5 Key Marketing Strategies Every Real Estate Investor Must Know

Michael Stansbury (00:20.44)
Hello everybody. Welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m Mike Stainsbury. Thanks for being here. And we’ve got a special guest from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Mr. Dan Jones. Dan, how are you, sir?

Dan Jones (00:38.717)
I’m great, I’m thrilled to be here, man. Thanks for having me on.

Michael Stansbury (00:42.062)
Yeah, I’m excited to hear your story, your origin story and what you’re doing now and talk all things real estate. But first, at Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors, service providers, and real estate entrepreneurs, 2 5X their businesses to allow them to build the businesses they’ve always wanted and allow them to live the lives they’ve always dreamed of. Dan, tell me, what is, I always like to start here. What is your origin story? When did you get started in real estate? Maybe tell me what you were doing before real estate.

How did you get down this yellow brick road?

Dan Jones (01:13.877)
Got it, the Batman origin story, okay. So, like most, it did not start out in real estate, it did not start out with where I am today. The current snapshot is that you run a marketing agency, I am a real estate investor myself, and as such, I have now niched down my agency to facilitate strategic marketing for real estate investors, specifically acquisitions. To get there, I didn’t start in marketing. I graduated high school, went to college.

you know, in a pretty traditional educational institution format, which did not really facilitate success for entrepreneurs like myself. You know, called, you’re the gifted kid, great. And basically I was wonky because I couldn’t focus because none of it interested me. It is what it is. I’m not making excuses. I just was delayed in getting there. So I went into tech. did some IT work, network administrations.

Michael Stansbury (01:53.805)
Right.

Dan Jones (02:10.751)
building websites for internal networks for intranets. I’d been building websites literally since the 90s, just hand coding some HTML back when that was a thing. So was something I always kind of had as a skill set, but never really leveraged or monetized. Fast forward a little bit to 2008. We all know what that meant in the real estate community, so we don’t have to wax philosophical on that too much.

Michael Stansbury (02:24.453)
.

Yeah.

Dan Jones (02:35.797)
Same thing happened in finance, which is where I was working for a bank a lot of layoffs acquisitions mergers and I found myself with the option of move to parent company in Canada or take severance and ship out I am a hockey player, but Canada wasn’t the right choice for me at the time nor is it now I love the Philly area So I was shaken. All right, Mike, you know this I was that you know moderately successful early career Sorry, I got my dog barking

Michael Stansbury (02:57.901)
That’s all right, we know what that’s like.

Dan Jones (03:05.044)
Yeah, shaken like what am going to do? I barely have an associate’s degree. Everybody’s looking for bachelor’s or master’s in IT in order to succeed. So I just worked for a local retail business. Again, not even in a marketing capacity, but as the person who can solve problems. All So there’s one of my quote unquote superpowers. Second. So I wrote that for a little while while trying to rediscover myself.

Michael Stansbury (03:18.156)
Thank

Dan Jones (03:33.617)
Since I was able to build websites and you do some graphic design early days of social media marketing I took on some freelance work with local businesses in the area doing just that but with no real strategy behind it on You know, what what is my niche? It was just kind of getting things done basic positioning But you know, I dove headfirst into all things marketing about 15 years ago and was able to you know leverage the experience with those clients to then get into marketing working specifically for a car dealer

Michael Stansbury (03:45.932)
.

Dan Jones (04:03.677)
independent car dealer in the Philadelphia area with three locations and worked my way to the top just by problem solving and giving customers and clients what they want in the simplest way possible. So then I’m director of marketing. Well, cool. I didn’t go to school for that, but I learned the hard way that applying basic principles to the four P’s and we can actually extend it to more P’s like people in marketing that always have to do is give people value, give people what they want in the simplest way.

Michael Stansbury (04:15.788)
Okay.

