Digital Marketing Secrets

Mike: [00:00:00] Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the show. Really excited to interview my friend, Brandon Bateman here today. He’s a pay-per-click expert. We’re going to talk about digital marketing, whether you’re using it or not, you should be, there is a reason why, uh, all your customers are online right now. And there’s a reason why you should be there too.

So let’s, we’re gonna talk about today is what’s working now in digital marketing.

Professional real estate investors know that it’s not really about the real estate. That real estate is just a vehicle for freedom. A group of over a hundred of a nation’s leading real estate investors from across the country, meet several times a year at the investor fuel you’ll save mastermind to share ideas on how to strengthen each other’s businesses, but also to come together as well.

And there’s more fulfilling lives for all of those around us on today’s show, we’re going to continue our conversation, fueling our businesses and our lives. [00:01:00]

I’m glad you’re here.

Hey, Brandon, welcome to the show. Hey, thank

Brandon: you, Mike. Happy

Mike: to be here. Yeah. Glad to have you. And I, you know, obviously we both run agencies, we do a lot of stuff with data and direct mail and things like that through the best machine you have a pay-per-click a business. And so I always love talking about lead gen because I know it’s the lifeblood of everybody’s business.

And right now it’s, uh, it’s I guess, more challenging than it has been in a long time, which creates a lot of opportunities as well. So, uh,

Brandon: glad to have you here. Yeah, absolutely super excited to be here and dab out a lot of this stuff. You’re doing Mike. Yeah. Well, you

Mike: too. You too. Yeah. Thank you. We can pat each other on the back for the next half hour.

Let’s do it. You ready? Hey, I’m really excited to do that. You’re you’re in the investor fuel mastermind. You serve a lot of our customers there. And one of the things that I, uh, that I really appreciate about you is that you add a lot of [00:02:00] value. You. Just trying to push your product all the time here. And obviously I’ve never seen you do that, actually.

So just sharing a great value and giving a lot of value and that tends to attract, uh, you know, people that want to work with you. So I’m looking forward to kind of learning what’s working now inside of, uh, the digital marketing front. So for, Hey, before we jump in, tell us a little bit about your background before you were a marketer for real estate investors.

Brandon: Yeah, it’s a, it’s a good question. So the funny thing is I actually started this company back when I was in college. So this whole idea of like, uh, like, like people ask me all the time, like, were you an accountant before you did this or that different stuff? No, like I bagged groceries at a grocery store, you know, it’s not like I have like a gigantic career behind me.

Um, but. The background is I started a company when I was in college and my goal was just to use paid ads to help companies grow. Uh, I was super interested in marketing. I was super interested in data and just really hungry. And I remember I just kinda like emailed every company in the local town that I lived in so that I could find online and just said like, please let me [00:03:00] do your marketing.

I don’t care if you even pay me or what you pay me or what you want me to do. I just want to do marketing. I want to learn. Um, and I’m, and I’m super hungry. Um, and that eventually morphed into Bateman collective, which is the company that we are today. Yeah. What introduced me to the real estate world is probably about six months after we started.

Um, I got in touch with, uh, some of the new, tiny marks. Dubler I don’t know if anyone here knows him. No. And you probably know his partner, Cody Hoffman, who’s the much, much louder side of the business. It’s kind of behind the scenes, you know, doing operations and stuff. Um, but, but mark basically came to me.

He, he runs a wholesaling operation in Utah and he said like, we’re in this weird industry. You’ve probably never heard of where we do this, like buying houses for cash. And then these were the things. And, you know, like, I think as I, I think I’ve seen it a couple of bandit signs or whatever the case is. Um, and we’ve worked with a lot of agencies in gear and we heard that this digital marketing thing can work, but we just can’t make it.

In our market, can you help us? Um, we want to bring someone in from the outside and, and that company kind of taught me [00:04:00] everything that I know about real estate. And I kind of learned through, through all that. Um, and that’s kind of my introduction to real estate. We grew their marketing eventually to 1.4 million in wholesale assignment fees from digital marketing.

Along that whole journey. You have been starting to work with a lot of other investors too. So

Mike: that’s great. Once you kind of build that skill out, it’s like, how do you, how do you help other people? How do you leverage that to work in, I guess, more markets. Right. So that’s great. So, um, you know, a lot of folks that are in my experience, you know, real estate investors are typically, you kind of fall into two categories.

This is going to be very broad. So I don’t want to alienate anybody here too, too bad, but. Super cheap and just try to do everything themselves, which I think is inherent from the fact that a lot of real estate investors had to be very scrappy when they first got started and just like had to, you know, be the acquisitions person had to like do everything themselves because they didn’t, they couldn’t afford a team yet.

