KGCI: Real Estate on Air - Real Estate Mailers, Ads, Events, & more!

Episode Date: May 27, 2024

Welcome back to the Agent Goldmine. Ali and I are here again for another solo episode. We're going to have a couple of these because we love them. Of course, we love guests, but we really just are obsessed with each other. So today, what we are going to talk about is probably going to me a quicker episode. We're going to talk about marketing. And specifically what we're going to talk about is my marketing strategy the first time around and what I would do differently if I were starting over today, which is highly applicable

because as you guys know from the last episode, I am starting over. So that's what we're going to talk about. And Ali is going to share her marketing lessons learned. And we're going to just have the best time ever after usual. Yeah, that's it. Right, Ellie? What else? Let's do it.

Yeah. Yeah. And this is applicable to both agents and broker owners, you know, marketing as for your team or marketing for recruiting, really. I mean, everything is marketing. What topic do you want to start with? Because I have one in mind. Oh, send it.

I want to talk about mailers. I want to get these fucking mailers out the way. And I think we have different opinions on mailers. Yeah. When I first got started, you know, that's when I first got started, the two like marketing efforts are like, door knock and mailers. And that's what I had like in the forefront of my mind. I'm like, okay, I can do door knock. I can do mailers.

And then who knows what else? What else I could do online? Digital is like whole different beast. And so it's okay. Let me look into these mailer things. Let me see what this is about. And I sent my first mailer, my first, okay, so I got licensed. One week later, I had a listing.

And I sent my first mailer two weeks after that. So it was like three weeks of me being licensed. I sent my first mailer batch. It was like 50, five zero, not a lot to just the neighboring homes around my listing, saying, hey, we just went on the market. I think it was, yeah, we must have gone on the market. We went on the market. This is what we're listing it at, blah, blah.

And then I got two reachouts from that. And I was from 50. And I was like, that's amazing. Hell yeah. I'm going to do these mailers forever. Amazing. And then one turned out to be just like some, you know,

they're not interested in selling. They just wanted to talk to somebody. They're older. And the other one was also older. But that was probably one of the most difficult conversations that I've ever had to have to have with a client, with a seller client, because his house was, even though it was catty corner from my listing, was not in any way

near the condition of the house that I was selling, which was pristine. And he couldn't, he couldn't understand that. I'm like, hey, these are the, these are the, these are the photos from the house right across, like, right diagonally from you. And he couldn't, he couldn't see how different his, the condition of his house was. And plus he started lying to me about the not, you know, having. liens on the house. Anyway, I fired him before we even got started. So after that, I was like, you know what? If these mailers, I don't want to do this. It like went from so high, so low,

because I spent hours at his property, only to then talk to attorneys because he was already in collections and just, it was a hotness. And then now after that, I like, because I think mailers were kind of shoved down my throat by everyone else, like other real-term media things, oh, mailers, mailers, mailers. I have like kind of an aversion to mailers. Not only are they expensive, but then like people that are just unreasonable, bored, lonely will reach out to you. And it's just not the highest and best use of my time. Can they work 1,000 percent? I don't want to make it work. So now I tell like anybody that joins our crew, I'm like, you can do mailers if you have a big ass budget. If you are ready to spend to wait money, yes. And then time and have a system

them to call them back, then go for it. But that's my opinion of mailers. What are yours? Because I know that you guys are like, well, I'll let you talk. We're not going to do mailers, at least not in the beginning. We might do it afterwards. So Drake has done mail. He did direct mail.

He probably spent $10,000 in direct mail in Charlotte. So that was a series of months. you probably spent, I would probably like a little over three for three months in a row to send out mail because that's the thing too. It's like you sent out 50, you know, the in the real estate investing world, it's like 5,000 per month. Like 50. Wow. You're not, why would you even waste your bunnies doing that, you know? Yeah. But it's just a little different too where you're like, I sent it if it was it personalized to every single name like maybe whatever. This is a math class and we did it for three months we heat and got like a point zero five percent like response rate

which is very it's low normally i think in the investor space they're aiming for one to two percent response rate from these like five thousand per month mail campaigns that are going out so all that to say i do agree with you i think that it is expensive i do i'll start with it works like people are still doing it yeah and it's talked about widely in the industry for a reason it does still, it absolutely still works. That being said, it is expensive and it is a commitment for an extended period of time. Depending on who you'll talk to, they'll say minimum of three months, minimum of six months of pouring out letters and money every single month before you start really seeing anything come from it. So all that to say, we're not starting with mailers.