Dan Jones (04:33.653)
So that’s where I rode that wave for a while. Now you see this logo up here, fire your boss. Again, still working for somebody is not the best use of my time, dare I say. So as I’m acquiring this book of business, you know, as a freelancer, I’m doing well in marketing, but still not happy because I’m working for somebody else. A few years ago, I rolled the dice and said, I quit. Now that client, that…

Michael Stansbury (04:59.38)
Okay.

Dan Jones (05:02.269)
employer became my client because I have a very good relationship with them. But they were my first big boy client as a marketing freelancer. And then I turned it into a pretty standard industry agnostic marketing agency doing WordPress sites, branding, social media marketing, and paid ads, industry agnostic staying in the area. It was almost by accident I got into real estate. Yeah, right? Like it seems to be how it happens.

Michael Stansbury (05:14.86)
All right.

Dan Jones (05:30.997)
I came across a group of local entrepreneurs who were, they all ran multiple businesses. They’re kind of like multipreneurs, which is a term I love just in running a business and being a real estate investor. So I joined this local community. It was spearheaded by a guy named Larry Steinhaus who runs an actual a real estate and financial literacy school and institution. So not like a college, but like, you know,

Michael Stansbury (05:39.492)
Right.

Michael Stansbury (05:43.435)
Thank

Dan Jones (05:58.771)
like akin to like a pace morby or what like Tiffany and was it Tiffany and Josh High are doing. It’s escaping me what their programs call but it’s education on real estate and financial independence. So I went to a school. I joined his community of people. I ended up doing marketing work for him. So I, you know, learned in a very short time, wow, real estate is where all the money is. We know the stat, 90 % of millionaires are so because they do real estate deals.

Well, yeah, I want in on that and being a master synthesizer. You know, I learned the basics like how to buy a property with no money down and all that stuff, you know, and how to create cash flow on a rental property. Cool. This is going back about three years. Picked up a couple of clients in real estate just because me and my people were known as getting getting things done. Just applying best practices with you being business owner, real estate investment company.

Michael Stansbury (06:49.497)
.

Dan Jones (06:57.333)
what you you know how to do better than I do. It’s my job to connect that connect your solutions with the customers or sellers depending on the context. So I just I learned everything I could and realized that there’s so much saturation out there in invested in real estate investing especially in the acquisition side that’s a that’s a good thing. I’m always going to say saturation is a good thing because that means you don’t have to valid you don’t need market validation.

Michael Stansbury (07:15.819)
Right, it validates itself. Yeah, yeah.

Dan Jones (07:27.209)
High competition, absolutely it’s validated, but you have to find your area, either 10 % different or 10 % better in order to compete. And that’s what we did. So we found that really our core offer is niching down, standing out, connecting better and scaling faster by combining brands marketing with performance marketing. And that’s what we do.

Michael Stansbury (07:54.1)
So that’s today what Dan Jones is focusing on. So tell me a little bit about some client wins or how you got into stacking these niches and what that means for the end, whether they’re wholesale or fix and flip or whatever that looks like.

Dan Jones (08:13.715)
Yeah, so the primary, we have 10 clients on retainer right now, which are wholesalers, slash fix and flippers. I think one of the first coolest wins was our ability to create a minimum viable brand offer and campaign in like record time. And the reality is AI helped us do that. So case in point, I have a Philly based investor who they’re pretty well niched down because they’ve been in business for a long time.

So they know they want multi-families in a specific geographic area who are looking for loan modifications. So they’re pretty dialed in on the type of avatar they’re looking for. And they’re really, they’re not wholesaling too much. They’re doing more of fix and flips themselves with the occasional hold. But they came to me with an idea to target the Florida market because they had some boots on the ground there in mid…

Michael Stansbury (08:47.496)
Mm.

Dan Jones (09:07.477)
So like end of summer into fall of 2024 where we had a couple of hurricanes, Milton and Helena, Helene, Helena, why not? To target properties that were specifically damaged, underinsured and basically to wholesale or to buy and flip themselves. I said, all right, it’s an interesting idea.

