Direct Marketing

If you are going to make real money in real estate investing, you need to have a steady stream of motivated seller leads coming in day in and day out. We have two rules that we reinforce to our students all the time: 1. Always market for dollars (private money); and 2. Always market for deals.

Of course, you can always make sure you have good working relationships with local realtors and brokers so they can feed you properties. But you also need to understand that in any market, there are always distressed homeowners who need to sell their houses right now – and that’s where the big money is.

It doesn’t matter where you live. There will always be a seller in your area who’s willing to hand their house keys over to you for 50 cents on the dollar. They need someone to come in and offer them a solution and you need to be that person. But, unless they know about you too, you can’t expect them to call you and beg you to take their house.

There are many marketing programs you can implement in your business. The key is to find out what works for you and getting good at it. This is where Strategic Marketing comes into play.

Right off the bat, I’m going to tell you that you need a combination of all these techniques if you really want to create an identity and presence in your local market. Just take a look at all the big players in your area. You’ll see that they employ a combination of online, offline and direct mail marketing programs.

Here are additional tips for you to understand start direct marketing:

The point is to get the word out that you’re a serious player in your market

I cannot emphasize this enough – you need to have an unmistakable identity in your market. Title agents, bankruptcy attorneys, trustees, local mortgage brokers, and practically anybody who has anything to do with buying and selling houses needs to have you on their priority lists as someone they can push motivated sellers to.

This is a big task, but it’s far from being un-doable. In fact, you can get started with this right this very second. And we can certainly help you out with this. We have extensive experience in most marketing techniques you can think off.

Now here’s an upside to doing aggressive marketing early in your real estate career: Once your business starts to pick up and you start closing deals, word gets out that you’re someone who gets things done.

You begin to build that identity that you’re someone who buys a lot of houses, sells a lot of houses, and makes deals happen. When this happens, sellers will start coming to you automatically.

But first things first: You’ll need to set up your marketing because this is key to your success. Ask any millionaire real estate investor right now, and they’ll tell you the same thing: If you’re not doing any marketing in your business, you’re flushing money down the drain. It’s only a matter of time until you need to throw in the towel.

You need to get started and you need to do it now. You can get started with offline strategies. Begin with direct mail, bandit signs, car magnets, door hangers, business cards, or fliers.

There are even those who do guerilla marketing, where they simply go to a particular neighborhood–can be a supermarket or even a parking lot–and give out business cards or fliers to passersby. This may sound outdated, but the mere fact that people still do it–not only for real estate purposes but for all sorts of businesses that require marketing–tells you this strategy still yields results.

The idea here is to pick an offline strategy you’re comfortable with–use it, exploit it, stick with it. Be disciplined, consistent, and focused and you’ll surely see results.The idea of creating a presence is the same with online marketing. The implementation may be a bit more technical, but in the age of social media and the internet, there’s no excuse for you not to be able to do this.

In this generation, it’s already quite easy to build a squeeze page and create a pay-per-click or keyword campaign in order to drive traffic to your website. Of course, we can’t go on talking about online marketing without mentioning social media. Using sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn to tell everyone that you buy houses is quite commonplace. I’m betting you’re already doing it. Online classified sites such as kijiji.com, craigslist.com, and backpage.com are also very valuable for your online marketing.

Here is an example of our Direct Marketing Website we use and recreate for our students and customers for as little as $500: www.HoustonCapitalHomebuyers.com

When you get a website like this ready, you just take a couple minutes to go out and post an ad directing traffic to your websites, and you would have expanded your online marketing reach that much further. Because practically everyone in this business is implementing some kind of online marketing tactic, so the biggest hurdle you’ll have to contend with when doing this is how to make it stand out from the rest.

The easiest way to do this is to put yourself in the shoes of your target audience. If you just lost your job, your bills are piling up and your bank account is looking more and more like Mother Hubbard’s cupboard, what phrase would you type in Yahoo! or Google to look for help? “Who’s buying (State) houses?” “(State) house for sale fast” “Who can buy my house here in (State)?”

As soon as you figure it out, make sure to include these phrases in your ads and online postings. Remember, just like any other activity, marketing expertise takes time. You just have to do it consistently and soon enough, you’ll become good at it. The key is to get started right away.

It’s easy to get frustrated while trying to get a foothold in the market. I get it.

Remember, you’re not the only one doing this. If you’re starting from scratch right now, chances are, your competition is already miles ahead of you. Moreover, all the other established names in real estate are still continuously and consistently doing their online marketing.

If you’re going to look at it from this perspective, it will definitely seem like a gargantuan task to get noticed in a sea of other more experienced marketers.

However, you should always remember, all these big names started out exactly where you are right now. The apprehension you’re feeling while looking at them is the same apprehension they felt when they looked at their own predecessors.

Imagine if they caved in and didn’t push through despite the seemingly insurmountable odds. Would you be standing in their shadows right now?

Just keep a positive attitude towards your endeavor and keep in mind that there’s always room for the small investor. Once you embrace this reality, you’ll immediately realize there’s even bigger room for you to grow. Adopt an abundance mentality, which believes that there will always be enough deals for everyone. As long as you do your marketing right, there are always going to be people out there who need to sell a house.

In this present environment, it doesn’t matter if you’ve been marketing for three years or three months. As long as you are making calls every month and making offers on houses (which you should be doing), you will end up with a motivated seller who’s more than happy to part with his or her house for 50 cents on the dollar.

I can guarantee that. Once you set this ball in motion, you need to prepare yourself to handle the traffic. I have seen investors in the past who have been praying for leads for so long, but as soon as they started marketing and their phones started ringing off the hook, they folded under the pressure.

Once you begin your marketing efforts, you’ll start getting a lot of calls and getting plenty of traffic. You need to be smart in handling this and set up some systems and infrastructure to handle the lead flow.

While it is true that there is a definite science to doing your marketing, there’s just no substitute for hard work, determination and focus when you’re still a beginner. As long as you keep with the basic goals and targets you set for yourself, you’ll see positive results. Remember, I was exactly in the same position as you are now when I started out. If you’re going to look at where I am now, you’ll come to the inevitable conclusion that what I do works. So you just need to follow my lead, do as I’ve done it, and you’ll end up in this same position I’m in right now. Keep on making those calls and keep on making offers.

Happy investing!

Brant

PS: If you’re interested in having my team help you set up a complete direct marketing plan, reply back to this message and we’ll discuss how to help you with your marketing plans.

PPS: If you are also interested in getting your own direct marketing website set up this week, just let us know.