ll record up to like 2000 sessions a month which nobody has time to watch that. 

SB:  Per month. So that’s plenty of data to go off.

PC:  And then from there, we’ll tweak things. So we’re constantly in the habit of like, okay, how can we make this ad better? Okay, can we add in a better headline? Or how can we make our landing page better, like Shreya was referencing like, tweaking the headline, because small tweaks, like we just did a tweak on one of our pages recently, 10% increase, you know, in, you know, as a 10% increase in conversions, from 20% to 30%, on and opt in form. That’s a big difference, if you’re running ads.

SB:  I will say that so the conversion industry standard is about 20% in this particular market that we were in. So, we could have just been like, we’re industry standard, we’re happy. But we do make those changes, we jumped it up to 30, which is, if you look at any emailing software, I actually did this search for it, where they say it’s an amazing thing if you ever make it at 30, you’re like a king of you know. That made me feel very happy because of the changes that we did make because it was an easy change once you track and once you see what can be tweaked.

PC:  Yeah. And it’s really knowing your audience and we really talk about. If there’s one exercise somebody could take away from this, even if it’s not even the SEO but the one thing we teach we call your customer avatar, like just ask yourself a couple of basic questions and we go through this exercise with the syndicators we work with. It’s you know, Who is your demographic? Who is your demographic? Who are you trying to reach? What are their likes? What podcasts do they listen to? What shows do they listen to? Where do they shop?

SB:  Yeah. And it’s okay to have multiple avatars. But you can name them. Like, you can say this person is, you know, Susie, and this person is Sally. Like, it’s okay to have both or, you know, Mark, like, it’s okay to have three. But when you’re talking to them, you’re talking directly to Susie, right? Which Mark won’t relate to. But when you’re talking to Mark, you’re talking directly to Mark. Conversions make it really go high up when you’re talking directly to Mark.

PC:  And we know in this space, you can have very different demographics, right, that you’re reaching. 

WS:  No doubt. Now, that’s incredible. I love the constantly: Yeah, just any way tweaking, you gotta be.  You gotta be constantly looking at your numbers, what’s working, what’s not. Figure that out, and just that you’re tracking it, right? You gotta be tracking it, or else you can’t even do that. How do you like to give back? 

PC:  You know, you mean, like, oh, give back as in the world?

WS: Just anyway.

SB:  We’re teachers at heart. And we love to give back with, you know, teaching students. So, we have a curriculum in high school where we do, when actually COVID hit, we actually went into the schools and did a Marketing Counts Challenge, where the kids went out and looked, reached out to local businesses that were struggling at that point and brought them online, and how do we get them, same similar topics that we’re talking about today. But we love to teach because we’ve noticed that when we hire people, because we do place people in marketing teams, even when they’re coming out of college, college doesn’t teach you the day-to-day marketing stuff that we do. They teach you the overall concept, right? So if we can give back and teach entrepreneurs, business owners, even students, and if they can take advantage of it, if they can make a side hustle out of it, like the college students, actually the one of the high school kid, they made it a summer business of what they learned from us, that brings us so much joy to hear those stories where things worked and clicked and they ran with it. 

WS: That’s awesome. I’d like to have one of those people myself. Guys, Paul, Shreya, grateful to have you on the show. Pleasure to meet you and just walk through some, some really good marketing stuff. I feel like I wish I had known many years ago, right? And even now, I still need to be working on many of these things that you mentioned, that we’ve not honed in on, we’ve not tracked well enough, or we’ve not pivoted and seen what happened and going back and change things to see what’s working. So this is good for us. Great for our team here. And you’ve mentioned so many great things that we can even implement right away. Tell the listeners though, how they can get in touch with you and learn more about you.

PC: Yeah, definitely, if they want to just email us at [email protected]. That’s probably the easiest way to get us and we’ll give you the marketing plan that we actually share with our syndicators. We’ll just send that over to you via email. So, if they want to do that, they can email us at [email protected] and we actually have this, it’s all laid out on a one sheet and it’s kind of the entire strategy that we lay out, so we’d be happy to share that.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[OUTRO]

Whitney Sewell (WS): Thank you for being with us again today, I hope that you have learned a lot from the show. Don’t forget to like and subscribe. I hope you’re telling your friends about the Real Estate Syndication Show and how they can also build wealth in real estate. You can also go to LifeBridgeCapital.com and start investing today.

[END]