Course: Marketing Foundations- NEW
Chapter 1
Alright, so lets talk about one of the most important parts of your real estate business, and that is, your Marketing. Marketing is your real estate investing business. You will always be doing this; week in and week out, month in and month out;as long as you’re investing in real estate; you’re going to be marketing. It is one of the most important things to master as a business owner. Now, let’s think about it for just a second. Real estate investing and a real estate investing business are no different from any other business; meaning, a local chiropractor, if they are running a local chriropracting business, their business is dependent on how well they market, how many clients they get in the door, and, of course, how they treat those clients. Well, real estate investing business is no different. We are looking to get leads in the door from motivated sellers and we’re looking to get agents contacting us with good leads that they may have just listed and we’re looking to get other outside referral leads coming in from sources. This is the life blood of our business. So now, here’s what’s important to know about marketing: Number 1, you have to set up your foundations. So you have to have things like business cards, a website, a logo, a url, an easy to remember phone number. These are some of the essential things just to let people know that you are in business in your area. Now, that's not necessarily what drives our lead generation every single week, every single month, as a real estate investor. Really, that can be broken down into three categories: one is getting leads from agents and properties that are listed on the MLS; and that's a big source it encompasses a lot of different niches from short sales to REOs to general distressed properties; but it’s a very consistent source. The other source would be what I call direct response marketing campaigns. This could be anything from pre-foreclosure campaigns to probate campaigns to online campaigns. These are specific campaigns geared toward a specific subset of the population that we’re going to be marketing to that we think has a high probability of being motivated. The third category is the relationships you build within the area that you are buying properties. So this is referral leads and these could come from anyone from a mortgage broker to an attorney to another investor, but please understand as long as you’re in the real estate business, you are going to be in the marketing business and you have to continually study new marketing trends, what’s working what’s not. You have to continually test your marketing and lead generation efforts. Because your success as a real estate investor- if you have a lot of leads to evaluate you have a higher probability of success because you’re going to have more deals you can make offers on and you’re going to be able to cherry pick deals that come out of the back end of your funnel. So marketing really is the life blood and I wanted to just give you a short synopsis of why its so important to you as a real estate investor.
Chapter 2: Lesson 1
What we’re going to talk about are the many elements involved in starting a business. New business owners face many challenges that they must overcome to be successful in today’s competitive world. Throughout this course you will learn about all of the foundational materials you will need to open up shop. To start your successful real estate investing business it’s important to have a powerful business name, a strong web presence, a business plan, and a proper business structure. We’ll touch on all these key components because building a business is not easy and as we know, you’re the x-factor and it does take work. For those of you who are brand new, this course is a must as these components are critical as they lay the proper foundation as you start your business. I also want to make it clear that your coach will help guide you when the time is right to set up your entity. The company we use, NCH, can assist on advising on setting up your business name, phone number, and website. The key here is that we, at FortuneBuilders are teaching you how to set up your business for marketing purposes and NCH will be the actual service provider in implementing that actual set-up of the structure, entities, and components. I’m certain many of you are anxious to set up your entity as you’ve heard the benefits it provides. We will guide you in this process. You will need to get several items set up and need to get your marketing going before you even take the steps for setting up your entity. There might be a handful of you that are ready for the entity set-up, however, I strongly encourage you to review these steps as these will better prepare you and expedite the set-up process for your entity.
Chapter 2: Lesson 3
What’s in a name
So, what’s in a name? That depends. When we’re talking about achieving success in our small business there’s a lot in a name. Much goes into choosing the right name for a business and having that right business name could lead your business towards a path to success or nose dive your business to failure. Here at FortuneBuilders we’ve found that the key ingredients to molding the best business names are to be unique and creative, have a strong web presence, avoid geographical names, open yourself to as many customers and networks as possible with your name, and correctly register your business name with the state. Naming your business is just the first step in marketing and succeeding with your business.
Chapter 3: Lesson 1
Your brand is very important as a real estate investor. It should embody how you want all sellers, buyers, real estate investors, all people you interact with to perceiveyour company. Yourbrand is what makes you and your business memorable and sets you apart from all other real estate investors in the market. So when you’re establishing your brand you have got to consider who your target customer is and what they are looking for in a real estate investment company and how you can provide that solution to them. If you have good branding, people will remember you. They are going to remember your business and it will help you generate referral leads over the course of the next couple years as you build your business. Now your logo and your color scheme are all visual aspects of your brand and it’s something we will get customers to remember who we are. So you are always going to want to use the same logo and the same color scheme on all of the different marketing that you utilize. Be careful though, although these elements are important to your business you don't want to spend too much time developing them or getting caught up in a week to create a logo, that's too long. Set it up, find a logo, find a color scheme roll with it because the campaigns that you actually execute to go after motivated sellers are the most important thing, but when we start, we have to build our brand and then roll with it as we grow our business.
Chapter 4: Lesson 1
Alright, so what’s a marketing campaign? A marketing campaign is a coordinated series of steps that you utilize to target motivated sellers through different marketing mediums such as direct mail, could be an online advertisement, could be a newspaper ad, or could be television, radio. A marketing campaign is specifically geared to a subset of people. Direct response marketing is when your marketing message is geared to get somebody to see your message and pick up the phone and call you. When you’re branding is when you are marketing your face or your name. What we do as investors is we focus a lot on direct response marketing. We send maybe a pre-foreclosure letter to a subset of homeowners who are in foreclosure and we try to get them to pick up the phone and call us or go to the website and fill out information about selling their property. So what we do from a marketing campaign perspective is we execute these campaigns and we create a system so that these campaigns go out regularly, every single month, that's the most important thing with your marketing is to be consistent.