Right. Or they’ve scaled up enough to where they know that in order to [00:05:00] have a life of any, you know, of any. Like they get their life back. Um, and to grow, they have to build out a team. They have to be willing to invest in marketing, outsource things to the right people. Right. And so my goal is, and I kind of always think of like the Robert Kiyosaki cashflow quadrant.

It’s like the upper left is an employee. The lower left is the, uh, self-employed right. They say they’re a business owner, but the truth is the business owns them. Right. Um, Then there’s the business owner that has probably still works in the business, but they have a team and they’ve got some systems and processes in place.

And then in the lower, right, there’s the eye box, which is they’re an investor and they don’t have to even get out of bed in the morning, but because their money is what’s earning them more money, which is, you know, kind of where a lot of multifamily and some of the bigger multi-family guys are. Is they invest.

They’re very passive and, uh, the money makes them, but most people can’t start there because they don’t have, you have to make them before then when he can work for you. [00:06:00] Right. So my goal and a lot of things that I do is try to push people through that flow, right? Like. Yeah. When I used to do a lot of coaching, it’s like, if you’re an employee, let’s get you to be self-employed and start selling then on your own, then let’s talk about how to scale to be more of a business owner and treat it like a business.

Right. And then let’s kind of move into doing more passive stuff. And so, um, so I guess one of the things we’ll talk about in this show is how do we move people out of being that self-employed box, where they’re doing everything themselves too. Scaling up through business and systems and processes and outsourcing some stuff so that they don’t have to do it all because the truth is, is if you’re stuck down there, um, You know, you, you’re never going to get the freedoms that you wanted, which is why you started real estate investing, you know, 99% of the time, which is your time freedom.

And being able to scale up and make enough money to buy your time back. Right? So that’s my little tirade there of, of why this stuff is important and why those that are listening right now should be listening to us. So let’s talk about why, you know, specifically digital [00:07:00] marketing is, uh, for those that aren’t.

You know, doing a lot of paper clicker, even Facebook ads right now, why they should be doing more digital marketing and maybe for some of those that are why they should consider ramping that up.

Brandon: Yeah, it’s a good question. I mean, I think perhaps intentionally it kind of relates to what you were talking about, about the different roles that you go through as a business, um, because different marketing channels have different benefits, but I think like, I guess one probably over-simplistic way to look at it could be to say that like every marketing channel is going to be somewhere on a scale way.

On one side of the scale, you have outbound market. Way on the other side of the scale, you might have inbound marketing and as you move across the scale, you find different things, but you start to find that the inbound marketing makes more and more sense as that company is growing. As that company becomes more sophisticated, more well-capitalized and the owner is able to get more and more out of it.

Um, like the reason that outbound marketing is really great to start is because if you’re looking at like, what, how [00:08:00] many dollars does it cost to get a new deal? Outbound marketing is usually cheaper than that marketing. Not always, but usually like, that’s the general trend. So you look at someone who’s like just getting into real estate and they have a thousand bucks.

Like, you know, maybe not, maybe don’t blow that on PPC. That’s going to be like, pick up the phone and start calling people because that’s going to be like the cheapest, most effective way for you to spend that money, getting the deal. Right.

Mike: Right. Yeah. Yeah. I think for a lot of people that, that first start off.

I I’ve talked about this a lot over the years is, uh, if you have more time than money, then you have to use more of your time to do things which could be cold calling, texting, driving for dollars door, knocking, bandit signs, like all those things. But, um, those things are not going to get you to freedom.

Like those might get you from the first step of the stairs to the second step, which is fine. Right? And so the goal is to get up to where your marketing is working and you don’t have to think about. [00:09:00] All that much. Right? Some students, some scaled up, uh, scaled up lead

Brandon: gen. Exactly. So, and you know, to be clear, I think that all of those channels, you mentioned all the channels we could talk about here.

Like every marketing channel has a place in business, right? I’m not really usually an advocate of like ditch that marketing channel started a different one. It’s all about building upon. Yeah, making things, uh, like basically combining all your channels together. Um, but it’s, it’s true that your, your focus shifts, right?

Because at some point, even in your business, from a marketing perspective, you want your money to work for you instead of your time working for you. So that’s where if you make the shift from the outbound marketing, To like, say in the middle between outbound and inbound and that place, you’re going to find like some marketing channels, for example, where you reach out to the seller in some automated fashion, instead of like actually calling them or texting them or whatever the case is.

