Episode #006 – Dominating your local market by boxing out your competition

You're listening to the REI marketing nerds podcast, the leading resource for real estate investors who want to dominate their market online. Dan Barrett is the founder of Ad Words Nerds, a high tech digital agency focusing exclusively on helping real estate investors like you get more leads and deals online. Outsmart your competition and live a freer, more awesome life. And now, your host, Dan Barrett.

Dan: Alright everybody, welcome to this episode of the REI Marketing Nerds podcast. Super happy to have you here. As always, this is Daniel Barrett coming from oldsite.adwordsnerds.com and this week we've got a really cool topic because we're going to get into both something that lots of people want, this is something I'm going to hear from investors pretty much every single week, and we're going to talk about our customs strategy, the strategy that we use for the investors that we work with to get that thing done. And so the goal that we're talking about is dominating your local market. This something I hear all the time. It's very, very common for investors get on the phone with us and say, "Hey, I want to dominate my local market." It's hard for people to figure out how to do that. Most people are going to think that that is purely a money game, it's purely going to be a thing where they've got to dump tens of thousands of dollars every week into ads and do all this crazy stuff. It actually doesn't need to be like that, because this was something that happened so frequently or something we got told so frequently and asked for so frequently, we actually developed a strategy for doing now that that's specifically focused on REI. I'm going to break down that strategy today. This is something I've only ever done with my paying clients or with my coaching students, so I'm really excited because it's something that I'm personally I'm very proud of and I think it's going to make a major impact, hopefully on your business and your marketing. So let's jump into this.

First thing we need to do is we need to define what we're actually talking about, because it's one thing to say like, "Hey, I want to dominate my market." but there are a lot of different variations on what that might mean, that might mean a lot of different things to different people, so let's define our terms. For me you when I'm talking about dominating a market, what I'm talking about is consistently getting the majority of the leads in that market and getting them first. Okay? So there's two aspects to this, right. There is the volume, getting the majority of the leads that are available. We're talking about search marketing, we're talking about people searching, grabbing those people, getting them as leads, but also getting them first, because it's very common for people to come online and fill out a whole bunch of forms on different investor sites, and if I'm getting those leads last or tenth or whatever, they're going to be worth significantly less. Because generally for investing, when we're talking about motivated sellers, the faster you're going to touch base with someone, get them on the phone, form that relationship, the more likely they are to do a deal with you. So really there's these two aspects here to dominating a market. There's the volume of leads and you are getting and there's the speed with which you get them. You really need both. You need both to truly be dominant, have a position that's very hard to attack.

Now an important note, you don't actually have to dominate your market to do a lot of deals. It isn't necessary, and I don't want everyone listening to this to think like if you want to make some money as an investor, if you want to be successful as an investor you have to dominate a market, because it just isn't true. We work with people every single week that are spending $2000 a month or whatever there is they're spending, they're doing significant numbers of deals, they're making a lot of money, and they're super, super happy. But there is a really common thread in the investing community where people want that dominant position, they want to know that they're on top. So if that's you, this is what we're talking about today. Alright?
Now, most people are going to assume that dominating the market is basically what that means is you got to spend a lot of money. And yes, to do this consistently and to consistently dominate a market, you will need to spend more than just saying to an investor, it's like, "Hey, I want to do a couple deals a month." But lots of investors pour lots of money into their marketing every single week and do not dominate their markets. So it isn't a case that dominating the market is simply a matter of spending money, and the reason that is, is quality. Quality and understanding how the idea of quality factors into online marketing is absolutely critical to understanding why some investors absolutely crush and absolutely dominate their markets, and other investors that spend the exact same amount of time and exact same amount of money do not. Alright? Now let's break this down even further.

When we're talking about quality in terms of online marketing, what I'm really talking about is better performance. If an ad is higher quality, it gets more clicks. If the landing page is higher quality, it gets more leads. So the higher quality the marketing that you're doing, the better the performance you're going to get from that marketing. And the better the performance you're getting, generally the lower the cost you're going to have to pay. This is really, really important to understand, Okay? When your ad is performing really, really well and generating lots of clicks, pretty much every marketing channel that's online is going to give you some kind of benefit for that. Because remember, like Google, Facebook, you know, if we're talking about ad channels here, they only get paid when people click. Even if you're doing SEO and you're doing organic marketing, you're not paying per click, Google wants sites that people click on because if people come to Google over and over and over and they never find anything they want to click on, slowly but surely they're going to stop using Google. Right? So Google, Facebook, all these channels, they prioritize ads and marketing campaigns that generate performance that get clicks.

