NEW BOOK BY ADAM GOWER PH.D.
Capital Calls and RESCUE Capital
A guide to thriving during the coming real estate crash for real estate syndicators and their investors.
Marketing to Real Estate Investors Is All Trial & Error
By Adam Gower Ph.D.
What’s the best way to market to real estate investors online? That’s a trick question. There’s no “best way” that will work for everyone. When you’re doing your marketing online, it’s all about finding the sweet spot that works for you. Your strategy may look completely different from the next person, but if it works, it works.
Finding out what works is the problem many businesses have. For that, you need to get hold of the data, interpret them accurately, and consistently test your content to find the right balance.
Everything Online is Trackable
The beauty of marketing to your target audience online is that you can track all the analytics and gather a ton of data. You can find out about and record every interaction, from someone opening one of your marketing emails to the same person liking a social media post or what they look at on your website.
That’s the advantage of marketing online. You get instant, quantifiable feedback with every campaign. Instead of waiting months or constantly reaching out to get feedback, it’s available every time someone engages with you, or chooses not to engage with you.
And because everything is trackable, you can collect the data to back up your decision-making process and respond appropriately to what’s happening with your campaigns – and you can fully automate the entire process. When you use data properly it will give you some indications about when you’re doing something right, when you’re not, and what you need to do to fix it.
Quality Over Quantity
What’s the purpose of your online marketing, over social media or other channels? Ultimately, it’s not about building up the largest audience possible, it’s about turning that audience into active, deep pocketed investors. In the real estate industry, we have a sort of unique position for online marketing. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how much attention you get if that attention isn’t from the right leads.
Having viral content won’t make a difference if no one signs a check or fills in your lead-gen forms and then signs up to one of your deals. You could have serious engagement and thousands of eyes on your content and still not raise any money from it! The quality of your message and who it’s aimed at makes a difference. You need to focus on speaking to the right people, not the most people, and your messaging needs to be highly focused on your value proposition.
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How to Test a Marketing Campaign
Content and messaging should live up to your expectations or it should change. The only way to know if your messaging is working is to test it regularly. Develop your thesis about what you expect to happen with your content, then test it with A/B testing or multi-platform comparisons. A/B testing is most effective for email marketing, ad testing, or social media re-targeting. Essentially, you’re presented different people in the same target audience a separate version of your content to see which version gets better responses. With A/B testing, you have to first define what you’re looking for, then track the data to see which version of the content did better, or if any of them actually lived up to the expectations you set.
Once you find a winning formula, you can then test that against another iteration until you find a winner to test on yet another iteration and so-on, ad infinitum.
Multi-platform comparisons are exactly what they sound like. Posting the same messages on different online platforms to see where you get the best responses. Whereas more investors might be on LinkedIn, you could find that those on Twitter are more engaged and interactive. This is especially important if you’re targeting multiple different groups simultaneously, such as investors and developers. It’s okay to focus on different groups and publish different content on each platform, as long as it’s all tuned into your overall value proposition, investment thesis, and deal flow.
Part of your testing revolves around finding the “watering holes” for your target audience. You want to figure out where they’re getting their information so you can make your way to the source and get your messaging in front of similar people. Your core customers are a great source of this kind of information, through surveys and conversations.
Making Your Content Work for You
Often, testing will show you some flaws in your content messaging or the platforms you’re using. Learn to pivot your message to match your audience. Don’t fall in love with your business or your message. Adjust to fit what your audience finds valuable but stay true to your core investment thesis and always be authentic in everything you put out.
By building up a collection of valuable posts, you’re making your content work double-time for you. Every new piece provides value to people who regularly interact with you, while the older posts present on your social media accounts or your website give new leads a starting point for getting to know you. They can look back at your posting history and get a feel for your business and your core message without you having to repeat yourself.
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No one can get marketing right 100% of the time. By understanding that and integrating regular testing into your content strategy, you can get it right more often than not. And it’s important to constantly be evolving your content direction instead of sticking to what’s worked before because circumstances constantly change and your message needs to adapt accordingly.
Embrace the trial and error nature of online marketing so you stay agile and gain a competitive edge.
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.
