Episode #259 – Critical Content Marketing Tips for Real Estate Investors with Josh Culler, Part 2

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.

0:39 Guys, welcome back. You're listening to the second part of last week's episode. Let's jump back in. Let's talk about tick tock a little bit tick tock. This is the I say this every episode at least once this is the part of the podcast where we transition to just stuff that I want to know and I don't care if anybody else is interested and I'm just curious about it. So like tick tock, really, officially officially right was the first time where I was like, I'm out. But you know, like I grew up, I you know, started using the internet. I was dialing into muds and Gino doodle stuff. I've been on the internet like basically since it came out and nerding out about it ever since. Right? And Tik Tok was really the first platform where it I just missed it, it was a little too old haven't really gotten into Tik Tok. I'm aware of it because tick tock content just gets reposted on every other show platform. Yeah, to the point where I'm like, it's, it's a grant, it's basically just a tick tock machine.

You know, it's very odd, right? Because I'm like, Okay, I'm aware of it. And I'm aware of it from a marketing perspective as like this, you know, behemoth where it is, in terms of the potential to reach a lot of people very quickly, very intense and the driver of a lot of purchasing behavior, not for everything, I think universally, but for certain kinds of products or whatever tick tock is basically a giant money machine or can be right. And then your video is the language of tick tock that is the medium, right? That we are we're swimming in there. What is your take on a junior and talk to me generally about your take on it as a marketer overall, like your kind of experience with it. And then kind of how you see Rei. And we could talk about Rei generally interfacing with, because I have my opinions on it, but I'm also old. So I'm like, you know, I'm like, you know, the old man shakes fisted cloud, like that's kind of the part of my life that I'm in. So you tell me, you know, as someone who's more in touch with that channel, what do you see going on there? And how do you think that affects or will affect, let's say, in the next 510 years or so, maybe not 10, but five years or so? Rei?

2:49 Yeah, I even think within the next year or so it's going to be extremely unpredictable, I don't. So the if we were having this exact same conversation a year or two ago, my answers would be completely different. So if we're talking two years ago, we were talking about this, I would say I don't care what industry you're in, go at tick tock as hard as you can, if you don't get what you're looking for, then you can step away from it. But stay consistent with it for six months, post twice a day, six months, and then see what happens. But the reality of today is that tick tock has become a platform that their algorithm is very inconsistent, it's really hard to get a good grip on the audience that you're trying to go after. It used to be decent. And then I don't really have factual data on this is just from observation. But once they were, I believe they were sold the Oracle the algorithm changed and a lot changed with it, the ability to reach your demographic quickly changed.

And no matter what type of content you're posting, now, you can still get a good amount of eyeballs the audience is definitely so there's levels to audiences, right and you have to think about the consumption process. So on tick tock, and this goes the same for YouTube shorts. It goes the same for Instagram reels, Facebook reels is your consuming 45/62 videos, sometimes even shorter than that. So it's just going to be a little hit, it's stimulating hit of like piece content, they'll scroll to the next one, they may like it, they may comment on it, if they have an opinion about it, whatever it is, to me tick tock is the bottom of the barrel when it comes to audience demographic. Mostly it's because it's such a worldwide platform, and it is still heavily dominated by teenagers and younger people, which are typically not going to be qualified to spend $25,000 on a coaching program, but the potential is there and I'll get to that here in a second. Then the next level up would be like an Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn is probably above that. But then now you go into like if you're talking about YouTube, specifically, or podcast, those are the higher converting platforms, you're not going to get as many eyeballs you're not going to get as much organic traffic. However, the conversion process is 10 times easier because they're consuming more deep content from you. So instead of 62nd videos are consuming 10 or 15 minute videos from you. So You have their eyes and ears for a lot longer time, and you have the ability to build a lot more relationship and value with them.

Now, there are a lot of famous tech doctors out there. But that's why typically, YouTubers are typically the most famous people on media, like platforms like Mr. Beast and people like that they made their name with YouTube because it's there, you're able to build such a strong relationship with them. And even if you look at there's a couple of people in our industry that started at tick tock right around 2020. So maybe they got bored or whatever. And they just started giving it a shot or uploading content. And they did really, really well with it generate a lot of results. Well, a couple people. Well, I'll give an example. Ryan Pinedo is one. He's a friend of mine. And he she was one of the first pioneers on Tik Tok for not just the real estate industry, but the business industry altogether. Because prior to 2020, hitting it, it was all dance videos and pranks and you know, stuff like that. And then there was a small wave of business owners and people in real estate that started making content putting out consistently well, one of the smart, very intelligent things that Ryan did was right around the end of 2020. He realized very quickly and I even sat down I was on a mastermind with him and I sat down with him for breakfast one day and he's like, What do you think about like podcasts and YouTube and leveraging my tic tock to push people to that and at the time, I don't even think he maybe been a guest on a few shows beyond it started his podcast or his YouTube channel. But what he did was he took his presence on Tik Tok.

