![](https://biggerpockets.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/member-blog-image.jpg)
![](https://biggerpockets.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/logo@3x.png)
Making Sense of Advertising for Private Money – Part 1 – Paper and Ink
Sometimes there just doesn’t seem to be enough time in the day.
You know what I mean?
As long as the technology conveyor belt keeps speeding up, accelerating us to the space age of George Jetson, they might as well get a move on this robot-worker thing. I’m waiting for my bebop assistant to handle all the little things that creep up and consume time in my day.
You probably feel the same way. Never enough time to get things done.
Especially your private money marketing.
After all, you’re looking at deals, talking to contractors, brokers, etc. Doing the email and phone call thing.
Where does it all go?
Since you’re an entrepreneur you’re naturally a problem solver. And, with there being no time to get your private money marketing done, why not just be more efficient and…
Run and Ad in the newspaper!
Wow! This is great. You can pay a few hundred (or thousand) bucks and get your ad in front of a lots of people, some of which are sure to have lots of idle cash sitting around and will jump at your opportunity to place their funds.
Oh, the genius!
So, you draw up a basic advertisement. Quarter page. “Earn 10% secured on your money.” You’re pretty sure your phone is going to blow up, so you set up a voice mail box to take the calls. You send in your check to the newspaper and sit back and wait for the cash to come rolling in.
You pick up the paper on the day your ad runs. Now, it’s time for action. And then…
Silence.
Crickets chirping.
Then, a phone call. Your voice message lights up. Suddenly more calls come in.
Dang it- YOU WERE RIGHT…THIS IS GENIUS.
Throughout that day and the next, you get quite a few calls from your ad. You can’t wait to rake in all of that private investor cash. You’re going to be rich in no time flat. Fiji, here you come. Move over Tony Robbins.
So you start going through the voicemails. And, you start to get a little agitated. Seems like a lot of the people that called didn’t really know what they were calling about. They thought you were a bank or that they owed you money or something. Oh well, I guess that happens when you’re dealing with the general public. There’s still quite a few more calls to go through. You continue.
The next few messages you get don’t make you very happy, either. You call some of those people back and they want to invest $500 or $1,000. That sure won’t work for a $250,000 investment property. You would need 250 of those people! Ok, so you press on.
The remaining messages you get are from people who want to know more information about your program – and then they find out that it’s about investing in real estate, and they lose interest. They don’t like the thought of real estate, since their stockbroker told them the market was up 60% last year. They also felt misled because you advertised the returns as ’secured.’ They’re not really sure what that means, so they tell you to just send them some information to evaluate.
“That can’t be right,” you think to yourself. “My phone rang a lot, I should have at least $100k lined up by now.” Sure, in a perfect world that’s what would happen. But what you’ve just experienced is an example of ‘non-targeted’ marketing.
But All the Other Kids are Doing it!
Just because the financial planners and insurance companies advertise their products/services in the daily newspapers doesn’t mean you should as well. After all, they’re going to make money on that mere $1,000 investment, and you are not.
Maybe you heard about other real estate investors doing this in different parts of the country. They thought it was a good idea too. But, you never saw their results or new how much private money they got from running the ads.
It’s usually a bad idea to make business decisions which aren’t based on results.
Ok, live and learn. Maybe re-tool the advertisement and put a better response sequence in. But then you get…
The Strangest Call of All
A voicemail is left by somebody from your state securities regulator. Seems they want to know more information about your securities offering, your entire operation. They are polite but stern.
Now, you’re concerned.
Seems that you may be in violation of some securities laws. You see, typically, you aren’t allowed to advertise your securities offering to the general public unless it’s a “public offering.”
Oops.
Pressing Onward
Now, we can see that non-targeted marketing isn’t the best and newspaper advertising is usually not worth the paper and ink it appears on.
We’re going to cover this more in depth coming up. In the meanwhile…
Happy Investing.
Comments