Website marketing strategies (Investor Carrot vs M5 vs DIY)

[Darrell Calotes]

Good Morning Investors:

I'm a professional in NYC making the push from newbie to actual investor/entrepreneur. Regarding online marketing, can anyone share their own experience with creating seller/buyer marketing websites? While clearly you can do it yourself (setup, design, lead pages and generation, search engine optimization, auto-email response), this is a lot of work. There are professional companies like Investor Carrot, M5 (Clever Investor), and Lead Propeller that advertise "turnkey" online marketing setup specifically for REIs, however, information and visibility on success rates, demos, and reviews are sorely lacking.

• Has anyone implemented their REI online marketing presence with either of these three companies? If so, can you please comment on your experience (i.e. lead generation metrics, quality of product/service, worth the $$$)?
• Has anyone created their own online presence a la carte using Wordpress, Mailchimp, etc effectively? Is the effort to DIY proportional to your other marketing efforts and spending time concentrating on finding investment deals?
• Advice and suggestions? 

Final note: I've searched fairly extensively online for investor websites in the regions I plan to invest in to see how others are doing it and it's apparent that many sites either use the same exact lead page template or don't maintain their websites. It looks spammy/scammy... a possible turn off to sellers/buyers. I'm wondering if there is a point of diminishing returns; in other words, does spending money to make an attractive and solid online presence produce leads (and deals) effectively in real life, and does working with these special turn-key website creators enhance that?

Many thanks,

Darrell