Looking for REI marketing strategies that will bring in business without breaking the bank?
You’ve come to the right place!
The key here is to use both reactive and proactive marketing.
Think of reactive marketing as your defense like football. Reactive marketing means that motivated sellers find and contact you (not your competitor) when they want to sell a property. The best way to make that happen is to have a strong website so that you come up on Google searches.
Proactive marketing is your offense. Proactive marketing means you’re pursuing motivated sellers who aren’t necessarily looking for your services. To keep your budget in line, you want to be strategic here and cold call or direct mail the right people in the right ways.
Always Give Options
Whatever marketing efforts you’re using (direct mail, social media or cold calling), always give the seller several ways to respond:
- Phone number
- Email address
- Snail mail address
- Website
There are people who will prefer to go to your website and check you out before they give you any information. There are people who have families and responsibilities that keep them busy so they’re not able to call you during the day and they prefer to go to your website or email you. Make sure all these contact options are on all of your marketing, including your business cards and car signage.
Always keep your seller or buyer in mind when you’re designing your marketing and make it as easy as possible for them to work with you!
Build a Better Website
Your reactive marketing is probably going to depend primarily on your website. You want to be sure that motivated sellers are able to find you online, so the best way to make sure that happens is to enhance your search engine optimization (SEO) so that when they search for “sell my house fast” or “no realtor commission”, you pop up.
Metatags
The first way you can do that is to use metatags. In other words, don’t just be concerned with the words your website visitors see on the page. You need to make sure keywords are also in your website’s code.
Do your research and make sure you are using the highest performing keywords for the best results!
Blogs
Consider starting a blog as part of your website. Write short articles (no more than 500 words) on topics that matter to your visitors. These topics will also matter to the bots that decide what shows up first in a Google search. They like to see dynamic content. They like to see topics that are relevant to your website visitors. If you can give them those things, they’ll give you a better position in search results.
Blog posts don’t need to be perfect and they don’t need to be long. Many motivated sellers don’t want to pay realtor commissions. So, write a 200-word article about how they don’t have to pay that commission when they work with you. Motivated sellers don’t want to or simply cannot pay for repairs. So, write a 200-word article about how they don’t have to do repairs because you’ll buy it as-is and even clean the property out (that will be valuable to absentee owners who live out of state).
Those articles will help you add keywords to your website. And, if you set up a blogging schedule, you can keep those bots happy with regularly updated content.
Contact Form
Rely on the contact form on your website. Not everyone is going to fill that form out, but that’s actually a good thing! The people who do fill it out are motivated. The people who don’t were probably going to waste your time. So the form essentially acts as a pre-screening tool for you.
Make sure your contact form is easily accessible so that everyone who visits your website sees it.
List Your Properties
If you’re looking to build credibility on a website for buyers, list your properties. If you don’t have any properties, the site should collapse the section that shows your current properties.
You can also get creative here. If you don’t have any properties, see if another investor in your area has a property you can list. Pass the responses you get along to the other investors. That builds your credibility, drives up your website traffic, and helps you build a relationship with another investor.
The Proactive Approach
In addition to beefing up your website and making sure it’s showing up in searches, do some proactive marketing.
The most proactive approach is to cold call the seller in real-time and ask whether they would consider a cash offer on their house. You’re going to get a lot of Nos when you cold call. But that doesn’t mean you need to give up on the seller!
Remember, most people don’t respond until they’ve been touched at least 7 times. So if your cold call is your first attempt to connect with them, they’ve only been touched once. Try sending them a postcard next.
You might not send a postcard to every person who says no. Create a grading scale (which you can give to your virtual assistant if you have one) so that you know which sellers said “probably not” and which said “absolutely not”. That decreases your spend and increases your chance of a deal.
Also, a direct mail campaign works great with postcards. They have a 100% open rate! Just make sure there’s a big, straightforward headline on both sides that tells your seller why they should care what you have to say. Hook them so they keep reading.
You could also do a direct mailing that’s not tied to cold calls that you’ve already made. The key is to send that mailing to the right people. Don’t send it to every person in a certain zip code. Get more specific. You could send a mailing to everyone in that zip code who’s owned their home for more than 7 years. Or you could send a mailing to the absentee owners in that zip code who have owned their home for more than 7 years.
Each time you refine that list you’re increasing your chances of a response. If you’ve got a targeted list like that and you find that direct mail works well for you but you’re not sure how many pieces you should be sending out, I’ve found that 500–1,000 pieces a month works well for most investors.
The Bottom Line
Whether or not you have a tight REI marketing budget, you should have a reactive and a proactive marketing strategy. And, no matter how much money you spend on marketing, you should spend time planning your marketing and always do what works best for your business.
Your Take
What REI marketing tips have worked well for you? Let me know in the comments below!
Regards,
Cameron Dunlap
