All Forum Posts by: Michael McKay

@Joe Cassandra Thanks! I'm a huge fan of retargeting. It's great at staying in front of potential prospects and building trust with them, even if the initial source of traffic to your website is direct mail. 

As @Mark Sewell mentioned, you can upload lists of custom audiences to Facebook. Facebook will then match the users on this list by using identifiers such as email, phone, etc. The match rate to a user can vary a lot based on how much info you have on a person and the quality of that data. This may work well if you have hundreds of old leads, who called you, but may have never visited your website. You could upload this list and show them ads.

The demographics are definitely limited when you're running housing ads. I have a few targeting strategies around video and engagement that I'm doing to experiment with that may solve this. Facebook also does a lot of work on the back end to narrow your audience to people similar to those who have previously engaged with your ad. I'll dive more deeply into that and custom audiences by uploading lists once I start setting up the campaign.

@James Wise Wow. That's a great cost per deal. Being able to convert leads who aren't a good fit as an investment to listings for your brokerage is a great idea to make the most of your marketing spend. I'm licensed in NY, but invest in CT and have been considering working out a referral agreement with CT agents for deals that are better suited to listing vs investing.

@Mike Landry Got it. Facebook catches on pretty quickly if you're posting the same messages over and over again in groups. Is your friend using paid ads for real estate or another industry? If it's real estate, I'd love to connect with him and exchange strategies.

@James Wise Appreciate the insight. What's your average marketing spend per acquisition using direct mail? A few people I have spoken to have said between $1,500-$2,000 per deal. I'm curious if that's on the higher or lower side you're seeing, since you're doing it at a pretty large scale.

@Mark Sewell Absolutely! I plan to show everything from my campaigns- cold traffic vs retargeting, campaign objectives, targeting, etc. More to come on this in future posts.

@Mike Landry Were those Facebook groups or the Marketplace? I haven't experimented with either of those, but I have heard of people getting deals and finding tenants in the Marketplace.

Facebook has become very strict with targeting for "special category" ads recently, which includes housing ads. You have to pick a 15 mile radius or larger as your target area and they take away a lot of the targeting options, including age. They used to have homeowner targeting, but that was taken away awhile back.

One strategy that has worked well for me in other industries is show a video to cold traffic (people who have never seen my brand) and then retarget people who watch a significant amount of that video with conversion focused ads. It will be interesting to see if this work well for motivated seller campaigns. I'll do a more detailed post on exactly how to set this up when I set up my campaigns.

@Mohammad (Asad) Asaduddin How long does it typically take for deal flow to start with the marketing methods you're using?

I'm curious to see how Facebook stacks up against other methods in this aspect.

@Mohammad (Asad) Asaduddin Great point! I'll keep track of that metric starting today. I'll also track the time it takes from a lead coming in to close, using my CRM.

There are a lot of posts and Youtube videos on using Facebook to generate motivated seller leads, but most of these only cover a small part of the overall marketing campaign. Online marketing has evolved a lot in the last few years- no longer can you expect optimal results from making a couple Facebook ads with stock photos.

I believe that I can find off market deals cheaper than direct mail by using online marketing.

I started working on this project 2 days ago and I’m going to document my entire journey here, including:

• Which strategies work and which don’t
• The tools I use
• How much money I spend on ads, design, vendors, etc.
• The exact ads I use
• My cost per lead, my cost per deal...everything

Why am I doing this?

I want to find off market deals and creating this thread will keep me accountable.

This thread also gives me an easy way to share my learnings. Plus, some of you will have great suggestions on how I can improve my strategy :)

What I’ll be building and sharing over the next few weeks

1. A high converting landing page.
2. An outline of my marketing funnel- this will be my road map as I build out all the pieces of this project.
3. Video and photo ads for Facebook- I’ll test these to see which ones work and which ones don’t.
4. A messenger bot for Facebook ads- We’ll see if these perform better than lead or landing pages ads.
5. A system to manage leads and automatically follow up with them

Test budget: $2,500.

Most people spend between $1,500 and $2,000 on direct mail to find a deal, so I thought $2,500 made sense since there are some set up items (website design, graphic design, etc.) that cost $500-$700.

I’ll update this thread every few days with my progress. I’d love to hear your suggestions!

I’ll do my best to create detailed posts of what I do, in case anyone wants to borrow my strategies. Feel free to ask questions if anything isn't clear.

@Sheena Tiller I'm not sure. I ended up using a company called Handwyytten to write cards. They have a machine that writes them using a real pen. Their pricing is a bit expensive if you're mass mailing to thousands of people though. I was able to decrease the price by about $1 each by speaking to their sales team to buy credits in bulk.

On February 2nd, Airbnb and other short term rental platforms will be forced to disclose the data of NYC hosts. We organized this Meetup to help hosts understand the implications of the data release.

This Meetup will cover:

-Current short term rental regulations and exceptions
-What data will be disclosed to the city
-Who is at risk with the data release
-Strategies that hosts can use to protect themselves
-What to do if you are targeted

Our featured speakers, are attorneys Brandon McKenzie, John Moss, and David Deemer, from Moss & Moss LLP (www.MossandMoss.com), a full-service law firm that’s practice areas include landlord-tenant litigation; real estate litigation, including administrative hearings; short-term and furnished rental matters; as well as real estate transactions, including sales, purchases, long-term, and short-term rentals. Prior to returning to practicing law, Brandon was the founder of MetroButler, a leading short-term rental management company.

Thanks to Noiseaware (www.noiseaware.io) for sponsoring this Meetup. NoiseAware is the first and only privacy safe noise monitoring solution built to protect your entire property, inside and out. Now you're able to prevent and protect what you're unable to predict.

RSVP HERE ON MEETUP

Thanks to everyone who joined us last night! Our next event will be January 9th.

@Stanly Berthil looking forward to seeing you there!

@Max Dukes thanks! Hope to see you Tuesday.

If anyone has questions for our speaker, please submit them using this form before the event.

Are you charging enough to maximize revenue or are you leaving money on the table with unbooked nights? As Airbnb hosts, having optimal pricing can make or break our business. This Meetup will cover:

-Dynamic pricing vs setting prices yourself
-Data deep dive: Actionable insights from a 60 property portfolio
-Revenue management basics: What levers can you use to increase revenue
-Automating revenue management

Our featured speaker, Anurag Verma is the Head of Analytics and a co-founder at PriceLabs. He spent 6 years designing and improving revenue management algorithms at United Airlines in Chicago, working closely with revenue managers within the company. He has a PhD in Operations Research, and loves applied Mathematics and Statistics.

RSVP HERE ON MEETUP