we we do plan I think after we have completely blown up everyone's Facebook page here in Lexington they're just like tired of seeing our faces will also probably start hitting them with mail once we are making money down the road once we're licensed closing deals you know the whole thing so from the book ninja selling they have a whole chart on there which I put into my real estate Bible which I give everyone that joins our crew. It literally has every single thought I've ever had about real estate sales. And mailers is the last, the lowest converting one, or not converting, but I like number wise, it's 2,000 to one. So for every 2,000 pieces of mail that you send, that's where you can expect one transaction. And everything else is above that. So I'm like kind of surprised at like,

when I got started every mailers is just the default. Oh, yeah. doorknob, open houses, and mailers. And like, all right, well, I must do all three. And I was like, no, no, no, I'm not doing that shit. Yeah. Well, flip side, though, just to debate it slightly. It's, oh, if you get one one deal from 2000 and if you spend, you know, I don't know how long ordering, which you can do it online from the comfort of your home, you can buy 2000, you can upload all of the addresses and hit send. And so there is that thought, too, where it's if you are able to get a deal out of that little amount of effort, and it all depends on what's most important to you.

Do you care about the sweat? Do you, are you poor? Do you need to, like, sweat for your business? Do you have the money, but you don't have the time? You know, there's just, okay. And now my devil's advocate is done, Holly. Love it. I love a good devil's advocate.

Okay. You mentioned online. Do you want to go there? Dude, I can't stop looking at my receding here. line it's so bad guys I don't go to not watching on YouTube for sure don't go on you to comment oh is to normally turn on a light above so you can see like my hair color is different from this black background but I forgot to do it so it's like all you can see is my face and the receding hair line it's terrible I have it

too so if you want to go on YouTube we we got it we got out on the side and that's the military bunch shit that oh is that why I think you're probably right yes 100% because I used to I used to braid my hair you know braid a little strand in the front and it was always just tugging and tugging plus you were in gymnastics I'm surprised you don't have more of a receding hair line you can't I can't do it anymore it's hard on your scale I do I do I feel it pulling my hair out okay you were saying something you were asking about marketing maybe we were talking about yeah what other what other

topic so we're done we're done with mailers but what other category. Do you want to go into? Well, I would like to share what I did the first time around and what result that happened is because I think that it might be helpful for people who may be doing the strategy that I did the first time around. And I'll give you a little, what is it? Spoiler on what fucking happens when you do it this way. Okay. So the first time around, I targeted investors. I was like, I'm an investor. I'm also a military. That's my target audience because that makes sense. Normally, like you are your target audience. It makes sense because you can get into their psyche and all the things.

But by doing that, so I was on bigger pockets. I'm not talking about the podcast. I'm talking about I was in the forums and like trying to work with investors. I started up pints of properties, which is the real estate investors need up. I got on social media and was sharing all of my deals, investing, investing. What else did I do? You get my point. By doing that, what I attracted was military and investors.

Oh, okay. I wonder why. So the point is the universe is a boomerang. So if you're not thinking like what you put out, you will receive back. And so if you're not strategically thinking about, oh shit, like I'm talking about investors, therefore investing, therefore I will attract investors. What will that life look like? Well, I'll tell you what it looks like.

Working with investors who see you do awesome deals and you share it online want the same deals. So they want to pay pennies on a dollar for a property. they want to as cheap as possible they're pinched and normally they're new because everyone wants to be an investor and from that newbie investor pool maybe one out of a hundred not even fucking kidding you one out of a hundred are awesome maybe five out of a hundred will close on something but that's a lot of conversations and it's a lot of because each one is so much of a fucking time suck even though you're like go educate yourself listen to these podcasts read these books like they're all still for the most part want you to handle them through their first transaction. Don't take ownership.