Michael Stansbury (09:15.933)
Right.

Dan Jones (09:32.885)
So I worked with them. Again, they’re already a client. So I already had that working relationship and we already had a tech stack and some solutions we could offer. The challenge was creating this campaign as fast as possible. So they spun up a new LLC, Florida Home Buyer Solutions. Actually, they did the dirty work of grabbing the list of potentially damaged houses. And we narrowed that down to vacant, not vacant, but absentee owners.

Michael Stansbury (09:45.704)
Thank

Dan Jones (10:03.145)
Targeting specifically landlords, which is hey, you don’t want this property anymore. It’s damaged. You don’t want to fix it We’re gonna take it off your hands liquidate your asset. That was the main value prop Slam them with a three-piece mailer and a digital retargeting campaign which

Michael Stansbury (10:18.298)
Okay, did you do the mailing yourself too as well or do you handle that? Is that a third party that handles that?

Dan Jones (10:25.683)
So my agency can, and we do use a third party affiliate to facilitate that. In this case, my client handled that internally themselves. So we just, we use the same list to hit up the Omni channel. We were able to create an entire new brand for this business within less than 48 hours. That includes the website, a pipe to the CRM, a brand, a logo, an offer, a funnel, retargeting campaigns.

Michael Stansbury (10:44.477)
Mm-hmm.

Dan Jones (10:54.677)
And even a B testing right like this is stuff I used to take weeks to do and and massive amounts of staff So we did it within 48 hours launched and in six weeks They did like four deals or something like that More wholesale, I think one flip and three wholesale, but either way it was almost like this is almost too much We’re gonna we’re gonna shut this down now that we we we entered and exited that quickly We’re gonna go back to our target area

So that’s like a pretty unique win and proof of concept that we were able to accomplish last year.

Michael Stansbury (11:29.124)
Wow, well that is so with a combination of AI and then what you already know is is you know your focus as far as marketing is concerned you’re able to spin this up in a very short period of time and then get results so which is pretty pretty awesome. Do you have any numbers as far as what they were to wholesale those items for like I always like to get in the details of speed all right this cost this much for this whole campaign

and it netted this result as far as the numbers were concerned. And again, don’t expect you to know 100%, but if you can throw a spaghetti at the wall and let us know what that looks like.

Dan Jones (12:05.831)
I don’t know. do know I have an aggregate across all clients only because we do have some NDAs in place where we don’t want to divulge specifically, but I do have that handy. This is aggregate. So usually cost per acquisition, our target is around $2,000.

Michael Stansbury (12:16.574)
look at that!

Michael Stansbury (12:23.931)
Okay, yeah, it’s beautiful. Yep.

Dan Jones (12:26.131)
That’s the bottom up. So we are from there. Then we reverse engineer the process. And that’s very dependent on the type of avatar that we’re targeting. So pre foreclosures, we’re going to put in a six month sale cycle versus end stage share of sale. obviously there’s a quicker close and a clicker return, quicker conversion happening there. But that’s basically on a

Michael Stansbury (12:37.027)
Okay, yeah.

Dan Jones (12:55.285)
CPL, so we got about $60 cost per lead, which that’s, mean, that’s, that’s across all channels. So, and I’m not even going to say if it’s a qualified leader not. Yes, that’s a low number. I highly qualified lead industry standard in our area is about 500. We keep it around 250. So bypassing a lot of paper lead companies because we’re creating our own leads. Aggregate of entire funnel. We’re doing 60, $70 leads here.

Michael Stansbury (13:07.454)
.

Dan Jones (13:25.309)
Again, because of that higher funnel retargeting.

Michael Stansbury (13:28.032)
Right and so and these are leads that are that are well You know, we’ll just give you some grace on the qualification But they’re in your CRM now and they’re able to be followed up with and you never know what will happen So which is which is a beautiful thing. I’m always Yeah

Dan Jones (13:44.03)
They raise their hand for help, right? And that’s, can’t ask for more than that.