So what happens is you get caught in a virtuous cycle. You write really, really good ads, make really, really good landing pages, you target it really well, you have a very high quality marketing campaign, that allows you to get more leads, And then the advertising channel gives you a bonus and they allow you to get those leads more cheaply. So what's happening here is you are now getting a higher volume of leads, and you're getting them more cheaply than your competition because your quality is higher. That leaves you more money in the tank that you can then reinvest back in your ads. And so your ads get better and better, you get more and more leads, the leads get cheaper and cheaper so you have more money to invest in ads, you run those ads more often and you get more leads and they get cheaper and cheaper and you have more money to reinvest in ads. And it's a cycle and it continues and it gets better and better and stronger and stronger. This is how you build the momentum that allows you to really dominate. I mean really sit there at the top of your market and get the majority of leads faster than everyone else. This is a really important, even if your goal is not necessarily to dominate your market, understanding this dynamic is critical. Because if you are just dumping more and more money into an ad campaign that's not particularly high quality, you're not going to get much of a return from that campaign. If you dump more and more gas in an inefficient vehicle, you're not going to get as far as someone who's highly efficient and also putting gas in their tank. Those two situations provided your input is equal, the person with the more efficient car is going to go much further, and the person with the higher quality campaign is going to get a lot more leads.

Markets tend to get dominated by the people who can get their least the cheapest and can get the highest value out of them. If I'm able to get leads at 20% lower than everyone else and I'm getting 20% more money out of all those leads, slowly but surely I will eat the entire market. It is inevitable. So, understanding this dynamic, and specifically how it applies to online marketing, is really the difference between having an incredibly effective campaign and just constantly putting money into something struggling and not being able to get a return on it.

Alright. So, let's say we have nailed down the quality issues, you understand that, you're crushing it, you have really high quality campaigns. Okay? And you're investing what you need to into those campaigns. You're putting in ad budget, you're putting in time, you're putting in effort, whatever you're investing, you're doing what you need to do and you're nailing the quality. So assuming that is the case, what is the strategy that actually lets you box out the competition and dominate the market? Because it's not enough to just do everything well, because there are other investors in pretty much every single market that are already doing things well. You need a strategic advantage on top of that. So, the strategy that we used to do this and it is really proven very effective and very hard to compete with is something we call content stacking. Okay? Content stacking.
The idea behind us is that we are going to be everywhere at once, so that if a searcher goes on to Google, wherever, they go on Facebook, wherever they go and they type in "sell my house fast", whatever they're selling, or they're typing in, we have a much higher chance of getting that lead because we're in multiple places at once.

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Dan: How does this work? Well the idea here is that we are going to stack different pieces of content on top of each other. So let's say someone, again, we'll use Google as an example. Someone comes on to Google, they type in "sell my house fast". First thing they'll see from us, if we're using this content stacking strategy, is an ad. Probably the simplest thing to understand here, we're just targeting the keyword, we show the ads, our ad's at the top of the page. Okay? Awesome, that's piece of content number one. Then our website has a page that organically ranks for that keyword in Google. So we've got the ad and we've got our website organically ranking, so that's two pieces of content on that page. Then we probably have a Google map entry or google my business entry, whatever you want to call it, so that's a third piece of content probably rank something from Facebook for that keyword, so that's a fourth piece of content. We get reviews or articles written on third party sites, so that's a fifth piece of content. We'll rank a YouTube video for that keyword, so that's a six piece of content. And so for the exact same search, let's say like "sell my house fast" your town or whatever it is, you're going to get to a point where nearly 30% of everything that that person is seeing in Google is actually you. It's actually about your business, it's about what you do, it's leading that person to work with you. And no matter what positions you are in, like even if you can't grab the top position, dominating such a high percentage of that first page is going to drive a lot of traffic. It's a very, very powerful technique. So the chances of you getting that lead, that person searching, really skyrocket at that point.

Now, the key to doing this well and not driving yourself crazy in the process is having a very clear strategy, because each of the pieces that you build need to be working in harmony. You need to be really clear on what you are targeting and how. If you try to do this for a thousand keywords, you're going to burn out. It just isn't possible. I mean maybe over a really long period of time, but it's just massively, massively difficult. So you need to be really, really clear on what you're targeting, who you're targeting and how you're going to target them and then how all those pieces connect with each other, where they're sending people, what they're saying, what they're linking to, etc.

So there's different categories to doing this. We can kind of break it down generally to give you a sense of what you want to do. There's no one thing you always got to do, the internet is constantly changing. And I want this episode to be evergreen. So I'm not going to say like you have to go to this website, because who knows. Maybe that website won't even be there two years from now. But there are general categories that are pretty much always going to be there that you can use to create your own content stacking strategy. Ads are the easiest place to start. They’re going to show up at the top of the page, they're easy and fast to get going, advertising on the internet is not going anywhere. Ads give you a lot of control over your targeting, so you can really zero in very quickly on just the search terms that you want. If you just want "sell my house fast Phoenix" and you don't want to "sell my house fast Mesa" or whatever it is, you can just put that into your ad campaign and boom, you're there. So really, really fast, really, really high impact, get to be at the top of the page, really nice. Of course the downside is you're paying for it, but that's the downside to all advertising.