Um, maybe it’s through, through mail or it’s through a Facebook ad or something like that. And then they basically raised their hand and they say, yes, that’s interesting to me. Yes. [00:10:00] I want to do that. So that’s like in the middle, right. It’s going to be more expensive than the outbound stuff usually, but it’s going to.

It’s going to be a higher quality lead when you get it. So, so there’s something kind of in the middle and then all the way on the far side, you would have like search engine marketing, where it’s like people actively seeking you out. Um, and those are generally the highest quality leads that you can have in your business.

And also usually the most expensive. So I think that whole, uh, that whole path there is important. When you have to think, like, do you want your time to work for you or your money? And usually what happens as, as companies scale is they want to start utilizing more and more channels that are either in the middle or the far end of that scale towards inbound.

Just because if you look at like how many deals can we do as a team, it’s more on that stuff. If you look at how many deals can I do with the amount of money I have, it’s usually more.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. There’s no doubt as you. And I think investors need to understand that as you scale your business up, you hit this point of diminishing returns.

Your advertising, your cost per deal is just going to [00:11:00] generally get higher, but you’re using less of your time. Right? And so it’s a scale, like to use an over-simplistic example, if you’re primarily door knocking, like you can’t do that. 24 hours a day, or you can’t do that 48 hours a day, right. Because there’s not 48 hours in a day.

So at some point you just can’t do that anymore. And of course, you know, it probably every point, you know, you, it’s just not a fun thing to do. You’re just doing it because you have to, right. So it’s like, you gotta do what you gotta do to get to the point to where. You can effectively buy your time back and use paid advertising to help generate leads, which is way more scalable.

I mean, pay-per-click, you know, pay per click and direct mail. And those are obviously two of the more common, um, paid advertising methods. You can’t scale them endlessly either, but it’s a whole lot easier to send you an email or to send us to the best of machine and email and say, Hey, I want to go from 5,000.

I want to double my budget next month from [00:12:00] wherever it’s at than it is to do to double your, uh, text message marketing or cold calling. And that’s a little more complicated because there’s a lot more people involved. That type of campaign, or if you’re doing it yourself, like you probably, can’t just double the amount of time you spend on it of your own time, because if you’re doing everything yourself, you probably don’t have a whole lot of free time in the first place.

Brandon: Yep. Agreed. Agreed. So, so anyways, I think that’s the, I think that’s the clear value. Inbound lead generation know whether that’s direct mail, whether that’s digital marketing, something like that. So, you know, for people that are listening to this that have kind of gotten to that point in their business where you can’t afford those things, it’s, it’s a, it is a really good next step.

And you’re, you know, most of the people listening probably are already doing some of that stuff. Um, so I think, uh, a good way to, to understand like why digital marketing, um, it could be to understand even whether their channel. Available. Right? Cause cause a lot of people just also do think of digital marketing.

Like that’s a channel, but it’s like the internet, you [00:13:00] know, the internet, all kinds of different things that you can find no less than a dozen channels that you can use. Um, but what I think it really comes down to is three that are important for people that are really trying to find motivated sellers.

Um, that’s PBC, which you mentioned a couple of times here, Facebook ads and SEO. And for, for most investors, some. Digital channel. Like at least one of those three makes sense. And then for many of them, multiple of those can make sense. Um, but, but it really is a natural progression. Um, one that’s commonly overlooked that I’m finding is Facebook ads.

You just don’t hear a lot of people talking about it, right? Like even like when we come into this, you’re like, Hey, PPC, BBC. And that’s most people because PPC is the one that you hear a lot about. Um, Facebook ads is the one that is our highest ROI channel across clients, which is super interesting to me because there, it has a pretty bad reputation because if you don’t do it right, then it doesn’t work.

But like if you do it right, it tends to work at a better ROI than PBC can, but it is [00:14:00] more of an outbound channel than people. You’re a little bit further on that scale. So it’s a good, like a for people usually just getting into digital marketing. I think Facebook ads is a good way to dip their toe in because you get more dollars out for every dollar that you put in, but you do have to deal with the lower lead quality.

Mike: Yeah. So on Facebook. So the idea with facing the challenge, I think a lot of people that hit with Facebook is, um, pay-per-click so let’s just kind of say Google, because that’s the most that’s most of it, but not all of it, but is behavioral, right? People are searching for keywords. Like they’re taking action.

Facebook is people aren’t really searching for anything other than just the distraction from whatever they should be doing, probably. And the hope is that you’re, they’re going to see an ad that resonates with them, but it’s not really as behavioral as it’s not based off of, um, that user kind of taking action or searching for something that would indicate that they probably want what you have.

Right?

