Intro to Marketing for Houses to Flip

Speaker 1: 0:01

What is up you guys. I hope that whatever you're up to today, I hope you're having an awesome one. This episode is your introduction to marketing for flip deals and you've got to stay tuned because you're going to find out the three phases of your marketing funnel, the goal of each of those phases and what you should be tracking in those phases in order to make sure your marketing dollars are being best spent. alright guys, it's a good one. Stay tuned.

Intro: 0:37

You're listening to the flip houses like a girl podcast where we educate, empower, and celebrate everyday women who are facing their fears, juggling family and business, embracing their awesomeness and wholeheartedly chase their dream of flipping houses . Each episode delivers honest to goodness tools, tips and strategies you can implement today to get closer to your first or next successful house flip. Here's your spiky haired, breakfast taco loving host house flipping coach, Debbie DeBerry.

Speaker 1: 1:14

alright, here we are. Introduction to marketing for flip deals. One Oh one okay. If this were a college class, this would basically be the entry level freshmen class. And I would bet you that most real estate investors and even agents aren't thinking about their businesses this way. Okay? So once again, you're going to be way ahead of the curve. alright, so remember in episode seven where we talked about the five stage process that real estate investors and agents must know to get the sellers? Yes. alright. Think back and we talked about funnels, right? What the funnel, Debbie , what are you talking about? alright, so remember a funnel is just your customer's journey with you. That's it. Okay, so in this regard, we're going to be talking about three phases, okay? Basically three phases of your customer's journey with you. The first phase being the attraction phase. So what you're doing to attract leads. So that's going to be the top of the funnel, okay? So think about an inverted triangle, alright? It's an upside down triangle in the top of it is super wide, right? That's the attract phase. That's where you are building brand awareness. So in this phase, the obviously the funnels wider , right? So there are a more people in this phase of the funnel. As it gets narrower, there are fewer people in that phase, okay? The first phase again is attract. The second phase is the nurture phase. Meaning how you connect with your customers or clients. Well, how you connect with your potential customers or clients because they aren't customers or clients yet. alright? So what are you doing to nurture those relationships with them in order for them to become a customer or a client? And then the third phase is converting them to a customer or a client. alright? And remember, one of the most important things when it comes to marketing is understanding where your lead is on their journey. So what part of the journey are they in me ? Meaning regardless of which part of that three phase funnel they're in, they are going to have different thoughts, feelings, needs and wants in each different phase. And you have got to know 100% what those thoughts, feelings, needs and wants are in each phase. Why? Because then you have to speak to those things in each phase in order to move them along your funnel. Because if you can't speak to where they are, they are not going to think you understand them. If they don't think you understand them, they are not going to think you can solve their problem, okay? Know what your lead is feeling, thinking, needing, and wanting. Okay? No it and speak to those things. alright? Yes, it requires work. It requires research, but the impact your marketing will have on that person is so much greater than the next investor over who isn't willing to do this part of the work and really understand where their lead is, what people are thinking, what they're feeling, what they're needing and what they're wanting. alright, so take the time to really understand that stuff. alright? Now along each phase, there are different questions that you need to be asking yourself. I'm going to have a downloadable guide for you because this is a lot of information and I really want you to be listening and not worried so much about memorizing everything. Okay? So I will have an easy to digest downloadable guide for you in the show notes. alright? Now you can have lots of different funnels in your business, lots of different marketing funnels. I'm going to use just one example to help you understand these concepts. Okay? Now, when I'm coming up with a funnel, I always start with the goal and then work backwards from there. Okay, so let's say you're going to do a direct mail campaign and the goal is to purchase a house to flip. Okay, so we're starting with the goal and we're working backward. alright? The vehicle we're using to do that in this example is a direct mail campaign. It could be a targeted postcard campaign, a handwritten letter campaign, whatever. Now, did you hear that? I said targeted because that's really important and I want to talk about this because I'm sure that either you have heard or you will hear that leads are the number one most important thing in your real estate investing business, right? If you don't have leads, you don't have a business. Well, I think leads are the second most important thing because if the leads are not targeted, they are worthless and it's a total waste of money. So the number one most important thing in your business is knowing your local market data. You have to know where your targeting, you have to know the neighborhoods and you have to go one step beyond that and actually know the property types within the neighborhoods that you're targeting, right? So highly targeted, knowing your data and knowing exactly what buyers are looking for in those areas that you're targeting. That is the number one most important thing in your business. Because if you are operating from a place of, Oh, I'm just going to do a blast marketing campaign and see what sticks, you know, see who calls me back. Let's just see. No, that is such a waste of money and time. It is totally inefficient. You will hear me say it