Listen to the Podcast Here: Podcast Episode by Jason Lee – Premiered December 23, 2021
What You’ll Learn in the Podcast:
- A look into Seth’s background (the first non real estate centric guest Jason is having on) and how he got into marketing.
- The importance of picking one target market, when starting out, to market to no matter what your industry is.
- An example of how Seth found a laser-tight target market to find massive success for a client.
- Examples of thinking “outside the box” when it comes to rethinking your business model so as to find your ideal client with great success.
- Who Seth’s target market is, which is a little different in that it can be from any industry but has some similarities regardless.
- Why (and how) you should think of marketing as an investment towards customers and not an expense.
- Marketing techniques for selling real estate that many brokers don’t use.
- Organic marketing vs paid marketing.
- The value of standing out in a proven market as opposed to being the first one there.
Summary and Highlights:
Have you spent quite a reasonable amount of time marketing real estate only to find out it is not working? In that case, you need to expand your knowledge on the latest tactics that make real estate investing easy and profitable, like investing in multifamily properties in San Diego or other densely populated areas.
Here are some practical tips to achieve that passive income and financial freedom that most investors dream about, but not everyone can get.
Multifamily Real Estate San Diego Made Easy
The easiest way to implement marketing strategies that work into your business is to blend insights from behavioral psychology and math. In other words, to use simple, quantifiable methods that look at why people do the things they do and how to make them do what we want.
But before you implement any tactic, you need only to pick and focus on one target market only. This is why I titled this section multifamily real estate San Diego made easy and not anything else.
It is no secret! At first, it is hard not to get distracted by the vast amount of channels and strategies available. But you have to analyze the selected target audience. to find their favorite media channels or avenues (events, gatherings, meetings, etc.) where they meet first. Then, we can discuss going in all kinds of directions.
How To Market Real Estate On Social Media
- Narrow your target market down to a sizeable audience of customers with similar tendencies. One that you can reach with your marketing budget.
- Once you figure out the ideal type of client you want to work with, remake your selling strategies to focus on that micro-niche.
- Create marketing materials that help your micro-niche get what they want and fulfill their dreams
- Use every social media you like to market to those people.
What Most Real Estate Agents Do Wrong
- You do not have to be constrained by the real estate industry norms. Think outside the box! Do what you want the way you want and then appeal to your ideal customer base.
- Make your life easier by focusing on the clients you want. You will attract more of the right people, so you will never miss the wrong clients.
- Your marketing budget depends on how much your customers are worth. So, focus on valuable transactions and clients who can make your ROI fast enough for you to keep investing.
What If Your Plan Does Not Work Out?
No one is perfect. So, you might fail sooner or later. So what!? Get rid of the wrong strategies and find out what did not work to start again ASAP!
For every failure, isolate the one or two things that generated a profit. Scale those ideas to the extreme and start from there!
Success is mining all the gold in one niche before moving to anything else. If you get distracted by other projects, you will never hone any marketing strategy. Plus, you will never pick up all the changes in your target market. Instead, those who focus on their target audience can sense the shift of their customer base from one social media to the other. So, they adapt faster than the competition.
Episode 25: Implementing Powerful Marketing Strategies to 10x Your Business
Watch the Podcast | Read the Transcript
Transcript
00:00
Welcome to the multifamily millionaire podcast. The show that interviews, multimillionaire real estate investors and top producers in the real estate industry.
If you’re looking to create passive income and achieve financial freedom so that you can do what you want whenever you want, you’re in the right place. Our goal is to simplify and make real estate investing easy for you. For more information, you can find us at www.JLM.realestate.
00:30
Jason Lee: All right, everyone. Welcome back to the show today. We got Seth Green with me. How you doing Seth?
00:35
Seth Green: I am fantastic Jason, super excited to be here.
00:38
Jason Lee: I’m stoked to have you. Your company and doing a killer job for me, helped me run my podcast and marketing. So I really appreciate your help first and foremost.
00:47
Seth Green: Well thank you very much and yes, in full transparency, you are a happy client, so we’re thrilled to be a part of what we’re already producing for you.
00:55
Jason Lee: So, Seth you are the first non-real estate guy I’ve interviewed on my podcast. Can you just tell me more about who you are and what your background is?