Brandon: Yeah. That’s an excellent point. The way that I’ve, I’ve heard it described often as you kind of have two different ways that you [00:15:00] can. You can gather customers. It’s either going to be through demand generation or demand. Harvesting demand generation would be the concept of what most wholesalers and flippers are doing.

Like direct mail is a good example of this Facebook ads is a good example of this. It’s all just like going to people and saying, Hey, do you want to sell your house? But they weren’t necessarily looking for that solution versus demand. Harvesting is like that person searching on Google right now.

They’re going to find someone else on Google. Who’s willing to buy them. Like almost guaranteed, unless you’re in some weird market, right? There are no wholesalers or flippers, then they’re going to find someone and that’s demand that exists. You didn’t generate that. And you just want to capture that demand instead of someone else.

So that’s really the difference between those channels. Um, and demand harvesting is just more of an inbound channel. So that’s why people love it. People that rave about BBC, the reason is those leads close quicker. They tend to be more motivated. Um, all those things, the leads are amazing. It’s just [00:16:00] much more expensive than something like Facebook ads.

So it’s a really good channel at the right point that you’re ready to scale that because if you look at it, How many people do you need to do a certain number of deals? I can almost guarantee you that number is lower with PPC than almost any other marketing channel, just because of the quality of work.

Mike: Right. Because the seller was searching for a solution, like ready to buy. Right. And I think that’s one of the things that a lot of. Don’t quite understand which hopefully this is fairly. Sometimes you hear something you’re like, oh, that makes total sense is with, um, SMS marketing and cold calling and things like that.

You’re calling a very broad list of people that weren’t searching for you. You might’ve found them. And there’s somewhere in the sales cycle typically they’re way earlier in the sales cycle, right. They’re like, well, Yeah, I thought about it, but they never took even the effort to do a search on Google yet.

Right. So you might, if you catch somebody that’s interested, you’re often catching them earlier in the sales cycle. Um, and so, but when somebody, you know, is seeking you out or seeking [00:17:00] the solution that you provide there, they’re already pretty far along in the decision to potentially say.

Brandon: Yep. That’s exactly what the differences. Right? So as with everything you pay a premium, right? So QVC is more expensive, but the quality is really great. And then Facebook, you’d spend a little bit more time chasing down sellers, perhaps not as much as it would be with like a purely outbound channel, right.

Because it is the thing that Facebook ads is. It is every person that’s a lead is still someone who typed in their information on the form itself. I want a cash offer and click the button to get that information to you so they could get that cash offer. So it is still an inbound, uh, inbound marketing channel, but a little bit less motivation.

Sure,

Mike: sure. Yeah. So for those of you that are listening right now that are thinking sometimes people, I think sometimes investors look at their cost per lead and they might say, well, Michael. Per lead through pay-per-click or direct mail or something is twice as high as these other things. But if you look at the cost per acquisition, you probably start to see a shift.

It’s like, okay, the leads might cost you more, but the conversion is so much better typically that the [00:18:00] cost per acquisition is really what you should be looking at. And potentially even the ROI on that deal. Like they could be more profitable deals. If somebody, if they’re more motivated, You know, in theory academically, they might be willing to sell for less than those that you had to convince to talk to you in the first

Brandon: place.

Right. And it’s more than just theory. Like we do track those metrics. I’m sure you do too on your side with the best of machine. Um, but we find that these channels on average produce significantly larger deal sizes for our clients. Then there are other channels. So it is interesting, you know, it’s a different kind of conversation with the, with the seller.

Mike: Yeah. So with pay-per-click or with Facebook, you said, you know, it’s often overlooked now, obviously one of the things that’s kind of gotten hot over the last, you know, year, 18 months is people that are virtually investing in their, the way that they’ve made Facebook work is they adver costs. They advertise it.

30 states. Right? And they’re just like, I’ll take a lead anywhere. I’ll invest anywhere, which that’s a legitimate model. There’s a lot of [00:19:00] challenges with that model too. Especially on the disposition side, it’s a lot easier to generate leads and acquire houses. The dispo side is the challenge in that model.

And so some people have said, here’s how we can get cheaper leads is just. Care where they come from. Um, but for my model and a lot of folks models, they invest in, you know, one market or maybe a couple of markets, but they’re heavy in those markets. So what’s kind of working now with pay-per-click stuff.

I mean, one thing that I’ll throw out there, it’s probably a soft ball is more of a retargeting ads that have visited your site and didn’t fill out a form or did. Right. But how about just kind of cold traffic? Like what do you, what are some tips you can give on Facebook? Cold traffic for local markets.

