Data-Driven PPC: How to Dominate Real Estate Lead Generation

Mike Hambright (00:00.805)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. Today I’m here with my buddy Brandon Bateman. We’re gonna be talking about pay-per-click and how to master this channel. Whether you’re doing it yourself or you’re relying on somebody like Brandon’s company, Bateman Collective, to do it for you, we’re gonna teach you some lessons today. There’s gonna be some nuggets here, I promise you, in our conversations that you haven’t thought of before or that you forgot about maybe. But this is gonna be a great show to watch if you care about lead generation for your real estate business. So, Brandon, glad to have you here.

Brandon Bateman (00:27.17)
Yeah, I’m excited to be here, Mike.

Mike Hambright (00:28.783)
Yeah, looking forward to chatting some more and you know, obviously we run Investor Machine, so LeadGen is near and dear to my heart and whenever you and I get together, we kind of nerd out a little bit on LeadGen. And so excited to continue that conversation today. So hey, before we get started, tell us your background, how you got here.

Brandon Bateman (00:48.718)
It’s funny when people ask me this because I don’t have that much of a background. And this is what makes me kind of like a weird leader of a company too, is I don’t have actual work experience before this, right? A lot of people kind of come into their company and they’re like, well, based on the other jobs I’ve had, like I’m building this kind of culture, I’m doing it this way, or I’m not gonna be like that boss. And I’m like, well, I bagged groceries at a grocery store, right? I didn’t know, so I never worked in like true white collar.

Mike Hambright (01:13.701)
You’ve been in pay-per-click or paid Legion your whole career. Yeah.

Brandon Bateman (01:17.262)
Basically, yeah, so when this company started, to give you a little bit of a view into me at the time, I was a sophomore in college. It my first semester of my sophomore year, so I basically had one year of college under my belt. And I was thinking, well, I think I want to get into marketing. Let me look at some internships. So I’m going through these internships. And by the way, you talk to a lot of entrepreneurs that are these crazy people that never, they’re unemployable people. That’s not me at all. I would be a great Fortune 500 employee.

like show up at work, do my job, I wouldn’t complain. That was like my career path for a minute. So I’m looking at all these internships and I just like, well, I feel like the goal of an internship is to learn and I feel like I’m basically getting coffee for people in these internships is what it looks like. And most of them are unpaid, right? So how do I get into this digital marketing space? Well, I don’t know. Maybe if I’m not gonna get paid anyways, I’ll just start a company. So I email 100 companies that day and I say like…

My name’s Brandon, I wanna do your marketing. I don’t care what you want me to do. I don’t care how much you pay me. I don’t care if you pay me. I just wanna do your marketing. And I wanna learn as much about marketing as quickly as I can.

like, you take me up on it basically? And I found a couple clients that were willing to say, sure, you can run our marketing and we’re not gonna pay you. And from there, like, got referrals and like, my pricing strategy at the beginning was just like double the price until someone says no. So like, I remember my first one was like $0 and then the next one, like, they gave me a referral to someone and it was like, I was like, I don’t know, I charged 500 bucks. And then the next one, I was like, I don’t know, 1500. And then the next one was like, I don’t know, 3000. And then the next one was

Alright.

Brandon Bateman (02:56.718)
5,000 and they said no. And I was like, okay, 3,000 to that price. This is what I charged. And so that was, that was like the beginning of Bateman Collective. Like for a minute there, it was, it was just like, like I wasn’t, I wasn’t out to build a great company. I was, I was just out to like learn a ton of stuff. And you know, there’s all kinds of stuff I can tell you about. like, you eventually found our way into real estate and now for about, so, so that was eight years ago was like the start of the company. And for about the last four years, we’ve been working exclusively with real estate investors.

Mike Hambright (02:59.844)
Hahaha.

Mike Hambright (03:10.638)
Yeah.

Brandon Bateman (03:26.812)
My third client ever at the very beginning was a real estate investor and there’s still one that we work with today. And that’s kind of like the thread that we pulled to get tighter and tighter into the real estate space. And now we exclusively work with real estate investors and it’s been that way for four years.

Mike Hambright (03:37.764)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (03:42.651)
That’s a great story. And Jason Lewis has a similar story where he wanted to get in, Jason Lewis, who you know well, obviously out there in Salt Lake City with you. But my business partner in Investor Machine is like, really wanted to get into real estate investing and he just offered to work to somebody for free.

they actually said no, and he just basically kept saying, no, I’m coming, I’m coming. And then eventually he got a bunch of experience and now probably, you know, certainly one of the top, if not the top wholesaler in state of Utah. yeah, there’s something to be said for that. Like a lot of people that I find, especially in the real estate space, because I think it’s because it attracts a bunch of get rich quick people. So they like, they want to get rich quick and if they don’t get rich quick, they quit. And it’s like, well, there’s something to be said for just coming in and.

doing a free internship, like why not? I mean, you’re willing to go, not only go to college, but pay like tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to go get educated from people that have never done the thing. Like why not work for free for somebody that actually has done it and can teach you to build a skill that you can then charge more than average for eventually, but yeah.

