Over at Adwords Nerds, we’ve been talking to some clients of ours who are real estate investors trying to find more motivated seller leads online. Pretty much everyone we’ve been talking to is concerned about a real tightening up of the housing market. I think it is pretty clear, if you talk to really advanced investors, that they are feeling a very real crunch in that housing market.
Because of that, levels of competition online are going up. Competition going up is never fun and it certainly gets difficult for people. The problem I’ve noticed is that people are kind of pulling their money out of the market– and we’re going to talk about why that is absolutely the wrong idea.
“The market gets tighter, the going gets tougher, things get more difficult.” Those are toxic words. When you find yourself thinking that it’s time to stop marketing, you are guaranteeing that your business is going to very quickly run out of oxygen. You are not going to have the leads or the deals in the pipeline that you need to get you through the toughest times.
Marketing is what supplies our businesses with the cash flow we need to grow. If you pull back on that when times get tough, you’re really almost guaranteeing yourself a very, very tough time.
So if the market’s getting wild, competitive, and substantially more difficult, what do we do about it?
The answer is more about follow up than it is about the marketing channels. There’s a whole lot we can’t control about Google or Facebook. But the follow up we implement into our investing businesses is something we absolutely have control over.
The national average for AdWords leads right now is about 1 out of 20. When you get about 20 leads, typically you can put a deal under contract. But that’s at a national average. There are people we work with that put out an average of 1 out of 7 leads and turn that into a deal under contract.
Now, let’s say you are running an investing business. One person over here is doing 1 out of 20, so every 20 leads, they put one deal out under contract. Then over here, you’ve got an investor who is putting 1 lead out of every 7 under contract. Those are very different business models. And those people are going to have very different experiences when the housing market tightens up.
The number one thing that determines how many deals you end up putting under contract from your online marketing is the follow-up. Whether that’s SCO, Facebook, AdWords, Bing, whatever, it’s the follow up. It’s not the ad, it’s not the bids, it’s not the landing pages. You need to be following up via texting, voice mailing, ringless voice mailing, mailing them, emailing, calling, and anything you can do regularly. If you aren’t doing this, you are absolutely leaving hundreds of thousands of dollars with of deals on the table. It’s just the way that it is.
There’s another thing that people kind of get in their heads when it comes to following up. It’s is the assumption that because the lead came in online, and they’re not ready to go right away, they must be a bad lead.
If you pop online to get something done but decide to check Facebook for any amount of time beforehand, you can get distracted. You’ll be taken away from the thing that you actually meant to do. It’s very easy to do. We’ve all been there.
Even if they’re highly motivated people, being online tends to be highly distracting. You just need to be in front of them when that switch flips and they become ready to convert. The way we stay in front of them is by emailing them, staying in touch, following up. And you might have to do this for weeks or months. 60% of deals are happening in the follow up not after the person converts. Not after they call the first time, but in the multi-week, multi-month follow up.
If you don’t have a system in place for doing that, you’re really doing yourself a disservice. You are leaving potentially a huge amount of money on the table.
When the market gets rough, don’t give up. Work on that follow-up. Turn those leads into deals into contacts. Stay present and build a system into your business plan that allows for substantial (and often long-winded) follow-up.
This is Dan Barrett from AdWords Nerds signing off. Cheers, everybody!
Photo source: Pixabay
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