Brandon: Yeah, it’s a, it’s a good question, right? Because a lot of people that you talk to that love BBC are going wide. Uh, what you do there is you trade one problem, the problem acquisitions for a different problem, but problem with dispositions. And it’s, it’s like for some people, it’s, it’s a good trade for others.

It’s not a good trade. Like there, we have clients that are really successful in both types of models. It’s just going to be a different [00:20:00] kind of advertising. Um, what’s been really successful. Um, is, I mean, it kind of depends on the channel. If we’re talking about Facebook only right now, there’s a lot of people who.

Have tried Facebook. I can tell you, it’s pretty rare that I talked to an investor that tried Facebook and just as I didn’t get any leads, right. Usually it’s I got so many leads and they were so bad. I don’t know how anybody makes us work. Right. That’s usually the problem with Facebook. So usually our, like the way that we do Facebook ads targets a much higher cost per lead than the average Facebook ad and also targets a much higher quality.

Um, the different Facebook ad and when we’d done test of our strategies versus different types of strategies, what we’ve found is our clients get more of a return off of less leads, which even if you could generate the same return off of less leads, I think that’s a win. Um, but really with Facebook, the reason a lot of people are getting stuck on it is because they think of Facebook.

Like they think of their other marketing channels, but it’s the internet. It works so, so differently. Um, like even like [00:21:00] all this stuff, like, I love what you guys are doing with investment machine. You guys are taking data to a whole different level compared to what other companies are doing. Those same principles that you’re using would make you fall flat on your face on Facebook ads.

But so many investors are taking those same principles and they’re pulling them in. Um, the best success that we’ve had with Facebook ads is leveraging Facebook’s techniques. The best that we can, Facebook is largely machine learning driven. So to give you an example, if I, for example, was to advertise, I mean, this is a weird example, like that’s just like cat food, right on Facebook ads.

Um, a lot of people would say you want to target people who have cats, right. That’s a really simple thing. Um, what you could do with Facebook ads is you could target everybody. And what you would find is when you started looking at, who’s seen your ads a few weeks later, they would only be people who have.

Because Facebook would start to learn that the only people who buy this share these common attributes and the exact same things, but. [00:22:00] The, the targeting monies to motivated sellers. A lot of people want to narrow their audience and it’s like only reach the people that we want to reach really typically the way that it works best is we target broad audiences, but we tell Facebook very clear what our goals are and the communicates Facebook.

Very clearly those goals are met. So Facebook learns over time, which people are more likely to accomplish our goal than other people. So in a sense, targeting through Facebook ads, it doesn’t happen through targeting, but instead through optimization and that. Significantly more powerful than any other data that we could feed into Facebook.

So we found that by doing that, by creating barriers to someone, filling out a lead form, and then using those leads that went through more friction in order to tell Facebook, Hey, this was good. I want more of this stuff. We have been able to increase lead quality significantly. And also just understanding that machine learning is completely random and it goes all kinds of different directions.

So you have to understand when it’s not working, Facebook is so far from a set and forget it type channel, um, at least on our side, right on your side, you know, you can set us and forget us, but it’s, uh, it’s about like understanding when that [00:23:00] machine learning is like messing up and being able to fix and intervene so that you get back to the right sellers and that’s where most people are going wrong.

If they did those two things. They would be able to get a much higher quality lead from Facebook. Yeah.

Mike: And I think that, that, that back to the investors being cheap, there’s a lot of folks with, um, I mean, we see it with obviously most people that, um, send direct mail most I’ll say, uh, cause we, we obviously, we’re probably the largest done for you lead generation system, certainly with direct mail in the country.

At this point, we’ve grown pretty fast to the best of machine, but I know. From being in the business for 13 years, there’s a lot of people that are like, well, what you see all the time? What’s your favorite list? What’s your best list of Cynthia? And people will say, oh, probate or something simple. It’s like, but that’s such a simplified version.

And then those are such small lists, ultimately in the grand scheme of things. So people will go get, and they’ll say I got the list as if it’s the static thing. And they’re like, oh, I pulled the list and then they don’t pull it again forever. Like we pull it every day. We pull [00:24:00] that stuff every day. Right.

And so, but, and then people don’t clean up their list, so they don’t take off the souls. They don’t take off. Sometimes they don’t take off the people that asked to be taken off. They don’t take off the undeliverables cause those are sitting in a box in the corner. And so, but in the, in, in the. Spirit of being cheap.

They just keep doing it over and over again. When they’re not really looking at the greatest expenses, the opportunity costs lost of not doing it. Right. And I know that’s the same with pay-per-click with digital marketing, people will be like, oh, I can just get in and figure this out. Or my buddy gave me a bunch of keywords that I could upload and put it in there.