Brandon Bateman (04:46.06)
I think it’s really just your focus, like what do optimize towards. And I think that’s part of what’s worked at Fabent Collective. Like they say, if you chase money, runs. And I just, like I was never chasing money. Like still my senior year of college, this is a couple of years after I started it, the company netted like three to $400,000. I can’t remember exactly what it was.

Mike Hambright (04:57.509)
Yeah.

Brandon Bateman (05:06.766)
And while that was happening, I was like applying for jobs, trying to find a job out of college because I’m just like, I just want to work somewhere. And then eventually I kind of convinced myself like, well, I got a company here. I should probably grow this. And I’ve turned into like an entrepreneur where I don’t see myself ever really going in a different direction. But it took me some convincing. Like I wasn’t like that natural guy. I always, even to this day, I optimize for what’s going to stretch me the most. How am I going to

and like the money that the business makes is kind of a side thought. And money is like a measurement you can use, right? Because as you succeed more in business, generally you make more money. Like that’s somewhat true. So do I care about it? Absolutely. But I only care about it like more so than caring about it financially and for what I could do for my life. I care about it from the standpoint of like this is a measurement of how much I’ve grown as a person.

Mike Hambright (05:37.338)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (05:56.805)
Yeah, there you go. That’s awesome. So we’re going to dive into some pay-per-click kind of masteries of a bunch of topics we’re going to talk about here today. And I’m excited for this conversation. maybe just at a high level, how do you define pay-per-click? A lot of people would, they cluster in Facebook ads or other social media ads in there. Like, how do you define PPC?

Brandon Bateman (06:20.514)
Yeah, it definitely depends on who you’re talking to, what it means. Generally, when we say PPC, we’re talking about Google Ads.

Google specifically has a pay-per-click platform, which is their search marketing side. And this is where, if you were to type into Google, we buy houses, and you see if there’s some ads that pop up when you type that in, like, we call those pay-per-click ads. Now, some people, they would say Facebook ads is part of that. It’s not technically a pay-per-click system, although I don’t really care, like, how we define the word. But, yeah, really, like, what we’re talking about here is, like, paid search marketing, which is, think, like, the most proper term. It’s just in the industry, people call it PPC. And it’s, which is more like the

the method of buying things. But that’s what makes it different than a lot of channels. You most channels, you’re going to be paying just to get the impression out there, right? And that’s true with direct mail, for example, like your real cost is like, what does it cost for me to print and mail this letter or this postcard? And in this paid search marketing, it’s largely paid per click. That’s how they do it. So it turns out to have your ad show costs you nothing. To have someone click on your ad, that’s where you pay the money and invest it’s called PPC.

Mike Hambright (07:28.368)
Yep.

And for those that don’t know, the main difference between the main difference, I mean, you’re the expert here, so I’m sure you’re going to correct me if I’m wrong, but with a Google search versus Facebook searches, it’s based on the behavior of the search person, right? So Facebook is not, I mean, they might be using behaviors behind there somewhere, but it’s not as, I guess it’s not as straightforward as Google. Like Google kind of knows based off of your searching, the types of things that you probably want to see ads for. You’d be more likely to convert an ad.

right?

Brandon Bateman (08:00.226)
Yeah, I would say there’s generally two things that make a quality of a lead. The first one is how inbound is it? And the second one is how much friction is there that produces the lead, right? So if we look at different channels, like Facebook is what I would call a low friction.

low amount of inbound, right? Because they were just on Facebook. Did they go to Facebook to go find your ad to try to see if they could sell their house? No. They went to Facebook because they were doing whatever on Facebook and then your ad showed up and it interrupted them. It’s called interruption marketing.

And they said, you know what? I might want to my house to you. And then it was easy for them to develop the form, right? Another example of interruption marketing that has a higher quality lead would be like TV, for example, where people don’t go to TV to find your ad, but also remembering the phone number finding you is a little bit harder. So that’s going to increase your lead quality. The cool thing about PPC is it’s the most inbound form. This is true for SEO as well. Like PPC and SEO are kind of two sides of the same coin where like

Nobody goes to TV looking for your TV commercial. Nobody goes to their mailbox thinking, like, I really hope there’s a cash offer in there. But they go to Google looking for you. And then they search a specific thing out of their own free will. And then they see your ad, and they choose to click on it. And then they go to your website, and they choose to fill out the form. And what are the chances that that person doesn’t have a house to sell, or they’re not interested in selling to you right now? And what are the chances that it’s not the right time for them?

