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A guide to thriving during the coming real estate crash for real estate syndicators and their investors.
Can Instagram Influencers Help You Raise Capital?
By Adam Gower Ph.D.
Influencer marketing is on the path to being a $5 to $10 billion dollar industry in 2020. While influencers can be found on every social media platform, Instagram is the most common place you’ll find them.Â
What’s all the hype about? And, can influencer marketing work to help you raise capital for a real estate project?
Who Are Instagram Influencers?
Influencers are people who can influence buying decisions from their followers. They’re usually people who have a relatively large number of followers and who command authority of some sort in their industry as a voice on a particular topic.Â
Essentially, they’re compensated in exchange for posting about you, your offering, or your business.Â
You’re probably familiar with the names of big-time influencers like the Kardashians, or any number of celebrities that make sponsored posts on behalf of companies. These heavyweights represent a limited view of the market overall because influencers are present in every industry, demographic, and group, even in real estate investment and development.
While not every influencer is as widely known or followed as others, they can still be effective at spreading knowledge of your company or a specific project. (????).
Types of Influencers
1) Nano Influencers
These are influencers who have around 1,000 – 5,000 followers. Although they’re much smaller, nano influencers tend to have a lot of trust from their smaller group of followers.
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2) Micro Influencers
As the next step up from nano influencers, micro influencers tend to range from around 5,000 to 50,000 followers. These are significantly larger spheres of influence that still tend to maintain a better engagement rate with their followers.
3) Big-Time Influencers
Anything above 50,000 followers puts an influencer in the big league. These influencers have a lot of reach, but all that reach can come at a high cost. Plus, there will likely be the added hassle of having to work through an agent or manager instead of communicating directly with the influencer.Â
These are rough numbers that can change, but it’s a good starting point to give you an idea of how to group influencers and where to begin.
Are Influencers Useful in Real Estate Investment Sectors?
The benefit of working with Instagram influencers is that your message is spread through word of mouth, which is known to be the most effective method even today. As unlikely as it may sound, there are influencers in every industry you can think of with every different type of audience.
While the largest and most famous influencers will probably always be in industries like beauty, cosmetics, or fashion, there are plenty of highly effective influencers in real estate and related industries as well. There are influencers on Instagram right now who can connect with your target audience and help your message find prospective investors who never knew about you before, or those who weren’t convinced about your message initially.
Just having the right people spreading the word about your development projects can be great for you. Investors come in all shapes and sizes, and you never know where they’re looking or who they’re following. By marketing through influencers in relevant industries, especially influencers with vastly different followings, you have the potential to grow your ROI on your social media marketing budget by diversifying away from traditional online advertising.
Influencers probably won’t drive millions of dollars in your direction straightaway. However, they can help introduce new prospects to your offerings and expand your reach to a base of people who already trust their opinions.
How to Find Relevant Instagram Influencers
Today, it’s a lot easier to find Instagram influencers than it was even a few years back. You can find them directly by searching relevant hashtags and looking for people who fit the bill, working with an influencer agency, or scrolling through an influencer marketplace.
No matter what your budget is, you’ll likely find influencers who will work with you. Even nano and micro influencers can have a great impact on the success of your marketing campaign.
We don’t hear much about super-famous real estate investment influencers, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Find them, pick the right influencers for your target audience, and see how they can spread the message about your new development in front of the eyes who will care about it.
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.
