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Perfection is the Enemy of the Good in Real Estate Crowdfunding
By Adam Gower Ph.D.
Authenticity means showing prospects and investors the raw side of your personality and business but it’s tough to put content out online that is anything but perfectly produced. Being authentic online when you are raising money for your real estate projects, however, will help prospects and investors connect with you more and in this article we’ll reveal exactly what you can do to attract more investors and why you shouldn’t worry about being perfect.
Is It Practical?
A lot of syndicators and people involved in real estate investment tend to feel like whatever you put online needs to be highly curated. It’s all about putting your best foot forward and presenting the most polished version of yourself. Traditionally, this is how you’d do it. So, is authentic, down to earth posting practical for real estate developers wanting to raise money online?
It can be. Just because you’re showing a more personal view of the projects, your company, and the people involved in your company doesn’t mean you’re showing all your dirty secrets.
Anyone who has ever been involved in a real estate deal, from either side, knows that things aren’t always polished and perfect.
Deals don’t always go down exactly as planned. There are always issues of one kind or another.
If you try to present yourself with a polished look, you won’t be connecting with investors and distinguishing yourself from other syndicators and investment opportunities out there. We’ve all seen the drone pictures, professional photography, fancy editing, and vague monotone video walkthroughs before. What are you doing to stand out and be a company that investors can connect with? For the rising generation of investors using social media regularly, connection is vital.
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Benefits of Authentic Branding
If you were to focus on posting content that gave a closer look into your company or some sneak peaks behind the scenes, what would it get you? There are some real benefits to a more authentic approach to social media marketing in real estate investment sectors:
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Differentiation
Everyone posts beautiful pictures of their projects, investment opportunities, and success stories. If everyone’s doing it, why would you also want to jump on that bandwagon? Be a leader in the new trend instead and differentiate yourself.
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Build Connection
As already mentioned, more authentic content tends to foster connections with people faster on social media. Millennials (who are now your go-to audience for crowdfunding a syndication) prefer content that’s more relatable and less fabricated. If you want to connect with them, it’s better to think with greater humility.
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Lower Budget
You don’t have to spend big money on professional productions, staging, and expensive videography. These things can be helpful for marketing materials, but you don’t need them for everyday social media posting. Even if you hire a freelancer, your budget will likely be better than it would be for an overly curated feed and postings.
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Better Engagement
Personal posting leads to more engagement. This has been demonstrated time and time again. When someone feels more connected with what you’re posting, they’re more likely to react to it instead of just passing it on their feed. Considering how hard it is to get organic views and reach right now, you need all the engagement you can get.
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Reach New Audiences
If you continue posting the same stock-image type pictures, videos, and content, you’re not likely to get younger audiences interested. New audiences want something different. They don’t want to be fed the marketing materials and filtered images. They want genuine, authentic content that meets them where they are. To reach a new audience, you have to take a new approach.
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Creating Connections Online
Social media is all about connections. It’s built to be more personal than your business website. Keep your curated content and stunning project images on your website. Those things also have their place, but so does more personal content.
Few syndicators have jumped in and started building a more personal brand image on social media so far.
They’ve been sticking with the safe strategy, but that’s a field that’s going to get over-crowded quickly. If you want to be a leader, instead of a follower, and want to totally dominate real estate crowdfunding so you can raise more money and stay ahead of the competition, you need to branch out and try a different approach to social media marketing.
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Authenticity isn’t as scary as it sounds. However you feel about personalized social media posts and relatable content, you may want to get used to the idea. As a syndicator advertising your project on social media, you need to speak the same language as your potential investors. Today’s investors are less interested in perfection and more interested in what’s genuine. Be genuine and see what happens.
If you have only just started in real estate development, have completed no deals, have no email list, but know you want the freedom and wealth being a real estate developer brings, then I suggest your first step is to start evaluating deals so you can recognize a good one when you see it.
Here’s where you should start. You’ll learn everything you need to know – the different types of real estate, different development strategies, how real estate cycles influence the market, and all about due diligence.
If you want to find deals and raise money for them so you can start your real estate development business, then learning how to conduct due diligence so you can pitch your deals better to investors is a great place to start.
If you’ve already purchased one or more real estate project and are seeing more opportunities than you can finance, then now is the time to start building your investor network so you can finance all your next deals quicker.
You’ve already got some momentum; now start finding and educating prospects about what you’re doing so you can build an email list of people to pitch to when you’re ready to raise money for your next deal.
This is what we build for private clients all the time – it’s called the Investor Acquisition System and you can access the entire program right here so you can find prospects, and convert them into being deep pocketed, repeat investors in your deals.
If you are a seasoned pro with multi-cycle experience, a substantial portfolio, a decent deal pipeline, and find yourself spending too much time raising equity capital because you’re still doing it in-person, then it’s time you put technology to work for you.
The wonderful thing about doing this is that you’re not going to be doing anything different than you’re already doing and, guess what, you’ll never have to sit through investor meetings again.
Sounds crazy I know, but I lay the whole thing out for you in this white board workshop where I personally show you exactly what it takes for you to transform your equity raising into a fully automated, capital raising machine so you can find new investors while increasing commitments from your existing network.