It’s probably the right time because they chose this time, right? And they probably want to sell their house because they wouldn’t have looked for it otherwise. So it’s the most inbound form of marketing, which means the conversations with your leads are pretty different.

Mike Hambright (09:37.487)
Yep. And obviously, you know, all channels are.

constantly evolving and there’s some that kind of come and go texting and cold calling this hasn’t gone away, but it’s down substantially right and in our industry at least but pay-per-click and even direct mail people think well that’s like a buggy whip like it hasn’t really evolved and I would say on our side what you know we’re still printing and sending postcards like we have for decades or hundreds of years I don’t know I don’t know how long but what has evolved is the predictive modeling the data the science behind the data who you’re mailing

to in the first place. Obviously, pay-per-click is way more data intensive. You have a lot more of the history, search intent, all that stuff in the background. But how has the pay-per-click channel evolved? And guess maybe a little bit about where do you see it going from here to continue to advance.

Brandon Bateman (10:34.156)
Yeah, and I think there’s kind of two different lenses that I can answer that question from. And maybe we’ll just do both. There’s like, has it evolved in this industry and how is it evolving? Where is it going as like a channel as a whole, right? If we look at this industry, basically what’s happened is the bar’s risen. I’m sure you’ve just basically seen the same thing with direct max.

Mike Hambright (10:45.891)
Yeah.

Brandon Bateman (10:56.142)
Once upon a time, could you just send a few postcards and get a deal? Yes. And that doesn’t work the same anymore because other people have similar data and they’re sending postcards to similar people and that person’s got a stack of 40 postcards already. They’re going to be a little bit harder to reach than somebody where you’re the first person that’s reached out to them, right? And the same thing is kind of true with PPC. So what we saw in this industry is as a whole, I mean, the PPC industry, there’s really smart people.

things. In the real estate investing PPC industry, that’s what attracted me to this industry originally.

I like, cannot believe that people are running these campaigns so poorly in this industry. I’d never seen a single industry that had like worse campaigns in like my entire career up to that point. So I was like, this is so easy. Like you just gotta like do half of what people are doing in other industries and you can win in the real estate investing industry. And the bar has certainly risen. And what that means is it’s no longer good enough just to be there. You have to be really, really good at it and you have to have a competitive advantage.

Mike Hambright (11:38.81)
Yeah, wow.

Brandon Bateman (11:58.414)
So if we look at where is it going as a whole, some of the interesting stuff that’s gonna happen is it used to be that PPC worked a little bit more like direct mail does now, where the data’s a little bit more manual, and you’re looking at it, and the marketer’s like the mad scientist.

It’s just like looking at the data and trying to figure out like what are we going to do to drive to drive a lot of value here and you’re segmenting it super deep and you’re forming really granular stuff and saying something different to this person than that person. And the, the, had, we had all kinds of things like something that exists in the PPC world was something called a scag, which is a single keyword ad group. It was like this madly like granular structure where you’re controlling like every little facet of your PPC campaign. And it’s evolved into a much more of like a machine learning led.

system where now the way that it works is Google has a lot of data and they have really good predictive algorithms and what they do is you can still do things manually if you want to. They’re just going to kick you in the kneecaps by making it so you don’t have all the data they have, right? So they’re like use our automated algorithms or do it yourself but also all the data that we have for automated algorithms we’re not going to give it to you to do it yourself. So even if like you’re better than us we’ll have more data so we’ll still be better so you kind of have to use their automated algorithms which are a lot better. So the game has become less

Mike Hambright (13:09.733)
Hmm.

Brandon Bateman (13:11.864)
of like, I be this mad science marketer that’s trying to figure this out? And it’s become more of, how do I get Google on my side? How do I feed their algorithm the best data that I could possibly feed it so it can get as smart as possible? And what you’ll find in people spending millions of dollars a month in PPC is that they’ve learned to partner with Google in a really great way to make sure the algorithm has everything it needs and feed it more and more data. And data has become like the currency.

of PPC and that’s kind of the direction it’s continuing to go because you take like, because algorithms are just getting, they’re getting really, really powerful, right? You take something like chat GPT, if it hadn’t read the entire internet, it’s just a dumb model.

The algorithm can be really strong, it just doesn’t have all that input in it it hasn’t learned. It’s just like taking a toddler that’s not that smart. Well, that’s the thing though, they are smart, right? Their brain is super capable, but they just don’t have enough experience, they’ve not seen enough, right? The same thing can be true about an algorithm where the same algorithm, just given more time, gets a lot smarter. So that’s kind how the game with PPC has shifted is it’s become like this whole data game and whoever has the most data wins.

Mike Hambright (14:02.787)
Right, right.