01:04
Seth Green: Sure. Well, thank you. I’m honored to be the only non-real estate person so far, although we’ve spent an extensive amount of time marketing real estate, which I’m sure we’ll get into. So as you know, I’m the founder of www.marketdominationllc.com, started 14 years ago. Started out as a retail financial advisor, college financial advisor, helping people cut the cost to college. And I was told by my fortune 500 branch manager to make 300 dials a day, interrupting strangers, asking for money before the internet. So that’ll date how old I am and that sucked. So I had the good fortune to beg my wife for 30 days in a row to let me go borrow more than the mortgage on our new house, our first house to hire a legendary marketing guru, Jan Kennedy, to teach me how to stop cold calling for a living, that worked incredibly well. I went from the last place, 6700th ranked financial advisor at that fortune 500 company to the top 30 nationwide in two years. That got me written about a bunch of trade journals.
Other advisors started calling again all before the internet saying, how do I do what you did? And I faxed Dan and said, what do I do? And he said, you start a marketing company and do it for them. That was 14 years ago. You know when I started all we had was the phone, print, advertising and direct mail. And now we got, you know, a new social network or new thing every week. So it’s been an incredible roller to ride of helping other businesses, not just financial advisors. We branched out to 63 different industries, since then grow their business so that they can run it.
02:34
Jason Lee: That’s fantastic.
02:37
Seth Green: There is like an hour long version of that story on YouTube, but we don’t have that kind of time.
02:42
Jason Lee: No, that’s great. So yeah, I find it fascinating that you have, you know, such a big marketing company. I’ve always been, you know, very interested in the psychology behind marketing. And as you know, most of the show, you know, that listen are, you know, real estate people. How do you think people should be implementing marketing strategies into their real estate business today?
03:04
Seth Green: I think it’s more important now more than ever. I think marketing gets over, We over complicate it, you know, it boils down to two things. It’s behavioral psychology, why we do the things we do and how to get people to do what we want and math and the math is the easier part. So I think the fundamental principles of marketing that I came up with, the five principles I came up with, never change. The forms of media. We have to execute them on change every day, right? There are now easier ways to get shiny object syndrome to get distracted. Ooh, should I go all in on clubhouse this week? Ooh, should I be doing tiktok next week? You know, it can be hard, especially when you’re in real estate. I mean, I got to hand my hat off to you guys. You guys work more than anybody else, right? There is, I mean, you get phone calls at night, you get phone calls on weekends.
If you’re in residential, you might be, God help you doing open houses as opposed to looking at cashflow spreadsheets. So there are all kinds of challenges that go with real estate as a profession and as an investment class, which you do really, really well. I think it’s more important now to be finding, I think the solution to marketing overwhelm and how you figure out what to do is you pick one target market, just one, and then where do they hang out the most. Whether that’s in person at networking events, whether that’s part of a REIA or something, whether they see the same lawyer, we got to find a place we can reach them affordably. And then let’s focus on one target market, one form of media and one offer that you’re going to make on and get really, really good at that one thing. And you could build an entire real estate empire just doing that and never have to branch out, but I wouldn’t start going in 17 different directions until you do one offer to audience really well.
04:43
Jason Lee: Yeah. I think you said that really well because there’s so many different ways to market now, right? There’s Instagram, Facebook tiktok, direct mail, PPC, Google, all that stuff. So I think a lot of people that I talk to that want to, you know, do more than just calling, right? They get, you know, kind of paranoid and nervous because there’s so many things to do. They kind of get that analysis paralysis and don’t know where to start.
05:06
Seth Green: Absolutely. I get that question every day and the most important question to ask yourself, and we’ve found that this is 50% of the success or failure of any business or any marketing campaign is your target market. If you start there and really narrow it down. So for example I’ll give an example Everybody would get, we had a dentist in our, one of our dental clients in the office years and years and years ago. And I said, doc, who’s your ideal patient? And he said, that’s easy anybody with teeth. And I said, no, it’s really not. You don’t have the marketing budget to reach everybody with teeth in your city. And you wouldn’t want them all if you could, Right. And what about the people without teeth? You do dentures. So we took days and days and days to interview him, interview his staff, look through his CRM and figure out who pays the most, who refers the most.