Anyway, what it also does, so that's a huge time suck. It also brings you a pool of people who want very inexpensive properties, which leads to inexpensive commission rates. And then when you're like, I have to get paid more than $1,000 on this closing or else like I can't do it. So there's this thing called buyers premium. Now you're charging, you're asking your buyers to come out of which actually were good practice because we're about to gnar that shit up here in July. Yeah. So that is what I did. Okay. And that's really my point about just be conscious of what you're putting out into the university because you all attract that. What are your thoughts on that, Ellie? 100%. When I first joined, I also thought I was going to work with investors because I am an

investor first. And I was putting my own personal investing stuff like out on social media and and guess who I was attracting. You know, I was attracting other, like you said, want to be investors, like people that still have not even closed now. And I've been licensed for almost like two and a half, three years, almost three years. And it's just I spent so many hours with people that were like, hey, I want to buy. And then we would go over their buy criteria, you know, their buy box.

And then you find properties that were on the market. And then they would get cold feet. and they wouldn't pull a trigger. And you can only do that for so long. It was charity work. And I don't, I can't. I can't survive off charity work. So, so I stop, like, I stopped putting anything about my investing stuff online.

Like, you will not see any of my investing shit unless I'm talking about the shred method with, I mean, for years, I stopped putting that shit out. So people, like, even though I'm an investor first, I keep that shit silent, you know? And yes, I'm saying this on this podcast, but there's other agents and not clients. So, and that's one of the reasons actually, like, why I step down from Investify being the co-host with Craig Curloff. So because that's who I was attracting more is other first-time investors that needed handholding. We're almost there. We're going to write the offer or we do write the offer and they back out because they're scared.

And I just, I can't survive off that. So I stopped. And instead, I just focus on other people, you know, because every person, no matter who you are, You're you have you're more than what you're involved in more than one it's like a Venn diagram like multiple Venn diagrams like you have every single activity that you're part of every single hobby that you're like doing I had just full focus like just focused on investing and then and after that I started tapping into the other bubble of my Venn diagram which is military and people that are military and want to buy are going to buy they're going to sell and that was also my people you know if I were involved. like karate or if I were a mom or if I were to go grocery shopping like literally all these different bubbles you can be a part of you just you don't have to focus on what you think is what comes to mind first if that makes sense totally totes okay yeah so that was for sure and I'm gonna share with you what are this is wave tops

Allie don't ask me all the way I mean you can ask I just don't know them yet because I haven't looked it yet but this is the plan for round two so and this is a this is a Shelby and Drake plan combined to combine our interests into one area because whatever goals is like life by design. You talked about, you know, paying the bills and all the things. Like we are at a place luckily where like bills are paid, you know, passive and like we've built the life where we don't have to worry about survival. And so this time around we are able to build it in a way where we can just be happy.

Anyway, our plan is we're going to connect with, okay, actually, in the backup one. So the goal is to build a repeatable process that's scalable with the ability to track results, tech forward, leverage heavy, and is sustainable for the long term. And we plan on doing that by connecting with builders. Ideally, new construction, builders, developers within the Lexington area in a price point of high. I say a million, but I just pulled that on my ass because I don't even have access to I'm a last to pull. I didn't know this, but I learned the other day that luxury means the top 5 to 10% of a price point in each market. I didn't know that.

So, dude, right? I heard some dudes say that the other day and I was like, wow. Okay. So once we have our MLS access, then we're going to pull it and identify like actually what is a realistic price point because I don't even know how many million dollar homes there are in Lexington. Like research has to happen first. That being said, higher price point in builders and or listing agents. of these beautiful homes because I want to market a beautiful home. I have sold way too many for $40,000 houses in my day. We are going for beautiful visually and proud of the product.

But I'm going to go to the builders and listing agents and we're going to be like, hey, we want to market your property for you and create gorgeous content of these beautiful homes in the form of like reels like short term comment, you know, those like home tours that you see, where where people like the agents are really crushing and doing home tours. So we're going to do home tours and eventually YouTube, shout out Sam Cottle, you know, and shout out Allie. You guys are an inspiration when it comes to YouTube. But anyway, so we have this beautiful product. We're going to market it for them, creating the gorgeous content, and then we're going to run ads on that content.

