Full Disclosure: I'm the founder of LeadPropeller
In order to help make a decision (whichever way you go, you won't really be wrong as both choices are great), I wanted to share more information about online strategy and what's most important. This is intended to help regardless of the platform you use or even if you decide to have a site custom built.
Things change pretty fast when it comes to online lead generation. There is more competition than ever and we've been focused on figuring out how to beat the competition. Here's what we found that works.
1. Automated Communication. Starting the conversation as soon as possible with the motivated seller. To do this we worked on automations and focused on making sure they didn't seem like automations. Let me explain. When a motivated seller searches online for a solution to a real estate related problem, they will see search results containing lots of real estate investor websites.
If you've worked hard to rank your site to be seen by these motivated seller searchers or are paying for pay per click ads, they will likely see your site in the results. They then click onto your site (if your title and description are enticing enough) and find out if what you offer is what will help them with their problem. They will also most likely make decisions about how credible your site appears. If your site has done well to convince them you are the right company to contact, they will either submit the form with their information or give you a call. The majority of sellers submit the form.
What happens next is where many people fail with online lead gen.
The seller then clicks the back button on the browser and goes to your competitors' websites. Not cool. But it's what they do. I do it too when I'm searching for things on Google.
So we focused our energy on making sure we did as much as we could to prevent this from happening. It's why even from the very beginning our websites had automated texting.
After the seller submits their phone number on the first form of our 2-step forms, they get a text message that you can customize. This automated text message can include the address that they entered into the form as well so that it is personalized and seems like someone really did type it out to them. It used to be that these text messages would go out as soon as the form was submitted. Not good. They came off as undeniably automated :(
They now have a time delay of roughly 30 seconds to make it plausible that you actually typed the quick text to them. How cool is that? Your autoresponder text should say something that tells them who you are and that you received their information and you will be calling them in a minute. This way they are anticipating your call rather than going to other websites. Since this goes out after the short time delay after the first form submission, they usually are still on your website filling out the second form.
We've found that the majority of sellers that you can get in touch with right away will not go to any more websites. We've found that they feel satisfied that they have done what they set out to do and want to see what you will offer them.
This is also why I always recommend calling a seller IMMEDIATELY when you get a website form submission.
The first person to speak to the seller usually has a much better chance of getting the deal.
If you've got an answering service handling calls, I suggest you find a way to have someone live answer it for you. This is where rapport needs to be built. Over the years, I've countless times been told that a seller called X amount of other investors and that I was the first to answer my phone. If they felt that special enough to tell me, you know it meant something very important to them....and I usually end up with the deal.
One issue many people have with trying to set this up is that the phone number the texts come from don't have their local area code. This isn't a huge problem but can be perceived by some sellers as slightly undesirable (because you might not seem local).
We put in the development time to allow you to purchase local phone numbers through LeadPropeller so that your automated texts can come from a local number. This is also perfect for tracking your marketing....which I hope you are doing. Using automated texts and emails (which are perfect for sending credibility information including testimonials) helps to make sure you have a much better chance at being the person that gets the deal. And when you look at what ALL of this online lead gen boils down to, that is really all that matters.
2. Content Marketing. My website used to only rank for a handful of keywords. Then I started blogging. Now my site ranks for roughly 2,000 keywords. Now granted, all of those keywords I'm ranking for won't be highly targeted for motivated sellers and many don't get much search volume, but when you add up all of the small search volume over that many keywords, it really does add up. Plus, most of those keywords are not what most investors are targeting...which means they're easier to rank for!
I highly recommend adding SEO blog posts to your website. You can use the free Yoast SEO plugin for wordpress to make sure your blog posts are optimized correctly. This is the tool that shows the traffic signal showing green if your blog post is optimized sufficiently and yellow or red or enough factors are not met. We've included this plugin in one-click blog install's for LeadPropeller websites.
You can hire writers on Upwork.com to write these articles for you. Good writers will typically cost about $.02 per word. Each article should be at least 1,000 words. Try to keep your site fresh with these articles. I recommend one per week but every two weeks or per month is better than nothing and will still give you tons of benefit over time. We've automated much of this as well with our content packs that are automatically personalized with your information and location so that they are SEO’d for your website's target city. It's much easier to rank locally.
3. The correct strategy. So many investors go into online lead generation with the wrong expectations. Having the right strategy built from the correct expectations greatly ensures success. We've found that, even with having professional SEO done monthly for your website, it can take as long as 8 months or more to get to the first page let alone the top of the first page for the best keywords. This in and of itself isn't a problem but a blessing. If you know this you will be more willing to work at it from the perspective of it being an investment. Most won't. Therefore, most people will never challenge you once you get to the top. It's much easier to stay at the top than to get to the top. So what do you do while waiting for this long term investment in SEO to pay off? Pay per click and posting ads on Craigslist is what I recommend. This advertising enables you to send highly targeted traffic to your site immediately.
We also have something big in the works that will be coming first quarter of 2021. Online lead generation is a passion of ours and we won't stop innovating.
If you have questions about strategy for online lead generation, feel free to contact me. I'd love to help.