Who’s the easiest to work with. If you could wave a magic wand and only work with one type of patient or client, your entire career, rest of your career, who would it be? And we were able to determine his target market was a 40 to 50 year old suburban woman who had gotten divorced in the last six months was starting to date Again, was terrified of competing against younger women, wanted to do something to make herself feel better about her appearance, but didn’t want plastic surgery. So that is a tightly defined micro niche, laser focused target market. And we remade his entire practice around just serving those women. He cut his hours in half, makes four times as much money and has a three month long wait list. That’s the power of narrowing down your target market and focusing all of your energy on One group of people.
06:39
Jason Lee: That’s amazing. And with that strategy, did you guys only use one like funnel or one medium to reach those people?
06:47
Seth Green: We have branched out. We started out, this was a while ago. So no internet, no social media. We started out with direct mail. Then we branched out to referral relationships, other people who see the divorcing women. So not only is that the obvious divorced lawyers and therapists, his number one source of referrals ended up being hair stylists, because who did they tell other than their best friend that he didn’t come home last night before they call the lawyer their hair stylist.
So we would have open house every month at his practice invite all the hair, stylists, buy them dinner, buy them martinis, have them come check out his practice, which got remodeled to look like a spa. They all got to check it out, hang out and then supplied them with marketing materials. And every single week he was getting, he ended up with like 23 different salons, sending him referrals, got to think outside the box. Another a great one for him was yoga studios.
07:41
Jason Lee: Wow. Can you gimme one more example of a story like that?
07:46
Seth Green: Sure. So we have one more relevant to your line of business. We have a financial advisor who said, one of the questions we ask is what do you hate about your business? Residential real estate agents will say they hate all open houses or show listing presentations. He said, I hate coming to work in a suit and tie. And I hate working in my office. And I said, okay, what would you rather be wearing? He goes, I’m a big hunter. I got 30 acres. I would rather be wearing camo. I said my comfy camo. I’m like, okay. And where would you rather meetings if it’s not in your office? He’s like, I would rather have them in my hunting lodge. I said, okay. So then why does every picture of you in your marketing, have you in a suit and tie in your office? He goes, I don’t know, that’s what I’m supposed to do. I said, so we redid all of his marketing to be aimed at affluent conservative hunters. In all his pictures, He’s now wearing camo. So he’s the guy that if you meet him, he will be wearing camo, cause that’s what you expect. And every single meeting takes place in his hunting blind on his property. So you don’t meet at the office and look at a laptop with portfolio analysis, you go climb up in a blind for four hours, drink whiskey, shoot animals, and have a conversation.
So I’m not saying I’m not a hunter, but if you want to remodel your business, don’t be constrained by the industry norms and real estate or whatever business it is. You can reinvent whatever you want. We had a residential real estate agent who said hate open houses. And I hate listing presentations. And I hate driving people around and I hate phone calls at night and on weekends he’s like, but that’s the whole business. And I said, well, let’s change your target market, who doesn’t care about open houses, listing presentations, nights, or weekends? Well investors. Okay. Let’s get out of state investors who are never going to see the house, right? Let’s sell them single family at residential investment property based on a cashflow and an ROI spreadsheet. You’ll never have to do a listing or an open house again. And he goes, oh my God, I never thought about that. And he’s never done a listing presentation since.
09:52
Jason Lee: That’s phenomenal. That is phenomenal. I think it’s really cool how you can kind of change someone’s career, Just with your kind of your strategies to pick a target market. I never really thought about that before until now.
10:05
Seth Green: Yeah. I mean, if you are willing to repel all of the people who don’t fit that criteria, right? That’s the risk you take. You’re going to repel the wrong people, but you are going to attract way more of the right people that you won’t never missed the wrong people. You know, my hunting guy does not want to attract left wing liberals who are environmentalists, who believe in saving all the animals. You know, I may believe that you may believe that, but this is not who he wants. So don’t market to those people and make your life a lot easier.
10:32
Jason Lee: So I want the question back at you, who is your ideal client?