Michael Stansbury (13:48.631)
Yeah, it’s very interesting. There’s this inbound outbound leads and I see more real savvy investors going toward, I want to deal with people that have raised their hand. We do cold calling and we do texting and we get deals from it, but it’s a much easier, more fun deal when somebody gets your piece and they respond to you. Because what happens normally and maybe I’d love your feedback on this.

Normally if your piece is good, they’re just dealing with you. Now they sometimes reach out to other people, but if you’re good enough and can get rapport, if you do the backend stuff right, usually that’s a, know, usually you’re the problem solver as you said earlier. You can take that deal from batter to cake pretty easily.

Dan Jones (14:42.465)
That’s 100 % right. And I do like the first thing you touched on about outbound versus inbound. Outbound works, right? And there’s entire businesses out there that thrive on that. But that has to be down to the individual organization, the owner. What do you want to be doing and overseeing? Do you want to be overseeing outbound at volume or inbound at volume? And I’m going to say pick one or the other is the first thing you don’t.

Michael Stansbury (15:06.075)
Right.

Michael Stansbury (15:10.383)
Right.

Dan Jones (15:10.805)
You have to be comfortable doing it. I don’t do outbound. I don’t do outbound at all. My form of advertising, I’m doing it right now, people. It’s going out there, getting out there and talking about what we do and how we help people. Not even upper funnel, out of funnel, right? And so that’s the first choice to make. And then, so I’m going say don’t hire us if you want outbound. I can point you in the right direction. Actually, I know a guy who does almost exclusively outbound.

Michael Stansbury (15:20.198)
Yeah.

Dan Jones (15:39.349)
in larger assets and commercial deals in the Philadelphia area and is absolutely smoking. And his, he’s the same as mine. Instead of doing spaghetti marketing, pick two or three channels or, you know, as Google recommends four channels that work and dial in there and optimize and go from there.

Michael Stansbury (15:58.125)
Yeah, Four channels and optimized. I’ve heard it and, you know, people need to hear it again and hear it again because we get all distracted. We’re squirrels and that’s what that looks like sometimes. So Dan, you know, tell us a little bit more about you and about what you’re doing besides real estate. What does life look like? We know we heard the dog in the background. I’ve got my dog in the background. But what is family life like? Hobbies outside of real estate? What is Dan Jones about?

Dan Jones (16:28.831)
Yeah, thanks for asking. So yeah, I apologize about the dogs. I don’t know. I guess the door cracked open probably from the cats. Yeah, that’s about it. But that’s part of me and my brand is, know, I’m a bit contrarian. You know, I’m never going to be a shirt and tie guy again, ever. And have I left money on the table that way? Absolutely. But I’m also working with the people I want to and, you know, living a bit of lifestyle freedom right now.

Michael Stansbury (16:34.757)
No apologies necessary. It’s live, folks. You never know what’s gonna happen here.

Michael Stansbury (16:48.303)
Right.

Dan Jones (16:57.781)
I hang out with my wife. We have our dogs and we both play hockey. I play hockey like five times a week at the age of, you know, as we’re recording this now, almost 41 years old. Like how cool is that? And yeah, we do a little traveling here and there. Just got back from Fan Expo in Philly. So we nerded out at the same time. Yeah, no, I’m just, I’m obsessed with creating passive income. Front loading the work to then chill out on the back end.

Michael Stansbury (17:11.725)
Don’t get better than that. No, sir.

Dan Jones (17:27.303)
It took me a while to get here. So I guess in some ways I’m still kind of enjoying that rather than focusing as much as I should be. Enjoying the time I got back from 20 years, not 20, I guess it was about 20 years of working for somebody else.

Michael Stansbury (17:27.427)
Right.

Michael Stansbury (17:32.024)
Yeah.