Mike Hambright (14:15.556)
Yeah, that’s awesome. So let’s talk a little bit about, know, obviously people can hire you, you have an agency. There’s also a lot of people that just say, well, I’ll just do it myself or I’ll go watch a YouTube video and figure out how to do it. so, I mean, the real estate, this is probably true. mean, my, my experience for the last 17 years is real estate investors and real estate investing. And so I, probably a lot of entrepreneurs are the same, but a lot of real estate entrepreneurs are just cheap. Like we’re trying to buy cheap houses.

We’re trying to find cheap labor cheap materials like everything we do is cheap So it’s inherently they’re overly frugal and they tend to think like well, I’ll just figure out how to do that now aside from that I you know, obviously both of us are biased like we obviously feel like we’ve built businesses to help people and we if you serve hundreds of Customers doing the same thing. There’s really no way that the average individual can compete with you, right? But there are plenty of people that still do it themselves or attempt to do it themselves Let’s kind of talk about like the

DIY, the do-it-yourself opportunities versus working with a done for you and kind of the pros and cons, I guess, of each.

Brandon Bateman (15:25.976)
Yeah, I would say someone listening to this could probably guess what I’m about to say. So I’m going to try to say something different than what you probably guess I’m about to say. Let’s just look at this. Let’s talk about data. If.

There’s two things to figure out. There’s how important is it that we get the best results? And then there’s which direction is gonna get us the best results? So I just wanna like dive into that how important is it that we get the best results thing first? Because what I think is generally true, this isn’t absolutely true, but it’s generally true that pretty much no matter the cost, you’re going to do better by having the best possible results than by saving money on how you get there.

Mike Hambright (15:54.404)
Right.

Brandon Bateman (16:12.878)
It’s just the truth of business, right? So what we do, what we’ve done, because this injection comes up all the time in our sales process, where we’re saying, OK, this is what it’s going to cost. And people look at it, they’re like, I’m going to pay you that much money. I can’t believe I’m going to pay you that much money. It’s not worth it to pay you that much money. So then we have to look at it, have to figure out, well, how much is it worth?

Well, people all the time are calculating what their return on investment on their marketing is. You know what people never calculate that’s actually really, important? What’s your return on investment on your management for that marketing? Because if the management of that marketing makes the marketing work better, well, where do you spend most of your money? You spend most of your money on the marketing, right? So people don’t go out of business because they spent too much on the management of their marketing. They go out of business because the marketing didn’t work. So if you look at that,

What the numbers say really objectively, like we have a calculator, I can show you like old Google sheet, how it all works, for our management fee, which is oftentimes double or quadruple what other companies are charging, by the way, depends on the company that you’re working with. It’s comparable to like, like we’re definitely like level with like the most expensive companies in the industry. So if, but, and you could find like, I mean, you could find someone on Fiverr to manage a PPC campaign for 20 bucks a month, right? Like it’s, it’s not that hard. So, well, not the PPC is not that hard. It’s not that hard to find somebody who’s.

Mike Hambright (17:20.688)
All

Mike Hambright (17:26.306)
It’s not that hard to find somebody to do it. Yeah. Right.

Brandon Bateman (17:28.43)
Yeah, who says they’ll do it, right? So, so we can be a lot more expensive. So we look, we say, well, let’s just say you’re paying $0 for management. If you were to work with us, guess what our average client, how much better their results have to be with us to justify us charging our management fee instead of $0. It averages about 4%. It depends on your exit strategies and it depends on like the size of your spreads and what kind of ROI you expect you to get otherwise, but it’s about 4%. So what that means is the one extra turn, the breakeven point on the management fee that we charge is that you get 4%.

better results, which means that like your cost per click could be like $96 instead of $100 or your landing page conversion rate could be 10.4 % as opposed to 10%. These little things just like are seemingly insignificant where you probably wouldn’t like the reality is who notices a 4 % change in the results? Nobody. So the amount of change that there would have to be in your results to justify our fee is actually less than you would even notice and that’s what’s true. So then what it means is the most important things that you get it in right. if

Mike Hambright (18:22.681)
Right.

Brandon Bateman (18:28.28)
you believe that doing it yourself is going to get you a better result, even by a little bit, you should absolutely do that. If you believe that working with an agency is going to get you a better result by even a little bit, you should absolutely do that. And you should focus less on what’s going to cost to do each of those things because that’s pretty insignificant compared to the actual results.

Mike Hambright (18:43.834)
Yeah.

