Invest – Applied Knowledge is Power

Accepting your role as a marketer is the thing that will move you out of the rut of occasional mediocre deals and up into a level of sustained success that would not otherwise be possible for you. And this is true of anyone in any other business or industry. The person or company who is most on top of their marketing, makes all the money, and dominates their market.

A marketing machine! Very average pizza. But aggressive marketers, and they virtually own their market. Look at Bill Gates (yes, I know, everyone cites BG). If you saw Accidental Empires though, a PBS documentary by Robert Cringley, you’d know that Gates was just one of hundreds of fanatical “techies” who were trying to make this computer thing work somehow. With his astute positioning and relentless marketing he rode Microsoft up over IBM to the $80B company it is today.

Of course, this doesn’t mean you just market better and let your buying, negotiating and selling skills go to pot. You’ve got to be the very best property buyer you can be and run your office well too. After all, your sellers and buyers deserve the very best treatment from you. But more importantly, doing what you do so well that people can’t resist telling others about you, is the purest type of marketing in and of itself.

Remember, it doesn’t matter how good you are if you have no Motivated Sellers to talk to. Buying houses from Motivated Sellers with little or no money out of your pocket is the name of the game, and marketing is the thing that brings in the Motivated Sellers.

OK, so, marketing. Really fabulous! But, what does it mean? So far it’s just a word I’ve said 10 or twenty times, right? Well, there are two types of marketing people typically use.

The traditional approach which, for want of any better way to go, usually involves just going out after randomly selected sellers. They haven’t been screened or qualified in any way. We just know they have a house to sell. We run up big phone and classified ad bills to get to talk to them. In communicating with them we usually talk to them about our financing, and how great it is, and if they will just sell to us their problems will go away. We do it manually; call by call, door by door. We talk about us, rather than inquire about them. We chase, they run. When we stop, the marketing stops. The cost per deal is very high, both financially and emotionally.

The second approach is the targeted, low-cost, systemized, response-oriented approach that, through a variety of media (such as direct mail, lead generating classified ads, flyers, signs, radio, cable TV) states or implies a benefit for the seller, calls for a response from them, and positions you as “the solution” for the sellers who want that. The sellers step forward and select you. The marketing is automated, and it is an operating system that works whether you are there or not.

I don’t want to shock you, but we are not going with the first choice here. Pick up just about any book or course about real estate investing or creative real estate and you’ll find the choice

#1 approach to finding motivated sellers, if any. What you won’t find anywhere in those books or courses is the choice

#2 approach, which is direct response marketing. Direct response marketing targets a specific group of most-desired prospects that you have defined as those most likely to respond to your offer (out-of-state homeowners, or expired listings), then it advertises for or delivers a message to only those people via a media (e.g. personal-looking hand-addressed number 10 envelope mailed first class) that will reach them and get their attention. Once in front of the target, direct response delivers the following:

Benefit-telegraphic headline, true marketing message

offer, or offers, reason to respond immediately

precise response instructions and mechanisms

With these five elements in place, you set yourself up to be called only by motivated, partially pre-sold sellers, continually, day after day! So now you can be freed to do the most productive thing possible for you as an investor: make offers to motivated sellers!

Hopefully you can see the picture here. Direct response marketing cuts your advertising expense in half. It sifts, sorts and screens your prospects so that only the most qualified and most motivated respond and get to talk to you. In short, it allows you to make more while working less, with more predictability, consistency and control than anything else you could do to find deals. Is that something you want? Think about it. Is there anyone you know of who is buying and selling a boatload of houses every month?

They are still doing a ton of business. Now, why is that? They don’t offer sellers anything more outstanding than you, do they? They certainly don’t offer sellers anything more creative than you are capable of offering. They don’t have any better phone manner than you. Not at all.

The only thing that very successful Real Estate Entrepreneurs do better than anyone else is: Create a reliable, consistent flow of motivated sellers calling in each day! That’s it! That’s the difference. So did you get the message here? I hope so. If you want to change your experience in real estate investing from one of anxiety, frustration and disappointment to working less and making more, you’ll make the change.