So we're going to push these beautiful homes in front of the people of Lexington. When people click and they go to our website, then we are going to retarget the people of Lexington are like, wow, five pillars is everywhere. Who are these guys? They are literally everywhere. And then through that over time, this is, you know, through capturing through the funnel, we will enter their psyche to the extent where they will actually fill out the form if they haven't already.

And then once they fill out the form with, you know, the leakman. The lead magnet is the beautiful home for more information or whatever we decide to actually use as our specific lead magnet once we get their contact information then it's the lead manager which in the beginning is straight speed to lead and set an appointment and then i come in crush the appointment yes 100 percent and according to that ninja selling chart that is the advertisement calls is 25 to 1 so much better than the 2000 to 1 with mailers do you know where are like what states or what cities people are moving to Lexington from yeah I don't know yet it's on our list to research yeah yeah why you're asking if so when when you do find out the top couple of cities

are you also going to tart how do you target them you know how do you how do you get in front of New Jersey New York before or is it just the website away that's some Drake nerd shit but yeah I'm sure it's possible we really should have him yeah point for him to let's do it his yeah but I want to see so phase two real quick actually do you have more questions on this phase one of the marketing plan no okay so phase two is once they're in so now at this point we have their contact information they're in our CRM we have captured them we're using bribery by the way but I still when we're talking about life by design I love to throw an event how you probably know this about me by now and you're

damn good at it. Yeah. Girl, stop. Okay, thank you. So I was thinking about like, how can I throw events that are, I love to throw something that's FOMO worthy, like people are like, oh my God, I have to go. I don't want to miss that or after the fact. I cannot believe I miss that. I will be at the next one. So that's after we have these people in our, in our grasp, or this is something that we also could present as an ad, you know, put it pushing out these events. But The ideas at this point is like an open house event. And I say it like that because you think of one thing as an open house.

But what if you turn it into a thing where, you know, either depending on the neighborhood, like food trucks for the lower end or like the really high end, like bring in like this well-known local chef to cook or bring, you know, out food and let people explain it and make it into with a photographer and a videographer and turn it into the deduction. of an event or open houses, you can align it with holidays. There's so many different ways to layer it with like different holiday events or educational events where it's like, oh, come. And I like the idea of doing it in one of these beautiful houses because we're partnering

with builders, right? And we want to showcase their house. So can we throw an event in your house that we're collaborating with local business owners, the builders, the vendors, because when we take, when we do this event, not only is it going be amazing but we're going to have all this content right and now when we go on social media and we share the content we're going to collaborate with every single like the chef who's well known or the business that brought in the baked goods or i fucking help me whatever the vendor who is sponsoring that we're going to tap into every single one of their steers by having this amazing

content that they want to collab on that is going to highlight their business as well and that's how we're going to tap into even more spheres so yeah the title companies the attorneys the the bug control guy you know like literally everybody that's cool yeah that's that's really cool were you were you at that conference i forget where but somebody somebody focuses on this let me let me i'm gonna do some research because somebody like focuses on these mega open houses and she doesn't even pay for it like she has every everyone else pays for it they pay for the marketing they pay for the you know everything related to it they they pay for the chef they pay for whatever it is so like you you could do this for free a lot of people think like mega open houses oh my gosh it's going to

cost me fortune but it doesn't if you're partnering with other uh businesses that want to put that on their social media so yeah that's cool yes and that's the point yeah is it nice okay what's fit wait was that phase two that is phase two yeah There's no face. Is there a face three? No, not right now because we really want to focus. That's the thing. Less things.

Just a few things do them really well. And then once we're ready, if we need to broaden, we can. But we got a year of just boring shit. Not that I'm bored. But you know what I mean. And that is the marketing strategy. We haven't really spoken too much about these mega open houses. Let's get some people on that have done this.

And so if you know of anyone, connect us, We're Ali the Agent on Instagram, we're the Shelby Show on Instagram. We would love to benefit everyone else. So thank you so much for listening and see you in the next one. Be a bro and show the show.