Marketing and Branding: Offline and Online

Mike: Welcome back to the FlipNerd.com REI Classroom where experts from across the real estate investing industry teach you quick lessons to take your business to the next level. And now, let’s meet today’s expert host.

Darrell: Hey, welcome. My name is Darrell Kucan and I’ll be your host today for the REI Classroom show. Sit back, grab a pen and hold on because I’m going to talk about a lot of information here in the next few minutes. Today we’re going to talk about marketing and branding.

Mike: This REI Classroom Real Estate lesson is sponsored by VirtualStaffNow.com.

Darrell: Some other people might talk about it, but this is my aspect on it. There are really only two types of marketing and branding that you’re going to do. There’s going to be offline and there’s going to be online.

So let’s start out with offline marketing and what is that. Offline marketing could be any thing from direct mail, cold calling people, bandit signs, newspaper ads, local businesses. And this is kind of a fun one. Their little fishbowls, right? So you might be able to put an ad or a flyer or something out in your local business or some business owner that you know, and then have people just put their cards in there.

Word of mouth, presentations, networking events. I’m a huge on networking events. The sign right behind me here. We run the San Diego Investment Club, that’s one of the biggest things that we promote as networking.

This is a people business, so you really have to network well. You could wrap your cars or there are billboards. Just all types of offline marketing that you can do. Word of mouth. We do a lot of business off referrals, because we just do business the right way, ethically, honestly. Right? So we do a lot of referrals that way.

I might talk a little fast because I’m going to give a lot of information out here, so bear with me for a minute.

Your team, your team is going to provide a lot of offline marketing as well for you. If you get a few good real estate agents on your team, they’re going to be talking about you. Your builders and your construction people, your title, your escrow.

Anybody that you come in contact with is building your brand and that’s part of branding. It is making sure that you get out there and the world sees you. Making sure that when they do see you you’re doing the right things and having the right people on your team.

So we’ll move on from offline marketing. I’m going to be talking about direct mail, indirect mail. There are all different types of direct mail, right? There’s yellow letters for example, there’s the post cards, there’s also all different types of stuff. What you say on those letters. Don’t go out and copy and paste other peoples words, you really need to focus on you. It needs to come from you because when they get the letter and they decide to call you, it’s because it’s what you wrote down and they connected with you in some fashion or another.

Now, let’s move on to online marketing. Online marketing, this type is really deep. Online marketing of course there’s websites, there’s squeeze pages, social media, there’s video marketing, and then you have your blogs and your newsletters and like Craigslist. There’s an online thing to these. Constant Contact is a tool that we use within our online marketing.

So let’s talk a little bit about websites. Websites, do you have a website? If you don’t, get one. They’re really easy to create. We need a simple “About Us” page, you need a buyers page, you need a sellers page, maybe even an investors page, available properties page. And then, how can they contact you? This is kind of where the squeeze pages come in.

A squeeze page is if you don’t know what they are. It could be a one page website where it leads people to enter their information so you can start to build your list, whether it’s a buyers list or a sellers list or maybe a wholesalers list, something like that. So a squeeze page is simply put an opportunity where somebody can find you, find out and download some free information.

The more you give away, the more you’re going to receive. So if you can offer somebody seven ways to avoid foreclosure in the next 30 days and download the free eBook, well you’re going to capture that information.

Let’s move on to social media. Social media is absolutely huge. I would encourage everybody if you don’t have one yet, most people do have a Facebook page. I would even go step further and have a LinkedIn page. I believe those were the two main social media platforms that we used. We use LinkedIn and Facebook. And there’s G+, Google+, that’s a really good one as well. And then you have your Twitter and your Instagram, and those kinds of things.

Well, Twitter is really huge. I’m an old guy, so for me to wrap my head around Twitter is pretty hard. But at this point in life what we’ll do is we’ll outsource that kind of thing, right? I don’t need to spend eight hours a day in my office doing marketing. We outsource it. But you if you’re just beginning this is a great way for you to learn about marketing.

Your videos. If you can create a video. Who cares what you look like? You look like yourself, that’s beautiful. You are who you are, so don’t worry about what your nose looks like or what color your hair is, just shoot the video and start to get your name out there, open a YouTube page.

And then your blogs and newsletters could come from your websites. That’s where constant contacts comes in that we use. There’s other platforms out there. A blog is simply what happened during the day or what happened this month. And a newsletter is just an update about business that people go subscribe to. What it does is it keeps them with you and your business on the top of their head. When they start seeing newsletters, someday they’re going to run into something that they’re going to say, “Hey, I know a guy.” And you’re going to want to be the guy and they’re going to want to be able to find you easily.

We used Craigslist for all types of different things as well. Hostlists is a really good website for you to host your properties on. One Click, it blasts to like 20 different websites including Zillow and all these other places.

Moving on from there, I guess we create systems and checklists when it comes to marketing. For example, if I’m going to be marketing a house for sale, there are certain steps that I have to go through. We always shoot a before, a during and an after video. And in the video it’s not necessarily, “Hey look, here’s what it is now.” I mean actually basically, yes. That is what it is.

But in the beginning introduce yourself. Who you are, what the project is, how much the product acquisition costs. What the rehab budget is and what you expect to sell it for. In the middle of the project you could show the work being done, if you were on track. Oops, we ran into some issues. Right? So you’re going to start to help. You’re going to create something that you’re giving away. And when you’re giving something away, people are going to want to give back.

Moving on, going in to social media, again the same thing. “Hey, I have a property for sale.” Or “Hey, I just bought a property.” And what this is going to do is it’s going to start create some energy and it’s going to create people liking you and following you, and then you’re going to start building your list that way.

And then moving on to when you sell a property. This is a same situation. Put on all the platforms you can. Really when you’re marketing, I really would suggest videos. People have a much better time watching videos than they do reading. However, you can always transcribe your videos into books or something like that. And that’s actually something we’re working right now. And some of these things will be available soon for you to download. We like giving free content out and I really commend FlipNerd and REI Classroom for giving you guys this type of information.

So if you have any questions, you can feel free to email me. My name is Darrell Kucan, K-U-C-A-N. You can just Google it and I should come up all over the place. I’m with Kucan and Clark Partners. Or behind me, you can go to SanDiegoInvestmentClub.com or just Google San Diego Investment Club. We’ve got a lot of resources and all types of paper work and videos that are on our YouTube channel. So I appreciate your time. Thank you for watching. Take care and enjoy the other shows.

Mike: VirtualStaffNow.com is the leading virtual system provider for real estate investors. As busy real estate investors there’s nothing more valuable than our time, and VirtualStaffNow.com not only helps you find the right real estate virtual assistant for your business, they train them on an ongoing basis, manage them daily to make sure they’re staying productive and effective, and in the event they’re not the right fit or need to be replaced, they handle that for you, too.

Whether you need 1 or 100 virtual assistants for your team, start the process right now at VirtualStaffNow.com.

Please note, the views and opinions expressed by the individuals in this program do not necessarily reflect those of FlipNerd.com or any of its partners, advertisers or affiliates. Please consult professionals before making any investment or tax decisions, as real estate investing can be risky.

Are you a member yet of FlipNerd.com, the hottest real estate investing social community online? If not, you can join for free in less than 30 seconds and get access to hundreds of off-market deals, vendors in your market to help you in your business, and you can start networking with thousands of other investors just like you. Get your free account now at FlipNerd.com.

Please check out the FlipNerd family of real estate investing shows where we host four great ongoing shows at FlipNerd.com/shows or simply search for FlipNerd in the iTunes Store.