Savvy marketing is not optional for successful real estate investors.
It’s imperative.
And if you want to get the word out there and produce leads, then cost-effective technology (coupled with time-efficiency) is the name of the game in this nutty high-tech world.
So trash your message in a bottle, tell that courier pigeon to “Fly away, you useless rat with wings!”, and send Paul Revere packin’…
…then join us on the cloud as we welcome a new marketing tactic with some super cool features.
It’s called CallFire, and as Paris Hilton would say, "That's hot."
CallFire is a cloud-call-center service from which you can send automated text and voice broadcasts directly to potential customers and clients that you specifically want to target.
In today’s lesson, you’re gonna learn about two of CallFire’s most helpful features for real estate investors: voiceblasts and local number rentals.
Put Your Voice on Blast
First, let’s look at a hypothetical real-world scenario that puts CallFire’s voiceblast feature into perspective:
Imagine that a certain real estate wholesaler gave himself 90 days to sell a particular house that he had under contract. Well call him “Sherwin”, because nobody in the history of the world has ever used the name Sherwin in any hypothetical examples, and it’s high time that somebody rectified this grievous injustice.
(You’re welcome!)
Eventually, concern befell Sherwin’s once-joyous face as he looked at his calendar and nervously noticed that 75 days had passed with no sale. Our anxious friend frantically employed all the marketing methods that he’d used before, including:
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Freeway advertising
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Contacting his existing buyers
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Placing an ad in the paper
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Littering the Internet with info about this property
Unfortunately, Sherwin didn’t get anywhere…
The advertising was costly and didn’t produce any solid leads…
His regular buyers were busy with other properties…
The few calls he got from the ad in the paper were a bust…
And each hit he got from the Internet lead somewhere slightly south of “nowhere”.
Dismayed that these marketing approaches failed to yield his desired results, Sherwin sunk low in his chair, wishing he could simply wave a magic wand to get this contract assigned already.
However, after hunkering down and doing just a bit more research, it hit him; as if the rabbit had jumped right out of his hat and slapped him in the face…
He needed a cost-effective and timely way to directly reach a specific group of potential buyers.
In the wake of this epiphany, Sherwin decided to utilize a cloud-call-center service to contact all the landlords in his county…
From the local apartment association’s website, he found contact listing info for 748 landlords in his county. Of course, it would be crazy for Sherwin to single-handedly call each of those people himself to talk about the property, so he had CallFire do it for him. He simply subscribed to the service, then he uploaded a spreadsheet of the phone listings.
Next, Sherwin set up and sent out a pre-recorded phone call message (aka. “voiceblast”) to those 748 landlords, in which he introduced himself and shared some basic information about the property. And after listening to Sherwin’s pre-recorded message, listeners could either “Press 1” to speak with a live representative, or “Press 2” to be added to the Do Not Call list.
When a recipient chose option 1, CallFire automatically dialed the phone number for Sherwin’s virtual assistant, who promptly (and happily) collected information from the interested landlord.
Thanks to CallFire, Sherwin had the contract signed just 8 days after launching his voiceblast.
(The cherry on the cake was that he also added 34 new landlords to his ever-growing buyer’s list.)
And yes, just like our hypothetical Sherwin, people really are using this service to their advantage and getting results.
This is the Kind of Rental You Want
Another cool thing about CallFire is that you can rent a number with a local area code – for only $1 or $2 a month.
This nifty little strategy allows you to send a call anywhere you want – an answering service, live operator or whatever else – while still maintaining a “local” feel.
For example, imagine that you want to distribute a voiceblast for a certain property, and rather than referring the voiceblast’s recipients to an impersonal 1-800 number, you want to provide them with a local number, in order to maximize your local “feel”.
With CallFire you can easily and inexpensively set up different local phone numbers for each of your market-specific advertising strategies.
If you're marketing to probates in Charleston, then have them call you via a local Charleston number. Or, if you're marketing to absentees in Charleston, then have them call an entirely different number there. And if you're marketing to “free and clears”, then they can call a third number.
Still not convinced? Well, in addition to enhancing the local “feel” of your marketing campaigns, utilizing this sort of phoneline-rental strategy allows you to enjoy 100% accurate testing data for each of your campaigns.
You see, I know (from personal experience) that people who do express interest in your property will almost always be asked to explain: “How did you hear about us?”…
…and it’s amazing how often they’ll say something such as, “Oh, I saw your TV commercial.” Which would be fine, except that you’re not running a TV commercial and that person has no idea how they heard of you!
(I’m sure they saw someone’s TV commercial, but a lot of good that does you…)
Having a separate, local number for each campaign automatically tracks your market results, so you know exactly where more or less of your leads are coming from. And this valuable insight allows you to identify which marketing strategies are producing the best (and worst) results for your business…
…which tells you where you should be focusing more of your valuable marketing dollars.
Familiarize Yourself with CallFire – Hop on the CallFire website, look around and check out the features that would be most useful for you and/or your company.
Utilize Voiceblasts – Decide to whom it would be most beneficial for you to send automated pre-recorded messages, and then craft a brief (yet clever) message to bring in their business.
Rent Local Numbers – For any markets in which you are operating remotely, set up as many different local numbers as you need for your various marketing pieces.