And then he started building a little bit of a presence on Instagram as well. But he pushed them to his podcasts and YouTube channel and aggressively migrated and and what happens is, you know, your percentage, if you have a million followers on Tiktok, you're probably going to get you know, 50 to 100,000 of them to go to your YouTube channel and eventually subscribing, that sort of thing. But it's just tick tock is one of those things at the moment. It's hard to generate any kind of reasonable results results and it is a pay to play platform at this point if you are putting out business content, but the thing I always say is Instagram reels is crushing right now. YouTube shorts is crushing right now. Like you said Tik Tok is the one who created that type of content. So if you have those two, might as well post on Tik Tok and do your best with it. You might as well post it on Tik Tok if you have that video already, because the person that consumes on Tik Tok may not consume it on Instagram. Perfect example is my wife is big on Instagram, she'll go through riddles for days, days, days days, she doesn't even have tick tock on her phone.

She's She's 28. But she doesn't even have tick tock on her phone. Me. I use Instagram for my feed on people I'm following. I consume YouTube shorts. So I might get hit with the same video that she gets it with. But I'm consuming it on shorts. She's consuming it on Instagram. And then somebody else might be consuming in on Tik Tok. So, that's kind of the conversation. But I think like you're not in the wrong for resisting it. But I would say still test it. If you have the content, just put it out there consistently give it a shot. And you never know what's going to do just don't I tell people now just don't expect a lot of it. It does strike

8:11 me as like kind of what you're talking about, at least where you're talking to them. The Penida example is for that level of sophistication and marketing, if you're really looking to say, you know, I have a number of different things, I'm linking them together, right? It's understanding like which channel is top of funnel, which channels middle, which channels bottom of funnel, right. So it's like you are taking something very, you know, in today's case, very wide, very general, very low conversion rate, like Tiktok, and then funneling them to the middle of the funnel stuff, like the podcast to YouTube. And then out of that, getting your bottom of the funnel people, the people that are ready to buy. I'm curious what you think about Facebook, you mentioned Facebook as being sort of higher quality. If you'd asked me like, a year and a half ago, I mean, we we run Facebook ads, particularly for our own agency, but we also run Facebook ads for for investors, right? So in for long time, I would spend 10 to 15k a month on Facebook, easily double or triple my ROI on that.

I could do that all day or every day I was the laziest Facebook marketer ever for my own business during the same video for like seven years in a row, which are like still people today will be like I probably saw multiple times. For that thing or like yeah, that one that one video I made like 10 years ago anyway. So it's like it never had to change, right. And then at some point around the iOS 14 update, which was the apple basically was like, you know, pixels are bad, and basically tanked Facebook's utility for us. So we pulled back from it a lot. Then we sort of slowly been coming back to it where now it is again our largest advertising channel while again for the agency right for agency clients, who you know, we're not Facebook specialists of maybe like 30% of our clients are also regulated But I'm curious what what your take on it was for the longest time I thought Facebook is basically felt like, you know someone's throwing a party but there's no one in the room. There was like a music playing and people are like, yeah, Facebook and there's like nobody doing anything and it does seem like activity has come back to Facebook. I'm curious like your just general take on it kind of as a general channel and also like as a place to post video particularly in Facebook very famously made a big push into video kind of didn't go anywhere, but it kind of did and still around and yeah, you have like Facebook video short things are like reels essentially. But they don't always go to Instagram. And I'm very confused by the state of that channel. Generally, what's your take on so something that

10:41 I haven't really thought about much until I don't even know what you said there that made me think of this, but I think I think it's important for context is so between, I would say like 2018 up until about 2021, early 2022. I think a lot of people like basically everybody, especially across the states, we're kind of like trying to find what, what media consumption method they're gonna go after. So are they gonna listen to podcasts? Are they going to consume on YouTube are they going to consume on Facebook, tik, Tok, Instagram, there's just a lot of loot like it, like everything was just kind of hanging out, like people were consuming on multiple different platforms. And I think over the past a year and a half to two years, what I have seen is people kind of corner themselves into one or maybe two platforms or that they're constantly using and they don't go anywhere else for it. And that's very interesting to me.

