Building a Marketing Machine – Part 3, Online/Social Media
With nearly 87% of the US population using the internet, it’s no surprise that this is a great way to market for deals. Even if you’re not necessarily tech savvy, there are many things you can do to find leads online. Today’s post will focus on how to use the wonderful world wide web to your advantage. Because there are so many ways to find or market for deals, I’ll break things down into 4 categories. I’ll also include a list of resources for each to help you get started on any of the items discussed (please feel free to add any that I may have missed in the comments section!).
1) Websites
Creating a website is a great way to gain visibility, find leads, and build trust among home sellers. In today’s connected world, it’s important to be able to look up a company online who you are considering doing business with. I’ve had many home sellers call me after sending them direct mail and tell me they decided to call after they had checked out my website. More and more Internet companies are offering products that make it easy for anyone to design their own website. However, if building your own website is still not something you feel comfortable with, a great alternative is to find someone to create it for you. I’ve included some freelance websites below where you can hire someone to build a site for you. I’ve had sites built for under $100 so it certainly doesn’t have to be a large investment.
There are several types of websites that you can create, including a business website, squeeze page or blog. Each has a specific purpose and should be created with different approaches.
A business website should have a professional feel to it and answer some key questions for your potential customer: Who are you?, What does your company do?, How can you help? and How can you be contacted?. Be sure to include a contact form right on the website so potential sellers or other professionals will know exactly how to reach you. A business website should address any and everyone you want to work with such as wholesalers, rehabbers, builders, contractors, and/or private money lenders. That may seem like a lot, and it is, but remember to keep things simple. It’s important that the website is easy to navigate and does not confuse people with mixed messages. As an example, here’s my business page – www.js2homes.com. Once you have your business page up and running, you can include the website on your business cards, direct mail, and drive people to your website through paid or non-paid online marketing (I’ll get into this below).
A squeeze page, or landing page, is a website that consists of one or more pages with its sole objective to get visitors to fill out an online form. You may be wondering why this is important…well, any time you have a potential seller’s contact information, the ball is in your court. Instead of waiting for someone to contact you, you are able to reach out to them. These types of websites have become much more common over the last couple of years and work quite well when you give the reader a reason to put their information into the contact form. That’s the big key to these websites – you need to create an excellent hook! These websites are specifically created for home sellers, so you can write the website speaking directly to them. The closer you can speak to the reader’s situation, the better the chance of getting them to fill out the form. I’ve seen some investors create one squeeze page for each reason that a homeowner may be selling – a great strategy, but not always necessary. Some examples of a great “hook” to get your reader to fill out the form: send them an article that solves their problem (selling a house), tell them they’ll get a no-obligation offer on their house once the form is completed, or send them a video explaining how your home buying process works. Here are two of my squeeze pages – www.selltojs2homes.com andwww.webuyhousesinma.com.
A blog is another form of a website. And, well… you happen to be on one right now! Obviously, this blog is designed for other real estate investors or anyone else who wants to learn about my investing journey, but you can easily tailor a blog to home sellers. Actually, you can include a blog as part of your business website as I’ve done here – www.js2homes.com/blog/. Blogs help your readers feel like they are getting an inside look at your business and create a sense of community. If you continually share great information, people will view you as an authority and a legitimate home buyer, which will ultimately build trust. Additionally, blogs are a great way to get ranked in online search engines like Google. Ranking refers to where your website lands on the list of websites when part of a Google search. For example, if you do a search for “Sell My Home” and your website is shown on the first page, this would mean that your website is highly ranked for those keywords.
Freelance Websites – Elance & Upwork
Website Hosting – JustHost
Domain Names – GoDaddy
Website Platform – WordPress
2) Social Media
Most people these days are familiar with social media avenues such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, etc. Each of these platforms have millions of users, and that alone makes them a powerful way to interact with potential home sellers. All of these are free to use and allow members to create personal profiles as well as business profiles. You can easily link any website (like your business website, squeeze page or blog) to your Facebook page which allows your potential customers to interact with you directly. If you do create a Business Page on Facebook, I would recommend that you post content that is educational to convey a feeling of trust and professionalism to your readers. Other ways to interact with sellers are to join local Community Pages on various social networking sites and become active in sharing ideas and commenting on other people’s posts. It’s also a great idea to join real estate investor Pages in order to communicate with other investors and potentially come across wholesale deals in your area. From my experience the more you post, the more attention you’ll get (as long as you are posting value add information). And the more attention you get, the larger your network will become, creating a much larger reach within your community.
Social Networks – Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram
3) Listing Services
Listing services, or classifieds allow you to search for home sellers or companies that have placed an ad to sell a house. Listing websites can range from free local classified ads to actual bidding websites where you can purchase a house with the click of a button…ok, maybe it’s a little bit more involved than that. Some of these websites also allow you to post “We Buy Houses” ads or the like. If a home seller has posted the actual ad, then because there is no real estate agent involved, it’s really easy to connect with them directly to learn more about the property. Also, it’s likely that home sellers who place ads on these websites don’t list their property on the market which significantly reduces your competition. Many people have had success buying directly from home sellers or through Auction websites.
Craigslist – Free classified website
Ebay Classifieds – Free classified website
Hubzu – Real estate marketplace, including Bank Auctions
Auction – Real estate marketplace, including Auctions
Bid4Assets – Auctions
Treasury – Government real estate auctions
Owners – for sale by owner
ForSaleByOwner – self explanatory
4) Paid Marketing
The last piece that I’ll touch on is paid online marketing. This is when you pay a company to help you promote your business by getting your business’ name in front of your target audience. If you’re not too familiar with how websites and the internet works behind the scenes you may be wondering why you need to pay someone to get people to visit your website. While social media and networking websites are a great way to get in front of people, there will always be more leads to reach. Even though you create a website, people need a way to find it. For instance, say you are searching for a product but don’t know where to look, what do you do? Most likely you’d ask Mr. Google. When you do this, Google will crawl all the websites that are registered with it and identify which website it believes to be the most relevant to the keywords that you entered. And while nobody really knows how Google “Ranks” each website, there are things you can do to increase your website’s Ranking so it lands on the first page.
Search Engine Optimization (“SEO”) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website in a search engine’s listed results. I don’t want to get too technical here but basically, there are strategies that people can employ on your website so your website shows up on the first page when people enter in specific keywords. For instance, if you want to get in front of people who have an inherited property they need to sell, you can pay someone to optimize your website so when someone types in “Sell my inherited house”, your website will pop up first.
Another way to gain visibility is by using Google AdWords or the like. This is a method where you can bid on a keyword or keywords with the hope of showing up on the paid ads section of Google. Going back to the example of “Sell my inherited house” you would put a price on how much you want to spend every time someone clicks on your ad to get to your website. Similarly, Facebook ads, which are cheaper than Google AdWords do the same thing but only within the Facebook network. Setting up Facebook ads is much easier than Google AdWords and they get pretty good results if done correctly.
Finally, the method that I have yet to try but will likely start soon is Interest-Based Advertising. This is an advertising program which selectively displays ads based on a person’s browsing history. To put this in an example, say you’ve been looking for Office Desks online and later in the day, you are scrolling through your Facebook feed. Well, the ads that are selected to display on your screen will likely be Office Desks. Pretty cool, huh? You can apply this methodology in finding home sellers so when they are searching for “Sell my Inherited Home” and go into a website that allows interest-based advertising, your ad will pop up.
Well, that pretty much sums up internet/social media. I do want to mention that I am NOT affiliated with any of the websites that I linked to above.
I’m interested to hear which methods of internet marketing you’re using and how successful you’ve been with them. Let’s chat in the comments below.
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