So ads are the obvious kind of first category where we get started with this strategy. So after that, generally we are moving on to third party listings. Third party listings are also pretty quick to do, they're pretty quick to rank, and they're relatively easy. So it's like if you're doing like a yellow pages or there's some kind of local website, something like that, it's not your property, it's not specifically like a business listing thing like Google Maps, it's just something that you can get a listing on, you can get an article on. Those things are really good because you can kind of ride the coattails of other web sites that are already ranking pretty well, so that's usually really good place to go next. Of course, you've got to have your own search engine optimization on point, meaning your main website needs to rank and rank well. Because generally that's going to drive the biggest percentage of clicks and leads. I generally get into that a little bit later in the process just because the work tends to be more in-depth, it's not like something you just click a button and get it done. You really got to think about what you are writing, how you're writing it, how well optimized it is, but it's such a big chunk of the traffic that you're going to get that it's absolutely critical that you do it. So it's a little bit more difficult, the time horizons a little bit longer so it's slower to get going, but man, if you can get it going, the impact is absolutely huge so you definitely want to dig in there.

Google Maps listings are another one that we typically do pretty early, and those are also very fast to do. You really only going to have one. I mean Google Maps is the dominant one. There are other kind of map companies you can work with to get a listing for, and those are really only going to help you for local searches, so if somebody is generally located near the town that you're targeting. So we used that Phoenix, Arizona example, generally going to see that local map kind of enter, show up in Google when they're in Phoenix. So it's not going to get you necessarily out of state searches or out of state owners, that kind of thing, but still really powerful, free, quick to do, easy to do and those are going to rank really well.

YouTube videos is a big one. This one is very, very fast. Google owns YouTube, I think most people know that at this point, and so You Tube videos can rank very quickly. The reason we don't do it earlier is because generally they don't stay in the search rankings as long as everything else. YouTube videos seem to have kind of a half-life where you'll rank them, they'll kind of drift out of the rankings over time, but optimizing them can have a really great return, people like to click on videos, it's an attractive search result in Google because it gets, usually it gets a little video icon, so they get a lot of clicks. Now you don't own it, much like the third party websites we were talking about, you don't own this, Google owns it, so it's not on your website, but really, really powerful, really easy way to get an extra thing in there.

Facebook pages can be very stable and rank very well, but it's hard to do a lot of them, and so it's kind of hard to do keyword targeting for them, but it's something that's really powerful. Generally you're only have one or two of these, so you really want to target that around your highest impact, highest traffic keywords. Even Twitter accounts can do really well, but like Facebook, there needs to be engagement on that account for it to rank in Google and show up in Google. So you really need to work it like its own marketing channel, put the effort in. And most investors generally don't do that. It's hard to do investor marketing for motivated sellers in a way that people really engage with socially, it certainly can be done, I've seen people do amazing jobs with that, but it's one of those things where it's like just because you have a Twitter account doesn't mean it's showing up and going to rank in Google. It's really got to be something that people are sharing, people are retweeting, people are liking, people are commenting on, that kind of thing.

So if you kind of take all those pieces together, right, if you've got an ad and you've got your own search engine optimization on your website, you've got third party listings, you've got Google Maps, you've got YouTube videos, you've got Facebook pages, got a Twitter account, all of these things are unified in their strategy around who they're going after, what kind of keywords are going after. You're going to massively increase your footprint in Google. And what that's going to do is get you a much higher volume of leads and a much higher quality of leads while lowering your cost, and that's what content stacking is all about. It's about combining this pursuit of quality with a strategic advantage that's really, really hard to topple.

If you're ranked number one in Google, that's awesome, but if that's all you have, sooner or later someone is going to try to take that from you. So having a diversified strategy not only gets you more leads, it gets more leads for cheaper, and it makes you safer in the long run from competition. It's massively powerful, it's something we do pretty much every day for our clients, I love it. I would really love to get your feedback on it, if you have any thoughts let me know because for us this makes a huge game changer of a strategy, it's really, really helped our clients.

That's it for the episode, you guys. As always, let me know. I'll have the show notes for this episode and some goodies you can download, maybe we'll do like an outline of the strategy and everything. You can go to oldsite.adwordsnerds.com/podcast, that's oldsite.adwordsnerds.com/podcast, I'll have all that stuff for you. Let me know what you think, I'd love to get your comments on this, and let me know if you use this strategy because it is very powerful, and if used well can really, really, really help you dominate your local market. Alright, thanks everybody, talk to you soon.