Why Marketing is the Magic Button

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. Now, let’s meet today’s expert host.
Sharon: Hi, this is Sharon Vornholt with the Louisville Gals Real Estate Blog and your host of today’s REI Classroom. Today I want to spend just a little bit of time talking about one of my favorite topics, which is marketing, and why I think marketing is the magic button in your business.
Mike: This REI Classroom real estate lesson is sponsored by FlipNerd Investor Coaching, your blueprint to investing success.
Sharon: Very few people know how to market their businesses, and in fact it’s the number one reason that real estate investors fail. Even fewer people have an actual marketing plan. Now, it’s important that you understand what business you’re really in. People think they’re in the house business, and that is true to some extent, but what you’re really in is the marketing business and the problem-solving business that happens to involve houses.
So once you understand that, then it begins to change your perspective on what you should be doing and what you should be spending your time on in your business. If you can get people to call you, if you can solve their problem, then you can put a deal together. It really is just that simple. You need those steps.
Now, what I hear from most folks is that they’re busy. “I’m just so busy, I can’t get my marketing done.” But once again, you need to understand this is your number one job. It’s the number one thing you need to be doing in your business, whether you’re full time or part time. So you need to ask yourself “Am I spending my time on the right things? Am I searching Facebook, or looking up ways to pretty up my website?” which is important once you’ve got your marketing done, but it’s not your number one job. Getting the marketing out the door so that you get people to call you, that’s your number one job.
Now, if you’re full time, it’s a little bit easier. You can decide how you want to do it. Different people work different ways. You might want to spend one whole day a week on your marketing. Other folks might want to spend two hours a day, every day.
Now, this is something, too, that you need to be aware of. You need to be spending, on average, a couple of hours a day on marketing, whether you do it in a long day or a day and half, or a couple of hours a day. But that is the benchmark, let’s put it that way. That’s the benchmark that you really want to hit, about two hours a day. So you have a lot more leeway in how you get that done if you’re full time.
Now, if you’re part time, you are going to have to decide “Do I want to do it in the evenings? Do I want to get up on Saturday morning? Do I want to do a combination of things.” But you’re going to have to spend your time or your money. If you’ve got more money, you’ll be able to outsource your marketing, get some people to help you. But if you’re short on cash, then you’re going to have to spend your time. That’s really what it boils down to.
So let’s talk a little bit about marketing and your investing strategy. Now, the investing strategy that you choose ultimately will have to do with a lot of things. It will maybe be tied in with your knowledge, your skill set, your background, but it will certainly be tied in with cash.
If your goal is to be a rehabber but you don’t have access to cash or bank financing or private money, then that’s probably off the table until you are able to have those resources. So the way you might market for those deals would be possibly different than a wholesale deal. Now, if I’m only marketing for wholesale deals, I just want to get a lot of leads in the door, sift through those leads. So direct mail would be my number one way. You can drive for dollars, you can do a lot of different things. But once again, if you don’t have a lot of cash to spend, you’re going to have to spend your time.
So if you spend the time on your marketing and you have a proper marketing plan, which we are going to talk about in another video, then you can build a business that allows you to actually have more free time and a lot less stress in your business. But you need to put those things on a calendar. If they’re not on the calendar, they’re not going to get done.
So think about this, and we’ll talk about a marketing plan soon in the next video.
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