Like for instance, I know people that only use Facebook and Facebook alone, they will they don't even have Instagram on their phone. They may have an account but they don't use it. They definitely don't use Tik Tok, they use YouTube, maybe a little bit to go find out how to, you know, switch the the O ring on their faucet that's leaking and stuff like that. Like, it's just stuff like that. Maybe they listen to podcasts or whatever. And then you have people that they swear by Instagram. Yeah, people that swear by Tik Tok, and swear by YouTube, everybody's just kind of funneled into their own like, okay, and then we've settled, we've not seen any really big changes to any of these platforms over the course the last two years, the last big change was YouTube, adding shorts to their platform. That was the last big change. And maybe like I think it was right before that Instagram took away IG TV, which was a complete disaster and made no sense. But and good for that they did that they realized like nobody gives a crap about this platform. But other than that, other than like maybe algorithms changing new creators coming in and out stuff like that, they're not really been any changes at all. And podcasting never changes. So to me, what Facebook has kind of developed into so when I'll just tell you like when I'm onboarding a new client of mine, and work deciding strategy, where are we posting, what are we posting now frequent, that sort of thing.

Whenever we come to the Facebook, part of the conversation, I always say, this is up to you. Because there's some people, let's just talk specifically, I want to ignore pages and groups and stuff like that. For now, let's just say use utilization of your personal profile to me, for me, specifically, I would say 80 to 90% of my Facebook usage is business related, I generate a lot of business from I could put out one post today saying I need four new clients to produce podcasts for who's and I'll have 25 comments, and a bunch of people reach out to me ask him, so I generate business from that. And that's all organic, that's all from just posting my personal profile. And then I'll clients that we post one or two times a day reels for them. And even though it may, like on a personal profile, maybe your videos get 200 500 views or whatever, it still creates a lot of connection with people and you get like fans of each other like because a lot of people for the most part, if you're in especially if you're Facebook friends with somebody and you're in a mastermind together, you know each other well, you're gonna have each other's backs and support each other and that sort of thing. So you get that kind of interaction. But when I when it comes to personal pages, I say it depends if you use it for personal reasons, then you can keep it personal, don't worry about it, like you know, it is what it is just go hard at the other platforms.

But if you're going to use it for business, you can still generate some decent results from posting Facebook reels, and then putting out some really good text based content that's short for like, don't be putting out a I'll see people like you know, they'll have like two lines and it'll say see more. And then it's like, ooh, like, nope, scroll on to the next one. So that it's poverty utilization is important. Now, when it comes to pages to me, that's your world. Like on the organic side, it's pay to play. Like if you're gonna put out organic content, you better be running paid advertising along with that. If you're not running paid advertising, it's not even worth going after, then you go into groups groups are really important. But I still say it needs to be all organic content, not posting reels into you know that group every day because that's not what they're there for. So Facebook is there's so many different conversations out with Facebook, but I do think as long as you understand the medium of Facebook and the mediums inside of Facebook, like your personal profile, the page groups, events, that kind of stuff, then you can start To utilize it a little bit more effectively, and it does still generate some good or specifically organic growth and then you can preach on the paid side. So yeah,

15:09 I think paid can still work quite well. You're very right that posting on a business page organically is just like just crumble up your post and throw it out the window and then you're like, whoever picks it up. That's a party you're talking about where nobody shows up. And you're throwing all kinds of crazy stuff. Let's find motivated seller leads online but don't know where to start. Download our FREE motivated seller keyword report today. AdWords nerds have spent over $5 million this year researching the most profitable keywords for finding motivated seller leads. And you can grab these exact keywords when you download our report at www dot AdWords nerds.com/keywords.

15:57 We didn't even talk about the metaverse, which is the next big thing. Dawnguard. So who knows, maybe I've been wrong. I don't know. Yeah, I've kind of like that one. I've sat back and like you guys told me what you're doing. So there was like an article in Wired where they like, it's like the user count on like the metaverse was like 14 people for like, the month of December or something. And it's just like, yeah, it's it is just at the bottom has dropped out on it. I'm sure I think it's um, I think it was ahead of its time. But we'll see. You might

16:29 run into Zack there. He's got to be one of the 14 Pete you're gonna be cool. Yeah. All right. Well, I'm I will literally keep talking to you about this stuff for ever. And just this podcast will be a million years. But I want to hit you with a question that I'm I'm always curious about which is, you know, this is true of any piece of content. So you could take it either way I am thinking video particularly one of the things that we always get you because you can run ads for video or on Google or whatever, you can run video ads on Facebook, you could run YouTube ads, through Google, there's a lot of different places you can use video, right? And AdWords nerds as an agency right now we don't have like a video creation option other than Hey, you know, we'll find a freelancer or something, you know, do your thing or, or hey, you give us a video, right? And we'll run it right. That's typically what we're doing. And one of the things that I always say to people is, you know, part of the advantage of video is that when you're running video ads and stuff, a lot of your competitors aren't doing them.