Michael Stansbury (17:41.888)
Yes, but that’s good that you figured out what you’re doing and one of the things is once you have that entrepreneurial bug and you have a little modicum of success, you know you can do it and that it’s repeatable and you know you’re never going back, which is good.

Dan Jones (17:57.55)
It makes one unhireable.

Michael Stansbury (17:59.99)
Right. All So what’s the worst injury you’ve had that you’ve either given or received in hockey?

Dan Jones (18:07.285)
Acute injury, I’ve been pretty lucky, I guess. I got caught with a skate when I was a kid, like, you know, now I’m like middle-aged, so my wrist kind of hurts perpetually, because I don’t let it heal enough. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And given, actually today, about three hours before we recorded this, I hit a goalie in the face mask with a puck about three times. So that was not so good for him.

Michael Stansbury (18:21.41)
Yeah, that’s 41. That’s what that is.

Michael Stansbury (18:32.696)
Yeah. Right. He’s going to have a little CTE probably.

Dan Jones (18:36.917)
Yeah, And safety lesson. OK, so now this triggered something in me is I’d say about six or seven years ago, I was a holdout on wearing a full cage mask, as we usually do in rec. Leaguer Beer League. I sold a little half visor like they were in the NHL, which is a league I have never played in and will never play in because they get paid to do so. And I don’t. I took some friendly fire in the mouth area from a high stick.

Michael Stansbury (18:41.369)
Yeah.

Michael Stansbury (18:48.354)
Right?

Dan Jones (19:04.782)
And from that point on, I said, I guess we’re wearing the birdcage now.

Michael Stansbury (19:08.75)
Yeah, I’ll never forget. My dad was 41 years old. He was playing softball and he tried to stretch a double into a triple. And the guy from Wrightfield threw a frozen rope, but it did not hit the glove. It hit my dad’s head. And they played, you know, in softball. You didn’t necessarily wear helmet. Or the helmet may have flown off. But he literally walked off. He got up, walked off and said, I’m done.

Dan Jones (19:32.277)
You’ll have.

Michael Stansbury (19:39.331)
I’m done playing. I’m done playing. just like, yeah, I know he just couldn’t, he just couldn’t, he, first of all, you don’t need to be stretching no double and a triple at 41 years old. And, but yeah, I remember, cause he did have a pretty bad concussion after that, but you you learn, you know, and you, and you find something else to do, or you get the mass, you get, you get, you, you get the full on shield. So you don’t, you know, look like a,

Dan Jones (19:40.509)
of Dunn playing? that’s a shame.

Michael Stansbury (20:08.611)
for a dental patient full time.

Dan Jones (20:10.705)
Yeah. So I, you know, and I got to wonder how many, how many guys in his league were able to throw that that way to be able to dissuade him from coming back. That was like, that’s, that’s a one-off. All right. There’s nobody’s throwing like that.

Michael Stansbury (20:21.219)
It’s a one-off. Nobody’s doing that. So you’re helping multiple different real estate investors in different markets. And so we talked about this. So you’re getting data. So are you helping them with their list stacking? Are you also helping in any kind of way with their PPC or PPL or anything like that? What other services do you provide at this point, Dan?

Dan Jones (20:30.197)
Yeah.

Dan Jones (20:47.967)
So what my main role would be would be fractional CMO, which is chief marketing officer for businesses who need a strategist but don’t need a full-time strategist. So it’s like marketing consultants. I can come in, depending on the situation of the business, help them scale by leveraging all the other vendors they have. But we do have a full in-house staff and stack that if, A, there’s any gap fulfillment we can provide, we will do so, or take over.

from other vendors who hate to say it, but we can do better.

Michael Stansbury (21:20.083)
Yeah, sure. Well, I mean, you have to say that and you have to execute on that. I always ask this question because I get it all the time from refilled. Is there any as far as, you know, the CRMs go or things that you like to use in your business? are things that you’re using now or what do you recommend in that space or do you have one at all?