And it’s so much more than that. I just, I just don’t think that real estate investors, the ones that are thriving right now have that mindset. And if you’re listening to this right now, You’re saying, oh crap. They’re talking about me. Um, we are right at the end of the day. What does it cost you to do this wrong?

Like, what is it costing? You, you can’t see it on your P and L but it’s a real expense and it’s probably your biggest expense. So, um, hopefully try to advise people here too. [00:25:00] At the end of the day, I’m a champion for real estate investors. I want them to thrive and have amazing lives and do all the things that they wanted to do.

But I see so many struggle and it’s because they just, honestly, they just do a bunch of half-ass stuff. So,

Brandon: and what a lot of people don’t, don’t get, uh, Yeah, well, I mean, we could talk about how people around with us all the time. Um, but the, what a lot of people don’t get is that it’s a data game primarily over anything else like with your direct mail and stuff, sometimes it’s not about you necessarily taking forever to press the button.

It’s about knowing which button. Yeah. And that takes experience. That takes expertise. That takes a lot of data from a lot of other places that tells you, which kind of things are working better, allows you to train whatever types of algorithms you’re using to do better. So that’s a tough thing. It’s like Mike, you’re not a digital marketing expert, but I, I have a firm belief.

I believe if we took all of the data that we have as a company, and I deliver that to you. And then we stripped me of all the data that we have. And I just went out on my own kind of like you are now in the digital marketing space. I [00:26:00] believe that you, if you put your mind to it and me, if I put my mind to it, you would outperform my campaign.

Because you have the data, the data is so important. Um, and that’s what a lot of people don’t fully understand. You know, like I talked to someone else the other day that instead of hiring us, wanting to hire like four in-house people to manage these campaigns, it’s like, well, I figured if we get like, you know, 40 hours a week, times four, people like that’ll work better, but it’s not the game of ours.

It’s a game of knowing which button to press more so than, than, you know, just sitting there, pressing the button all day, if that makes sense. And the data is the data is so, so important.

Mike: Yeah. Maybe you could give some guidance to those that are out there. Let’s look out to talk to two different people.

Let’s say that there’s the investor that just doesn’t have, you know, enough of a budget yet to pay an agency because there’s a management fee. Right. That’s always one of the issues of, like you said, if you’re, if your marketing budget is a thousand bucks a month, I mean, firstly. God help you because that’s not much to this day and age.

Right. And so I’m not, you know, trying to say that [00:27:00] folks that are just getting started out there. If you’re listening to this, there’s not a way to get started when it’s probably not. It’s probably not digital marketing. It’s probably not direct mail. It’s probably not. It’s, it’s more hustle, like save your money and, you know, cold call or a text message market or whatever you gotta do to get going, but know that paid advertising ultimately is how you scale.

Well, let’s talk to that person that is, has a low budget. Um, You know, where do they get started with digital advertising as they start to raise the budget up. And then, and then we’ll kind of ask the same question of those that have a decent budget, but aren’t seeing the returns they want, like, what are some ways they can maybe optimize, right.

So let’s start with kind of the low budget person first. Um, how do they even get started in digital marketing? We really haven’t talked much about SEO. Maybe it’s, maybe it’s SEO, which is a lower hurdle, but I don’t want to take any, any words out of your mouth, but maybe share your.

Brandon: Yeah, I can share some, some examples of what someone could do.

Um, and, and what I have seen people do. Right? So if you’re going to come in with a really small budget, [00:28:00] you may want to strongly consider just focusing that time and those efforts on other channels first, because digital marketing is a more expensive game, right? If you’re going to go the digital marketing route, this whole concept of small budget is sort of, you know, like, like what is small?

What is it small? Like, I can tell you what we usually tell people. Um, when it comes to like the paid ads side, if you don’t have three grand a month and you’re not able to sustain it for six months, Maybe do something else first until you can be at that point, then it’s time to start experimenting with digital marketing.

And usually like at that lower budget range, Facebook ads is usually the best first channel because it’ll generate a lot of leads for the amount of budget. If you do it right, it’ll be the right quality. It’ll get you the most dollars out for every dollar in on an immediate level, instead of like SEO, which probably would be Facebook ads from an ROI standpoint, it just would take a year to go.

Or whatever the case is. The other thing that I have seen people do, including people in investor fuel. All right. Obviously we’re both a part of, I’m a part of you own, um, is [00:29:00] SEO. You can kind of hustle your way through SEO. If you want to. I think expertise is, is helpful, but you can find lots of information online.

