Episode #99 – What Do You Do When Your Marketing Isn’t Working?

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. [00:33.5]

Dan: Alright, hello everybody, welcome to this week's episode of the “REI Marketing Nerds” podcast. As always, this is Daniel Barrett here from AdWordsnerds.com and this week I'm going to do something a little bit different. I wanted to bring you a recording that I recently did in the REI marketing nerds Facebook group. If you're not in that group, I go live in that group pretty regularly, I do trainings there, we answer questions there, investors kind of share what they're doing online to find seller leads. It's great and if you ever want to find it, you can go right to AdWords nerds.com/group, and you'll be taken there. Go ahead and request to join, and I'll be sure to add you. [01:18.8]

But this week I actually went live in that group and I didn't really know what I was going to talk about. And I started just riffing on the issue of problems in your marketing. And I don't know, I was, I was in a weird mood when I started, I was kind of not feeling great. And once I got going, I really feel like I expressed something that I've been thinking for a long time, which is how to deal with problems that crop up in your marketing, how to deal with how that impacts your mindset, how to deal with thinking about like, does that mean you got to stop or should you keep going or when's the right time to quit? And I don't know. I really liked what came out. So this week, I'm just going to share that with you. So without any further ado, I'm going to get right into this recording from a Facebook live that I did in the REI marketing nerds, Facebook group and I hope you enjoy it. [02:13.4]

Ladies and gentlemen, how are you? This is Daniel Barrett here from AdWordsnerds.com. Hope you are well as always, if you ever want to talk to me or my team about fixing your online marketing for motivated sellers, MotivatedSellerLeads.com, that's the place to be MotivatedSellerLeads.com. Let's talk about problems. Let's talk about obstacles. Let's talk about things that get in the way and prevent you from getting what you want to get. For most investors, that's motivated seller leads, it's like, Hey, I want to get leads and deals online. Great, I get it. And it's very common when you get into this space, you might hear someone like me talking about this, or you might hear a coach talking about or whatever, and you're going to say, okay, I'm going to go do this and maybe launch your ad campaign, or you start doing SEO, or you start doing Facebook ads. And nothing, nothing happens, right? Either nothing happens or you spend some money, you don't get any leads or you get the clicks, but they don't convert. And it's very frustrating, right? [03:14.9]

It's very frustrating that I just went through this and literally just, just so you don't think right that I have everything figured out. Everything goes perfectly for me, literally my company, right? We run at Facebook ads for our business. This is not for our clients, but for our business. And literally for six months, they would get shut down and we'd have to get them reapproved and then they would get shut down again. And then they would work and it was a nightmare and it's just such a pain in the butt. Okay. So this happens to me the same as it happens to you. And in fact, I was just talking, so earlier today I run a coaching programs called the Search. Click. Convert. Bootcamp and in that I had a student come and say, Hey, you know, I've launched my ads and you know it’s going fine, but I'm getting low impressions, which means no, one's seeing the ads you know, what do I do about it? And I had somebody else saying like, yeah, I have that problem too. You know, what do I do about it? This is always the question, right? What do I do about it? Okay. [04:13.2]

And I am going to tell you what to do about it specifically intimate. But first I want to point something out. There is no point at which you do not have some kind of problem with your online marketing. And I mean, this, it doesn't matter how good it is. It doesn't matter who does it. It doesn't matter if I teach you. Doesn't matter if someone else teaches you, there's always going to be an obstacle. There's always going to be a bottleneck. Why is this? Well it's because the minute you fix the bottleneck, the minute you address a constraint in a system, it moves, it doesn't go away. It just becomes something else. And as you start to get more successful and things start to go better, your standards rise. So maybe in the beginning you were psyched just to get a lead. But now you want 10 leads. Then you want 20 leads and you want to do 40 or 50. Literally I have an ex, a past coaching student, someone who went through my program that has 40 or 50 deals a month. [05:22.4]

You know, somebody who knows this person, right. He's doing 40 50 deals a month. And he hit me up and was like, I'm trying to get, try to make my ads run better. Like, there's a problem with my ads. Everybody's got a problem because the minute we fix the constraint, it moves. And then the minute that we have success, our standard dries. And then here's the third thing. If you figure it out, let's say you figured it out. You have the formula, the keywords, the landing page. Everything's perfect. The ads are perfect. Everything's perfect. The minute you figure out someone steals it. And so when someone steals it, they use your advantage against you and two advantages cancel each other out and we're right back where we started. There is one core reality of online marketing, one core reality of real estate investing and that is change. [06:22.0]

Change is the only constant, change is the only thing I am sure is going to be a part of your life tomorrow and the next week and the next month and the next year and the next decade. Change is the core reality of what we do. But we can't throw up our hands and say, well, I don't want to do it anymore. We can't just say, well, that's it for me. We need to go out and get deals. We need to go out and make money. I need to feed my family, right? I have two kiddos. I need to feed two kiddos and a cat and a wife. So what are we going to do about it? Here's what you do about it, first of all, you let go of the attachment to the idea that everything's going to be perfect. It's not, it's not a destination. It's a process, okay. It's just the thing we're always working on. It's a muscle we are constantly exercising. It's a thing that's never over. And that's fine. It's a part of business. It's part of life. It's a part of investing. So it's never over. [07:20.9]

So you're not failing, if you're running into problems, you are just in the, in the business. That's all it is, you're in the business. So we let go of that. Now you guys have heard me talk about in this group here, you heard me talk about the ‘Theory of Constraints’ before. I'm going to say it again. If we say this is the process it's always changing. Everything's about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Here's what you do. You find the constraint and you fix.