Brandon Bateman (18:46.732)
That said, are we really good at what we do to be generally get more than 4 % better results than what you get yourself? Absolutely, because you have this beginner tax, which is basically this idea that you’re going to make all these mistakes doing all these things that we’ve already done. We can go into as much detail as we want to about what those specific things are. But the reality is, somebody who has more data, it’s even to this point where like, Mike, I don’t consider you a PPC expert. I believe if you had all of the data that we have,

and you’re running the campaign, and we were like going head to head, I had to run a campaign, I had to beat you, and I had none of the data we had, but all of our knowledge, I think your campaign would actually outperform my campaign. That’s what it comes down to. Data is the most important thing. Who has the most data is basically who you want to work with. So unless you’re going to spend millions and millions of dollars, then you’re not going to be the company that has the most data. So you have to focus on more data equals better results. So you have to have that data advantage, and that’s largely the world that agencies are playing these days.

Mike Hambright (19:34.33)
Right.

Mike Hambright (19:42.437)
Yeah, that’s awesome. That’s great stuff. And I think, you know, what most real estate investors, a lot of real estate investors still do not really consider is like, did you start this business to be…

to run an agency? Like, did you start this business to be a property manager? Like whenever somebody thinks that they should manage their own rentals, then I say, well, why don’t you just start a management company and do that? Like, cause you’re not going to be better than a property management company that manages hundreds of rentals. Just like you’re not going to be a better agency that then somebody that has hundreds of clients, right? Like you just, you’re never going to have that skillset and you can’t, despite the fact that we try as entrepreneurs, you can’t wear all those hats effectively. And so it’s like, you know, build a,

business that allows you to partner with people to do those things that you’re never going to be the best at and just do what you enjoy doing the most. And you know, there’s some things that you kind of have to do. It’s really difficult to outsource your sales like acquisitions other than to build your own team out.

You don’t have to do the marketing, you don’t have to do the property management, you don’t have to do the construction and rehab. And so this is a natural business to kind of outsource all the stuff that you’re never going to be the best at because you’re just not. mean, you’re never going to have the capacity to be the best at it. You’re just, worst case, you’re going to do okay and you’re going to limp along.

Brandon Bateman (21:02.35)
Yeah, I I’d have to be like an egomaniac to think that I’m going to make better direct mail campaigns than Jason Lewis, who’s spent the last like seven years of his life all day, every day, trying to figure out how to make the best direct mail campaigns. there’s, it’s just, it’s silly, right? It’s like this, this like, I’ve got to have some like God complex or something. So I, I’m totally with you. Like when I say like, when I say in-house, I don’t even consider the real estate investor should be doing that. I think that’s like pretty objectively, just a really bad idea. I think the only thing that like I really consider is hiring someone in-house.

house to do it but even then like you’re I mean you can’t consider that unless you’re spending a ton because you’re talking the six-figure hire there and that six-figure hire is gonna want to make other hires to make that possible so it’s one of those things where you like you look at the price tag of the person to do it you’re like that’s a lot of money and then you realize

Mike Hambright (21:44.739)
Right.

Brandon Bateman (21:51.468)
That’s just what they cost. For them to pull this off, it’s going to cost a lot of other money too. And it’s wild and you’ll probably get worse results than somebody who’s specific to the industry and has more data. Because the best marketer in the world with no data is going to work worse than the medium marketer that has the most data.

Mike Hambright (21:53.082)
Right.

Yeah.

Mike Hambright (22:09.038)
Yeah, yeah, that’s awesome. So let’s talk about some common misconceptions with with pay-per-click. I know that, you know, it could be you got to have a big budget or if it doesn’t work with a small budget, it won’t work with a big budget or there’s all these kind of like…

wives tales out there about like just misconceptions about what should or shouldn’t work and then maybe even like budgeting like a lot of people you know in this industry whether it’s and it’s especially true on lead gen because I keep my finger on the pulse of that pretty more probably more than anything of people saying that I tried something and it didn’t work and therefore they’re like pay-per-click doesn’t work or direct mail doesn’t work and it’s like now the way you did it

doesn’t work or the way you were doing it didn’t work yet. But we tend to like make these broad brushes of saying like that definitively does not work, never do it again. And then, and then the, you know, a typical real estate investor will find out that they can say that about every channel, the way they did it doesn’t work. And therefore, what do you do? Just go out of business or shut it down or maybe rethink like how it was done, or maybe you just don’t do it anymore. But let’s talk about some kind of common misconception.

of pay-per-click and I guess overall lead gen.

Brandon Bateman (23:24.098)
Yeah, I mean, that’s definitely a rookie mindset, right? Because nobody can maintain that mindset and still be in business, right? So there is like one level up from that mindset, but still not where you need to be, which is like, well, PPC doesn’t work. then, you know, when like this is most of our leads as people who are like now like their fourth time trying PPC where they decided it doesn’t work. And then after six months, they’re like, shoot, I need more marketing channels. Like I’ll try this again. And I’m sure you guys see the same thing with direct mail.

Mike Hambright (23:50.34)
Yeah. Yeah.