10:37
Seth Green: We have a couple because as you know, I own more than one company. So for our marketing company, our ideal client is a professional practice. So financial services, real estate, dentist, doctor, lawyer, high ticket transaction value. You know, if you’re a pizza place making two bucks a slice of pizza, we’re not for you. You’re not going to get an ROI, but if you’ve got a high ticket transaction value and you are a white collar professional practice and you are willing to think outside the box and do something different and you are already successful and just want to get more successful, we can put your growth on rocket fuel.
11:09
Jason Lee: That’s amazing. Yeah, I think your strategies have been very outside the box, your team members definitely think different. They run my social media now and I’ve been having a great experience with Kyle and his guys. I think your strategies have definitely, you know, been much better than other people I’ve dealt with. So Kudos to you, Seth.
11:30
Seth Green: I have brainwashed them Well.
11:35
Jason Lee: So what are some struggles you’re seeing? What are some struggles that you see when people come to you? When they’re trying to kind of start their marketing budget and get their business going that way.
11:48
Seth Green: So it’s a great question. The first thing is they think they need a marketing budget and you should not have, and I’m going to throw out the marketing textbooks I read in college that say, it should be like a percentage of your sales or a percentage of your net, And that’s how fortune 500 does it. Well, unless you got bottomless pockets, don’t do that. So I don’t think you should have a marketing budget. I think you should know how much is my customer worth, my client?
What does it cost me to acquire them and then how many can I buy? Because if you gimme a dollar and for every dollar I give you back $5, do you need a budget to figure that? How many times do you want to make that trade, all day long Right? You’ll back up the, you’ll go borrow money to fund it. If it’s going to do that. So you don’t need a marketing budget if you can acquire customers at a profit. It’s a question of how many can you buy, How fast?
12:37
Jason Lee: Yeah, that’s amazing. That is definitely one that I dealt with. I thought I had to like set away like 10% of my income into marketing. And it’s not the right method to have. Cause what if that 10% is making you absolutely nothing. You’re just losing money.
12:51
Seth Green: Right. It should be marketing should be as risk free as possible. It shouldn’t be an expense. It should be an investment. Does every stock you buy pan out? No, of course not, nobody beats a thousand, but our goal is always, we’re not perfect. Our goal is always to fail fast and cheap. So let’s get the stuff that isn’t going to work out. Let’s get rid of it as fast as we can and find out it won’t work so we can take the one thing or the five thing that generate a profit and scale the heck out of those. I mean, we’ve got a client that is an e-commerce shoe company.
The only days I wear sneakers are in the office is when I’m shooting video for them. And we’re doing a contest right now for them. And we’ve got 620 different permutations of our advertising campaign online running. And we will find out very quickly what’s the top 80/20, what’s the top 120 ads that are working the best. Awesome, Let’s pause the other 400 and scale the heck out of the ones that are working profitably.
13:47
Jason Lee: It’s brilliant. It’s absolutely brilliant. I mean, I feel like marketing is simpler than most people make it to be the thing. It’s this crazy thing they got to figure out. But like you said, it comes down to behavioral psychology and math.
13:59
Seth Green: Yeah. You can overcomplicate it for sure. It’s really easy to do to get lost in the weeds. We do that sometimes I have to remind myself, all we need is one target market, one offer, and one way to reach them and let’s mine, all of the gold in that, before we go start digging someplace else. I’ve had that. I get shiny object syndrome too. I was on clubhouse for a while and then I said, it worked great more during the pandemic the first couple months when everybody was shut down and all of a sudden there were no conferences to go to.
There were no networking groups and people were starved for conversation. And then when things got back to normal, well normal-ish I’m in New York, you’re out west, neither of us are in normal land, but all of a sudden it’s oh, well I can go to that REIA association group or I can go to that conference now cause everybody’s vaccinated or whatever the numbers on something like clubhouse drop and maybe now tiktok in a 32nd video is what my 9 and 12 year old daughters are obsessed with.
14:58
Jason Lee: Yeah. Kind of switching gears a little bit. So for the real estate investor, that’s watching this show, Is there any examples of marketing strategies that have worked well for your clients that might want to get started?
