Should you outsource your real estate lead generation process or do it yourself?
If you follow my blog posts, you’ll remember Bob from the post about Real Estate Burnout. This story is an important lesson that really hits home with real estate investors. Bob focused on his first deal so much that he didn’t do enough work to get leads for the future.
Your real estate lead generation and marketing processes are the future of your business and in this blog, I want to show you how to become a pro at real estate lead generation for your business.
Generating Leads — The Lifeblood of Your Business
Okay, you’ve taken Bob’s story to heart. You’re out there in the market chasing down leads. You know you need more customers, but you don’t have a good way to go about doing this.
When I coach new real estate investors, I see two problems.
- They don’t understand leads and sales cycles
- They don’t have a coherent marketing plan
Let’s take a look at point one now and we’ll tackle point two later in the post.
Understanding the Value of Leads and the Sales Cycle
When it comes to leads, you need to know first-and-foremost that:
All leads are not created equal.
This is the most important advice I heard when I first started out. Your marketing efforts might be working, pulling in some leads, but are those leads high-quality leads?
Work out a system for scoring how the value of a lead. My system goes something like this:
- How old is the lead?
- Where did the lead come from?
- Will I be the first to speak with the customer?
- How ready is the homeowner ready to sell?
The best lead is a homeowner who is ready to sell, that no one has spoken to, that is new, and is from a trusted source.
Lead scoring isn’t the only important thing. The lead funnel is also really important for creating a strong lead generation machine.
The Lead Funnel
If you haven’t heard of the lead funnel, I want you to picture an upside down triangle. This is our funnel. Potential customers start at the top and go down the funnel, towards the point of the triangle. The funnel gets smaller the closer you get to the tip of the triangle. That means fewer and fewer of the leads you find make it to the point of the triangle. But, the leads that make it to the point will be the best leads, and they ultimately convert into a customer.
The funnel is how we attract, score, and convert leads. I could do an entire post on the lead funnel. machine.
Building Your Real Estate Lead Generation Machine
When you are just getting started, you have a few questions to ask yourself. Any business owner knows the trade-off between time and money.
Option 1: Do I save money and spend my time on marketing?
-or-
Option 2: Do I spend money on marketing and save time?
Let’s talk about option one first. You can see this kind of entrepreneur often. They’re out there, hitting the streets, rushing from place to place. They wear all of the hats in the business usually. They save money by throwing themselves into the marketing and lead generation.
Option 1 tactics: (low cost / high time usage)
- Driving for dollars (driving through neighborhoods looking for ugly homes, looking at FSBOs)
- Business cards left on car windows in parking lots
- Door flyers
- Bandit signs (can be the most effective, but be careful of city ordinances)
- Attending networking events, meetups
- Word-of-mouth
These aren’t glamorous ways to get leads, but they’ll get the job done if money is your primary concern.
If you have some money for marketing, you’ll have access to many different options to generate leads locally.
Option 2 tactics: (high cost / low time usage)
- Newspaper ads (or community papers like Green Sheet)
- Direct mail (postcards are the cheapest, letters are more expensive)
- Finding or buying a list of real estate names (leads)
- Advertise at local businesses or on real estate boards in your community
- Host a housewarming party
- Advertise at local tradeshows or real estate meetings
Now, I’ve purposefully left off the digital world for real estate investor lead generation. I did this because here at REI Consulting, we help real estate investors build up their online lead generation.
You are probably familiar with online lead generation, so let me give you a few ideas for new ways to find leads.
Digital Marketing
- Implement SEO
- Google Adwords campaign
- Host or attend a podcast as a guest
- Create a small eBook
- Produce a short email newsletter
- Advertise on craigslist or Zillow (or important local websites)
Depending on your budget, you can use a combination of all of the lead generation ideas I’ve talked about. You’ll eventually find what combination works for you and your budget.
5 Tips to Boost Your Real Estate Lead Generation Efforts
When I was getting started, I tried almost every tactic to increase leads. In the beginning, it felt like being at a giant buffet, trying to put together the tastiest plate that would draw in the best leads.
Along the way, I picked up five pieces of advice — food pairing tricks if you like — that really got me better leads.
- Define a few buyer personas to add clarity to your marketing efforts. In marketing, a buyer persona is a representation of your ideal customer or customers. Try to get into the mind of your buyer. What motivates them? What are their interests?
- Harvest and share customer testimonials. Take all of the good things your customers are saying to you and use those in your marketing efforts. People like to buy from someone who others like. If you can find one customer willing to record a video about working with you, even better!
- Check out your competition to see how they market. Yes, I know this obvious, but it’s really important. Get out there and take notes of what your competition is doing. Find a local pro you really admire and emulate their marketing efforts. Call me and I can help you!
- Experiment with different marketing channels and techniques — Fail small and fail fast. I heard this at a management seminar years ago and it just stuck. I love the idea. Once you get established, try out some of the different marketing ideas I listed above. See if anything generates outsize returns. You’d be surprised what works.
- Build the image you want online. Everyone is online these days. We all have phones. Future customers of mine have — right in front of me as we are talking — check out my website. A poor quality website can really reflect negatively on you. Don’t lose a deal because you had a bad web presence.