And so what makes you different, but like, what the reason that they're not doing them is that making good videos that run as ads is hard. Like there's a barrier to entry. Right? Like you gotta have a camp, and you got up for yourself. I was still about I still remember so vividly to this day, I had this client really sweet guy, then I was like, can you make us a video and we'll put it on the landing page we're doing we're running it through just gonna put it on your land pitch. And he's like, got it. And he took you know, you have like the iPhone video, which is fine most of the time, but he framed it in such a way I'm gonna try to do this on the video. He framed that so that he was like down here. Yeah, like literally, shoulders and head. And then like, all this empty space. And the lighting, it looked like he was being held hostage. And this was the video that they sent for, like proof of life where you hold up the news, he was here. And Ray was so bad. It was like, I will pay you $5 To not post this video like No, whatever it was, was so bad, right? And it really made me realize, yeah, he's a great dude.

But he just he didn't it was not the medium for him. And so there's a barrier entry. That barrier to entry is what makes having a great piece of video content. So value, right? This is again, for people who like are curious about this, this is what Josh does, right? Like him and his team will help you make these assets. And the whole point is like a really good video asset truly, truly, truly sets you apart in a way that's really hard to recruit. And so like, when investors come to you, right? And they're like, Okay, I made this piece of content, or I made this video or whatever. Can you give people like a big or like a couple big mistakes that people make over and over? Where if you're like, if you just don't do this one stupid, Hey, your video will be noticeably better. Is there anything that comes to mind? When I asked you that question?

19:20 You know, I'm actually in the process of creating an entire curriculum for this sort of thing. It's, I you know, I'll use it for like consulting clients, but primarily, it's gonna be for like my clientele and that sort of thing. But to me, and as I'm approaching this, for the most part, most people you know, there's a lot of people that are like, they'll get a local videographer or we even I even sometimes go and travel to clients and I'll like take my camera with them and film them be there on set director guide them through everything and that sort of thing. But for the most part, people are going to be filming the video on their own, so they're gonna have their iPhone or maybe a simple camera on that sort of thing. The thing I always tell people I will preach this until I'm blue in the face till the day I die. Keep it simple because I don't know how many offices I've walked into over the years and looked in the corner, and there were boxes of, you know, Canon gear or Sony gear that has still been in the box. And I asked, When did you get that, oh, two years ago, bro, it's still in the packaging, you haven't touched it.

And it's because people think that, oh, well, this person built out a $20,000 podcast recording studio, or this person invested in a $10,000 camera. So that means I need to as well. But the thing that you have to understand with anything in life, especially this type of stuff, is that there's levels to it. If you can't record simple, good quality video on your iPhone, which you had the capability to do, because the technology is there now, then you're not going to use $20,000, where the camera gear to record video, that's just the reality, you're not going to commit to it. Because that sort of stuff will bog you down so quick, unless you have experience with the gear. That's the difference. It's no, it's no different than so I play basketball every single morning at my local YMCA. And every once awhile, you'll see like old guys come in there or even people that are my age, but you can tell they have zero experience in playing basketball, where I'll stay and do like complete workout, you know, shooting 1515 foot jump shots are then I'm stepping back from threes and hitting five from the corner and five from up top. And then I'll drop down to the post.

And I'm doing that these very intensive workouts that are very skilled based workouts, they'll walk into the gym with their ASICs running shoes on and grab one of the flat balls that are off to the side that had the YMCA stamp on it, they'll start shooting five minutes in, they get wiped, they, you know, you see them shooting their balls or shooting you know over the backboard and that sort of thing. And then they'll walk out and leave. Well, they got exhausted because they didn't know the skills on how to actually use the ball and put it in the hoop. It's no different than that. So keep it simple. To me. The simplicity of it is that you have your iPhone post production is a charm nowadays, right so like for me, we we have a full video editing service that we manage, you know, video editing, from start to finish from like clipping all the way through, like adding captions in the B roll and stuff like that, cleaning it up, and just making it look stellar and getting it out there. It's it's simple on arm because we do it so often. But like even to you as a human being, it's like, if you keep it simple, you will always get better over time, what people try to do is they try to shoot for the Ryan Panetta status at the given moment from square one. And then if stay consistent with that for two weeks.