over and over. Targeted mailing campaign, targeted lead generation. And that's what I mean. So every time I'm talking about marketing, you can always assume that I'm talking about highly targeted marketing, right? So knowing what buyers are buying, where they're buying it in my local market. Okay. alright. Let's get back to my example. Okay. This is again, a targeted postcard or handwritten letter campaign. alright. The end goal purchase a house to flip. So in the attract phase, right? We're basically, we are sending out mailings to a bunch of people that don't know us yet. The call to action on that postcard or letter is going to be to visit your website and fill out an intake form or does schedule a call with you, right? So the call to action is basically what action do you want that lead to take next. So if that is that you want them to visit your website, put on the card, visit my website at www, we buy houses.com, whatever it is or call me at, and then you're going to put your Google voice phone number on there. Okay? Always tell them what you want them to do. That is a call to action because if you don't, if you just send out a mailer that says, hey, we buy houses. Okay, now it's call us today at or visit our website. Now I know that might sound really obvious, but I have received postcards from investors that do not have a call to action on them. I even received them from real estate agents. It's ridiculous. Okay, so the goal of this little piece of the funnel is to get them to either visit your website or to give you a call. alright? Now there are three things here in this piece that you need to be measuring. Three metrics that you need to be tracking, okay? Number one, the total number of leads you generate. The second one, the cost per lead. Let's say you generated a hundred leads, alright? You mailed out a thousand postcards. You generated a hundred leads. These are just numbers, okay guys, these are just numbers. I'm just giving an example, okay? alright. You sent out a thousand mailers, you got 100 people to either call you or fill out an intake form on your website and real quick by intake form, I just mean that they are filling out their , basically they're giving you all of their property information. Okay? So on your website you're going to have fill out form and it's going to give them all kinds of questions. And here's the thing about those intake forms or those property information forms you want them to be on your website because the more filled out those forms are the better quality lead. Okay? I'm going to say that again. The more filled out, the more detailed those property intake forms are the better quality of lead and we're after quality. Okay? If it costs me 50 bucks to get a quality lead, but I can get crappy leads for three bucks and chase my tail trying to get them to answer my calls and emails and text messages, I would take the $50 leads all day long. Okay. Quality over quantity. alright, so back to our example. Let's say you sent out a thousand mailers, you got 100 leads and let's say you spent $500 to send out that mailer. Again, these are just numbers just for illustration purposes, okay? That means that you paid $5 per lead because you spent $500 and you got 100 leads, so you paid five bucks per lead, alright? That's a metric you need to track why marketing is a numbers game. Once you dial in your numbers, once you know your numbers, guess what? You want more leads, you put more money in. If you know that you can get leads at $5 a head and you want to double your leads, all you do is double your ad spend on something that's working, okay? This doesn't mean you add a totally different marketing vehicle and spend the same amount on it and hope for the same results. No, I'm talking about that specific marketing vehicle , so let's just say it's postcards. alright, and if I'm getting $5 leads, all I have to do is send more mailers and I will get more leads because I have proven that those are my numbers. Those are the results I get. alright? It's the beauty of marketing. Once you get it dialed in, all you do is add more money and you get more leads. alright? It's awesome. It's super powerful and super important that you know these things. Now, these are numbers that you have to continuously monitor because as you see those price or those cost per lead starting to creep up, you need to have a threshold at which once they reach x amount, I need to tweak some things. Know what you're going to tweak and know when you're going to tweak them. Okay, so we're tracking the total number of leads. We're tracking the cost per lead, and the third thing is you need to be tracking how fast either you or someone on your team is getting back in touch with these leads, meaning how long does it take from them submitting that property intake form on your website or them calling you? How long does it take for you or a team member to call them back or to email them back? All of these things need to be systematized. You've got to have processes in place to make things run efficiently, and so you don't drop the ball and things don't fall through the cracks. One of the top mistakes that I see, even seasoned investors make is they are not following up with their leads. They do all of this work. They spend all of this money and effort and time to get leads to fill out a form on their website or call them, and yet they do not reach out in time or at all. It's so crazy. Okay, so don't do that. Don't be that investor. Okay? So once they reach out to you on your website or via telephone, your next goal is to get the appointment, okay? So that's why time is of the essence and you've got to reach back out to these leads in a timely manner. You're not the only person they're reaching out to. Okay? Reach back out, build rapport, and try to get the appointment as soon as possible. However, if they aren't ready to schedule an appointment, you're going to nurture those leads and those relationships. And how are you going to do that with a CRM, a customer relationship management tool. It automates everything. A good one for new investors to use is MailChimp because it does the important thing of tagging, which you want to be able to segment people