Hey Moguls, Doug Van Buskirk here…
You’re just 4 steps away from a breakthrough advertising campaign – one that cuts through the confusion and frustrating results… One that brings in deals and gives you a proven foundation on which to build your business.
These 4 steps are used to the tune of tens of BILLIONS of dollars in hundreds of industries across the globe.
Master these steps, and there’s little that can stop you on the road to the top.
The outline I’m giving you today can be applied to:
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Postcards
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Yellow Letters
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Bandit signs
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Websites and Web Pages
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Newspaper Ads
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Flyers
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Sponsorships
As a matter of fact, it should be applied to every single aspect of your advertising – large and small, paid and free.
Do you know the most important number in marketing?
It’s actually a set of letters: R.O.I.
As investors, we’re really keen to ROI in terms of deals were looking at. You’d never buy a deal that clearly resulted in lost money and wasted time, right?
Yet, that’s what real estate investors do all the time with their marketing. They buy postcards, bandit signs, yellow letters and websites, but completely lose track of whether it’s worth the time or money.
It reminds me of my early days as an investor…
I spent more than $1,000 setting up my website, setting up an autoresponder and agonizing over what to write. All in, it took up 6 weeks of my time. And guess how many internet leads that website brought in?
The big donut…ZERO!
I kept working on it, trying to make it better, not realizing that my time and money would have been much better spent elsewhere.
4 truths that will set you free
There’s 4 Marketing Principles you need to embrace to keep yourself from making the same mistakes I did:
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Testing
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Tracking
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Optimizing
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Scaling
We’ll break ‘em down one by one so you see how to put them to work to get you more, better deals with less work.
I want you to do two things as we go through these.
First, ask yourself if you are currently doing this in your real estate business.
Second, write down 1 to 2 applications of this material. How will you use this to make your business hum?
Build Your Foundation
We need to test everything in our marketing. We put a few variations of our advertisements out there in order to see which one performs best…
You can vary what you say – for example, testing different headlines on your postcard or changing the wording on your bandit signs.
You can vary who you say it to – by mailing to different areas, different types of lists, where you put bandit signs, etc.
You can also vary how you say it – postcard vs. bandit signs vs. yellow letters vs. online advertising.
WARNING: In the excitement of testing, we need to be very careful to only ever change one thing at a time. If we tested the color of our landing page AND the headline AND the picture all at the same time, we wouldn’t be able to figure out which of those things was truly responsible for the change in results.
The only way to know what works
Tracking.
This is where most investors drop the ball.
Because, let’s face it – you can test different things in your marketing until you’re blue in the face, but if you’re not tracking properly, then you’ll never get any meaningful results!
We need to know the specific numbers for things like:
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# of calls
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# of qualified leads
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Cost per lead
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# of deals closed
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Amount of revenue generated
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R.O.I. (Revenue generated/money spent)
We need to know these numbers specific to each marketing channel: newspaper ad, Google, postcards.
And we also need to know these numbers based on variations on specific advertising; how well Postcard A performed vs. Postcard B. That insight means that the next campaign we do will be smarter and more profitable.
Tracking can be as simple as just asking inbound callers where they found you – that works on a broad level.
But you probably want to stop short of asking them to read you the headline that’s on their postcard, for tracking purposes. For that, you can use tracking phone numbers, promo codes or online tracking to measure the effectiveness of your variations.
Start Simple: Rome wasn’t built in a day. A simple test run would be sending the same postcard to 3 different areas. Then measure the response and move to step 3.
We found what we’re looking for!
Optimizing – this is where it gets fun…
After we run some tests and track the performance, we look at the results to find the winners. Optimizing is as simple as eliminating the losing advertisements that aren’t pulling their weight.
An advanced step to add into the mix is to take the winners and test new variations of those to see if you can find something even more effective. (But let’s not worry about that for now.)
Optimizing is crucial because, like everything, advertising follows the Pareto Principle or the 80/20 Rule. Basically, a small piece of your overall advertising is responsible for the vast majority of your results.
Our job is to find that small portion and eliminate everything else, which leads us to the final step in the plan to dominate our local markets…
Show me the money
Scaling up our marketing!
Once we find the subsection of our marketing that’s crushing it, we stop everything that’s not working and then redirect those formerly wasted resources to our proven winners.
Let me ask you a question: If you found a marketing strategy that was bringing in $5 in revenue for every $1 in advertising, how much money would you spend on advertising?
As much as you could get your hands on, I hope is how you responded...
This is where billions of dollars are generated each year in hundreds of industries across the globe. They’ve tested, tracked and optimized… and now it’s time to start cashing checks.
See it in action
I want to give you an example so you can see the whole process laid out.
We’ve got a list of 3,000 people to send postcards to – and we’re testing 3 different headlines (1,000 of each is sent out).
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$1,500 total spent
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$500 per variation
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Headline 1 brings in 6 leads (0.6% response rate)
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Headline 2 brings in 3 leads (0.3% response rate)
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Headline 3 brings in 14 leads (1.4% response rate)
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23 total leads
Headlines 1 and 2 were terrible, but we found a winner!
So we schedule another mailing. This time, we only use Headline 3 and send out 3,000 more postcards...
On the second mailing, we bring in 42 leads (3,000 postcards x 1.4% response), instead of 23.
That’s 19 extra leads, nearly double the first mailing. Or to put it in money terms, if 1 out of 10 leads turns into a deal, that’s an extra two deals just from that mailing.
If you’re making $5,000 per deal, that’s $10,000 extra in your pocket, just because you followed the steps laid out above.
Then of course, if you’re smart, you’ll reinvest that money into a larger mailing that brings in more deals (Scaling Up).
From there, it’s just a matter of rinsing and repeating your way to success and major profits.
Lemme hear from you
Have you had success with my 4 step process? Talk to me in the comments section below.
Test at least one thing in every campaign. This is what gives you the insight to make each campaign better than the last.
Keep close track of all results. Your tracking gives you the intelligence you need to separate yourself from the pack of other investors. All of your marketing hinges on this.
Optimize by simply stopping all the poor performers and only running the “winners.” Continue testing and tracking to find even better winners, if you’re up for it!
Scale your results into major profits. Once you know what works on a small scale, crank up the volume on your campaign. Get that message in front of more people to bring in more leads and, of course, more dollar bills into your pocket.