15:11
Seth Green: Yeah, absolutely. So on the investment side, you got to do two things. You got to source deal flow, right? You got to find properties and they need you for that. And then they got to get the property sold and they also need you for that. But if you wanted to compliment Jason’s awesome efforts. So we have created marketing campaigns where, you know, we did, we got a list of absentee owners, like out-of-state own owners of property that had fallen behind or in disrepair or whatever, and sent them email, direct mail on social media saying, Hey, you want us to take this off your hands type of thing. So that generates deal flow. We’ve also built relationships and done podcasts with mortgage brokers, commercial real estate brokers, attorneys, accountants, financial advisors, other people who might see those people wanting to [15:55 inaudible] properties. And then on a flip side, we’ve done the same thing in terms of we’ve built online marketing funnels, selling houses, selling investment property, and then driven traffic of whether it’s an accredited investor or regular investor going to I sold my own house this way. I did online funnel. I ran Facebook and LinkedIn ads. It wasn’t an investment property.
We ran ads to families who were fans of our school district, but didn’t live in it, but were in 20 mile radius. And we said at the time it was our first house and we said, we got a great starter house for you. If you got two kids, two parents and you want to be in this school district, we’re having an open house. We’re selling it on one day. This is it. Your realtor can’t come another time. It’s this day, come make an offer on the spot or you’re done. And my real estate agent goes, oh my God, what the heck did you do? Because it was standing room only in our house. Like it was over full and we got bidding war in Buffalo back when our real estate market wasn’t hot and that wasn’t heard of. And we sold well over asking because I created artificial scarcity and said, we’re selling today only. And everybody showed up and bought.
17:06
Jason Lee: That’s fascinating. That is fascinating. How much the hell sell for? Just curious.
17:10
Seth Green: I’m trying to remember, it was eight years ago, I think and again, this is Buffalo. We’re not in California where things are crazy. I mean, I think we bought it for like 1 20, 130. I think we probably sold close to 200, I’d have to go look it up.
17:29
Jason Lee: That’s great. I’ve never heard of anything like that.
17:32
Seth Green: She’s like, how did you get all these people here? I don’t understand. We have like normally have like 10 people trickle in all day. I said, it’s called marketing.
17:42
Jason Lee: Yeah. I feel like there’s not enough people in real estate using marketing methods that should produce great results. I think there’s a lot of people who are still very traditional, especially in commercial real estate. In my field, No one’s really doing any marketing.
18:01
Seth Green: It’s all word of mouth, networking. The problem is your, the real estate world of agency representation is, you know, it’s oversight, right? Everybody knows somebody who’s a real estate agent. It’s funny. They said, I saw a stat the other day. It was like 88% of people would reuse the real estate agent They bought their house from to sell it. But only 17% actually do, 70% drop off. And it’s because that real estate agent sold them the house and said, bye, thanks for the commission. And hasn’t talked to them in eight years. I mean, even a simple monthly direct mail drip strategy to stay in front of them, which we produce would dramatically increase your referrals. Cause not only will you get them back for the next house sale, but they know other people selling houses.
I mean our own realtor bought us, She didn’t do, she wasn’t a client on my marketing firm, but she figured this out somewhere and she bought us a subscription to like the local high end magazine, the Buffalo spree. So every month it showed up with her name on it. So my wife has sent her easily, It’s been eight years since we moved, She sends her a couple referrals every single year. Cause she knows from and who are moving. And Carol stays in touch. My kids call her, my daughter calls her aunt Carol. Not because we’re that close, but because she saw her so much. Cause my wife looked at like 50 houses before she picked one and I said, God, Carol, I wish I didn’t, I’m glad I don’t have your job. And I just get to market that.
19:33
Jason Lee: Yeah, no, your job is pretty cool. So kind on the topic on organic reach marketing versus paid marketing do you use a mix of the two or do you believe in just one method?
19:46
Seth Green: We use both. However, the one caveat I will give you is organic. You can’t scale on purpose. So I can put a post out and get a couple hundred views or whatever it is, but I can’t control it. Whereas if I am doing an engagement ad on that post on Facebook, for example, I have direct control over how much I spend. How many people see it. I can turn it on or off on demand, which organic is cross your fingers and pray. You need both. But if I had to pick one, I’d pick the one I can spend money on. Cause I can control it.
