The Best Social Media Platforms for Finding Real Estate Investors

ADAM GOWER: You talked about needing something "meatier". So, from a real estate developer's perspective, looking to raise capital, let's talk about, again, kind of, through the lens of our mutual experience recently with this campaign. What what would that mean for a real estate developer raising money? What does it mean to have something "meaty"? And let me actually just, kind of, contextualize that by asking, by thinking in terms of what are the best strategies for advertising? Is it best for building a network? Is it best for asking for sales calls? Is it best to directly sell something from the ad? So, in that context, what do you mean by something "meatier" that you have to offer when you're advertising on LinkedIn?

AJ WILCOX: Yeah. So to put this into perspective from an ad, you know, you're buying that space, you can ask anyone to do anything you want. And there's this whole range of, we could ask them to do something very light, like come and read this blog post, or we could ask them to do something very heavy, like pop on the phone with a sales rep or buy something. And I don't recommend the extremes on LinkedIn usually because with a blog post, you're going to pay LinkedIn's expensive prices and you're going to end up getting blog visitors that don't convert. So it's kind of a scary proposition. Fortune 500s can do it. I don't recommend people who are on a tight budget to do that. On the other end, usually when we ask too much, too soon, we're asking a cold audience, hey, come and talk to sales or buy something. Most of the time, that's not attractive enough that people just kind of brush you off. When they brush you off, you end up getting... LinkedIn's going... well, we're not making very much money from you, so we have to raise your prices so you end up paying higher and a call to action, like, talk to someone is going to have a very low conversion rate. So you end up with these astronomically large like $200 to $500 per lead, kinds of numbers. So, usually what we have to do is sit right in between there where we're still asking for them to submit a form. We call it gaited or lead magnets but we're providing enough benefit that they actually care enough to to say, yeah, that's valuable. I'll fill out my information to get that. So that's what I mean by "meaty". But sometimes, you can skip right to the bottom if you've got this amazing offer, something where there's late demand in the marketplace or it's a new disruptive kind of product or service and that's what I think we were testing on this campaign that we worked on together was, can we ask a cold audience to hop right into exploring an investment?

ADAM GOWER: Well, you know, so yes. So here's I think, one of my takeaways and we shouldn't get too deep into this because we're going to do something special for everybody later, a little bit deeper. But, so the... what I think you're, what I'm hearing you saying is that you might not want to start your first advertising campaign on LinkedIn with a "come invest now". Right?  Please write me a check. Instead, and you don't want to talk about.. you don't want to point people to a blog but what you might do and I'm just kind of brainstorming with you, right? But what you might do and what I think you're saying is more effective perhaps, is that you might create a high value white paper or some kind of insightful document from which you get top of funnel names, what I've written down here is, create a top of funnel lead magnet, after which you can then create your nurture campaign. So, in the sense of a sales team, you would create something that somebody would buy into and then a sales team might follow up.

AJ WILCOX: Yes.

ADAM GOWER: In the context of raising money, it might be something that demonstrates your leadership in your field of real estate and then that allows you then to follow up and nurture them later. But not to say, you know, write me a check.

AJ WILCOX: Yeah, exactly.

ADAM GOWER: On day one.

AJ WILCOX: Yeah and you could approach it from, OK, who is my ideal target audience? Oh these are registered accredited investors. We know what kind of problems they face. We know what they care about, what keeps them up at night. So we're going to go and create a report of like the....I'm not coming up with something here on the fly, but...

ADAM GOWER: How to save taxes or something, you know, real estate investing.

AJ WILCOX: Exactly. And the closer you can get from them saying, yes, that's a pain point I feel to yes, my product is the is the solution to their pain the better. But I mean, as long as you have a piece of content where everyone who opts in, you know, they are a prime candidate for you because they raised their hand and said, yes, this issue is plaguing me right now and I need the salt.