@Leah Bonner I do PPC for investors professionally, so please take what I say with a grain of salt. here's my take on the differences between SEO, PPC, and Direct Mail.
DIRECT MAIL
Direct Mail has long been the workhorse of motivated seller lead generation. There's a reason that nearly every REI coach/guru teaches direct mail - it works, and has worked, for decades.
Direct mail has two primary strengths: list selection and affordability.
List selection allows you to know, for example, that everyone getting your pieces has a property in probate, or that everyone has a certain amount of equity. That's INCREDIBLY powerful, and allows you to fine-tune your marketing.
Affordability simply comes down to the fact that it's cheaper to send out direct mail pieces than it is to do nearly anything - and if you're outsourcing, it takes very little time (though many investors hand-write their letters, which obviously negates that last point).
Direct mail also has two primary weaknesses: low response rate and low barrier to entry.
Direct mail typically has a low response rate, with anything over a 1% response being considered quite good on a national level. DM also typically has a lower conversion rate of leads to deals, the national average probably being about 30 leads needed for every property put under contract.
The caveat to this is that your list selection affects this quite a bit; I spoke with an investor the other day that gets a 40% response rate on his mailings (hand-written, to a well-maintained list). That's quite rare, however, at least in my experience.
A low barrier to entry means that markets with a lot of other investors are often saturated with direct mail. Often, multiple investors are sending out the exact same mailings they got from their instructors, and potential sellers will sometimes have whole stacks of postcards on their desks by the time they call you (if they do). I've noticed a real uptick in complaints about this lately, but that's purely anecdotal.
PPC
PPC, or pay-per-click online advertising, is the newer kid on the block, although it's been growing quite a bit due to some prominent adopters (notably Sean Terry, the guys at We Buy Houses, etc).
PPC has two fundamental strengths: speed and objectivity.
PPC is one of the fastest marketing channels there is, and it's raw speed allows you to launch into entirely new markets in around ten minutes or so. There's also a great deal of velocity in getting your first leads in the door; if you have some knowledge, you can start generating motivated seller leads within an hour or so of launching your campaigns.
PPC's objectivity comes from the huge amount of data it generates; once you've run for a bit, you can tell which keywords generated your leads, what you paid for them, the responsiveness of the people that searched them, the conversion rate of those people, where they came from, the time of day and day of week they converted, etc. Using that data allows you to grow and get more efficient over time, increasing your leads while cutting your costs.
PPC has two fundamental weaknesses: difficulty and cost.
Difficulty: While I believe firmly that anyone can learn to run an effective motivated seller PPC campaign (I teach people to do this every day), it's still a technical skill that can be overwhelming to people. This is the core of why so many people lose money on PPC - they make some kind of technical mistake early on and end up spinning their wheels, getting frustrated, and quitting.
As for cost, PPC leads tend to be higher cost than something like direct mail, but also higher quality. So, while a PPC lead might cost you anywhere between 70 and 150 dollars, depending on your market and strategy, the typical rate of conversion into deals is roughly 1 out of 20, rather than 1 out of 30. Even with that considered, high levels of competition make some markets prohibitively expensive for some investors.
SEO
SEO is probably the oldest online marketing method, but also the most powerful - the vast majority of all searches online go to "organic" (i.e., non-paid) listings in Google, and consistently high ranking for a valuable keyword can be worth dozens of deals over the course of a year.
SEO has two fundamental strengths: long-term ROI and volume.
In terms of long term ROI, no marketing channels beats SEO. Since, by it's very nature, SEO can generate a long-term, steady flow of leads at no cost, it tends to be wildly more profitable than paid channels. The quality of traffic, presuming some strategic work on your part, can also be incredibly high. Once you're ranked, these leads are free - it's very hard to beat that.
For sheer volume, SEO also beats out most other channels. Search volume has been going up every year since Google first showed up; motivated seller searches, specifically, should also trend upwards very consistently as the younger, "internet-first" generations become the primary source of all home sales. Nearly 70-80% of all searches go to organic listings, making this the biggest single source of leads in nearly every market.
SEO has two fundamental weakness: time to pay off and labor-intensity.
SEO has a long time to pay off, in the sense that it requires a good deal of work and effort to actually move the needle and change your site rankings enough to create a greater lead flow. If we assume that a site needs to be at least on the first page of a particular search to generate leads consistently, and preferably on the top half of the page, it will often take 3-6 months of consistent work to get there. Many people get discouraged, drop out, or can't maintain the consistency needed over that time period.
SEO can also be very labor intensive. If you're blogging, optimizing, posting on various other sites, doing social media, etc....it can all add up to a great deal of work, especially if you're not being extremely efficient or smart about what you spend your time on. Conversely, if you outsource to an agency that's any good, they will be putting in a lot of work and will charge you accordingly.
I tried my level best to make this as objective as possible. All marketing channels have strengths and weaknesses, and in reality, you should do ALL of these! If you need to choose one to start, though, you might consider testing them out and seeing which seems to give you the easiest path forward.
If you have any questions or want any clarification, tag me and let me know. :-)