Brandon Bateman (23:52.108)
Right? And then there’s the level where people just learn to get like really consistent and focus on the data and figure out what works. That’s the, I think the most important thing is you kind of have to focus on like every single dollar you spend on marketing has two purposes. Purpose number one, drive results. Purpose number two, help me learn something that’s going to help me drive better results tomorrow. Right?

And those things, don’t want those to be broad strokes things. They have to be specific things. And the only way to get actual true good insights is you have to be split testing things. And a split test is not I worked with this agency and then I fired them and I worked with this other agency and now my results are worse or now my results are better. A split test is we test like specific things. There has to be a hypothesis. I think if we did X instead of Y, it would work better. We run X and Y at the same time and we see which works better and then we just like learn something from that and then we do it again and then we do it again.

Mike Hambright (24:39.343)
Yeah.

Brandon Bateman (24:42.99)
So that’s the game. What’s the problem? That takes time, it takes money, you gotta spend budget. But that’s ultimately the difference between really good marketers and not so great marketers is they actually, they understand progress and what that has to look like.

Mike Hambright (24:54.213)
Yeah.

Yeah, I’ll give you an analogy here. And I think this is a, for folks that are listening to this right now, I’m just pulling this out of the air right now. But we’ve all seen people that…

got divorced, they were married and they got divorced. And then they go lose a bunch of weight and they get in shape and they kind of get their mind right. And then their second relationship like miraculously works better. And it’s like, what if you had done those things in your first relationship? Like maybe we wouldn’t be here right now. And so my analogy of working with an agency or a channel is like,

Brandon Bateman (25:27.512)
Sure.

Mike Hambright (25:32.599)
listen to them, find ways to tweak. Like there’s nobody that starts any channel that isn’t going to require some lever pulling and some knob twisting to kind of optimize and improve things over time, right? And so like instead of just throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater and saying this does not work, somebody else must know how to do it. It’s like, well, let’s make some improvements here before you jump into a different boat in the same pond, right? Essentially.

Brandon Bateman (26:00.962)
Yeah, yeah, 100%. And that’s where I think diagnosing problems is really important. Something that I’m pretty passionate about is that you want to get to the most specific root of the problem possible. Because the number one problem we face as entrepreneurs, in my opinion, is not that we can’t solve problems, but that we misidentify which problem needs to be solved. What I identify is I have an incompetent employee. What’s the reality? I have the wrong culture.

Right? So if I like say the incompetent employee is the problem and I try to fix it there, what’s going to happen? The problem is still going to show up again and again and again until I find the actual root of that problem. Right? So, so the, my favorite way for doing that is, basically a funnel analysis when it comes to marketing return on investment. If you think like, what do we want? Well, we want to put money in a funnel and we want to get money out of it. Right? We want to put a dollar in and get three, four, five, six, seven dollars out, right? Whatever our goal is.

And a lot of people just focus on that, like, well, the problem is that I have a bad return on investment. Is that the problem, though? Because the reality is that dollar goes into that funnel, and then it goes through 13 stages, at least as it relates to PPC marketing. goes through 13 stages where it’s converted to one thing.

At first it’s converted from a dollar into an impression, then an impression into a click, and then a click into a lead, and then a lead into a net lead, etc. And it pushes all the way through the funnel. And in between each of those stages there’s a ratio at which it converts. And turns out you can gather a bunch of data from a bunch of other similar companies and you can put it side by side with yours for that funnel and you can understand where are things dropping off in my funnel compared to this other one. So you can take something that’s like a, I have a bad marketing return on investment, and you can turn that into…

I’m bad at closing out appointments, or my contact rate is low, or my cost per click is too high. Whatever it is, and then you can solve that actual point of problem. And I think that makes a massive, massive difference to have that methodical viewpoint of solving these things. So that’s what basically what we do as a company with our clients, and we have these meetings with people on monthly basis where we’re looking at this funnel while identifying where are things breaking down, and we’re putting all of our effort towards solving that breakdown.

Brandon Bateman (28:08.32)
solving that constraint and once you solve that then naturally your results get better.

Mike Hambright (28:13.338)
Yeah.

That’s awesome. So let’s talk about kind of results in the measure of success. So that’s another, I think, problem that a lot of real estate investors have is they don’t use the right measuring stick to kind of measure success. Like they’ll use and I, you know, I’m pretty open that I think that cost per lead does not matter, but that’s the primary metric that people look at cost per meter, cost per lead or even cost per closing. But it doesn’t indicate profitability of that, of that channel. Right. And so there’s a lot of other

things, but let’s talk about what some of the correct measures of success are. And let’s also talk about the time to get there, because I think that’s another problem that a lot of real estate investors have is they try something for a month or two and it doesn’t work and it hasn’t worked yet. And then they say, well, this doesn’t work. And they just like shut it off. it’s like, you know, I usually give this kind of analogy of your world. It’s common for us as real estate investors to buy houses from people that have been distressed for years or literally decades. Like we buy these houses.

that just haven’t been updated in 20 years, right? And we expect to market to them in one month and convert that person that’s been distressed for years or decades. And so, you know, my general belief is that people need to try everything they do for at least six months, but also, and not give up. Like I say this all the time, any channel you go into, you should advertise enough to buy at least one deal based on your…

based on your kind of average margin in your market per month, but go six months without any return and not waiver and quit early. Not that you can’t make tweaks, but do you agree with, do you agree with roughly with that?