Um, I think if you are going to DIY a channel, SEO is the one to DIY. And the reason is it is more of a game of pressing a button a lot of times than knowing what’s depressed and like on PPC Facebook ads, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re going to blow your money like crazy. Whereas SEO, you can only really blow your.

Right. You can go out and trying to build your own links. You can write your own blog, posts, content, get it all out. Like you can do all those things. Most people by the time they really get into that, they’re like, okay, I should just hire something to do with this. If they don’t think it’s worth their time.

Um, but that’s, that’s probably my. Like, if you’re looking for the DIY channel SEOs, I think the one that’s most possible. Um, but at some point you probably will want to outsource that just because at some point you’re looking at what it costs to get it done by an agency and how much time you spend on it.

And you’ll realize there’s like, unless you like want to build your own SEO agency and like build all the processes and hire like an army of VAs to do your SEO. Uh, it’s, it’s a hard, it’s a hard path, you know, but it can get, you started, right. If you’re willing to hustle. [00:30:00]

Mike: Sure. Sure. Awesome. Um, and then let’s talk about the person that’s, that’s kind of scaling out there in the scale up stage.

Like they have a decent budget they’re spending money. They might already be online, but they are having a hard time kind of scaling it more they’re at, maybe they’re doing it themselves and they should outsource it. Maybe talk to that person a little bit and just say, what are, what are some of the common things you’ve seen that people are kind of either doing wrong or not doing right.

At least that ha that, that, you know, if, if tweaked, they could start to scale and see better results.

Brandon: Yeah. Excellent question. I mean, and the thing is it could be a variety of different issues. What you really need is to be able to diagnose what that issue is. Um, so the, the number one problem that I see with this is this people are basically saying like, Hey, money’s going out.

I’m not getting money back in, but they don’t know the first thing about trying to figure out why that’s the case. Right. Cause you’re just like, oh, I hired an agency. I give him my money. We didn’t get the money back. You know, what, what do we do? All right. So that’s so, so the important thing is to. Um, [00:31:00] what kind of issues there could be and understand how to detect which kinds of issues there are.

Like you need to, to basically consult with someone who understands it, you should be buying these types of quicks. And when you do, you should have about this kind of conversion rate on your website. And when you do about this percentage of the leads should be people that are sellers that you can get on the phone.

And if you do get that, then a normal close rate would be this and for your market, a normal assignment would be that. And a lot of people don’t really know how to diagnose that, but then you can find, you know, could it be an acquisition? Yeah. I can tell you it’s really common for people coming from channels, like cold call and text into digital marketing to fail.

From the acquisition standpoint, I had a client recently in Atlanta that had a, like a pretty solid, uh, business. They were doing multiple six figures every month, um, off of cold call in the business. And we added digital marketing Facebook ads for four months, they got zero deals and they were like, what the heck brand?

And I thought you said, this works. Um, and I was. Look [00:32:00] pretty, it looks like working five 40 minutes analysis. Like what kinds are happening? What kind of people are seeing the ads? What kind of leads are we getting? All that stuff looks fine, but there’s a 10th of a disconnect. We found out that their team was just trained on the wrong kind of leads.

And they didn’t understand how these leads were different. Right. They were looking for the digital leads where you can have to assume that there’s motivation because they reached out asking for a cash offer and they were treating them like they were a cold call lead where unless the price is right.

We’re not going to go out right. In the past four months after they retrain their team, they had 17 deals from Facebook ads averaging over $30,000. Each the complete 180 degree turn just from like they’re taking acquisitions, people that know how to close deals, but didn’t know how to close Facebook ads deals.

So you have to make sure that you have that process in mind. And then of course it could be the marketing. That’s the problem too. But what people think is they think like I’m going to test this company versus that company versus this other company. And just keep on trying companies. What you want to try is strategies, because what people end up doing is they hire four different companies to do the same thing.

Hoping that they’re going to get different results because they don’t really understand [00:33:00] what the companies are doing in the first place. So if anybody’s in that kind of situation, I’m more than happy to talk with you kind of go through your metrics and tell you where the metrics are varying from benchmarks, because if you can find where the problem is and you can fix it, that’s going to be a lot more effective than just giving up or just trying again, but not even understanding what you’re doing different than the first.

Yeah, that’s

Mike: awesome. That’s awesome. Brandon, good stuff. So a couple of things that you’ve, you’ve been a part of the investor fuel, you know, one of the things that I think is great about digital marketing is that you can, especially as an agency, right? You can compare how people are performing. You can compare those campaigns.