20:17
Jason Lee: That’s huge. That is very big. Yeah, So but for organic marketing have you seen it like, so like I’m starting to use SEO a little bit now Google SEO, a little bit dabbling with it.
20:31
Seth Green: We should talk about that. 20:32
Speaker 1: Go ahead. What do you got to say?
20:34
Seth Green: I was going to say we should talk about that separately. I was going to say we have a service that’ll get that, Like you don’t pay until you hit page one.
20:42
Jason Lee: Oh really?
20:44
Seth Green: So that’s a whole separate conversation.
20:45
Jason Lee: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’ll talk about that later. So if you had to pick one method to market, this might be a bad question, but I’m just going to say it anyway. If you were a real estate investor agent and you had to choose one method to start marketing right now, what would it be?
21:01
Seth Green: Who’s my target market. And then I can answer that question. 21:04
Jason Lee: Okay. Your target market is a 75 year old and above individual who owns maybe one or two properties locally [21:12 inaudible].
21:13
Seth Green: And am I getting them to sell their properties or am I trying to get them to buy more?
21:19
Jason Lee: You’re trying to get them to sell. 21:20
Seth Green: Direct mail. 21:20
Jason Lee: Direct mail.
21:23
Seth Green: You said they’re older. They still read their mail more than anything else. They’re not on Tik Tok or clubhouse, right? They’re only on Facebook to watch their grandkids If, why would I want to do a 32nd Facebook video when I could send them a 15 page sales letter and get like half an hour of their time. If you were selling door to door, vacuum cleaners and you knocked on the door and the person who answers the door says, come on in, tell me you all about it. I’d love to hear about your vacuum. Would you say no, I only want to stand here at the door for 30 seconds or would you say I will come in and tell you about this damn vacuum cleaner until you buy it or kick me out. You’re an awesome salesman. You would take as much time as they would give you. Cause you know, the more time you get, the more likely it is that you’re going to get a sale.
22:08
Jason Lee: Can’t argue with that. 22:09
Seth Green: There you go.
22:11
Jason Lee: So you’ve been doing this for 14 years. How have you seen the business of marketing change in the last decade and a half since you’ve been doing it?
22:21
Seth Green: So, other than the fact that there are a million more media platforms you can use to advertise on that’s the biggest one. I will say the consumer attention span has shrunk, like to what is it now we’re supposed to be nine second goldfish or whatever the deal is. So I think you cannot actually be too entertaining, right? The biggest marketing center in my opinion is being boring. I can get someone to watch a video for three hours if I’m entertaining enough, if I’m interesting enough.
So I think number one, the media platform fracturing and there being so many more choices now is the biggest change. I think the second biggest change is the fact that anybody calls themselves a marketer now, right? There’s, I met kids who were 22 years old and in their parents’ basement, but they took a course online or watched some YouTube video for $47 and get business cards and think they own a marketing agency. So it’s gotten a lot more competitive, which is awesome for us cause it makes us stand out more, right? I always say competition is a good thing. I don’t want to be the pioneer who got arrows in his back. I want to be digging in a gold mine where there’s a ton of gold and we know it cause other people are trying to dig too. I will dig better and stand out more.
23:34
Jason Lee: Well said. Definitely well said. So my final question for you, Seth before we go, if people want to learn more about you and want to get in touch you and potentially utilize your services, how can they reach out to you?
23:50
Seth Green: Yep. Best ways. Our website, www.marketdominationllc.com. We have a special offer there, after you watch the trailer, video, there’s a form next to it. If you fill that out, we will get you a thanks to Jason, We’ll get you a 30 minute marketing consultation, we call it a fixed my marketing consultation. I guarantee we can solve any marketing challenge you’ve gotten less than 30 minutes and we normally charge $497 for that. But if you tell us Jason sent you, it will be free.
24:15
Jason Lee: Cool. Well that is awesome. I appreciate you doing that for our listeners. And thanks for coming on Seth. That was a great interview and thanks for your time.
24:22
Seth Green: Thanks so much for having me. 24:24
Jason Lee: Of course. Talk to you soon.
End of Transcript