Brandon Bateman (29:53.314)
Yeah, absolutely, I would say time is a really important thing. And it’s important to understand which of our metrics are goals, meaning this defines the success of a channel, and which of our metrics explain how we get there. And the thing is, the metrics that explain how we get there.

you could get there different ways, right? Just like I always said, like we have, could break down the funnel, we can know how it works. Well, how that works for some clients is sometimes we find this niche in like really high quality leads that are really expensive, right? So we blow our cost per lead projections out of the water, but we’re like the quality’s there so we can hit a return on investment. And other times like, you your cost per lead.

you decide like, well, to get the return on investment we want, we need a $300 cost per lead. And it turns out we end up being at a $200 cost per lead, but we still can’t make it work because we don’t have the quality in the right way, right? So that’s where cost per lead, the quality, all those like 13 stages of the funnel that I talked about earlier, all those are like, how do you get there? Metrics.

Ultimately, we care about where we’re going. If we can find, like, it doesn’t matter how we got there, as long as we get there, right? And what I would say is like the place we want to get, I would say there’s four metrics that ultimately matter about a marketing channel. And I have little acronym for remembering this, it’s DART. So D-A-R-T. And the way it works, the first one, deals per month. It matters what potential for scale does your marketing channel have.

Right? So it’s not how many deals per month do you get from it as much as how much can be done, right? Cause if we’re investing into like, a marketing channel that has a lot of scale potential, then that’s more worthwhile for us to figure it out versus a marketing channel where like, could get a great return on investment, but it might not scale that much. It’s kind of like, like, let’s just say you say return on investment is the most important thing. Well, let’s just say you give me a dollar. I’ll give you 10 back. How exciting is that compared to you give me a hundred dollars. I’ll give you 300 back volume.

Brandon Bateman (31:41.484)
matters, it matters a ton, right? So that’s the first thing, is the volume or the scalability. The second one, the A stands for accuracy, which basically comes down to your lead quality.

accurately getting the right people because turns out a marketing channel has a lot of hidden costs associated with it with all the weeds that you have to sift through to find the good stuff right so that’s gonna cost you in the management it’s gonna cost you in acquisitions it’s gonna cost you in culture and all these things where it’s really really hard to say like what exact impact does it have on the company right so so a is for accuracy R is for return I think everybody knows about this like return on investment is the most important thing and then the last one T stands for time

And this is something I think a lot of people forget. Time is cash conversion cycle. And I’ll give you an example with this. was at Jerry Norton had an event in Puerto Rico a few weeks ago. I was there and I was speaking to this group of like newer investors.

And we’re talking about different channels. I told them about PPC, I told them about SEO. And they were like, well, what kind of budget do have to spend on these? I said, well, PPC, you’re looking at maybe $5 $10 grand starting out. SEO, you’re looking at more like a $2 to $4 grand. So someone asks me, they say, well, I don’t have that much money. Should I do SEO instead of PPC? Because there, if we’re just taking low end, I could be at $2 grand a month. Versus PPC, I’m going to have to be at $5 grand a month. So I can afford that more.

So what I described is like, well, let’s just say with PPC, your cash conversion cycle was 90 days. And let’s just say with SEO, your cash conversion cycle, because it’s a more long-term marketing channel, let’s just say it was 12 months. Well, in 12 months in SEO, how much money are you going to spend? 24 grand. In 90 days with PPC, even at a five grand budget, how much money are you going to spend?

Brandon Bateman (33:25.838)
15 grand, right? So might actually be less than the whole, right? Think of it like this. Let’s just say I was a hard money lender and Q1, I invest 500 grand into a property. I get it back. Q2, I invest 500 grand into a property. I get it back. I do the same thing Q3. I do the same thing Q4. How much money did I invest as a hard money lender? You could say $2 million or you could say $500,000 four times.

Mike Hambright (33:52.099)
Mm-hmm.

Brandon Bateman (33:52.442)
That’s how important the time back is, right? So let’s just say I’m spending 10 grand a month on PPC over 12 months. Did I invest 120 grand into PPC or did I invest 30 grand four times? That’s why cash conversion cycle is really, really important, especially if cash is a limitation in your business. If you have unlimited cash, it doesn’t matter and return on investment would be more important, but focusing on how fast that turns is really important.