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I will tell you one of the most mind blowing things I ever learned from the ‘Theory of Constraints’, which you can look it up, it's a manufacturing idea. I just brought it into all the marketing for real estate investors. I didn't make it up, I'm applying somebody else's work here in maybe in a novel way, maybe not. One of the most mind blowing things I have learned from the ‘Theory of Constraints’ it is called The Illusion of Local Maxima, The Illusion of Local Maxima. And this is a fancy word in fancy. A fancy couple of words I will admit, but first of all, you can say it in parties, people think you're smart. The Illusion of Local Maxima. Here's what it means, in any system there's a constraint, right? People got to see your ads and then they click your ads. They're going to land on the page. And then they got to convert on the page. And then they got to get on the phone with you and they don't close. [09:10.7]

One of those stages right now for you is the constraint. The place at which the bottle gets the narrowest, the pipe gets the narrowest. The point at which your volume is throttled, that's the constraint. And there's only ever one. There's only ever one limiter on the system. It's a place where things get the tightest. Now The Illusion of Local Maxima is the belief that I can make the system better by making everything better. If I get more views and more clicks and more conversions and more deals, I should work on all of these and make them all better. But it's an illusion. It's an illusion because you can't improve this system anywhere other than the constraint. Let me give you an example. [10:06.2]

Let's say your problem is you can't close on the phone. I'm not you. You're great, right? But let's say your problem is you can't close on the phone. You could get infinite number of views and infinite number of clicks, an infinite number of conversions, an infinite number of phone calls. But if you can't close, how many deals will you get? Zero. The only place you can improve the system is that the constraint. Think about it in a different way. Let's say your problem is your ads are terrible and no one wants to click on it. You could get the most views on those ads ever. You could make the world's best landing page. You could have the world's best answering service. You could be the world's best closer. If no one clicks the ads, no, one's on the phone. That's The Illusion of Local Maxima. It's when we forget that there's only one place and one place only where we can improve a system and that is say it with me at the constraint. [11:15.7]

This was a mind blowing idea for me, because I really grew up with this idea of you improve everything a little bit, 2% here, 2% there, 2% here, 2% there that gives me an 8% improvement. That's not how it works. It's not how it works. If you improve everything by 2%, it's not 2% times, 2% times, 2%. It's not 8% or 10%. It's 2% because you only improve the constraint by 2%. Every system improves to only add the constraint? Now, what does this mean for you? It means that yes, you are locked into perpetual battle against your competitors, against the market and against Googles changing everything, your Facebook's rules are changing, yes, you are at war with change. Change is the only constant change as your reality. It's hard. It stinks and everything. You get it. [12:17.1]

You get it right. And then it breaks and you, you get it right and someone steals. But there's only ever one thing on your to do list. There's only ever one thing you need to focus on, there's only ever one thing you need to do or worry about or think about there's only one thing. And that one thing is how do I find the constraint and how do I fix it? And that's it. And suddenly the chaos falls away and the noise falls away. And what you're left with for me anyway, is clarity. That clarity is all I need to do every day, my job, as an entrepreneur, as a real estate investor, as a marketer, even as a father, even as a person, my only job, my only responsibility find the constraints and make it better. [13:17.7]

And if I do that, my business will run better. My clients will have more success. You listen to this right now, you'll have more success. My kids will be happier. My family will be wealthier. My life will be easier. Your life will be easier. It's what it's about. You want to make the world a better place. You want to make the world a better place, because I do. If you want to make the world a better place, find your constraint. I hope that makes sense. This is Danny Barrett, MotivatedSellerLeads.com. As always, you want to talk to me and my team, just get a sense of what we're doing, see what we're working on. Talk a little bit about what we see other investors doing. We would love to talk to you, go to MotivatedSellerLeads.com. Grab a time on our calendar. I hope you are having an awesome, awesome day. And I will talk to you soon. [14:12.3]

As always, you can find all of our past episodes and show notes at REI MarketingNerds.com. That's REI MarketingNerds.com. And yeah, if you could leave us a comment or review, I see every single one, wherever you get your podcasts, I'd appreciate it helps other people find the show. And yeah, that would be excellent. So I'm going to leave it here for this week as always, I'll see you next time and hope you have a great rest of the week. [14:39.7]

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