And like you said, even as an agency, your data across multiple customers helps all those customers because you’re learning and you can tweak everybody’s campaign to kind of follow that. So along those lines, Being part of a mastermind like investor fuel, you can get in a room and compare what’s working and what’s not working and learn and grow faster than anybody could ever do on their own, which you’ve been a part of a investor fuel for, I guess, about six months or so now, roughly, uh, would you mind just kind of sharing your [00:34:00] thoughts on, uh, being a part of investor fuel so far?

Brandon: Yeah, I mean, I think just the way where you kind of shared a little bit, there was just the, even the value of like a mastermind. I’d say if you’re a real estate investor and you’re not part of some type of group of people that you can be accountable to. And that have quality information. People whose businesses reflect the kind of business that you want to create.

If you’re not putting yourself in those rooms, you’re, you’re just not going to grow the way that you could grow. I think that is such an incredible part of the business. Uh, then, then the question would be why investor fuel? Um, I think investor fuel has like a good group of caring people. I’ve I’ve really like from, from day one that I came there.

Um, I felt like even as a vendor, which is. A little bit of a different scenario because everybody knows that you’re there to sell them anyways. Um, the people are nice and the people are helpful and I see tons of collaboration there and I see people growing their businesses in ways that they wouldn’t otherwise.

So I think, uh, yeah, I, I love the love, the group love what you guys are doing there. And I think, uh, You know, among masterminds. I love [00:35:00] what you guys are doing from a community standpoint and how much fun you guys are having at the events. I think that’s like some of the core benefits of investor fuel, and even just like masterminds.

Like if you’re, if you’re listening to this and you’re not part of a mastermind then, like, what are you doing? Because that is the game going to be like, I can almost guarantee. Whatever money you invest into a mastermind is going to come back to you. Um, just because of the kind of model that it provides.

You don’t know what you don’t know until you’re with a group of people that can show you what you can become. And that is so important.

Mike: Awesome. Awesome. Thanks for that, Brandon. So if folks wanted to learn more about you, I know you, you. Take a lot of time to just share people that aren’t even clients yet, like, you know, what’s working, what’s not working and maybe kind of give them assessments on what they’re doing and how they can improve it.

Uh, which is pretty amazing that you take the time to do that. But if folks wanted to connect with you or learn more about, uh, some of the digital marketing services you want.

Brandon: Yeah. So, so a good place would be to, to go to Bateman, [00:36:00] collective.com/fuel. It was just our link for investor field. So that’s B a T E M a.

Collective.com/fuel. And there you can schedule right onto my calendar. Um, and you can just mention the middle. It’s like, Hey, I want to take a look at my digital marketing campaign or whatever the case is. Um, and I’m an open book, you know, if you could, I don’t know how you guys, you might find someone if you ask around, but we’ve done this kind of analysis for, I know we’ve certainly done it for a lot of investor field members.

Um, we’re even if we don’t end up working together, it opens their eyes to things that they never realized about the digital marketing campaigns. It saves them a bunch of money.

Mike: Yeah. Awesome. Good stuff. Well, we’ll add a link down below for this, for those of you that weren’t able to write that down. We’ll put a link in the show notes, so awesome.

Right. Well, Hey, thanks so much for sharing some advice with us today and some guidance. And for those of you that are listening, hopefully you got some good value here and hopefully at a minimum, just the lesson on the importance of if. Really good at this stuff. The way to separate yourselves from the pack is to work with somebody [00:37:00] that can do it for you.

Like you don’t have to be a Jack of all trades. You don’t have to be, you don’t have to do everything yourself. Right. And if you, if you’re trying to do everything yourself early on, we get it. There’s some hustle that has to happen before you get to you get to that point, but you’re never going to get the freedom that you want.

And you’re never going to be operating at a high level. Uh, if you’re trying to do everything yourself, there’s just no way you could be good at all those things. So we encourage you to reach out to other events, you know, kind of other know, service providers that can help you because it’s a hard skill to ever be as good as somebody that does it professionally in house.

I mean, quite frankly, that’s just kind of where we’re at in the industry, and it’s only going to bleed more and more in that direction. So I appreciate you guys a ton. Hopefully you got some good value. If you haven’t yet checked out investor fuel, you can go to investor fuel.com to learn more and schedule a call.

Want to talk about it. We have an amazing group and it just gets better each and every month. So appreciate you a bunch. We’ll see you on the next show.

Brandon: Are you an [00:38:00] active

Mike: real estate investor? If so, and you want to latch onto the power of surrounding yourself with over a hundred of the nation’s leading real estate. All committed to building stronger businesses and living richer fuller lives. You should jump on a call with us to learn more about investor fuel.

Simply visit investor fuel.com to get started. .