Mike Hambright (34:02.489)
Right.

Yeah.

Mike Hambright (34:08.666)
Right.

Mike Hambright (34:15.598)
Yeah. And the deals per month, you probably alluded to this, but it’s also scalability, right? So with direct mail and pay per click, they’re highly scalable channels. Like you just raise your budget and it’s not as easy as I double my budget. I double my deal flow because there are some point of diminishing returns, but you can’t, it’s hard to scale. It’s hard to scale SEO, harder to scale SEO. And it’s harder to scale, cold calling and texting. Cause you have to, you have a, you already have a revolving door of people that are being told to

screw off all day long. it’s really hard to kind of scale those things. you know, sometimes I get people that say like, Hey, I found this really good deal for some radio ads in my market. only $500 a year. And I’m like, what is that going to get you? Like, it’s not scalable. It’s like, if it was really good, like, how do you spend $500 a day? Like, well, like, no, that’s not the deal. It’s just $500 per year. It’s like, okay, maybe you get one deal a year, but it’s not scalable. So as a real estate investor, stop looking at like, look at

things that are scalable because what you really need is scale. mean you really need, you can’t buy back your time, you can’t build your team by finding some little nugget that might get you one deal a year, right?

Brandon Bateman (35:27.81)
Yeah, I’m 100 % with you. I do the same thing in my own business where we’re at opportunities. Like we’re willing to invest way more in the channel to figure it out. If the fruit of figuring it out is that I can then repeat that, I can then 10x that on a monthly basis, I can then continue to utilize that for a very long time versus something that’s just like a one-off type of thing, which isn’t nearly as worth it. So scale, would say is wildly important.

Mike Hambright (35:50.981)
Yep, yep. Well Brandon, this is great stuff. We could probably, I know you and I could talk for hours. We have talked for hours on this stuff before. So if folks wanted to learn more about you, what you’re doing, Bateman, and how you can help people. I know we talked a lot about Paper Click today, but you also help people with Facebook ads and SEO, any other channels. It really kind of digital channels,

Brandon Bateman (35:58.296)
to.

Brandon Bateman (36:12.258)
Yeah, those are the big ones. There’s some things you could group into that. We’re doing some YouTube. We’re doing some what’s called Performance Max on Google and stuff. All this is within the Google platform. Really what we try to do is be really good at the online channels for real estate investing. And you could put a list there of 30 together, but the reality is some of them.

really work in this industry, so we focus on the ones that do work, which tends to be Google, Facebook, I suppose the other side of Google, which is the mechanics side, SEO. So if somebody’s interested in learning more about that, go to batemancollective.com. There you can see like a foreign fill out and you’ll get the booker call right there.

expert from my team. While I would love to talk here about all the details about every market, about everything, about every budget you could consider with where you’re at in your business, the reality is that can’t be done at scale, but we can have someone on the team talk to you specifically about your specific situation, and that can help you evaluate is this a good fit for us or is it not. So I recommend that. There’s also other things you can look at, if you’re looking at like…

We have a toolkit that’s pretty popular. You can go to batemancollective.com slash toolkit. And if you go there, what you’ll find is an entire master class that like today was just like a teeny bit into this, but there we have over eight hours of content diving deep into every aspect of Google Apps.

We basically peel back the curtain and show you everything that we do, knowing that most people after they see that aren’t going to want to do it themselves. They always want to do it themselves when they feel like it’s easy and once you actually see what’s required, you’re no longer interested. But that said, we have had people kind of follow that framework and be successful if they do want to do it on their own. So that’s another resource.

Mike Hambright (37:41.538)
Alright.

Mike Hambright (37:49.999)
Yeah, awesome. Cool. Well, check out those links guys. We’ll put them down below in the show notes here as well. But Brandon, thanks for spending some time with us today.

Brandon Bateman (37:58.766)
Cool, yeah, thank you, Mike, I appreciate it.

Mike Hambright (38:00.336)
Yeah, and everybody hope you got some good value here at the end of the day like we’re both pretty passionate about lead generation. We’re also both biased because we do this as a service for real estate investors through Bateman and then Investor Machine obviously, but I’ve always been very passionate about lead gen because it really is what separates those that are just kind of getting by with those that are high performers. I mean at the end of the day you started this business to not be a marketer to not be a property manager to not be a GC to not do all these things you got in this business for freedom. So why are you wearing all these hats?

when you’re not going to be the best at it anyway. So, Li-Gin is really the fuel that fuels all of our businesses. if you have a Lamborghini and there’s no gas in the tank, it’s not going to take you anywhere. And the gas that drives your business forward is Li-Gin. So, appreciate you guys for listening today, listening to our biased opinions, but they’re just accurate. At the end of the day, we’re right. But anyway, definitely wish you guys all the best and we’ll see you on the next show.