And my overarching here is in the world of what we do here and content, especially organic consistency, is it it, it sounds so simple, dude. But and you know this, but it is the thing, if you do consistently over time, the fundamentals of content, whether you're putting out one podcast a week, two social media posts a day, or whatever it is, it will work, you just have to stay consistent with it. And if you put yourself in a corner where you're, you know, stressing out about the camera gear you're setting up, or you don't know what topics to do stuff on, then you're gonna bog yourself down, you want to stay consistent with it, and you won't see results. And then you'll chalk it up to it didn't work. Right. So to me, simple stuff is you just chat GTP to get you a bunch of topics, say what are some topics that I could do to you know, talk about my coaching program, or if you're a real estate investor, a prime example is write down every single question that a motivated seller lead has about anything that you guys do. And then every common one, do a video on that. That's pure data that you're that's, that's fake. That's easy. There's a bunch of other tools that you go find online on like answer the public.com and stuff like that Google Keyword search and stuff like that, where we can generate topics with when it comes to video. Using an iPhone, you can get microphones that are either wired or wireless, that'll plug right into your iPhone and do the work for you post production can stitch everything together.

To me, I always tell my clients it record talk if you screw up 20 times I don't care don't stop the recording, just get through it because in post production, you can smoosh it all together clean it up and make it seem like one congruent video. And then the last thing I would say dude is lighting well when it comes to framing just frame yourself correctly, give yourself a little bit of space between the top of your head and the frame. Elbows to head should be in the frame just like that in case you want to crop it vertically. But with lighting natural lighting is always going to be the best if you can base a window that's going to give you every single bit of lighting that you need at all or if you're going to film outside that sort of thing but honestly like there's I could create a whole masterclass on creating easy intentional video but the the key thing is like still have high quality content cuz I do think that that is important, but it doesn't need to like there are stages to this like and work your way as you go along. Don't try to start from square two under 50. When you haven't even stepped into square one. That's that's where I'll leave it.

24:57 Don't try to benchpress through him. Turn 50 pounds your first day is what I'm hearing. If you're Spongebob, and you're trying to benchpress 350 On your first day, then you're doing the wrong things. Exactly. Just look up, you know, Jim fails on YouTube, watch the videos of people, there's like, you know, they tried to get out from under the thing and then internalize that video was what this was for. I love that. No, that was great. It's like it's been a long day already. All right. Josh has been super helpful. Ben, I, I really cannot tell you how much I appreciate this. So the website, so a couple of things. One, you mentioned, you have a book, the book is called the REI marketing book, you can get it at our E i marketing book.com. That'll take you to Amazon, you can go on Amazon and type in Rei marketing book, so people can go and check that out. Of course, the website is color media.com, which is spelled C U L. L e. r media.com. For people who are curious about working with you, like I said, you have a whole team that is there to help people with content marketing, video creation, all this stuff. For people who are curious about working with you, what is the best way they just go to the website and kind of click contact? How do they reach out to

26:12 you? Yeah, actually, if you want to reach out to me directly, you can always just email me Josh at color media.com. If you are serious about working with me, we are a little bit of a premium price service. So just be prepared for that. But we We do everything from start to finish with you. And that is our core three services is social media management, you to management, podcast management, those are big three that we do. And it's all like the design of what we do is to leave the client out of it as much as possible. I don't want them recording the content. I don't want them planning it. I don't want them writing scripts for it. We help with all of that, the strategizing everything like that. And then we'll go as far as producing all the raw content, quality, check it, you know, a fully edited quality check and write copy for it, post it and do that on a daily basis. You know, there's some clients we post five times a day for so yeah, you could just email me and by the way, I'm also happy if if anybody does want to reach out to me personally just have simple questions or whatever, feel free to reach out. I'm more than happy to provide that for your audience and answer any questions that they have. And if it leads to it and hop on a phone call with them.

27:18 Awesome. Alright, so that's Josh at color media. I will put it on the show notes as well, which would be good at our AdWords nerds.com/podcast But Josh color from color media.com Thank you so much, man. I I again, this was super fun. I learned a ton and look videos, the present and the future. So I really appreciate your your advice, man. That's
great. Yeah, this was tons of fun. You're a great house and hope to be back again at some point soon. So hope that makes sense. Everybody I hope this was useful. learning all about social media and video and content marketing stuff. Josh is a truly special person. Like I said, color media.com See you ll e ar media.com is the place to go and hey, did you know if you go to AdWords nerds.com You can find the podcast show notes and links and all sorts of stuff for all of our episodes. Just go and click on where it says podcast you will get all that information and more we post blog posts all sorts of fun stuff over at AdWords nerds.com. Look as always, I appreciate you listening. This show means a lot to me. We've been going for a long time now and I have a lot of fun every single time I do it. So thank you for being here. I will talk to you next week. Have a good one. Talk just

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