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.
What Real Estate Influencers Do For You, and How They Deliver
By Adam Gower Ph.D.
Marketing for real estate investments is tricky business. It’s still a largely untested field, meaning you have endless opportunities to accidentally screw it up and waste your budget. Or, you could get it right and convert new people into investors. Finding a balance is important.
For the right balance that’s relevant in today’s marketplace, you need to explore all your options. One of those options is influencer marketing.
What Is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing refers to marketing activities that revolve around leveraging influencers to promote your product, service, or brand. In most cases, this means signing a contract with an influencer to provide certain content deliverables for a set price.
This is just one marketing activity, but it can give a boost to your other activities and may draw more attention to your company from a new audience that was previously out of your reach. While influencer marketing may not be the thing you want to organize your whole marketing strategy around, it’s certainly a valuable component.
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Who Are Influencers?Â
Influencers can be anyone with a large enough following on any online platform. There are influencers on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and other platforms. They can be artists, moms, businesspeople, activists, fishermen, and everything in between. Anyone can be an influencer if they can build a large enough following of people that pay attention to the content they post.
Beyond what the influencer actually does, there’s also some consideration of how people view them. Are they aspirational, relatable, entertaining, informative? Two influencers may operate in the same space online, but they do things in completely different ways.
For example, one influencer working in the interior design space may focus on posting aesthetically pleasing images while another may post content educating people about common design questions and problems. Both of these influencers have their place in marketing in the interior design space, but they’re not the same.
The Gentle Nudge
No matter what kind of influencers you work with, they have a set purpose they’re meant to accomplish. Depending on who their audience is and how they interact with them, that purpose can vary.
In the real estate investment industry, influencers are generally not meant to lead people to the end of the sales funnel. Instead, they’re gently nudging people further along through the process. Think of it as helping people to enter your sales funnel or to move one step closer to a buying decision.
An influencer may introduce people to the concepts of your business and show them how to learn more, or they might talk about their own experience and share how others could follow in their footsteps.
The purpose isn’t to give all the information needed to make a final purchasing decision, but to help their followers feel more comfortable going down the path to learn more about you.
Understanding An Influencer's Value To You
Because of the role influencers play, it’s vital that you identify which influencers make the most sense for your business specifically. Some influencers offer more value for your goals than others do.
Don’t get distracted by vanity metrics such as their high follower or subscriber count. Vanity metrics are the statistics you can see from the outside that look really great, but they don’t play into the performance of that influencer’s content.
Some influencers with high follower counts might have high engagement while others have very low engagement. But, those with more followers tend to demand higher pay, regardless of the true performance their content receives.
On YouTube the problem is especially noticeable. Channels with more subscribers tend to charge more for sponsorship slots, even if their average views per video are lower than a channel with fewer subscribers.
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To be most effective, you should base your pricing on guaranteed deliverables and solid industry numbers. Value for an influencer is whatever helps you reach your goals, regardless of what’s on offer. If the price requested outweighs the value you’ll get from the service, it’s not valuable to you.
Every influencer type in any industry has an average price attached to their services. You should research this type of information so you can come to the table prepared to pay for what’s valuable to your marketing campaign.
What Should You Set As Deliverables From Influencers?
Just like with any other type of digital advertising, influencers have deliverables. They should sign contracts, get briefed on your products or services, and follow specific project guidelines. What they agree to do should be clearly detailed in the contract, including the number of posts and the type of content they’re going to post on your behalf. These are not usually strict scripts, but more of key points they’ll touch on in their content. If you want final approval, make that known.
As they’re going, you need to be able to track the performance of the sponsored posts. When you’re working with one or two influencers, you can likely manage tracking on your own by simply coordinating with them on a personal basis. If you’re working with more than a few influencers, or doing more complex campaigns, you may want to consider partnering with an influencer marketing agency to help with the tracking and coordination.
Tracking the performance of a campaign is instrumental in further advertisement retargeting, demonstrating the ROI, and understanding the full impact of an influencer marketing campaign.
How To Fit Influencer Marketing Into Your Advertising Strategy
Digital marketing for real estate investment is still a developing practice. When you add a new element like influencer marketing, it’s a blue-ocean type scenario, basically untested at this point. But, just because it’s untested doesn’t mean it’s ineffective. Influencer marketing has the potential to do a lot for the real estate investment industry, when it’s done right.
Influencer Marketing and Digital Marketing Strategies
Influencer marketing works well in conjunction with other ongoing digital marketing efforts. If you do it alone, it may not have the impact you want. You need other digital marketing elements surrounding your influencer marketing to improve the overall ROI of the campaign.
Highly targeted social media ad campaigns, PPC, content marketing, and anything else you’re doing in your digital marketing campaign will complement your influencer marketing. It’s part of a mix, not the entire marketing effort. Don’t expect one or more influencers to replace everything else you’re already doing. Plan ahead on how you can make it all work together to build off the temporary boost of visibility and reach.
Creating Conversions
Influencer marketing has the same primary goal as any other marketing tool: creating conversions. What counts as conversion depends on the purpose of your specific marketing campaign. If you’re looking to build a brand, conversion could mean customer engagement, page visits, or new email list subscribers.
For real estate investment deals, conversion usually means new investors. Influencers partnering with you should be instrumental in getting people connected to the investing process.
Retargeting Advertisements
Some people who see the initial influencer posts won’t engage with them or will turn into cold leads because they never ventured further down the funnel. These people are the perfect group for retargeting with multi-platform online advertisements. They may have been interested in your services but did not respond to the call to action at that time. Or, the initial posts may have been an introduction to your service that requires further exposure.
Influencer marketing is a very gentle way to introduce your products or services to people. It’s more warmly received, allowing people to form a better opinion about your company from the start, especially if they value the opinion of the influencer who posted about you. When those same people are exposed to your advertisements later, they’re not immediately hostile towards your marketing efforts.
Ads are better received when they’re used as follow-ups while influencers take care of the initial contact. A positive first interaction can lead to a long term result.
Trying New Things
Risks are a given in any business. The level of risk you take in your digital marketing often reflects the level of success you have in getting the word out. You could end up spending without any noticeable ROI, or you could get a huge ROI and be the frontrunner in a new effort to market real estate investment opportunities to untapped markets.
Influencer marketing isn’t the norm in our industry today. Learn about it, do the research, and see if there’s a place in your marketing strategy where influencers could give you an advantage or boost your ongoing efforts.
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.