Dan Jones (21:47.657)
I really, don’t have a chief recommendation for a CRM because we use a few of them, like my own. I use Brevo, which used to be called SendinBlue and it was predominantly for email marketing. But you can use it as a very basic pipeline CRM. I’ve got some clients who are using Salesforce. I’ve got some using REI SIFT. End of the day, if you can create a pipeline and some Zapier integrations, I really don’t care or have a really big recommendation.

Michael Stansbury (22:15.744)
Right.

Dan Jones (22:17.781)
the simpler the better because you can really get into the weeds incorrectly with some stuff and having some false positives on a very small amount of data. And, you know, I don’t love Salesforce for that reason is because of how nuanced and how granular some of the robust that could be a value, but is it good for e-commerce? Absolutely. If Coca-Cola wants to know

Michael Stansbury (22:19.436)
Right.

Michael Stansbury (22:33.314)
Right?

and robust. crazy. Yeah.

Dan Jones (22:45.065)
how they can make a half of a cent more on each can of soda they sell. That’s what Salesforce is good for. Fewer than five acquisitions per month or even a couple hundred conversions, some of the data is almost useless until you have years and years and years worth.

Michael Stansbury (22:59.968)
Yeah, I agree. I’m always interested in hearing people’s ideas about that, but I think that your principle is correct. If your pipeline’s good, then it’s the CRM that you use is the best one that you’re able to maximize. So Dan, your fractional CMO, again, I don’t want to get in the weeds with this, but what does that usually look like for somebody that maybe is doing… I mean, what is it that Dan charges if you want to go into that? How does that work?

How do you, what’s the value proposition there?

Dan Jones (23:32.757)
If you want to get into specific numbers, it’s really usually bespoke for each client. But I have going into it my 597 offer, which is a one hour consultation with a one hour follow up. And in between that, I give you a roadmap of your top three growth levers, depending on where you’re at in your business. And I know this is kind of vague, but

since I do work with multiple industries, I will put it in the real estate context. What’s working and what’s not, I’ll give you your top three growth levers, where the opportunities lie, and what you should do with your existing resources today, and then a roadmap for an entire year. And if someone wants to hire us as a month-over-month consultant to scale and implement those systems, that 597 offer gets rolled into, it’s credited towards whatever they pick up.

Michael Stansbury (24:23.16)
Sure.

Dan Jones (24:24.009)
And it can be as simple as just PPC management, right? Maybe that’s their gap because, you know, it’s again, as simple as possible. Your ad has to match your landing page and has to match what the person on the phone is going to say. And the amount of like incongruency I see there and lack of synergy is astounding. And that’s, that’s like one of the bigger patches to deploy that gives people some quick wins and like will even double their conversion rates with the same amount of marketing spent.

Michael Stansbury (24:53.727)
Yeah, because the communication’s off and because yes, and because yes, so I get that that’s a that’s a real good value. I see the same thing when I look at other marketing as well. So yeah, that is a great value add. So Dan, where can other where can we find you on the web where we can find you on the socials? Let us know what that looks like.

Dan Jones (24:55.849)
Yeah.

Dan Jones (25:08.543)
Yeah.

Dan Jones (25:14.535)
Yeah, so I’m a big fan of using other people’s audiences. I don’t have terribly large socials myself, but I have a couple of partners I work with who have followers in the hundreds of thousands to millions. So we work together and I get to leverage our audience. But, you know, my businesses are at manyresults.com and investordealflow.com.

Michael Stansbury (25:35.776)
Okay.

Michael Stansbury (25:41.702)
Awesome. guys, folks, if you want to learn more about Dan Jones, we’ll have that information in the show notes. So you can click on that and find him there. Dan, thank you for being a part of the Real Estate Pros podcast. It was wonderful getting to know you and very informative. Folks, like and subscribe and come back and see us next time on the Real Estate Pros podcast.