Episode #102 – Marketing & Conversion Series | 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 AdWords 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: Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week's episode of the REI Marketing Nerds podcast. As always, this is Daniel Barrett, your intrepid host here from AdWordsNerds.com and REIMarketingNerds.com.

This week we're talking about positioning and if you've been a real estate investor, for any amount of time, you may have noticed that not everybody has the best view of real estate investors and real estate investing. [01:06.9]

Honestly, that's kind of a bum out, because if you know real estate investing, you know that what real estate investors do is provide liquidity to the market where it is not available anywhere else. But how do you express that to people? How do you get that across in your marketing? How do you get it, so that sellers not only work with you because they have no other choice or work with you because they're under stress or under pressure or whatever, but work with you because you are helping them in a way that no one else can help them?

This is where we get into positioning for real estate investors and, in this episode, we are going to dig into exactly that. So, without any further ado, let's talk positioning for real estate investors.
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We're going to get into both something that lots of people want and is something I'm going to hear from investors pretty much every single week, and we're going to talk about our custom strategy, the strategy that we use for the investors that we work with to get that thing done. [02:15.7]

And so, the goal that we're talking about is dominating your local market. This is something I hear all the time. It's very, very common for investors to get on the phone with us and say, Hey, I want to dominate my local market, right? And 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 got to dump tens of thousands of dollars every week into ads and do all this crazy stuff; and it actually doesn't need to be like that.

Because this was something that happened so frequently and was something we got told so frequently and asked for so frequently, we actually developed a strategy for doing that that specifically focused on REI, and I'm going to break down that strategy today. [03:01.5]

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 personally am very proud of and I think it's going to make a major impact hopefully on your business and your marketing.

Let's jump into this. The first thing we need to do is we need to define what we're actually talking about, because it's one thing to say, 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, when I'm talking about dominating a market, what I am talking about is consistently getting the majority of the leads in that market and getting them first. Okay.

So, there are two aspects to this, right? There's the volume, getting the majority of the leads that are available. If we're talking about search marketing, we're talking about people searching, grabbing those people, getting them as leads, right? [03:57.4]

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 investors sites, and if I'm getting those leads last or 10th 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 are these two aspects here to dominating a market. There's the volume of leads that you are getting and there's the speed with which you get them, and you really need both. You need both to truly be dominant and 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, right? It isn't necessary and I don't want everyone listening to this to think 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. [05:00.6]

We work with people every single week that are spending $2,000 a month or whatever there is that they're spending. They're doing significant numbers of deals. They're making a lot of money and they're super, super happy, right? 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. All right?

Now, most people are going to assume that dominating the market, basically what that means is you've got to spend a lot of money, right? And, yes, to do this consistently and to consistently dominate a market, you will need to spend more than just saying to an investor, Hey, I want to do a couple deals a month. Right? 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. [06:02.9]

And 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. All right?

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 a landing page is higher quality, it gets more leads, right? So, the higher quality of the marketing that you're doing, the better the performance you're going to get from that marketing—and the better the performance you are getting, generally the lower the costs you are going to have to pay. [06:55.4]

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 Google, Facebook, 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 the 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 and 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. [08:05.8]

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, to really sit there at the top of your market and get the majority of leads faster than everyone else. This is 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 a campaign that's not particularly high quality, you're not going to get much of a return from that campaign, right? [09:07.7]

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, right? Those two situations, provided your input is equal, that 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 leads the cheapest and can get the highest value out of them, right? 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. [10:07.0]

All right, 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 an ad budget. You're putting in time. You're putting an 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, right? 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, right? The strategy that we use to do this, and it has really proven very effective and very hard to compete with, is something we call content stacking. [11:00.1]

Content stacking. The idea behind us is that we are going to be everywhere at once, so that if a searcher goes onto Google or wherever they go, on Facebook, wherever they go, and they type in “sell my house fast” or 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 of it.

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How does this work? The idea here is that we're going to stack different pieces of content on top of each other. [12:03.6]

Let's say—again, we'll use Google as an example—someone comes on to Google. They type in “sell my house fast.” The 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 or ads at the top of the page. Okay, awesome, that's a piece content, number one.

Then, our website has a page that organically ranked 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 Maps 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. [12:57.7]

And so, for the exact same search, let's say, “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, 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 skyrockets 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 are going to burn out. It just isn't possible, right? I mean, maybe over a really long period of time, but it's just massively, massively difficult. [14:14.5]

You need to be really, really clear on what you're targeting, who you're targeting and how you are 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.

There are 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’ve always got to do. The internet is constantly changing, right, and I want this episode to be evergreen, so I'm not going to say 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 that are pretty much always going to be there that you can use to create your own content-stacking strategy. All right? [14:57.7]

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 “sell my house fast Mesa” or whatever it is, you can just put that into your ad campaign and, boom, you're there. Right? 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. Okay? So, ads are the obvious kind of first category where we get started with this strategy.

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, right? If you're doing Yellow Pages or there's some kind of local website, something that, it's not your property. It's not specifically a business listing thing like Google maps. It's just something that you can get a listing on, you can get an article on. [16:16.6]

Those things are really good because you can kind of ride the coattails of other websites that are already ranking pretty well, so that's usually a 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 that you can just click a button and get it done. You’ve really got to think about what you are writing, how you're writing it and 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 horizon is 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. [17:10.4]

Google Maps listings are another one that we typically do pretty early and those are also very fast to do. You're really only going to have one. I mean, Google Maps is the dominant one. There are other kinds 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, right?

So, if we use that Phoenix, Ariz., example, generally, you're going to see that local map kind of entry show up in Google when they're in Phoenix, and 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 are a big one. This one is very, very fast. Google owns YouTube. I think most people know that at this point, and so YouTube videos can rank very quickly. [18:04.2]

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 usually gets a little video icon, so they get a lot of clicks.

Now, you don't own it, much like the third-party websites that we're talking about, right? 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 going to have one or two of these, so you're going to really want to target that around your highest-impact, highest-traffic keywords. [19:04.7]

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 its own marketing channel and put the effort in. 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, it doesn't mean it's showing up and getting ranked 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, 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, you’ve got a Twitter account, now all of these things are unified in their strategy around who they're going after and what kind of keywords they're going after. [20:06.7]

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's going to try to take that from you. Right? So, having a diversified strategy, not only gets you more leads, it gets you 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 and I would really love to get your feedback on it. If you have any thoughts, let me know, because, for us, this is a huge game changer of a strategy and it has really, really helped our clients. [21:02.6]
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That is going to do it for this week's episode of the REI Marketing Nerds podcast. As always, you can find all of our past episodes, show notes, more information, all sorts of cool stuff at REIMarketingNerds.com.

And if you want help with your online marketing, if you want help finding motivated seller leads online, that's us, AdWords Nerds. We are the company that will help you do that. I'd be happy to get on the phone with you or have someone from my team get on the phone with you for free to help you put together an online marketing strategy for your market that works. You can get that at AdWordsNerds.com/Strategy.

Finally, if you want to stay in touch, the best way to do that is the REI Marketing Nerds Facebook group. I am in there every single week, posting trainings, posting reactions, posting news about what's happening in online marketing for real estate investors, and you can get there at AdWordsNerds.com/Group. [22:04.6]

As always, thank you so much for listening to this show. I could not do any of this without you, so thank you, and I hope you have an amazing rest of your week.

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