Death of Direct Mail...Birth to Digital Marketing (Part II)

[Omar Ruiz]

About 9 months ago, I created a post on BiggerPockets (for those who are interested, check out the post) around how I was choosing to stop this romance with offline marketing (i.e. direct mail, driving for dollars, door knocking, etc.) so as to venture into online markering. Since then, here is what I learned:

• Regardless if you choose offline or online (i.e. website, Facebook Ads, Google Ads, etc) marketing, you are going to need a good size budget ($) to fund your efforts.
• You can build a website for free, invest in a real estate investor customized site (LeadPropellor or OnCarrot), create a personal (professionally designed) site, or just pay for a lead generation site. It all does not matter unless you have a marketing plan that will guarantee that people will not only visit your site, but also convert. 
• You are going to need to build a team and you are going to need to pay them (i.e. Bird Dogs, Acquistion Manager, Virtual Assistant, SEO consultant or Social Media Marketers, etc) in order to see progress over time, based on your marketing efforts.

My questions to the BiggerPockets community are...What keeps you going? What are you doing that allows your business, of real estate investing/marketing, to be successful in the way it is successful to you? How are you investing your money, back into the business, so that you are not running out of funds too quickly? 

[Irina Belkofer]

@Omar Ruiz all these new strategies are interesting and sound fancy but until you close any deals, you can't compare the impact of each strategy.

Let's say, a year ago (13 months to be precise) I mailed 30 letters to absentee homeowners.

As for now, I've sold 2 houses from that mailing and one is still listed for sale. When I compare with my other strategies (mailing to different groups of potential clients), this one gave me the best return on investment of my time and money (whole $25-30 worth).

So, when I divide the commissions I made by $25 invested in that particular are and few hours of my own time to get precise list by my criteria of these 30 addressees, it's huge amount in %%, like $7K/$100=7,000%

When you divide $0 closed deals by your expenses on SEO, web site (time) etc - it's still zero.

When you're creating a new system, don't dispose that one which brings you money already. Because these few hours (2-3) was the only time to bring me clients.....in this particular case.

Unless people called you and you turned them down because you have to go to the gym.

All that fancy talk is cheap until you can show some money to support it....just saying