depending upon where they are in your funnel. So have you scheduled an appointment with them yet? Are you waiting to schedule an appointment? All of these things you can tag. And then that way you can communicate with people who have that tag in a certain way because think about it, if you have not scheduled an appointment with somebody yet, would you be sending them emails about, thank you so much for your business. Do you have any referrals for me? I mean obviously that's not the wording, but you see where I'm getting at. Right? Okay. So that's the importance of tagging. You want a CRM that can do tagging and MailChimp is one of them that we're up to, I think 2000 contacts. I think you get a free account. Okay, so check into that. And then I have no connection to MailChimp. So do your research and see what works for you. But I like to not have a lot of overhead, and so I thought maybe you would like that too. So I knew that was a free or inexpensive option for you. Okay? Now remember, the goal of the nurture phase is to get the appointment. Once you get the appointment, the metric that you are tracking is the number of appointments that you set. Because what we want to know is how many postcards do I have to send out to get how many leads to get? How many appointments? alright? So how many leads do I need to get in order to make an appointment? Okay? That is a hugely important metric. Now, the third and final phase of this marketing funnel is to actually convert that lead into a customer. alright? To get the contract signed and closed. So the important things here are obviously communication and doing something to stand out at closing. Don't just show up and sign the paperwork and be rid of this seller . No, you're going to bring a gift. You're going to do something handwritten notes, something to stand out, okay? Why? Because you want referrals and this is a relationship business, okay? You'll continue to stay in touch with them as well, and you'll use that CRM like I just mentioned to do. So to make that easier and automated, the important metric to track here is the number of closings, okay? Because we want to know ultimately the number of closings per the number of appointments scheduled per the number of leads that will tell us how efficient this marketing vehicle is. And also once that gets dialed in, meaning you're hitting those same metrics consistently, then and only then should you add more marketing dollars to that marketing vehicle. Okay? So once it's dialed in, then you add more fuel and you get more leads, you get more leads, you get more appointments, you get more appointments, you get more closings. You see how that goes? It's just math. It's just a numbers game. Okay? So that was a lot of information. Let's recap it here. Remember when talking about marketing funnels, you've got three phases. The top phase. If you've got an inverted triangle, the top phase is the attract phase. The second phase is the nurture phase, and the third phase is converting to a customer or a client, okay? Now, in the attract phase, the goal is to get them to fill out a form or call you or whatever your call to action is. The point is basically you want them to raise their hand and say, yes, I need help. Yes, reach out to me. Okay? What you're tracking in this phase is the number of leads you get per the number of mailings. Now remember, if you're doing another marketing vehicle, it's the same thing. The number of leads per whatever the number of flyers, the amount of Facebook ads spend, whatever it is, you've got to track the number of leads per whatever it is you're doing, okay? In this second phase, the nurture phase, the goal is to get the appointment. You want to walk through the house. You want to meet the seller in person, build that rapport, okay? Remember, make sure anybody who needs to be there to make a decision is at the appointment. What are you tracking in this phase? You're tracking the number of appointments for the number of leads. Okay? So if it's a hundred leads and you get 10 appointments, then you've got 10 appointments out of a hundred leads. Okay? The third and final phase is converting to a customer. The goal here is to get the contract signed and closed. And again, the metric here that you need to be tracking is the number of closings. How many closings do you get out of how many appointments? Okay? Do you see how all of those numbers are intertwined? They're all relative to each other. Okay, that's it. That is your introduction to marketing for flip deals. Now again, I'm going to have the pdf download in the show notes. I'm also going to link to MailChimp and anything else that I mentioned in this I will link to in the show notes. Alright , so what do you do with this information? Well, if you have some marketing that you're doing, go track the numbers. Go figure out what your numbers are if you aren't already doing so, if you aren't doing any active marketing, do so with all of the information in this episode in mind. Okay, look, I hope that you found some value in this episode. There's a lot in here. It's really important episode. It might not be super sexy to a lot of you because a lot of people don't like to talk about marketing, don't like to talk about numbers. It freaks them out, but you've got to embrace it, okay? It's not scary. It doesn't have to be scary at least. Now, if you did get some value out of this episode and you're liking the podcast, would you do me a huge favor? Yes. It's that time. Would you please first subscribe to the podcast and then would you be so kind as to leave a rating and a review? Because it really helps me reach more like- minded women like you. And remember the point of this entire podcast is for me to instill in at least one person out there that they absolutely can chase their dream of flipping houses and they can be wildly successful doing so because guess what? Her kids are watching, her grandkids are watching. And at the end of the day, that ripple effect of those kids seeing an empowered mom or grandma or aunt or sister or whatever it is that makes a difference. Okay, you guys, I will see you on the next episode. Until then, go flip houses like a girl and make it a great day.