PPC Vs. Facebook Ads, Vs,. SEO

if you've been following the show, or following our blog, or noticing some of the products we built, not too long ago, we launched a product called listing advocate. The reason why we launched this product was because everybody in the world wants a cash offer today and we just created a solution for you to compete back against big tech assholes like Zillow, and all the above.

So what we want to do is bring on a guest today, who's an expert, and we're going to talk about the pros and cons of different digital marketing. Brandon Bateman has been in the game of generating motivated seller leads for almost four years now. He's spent over 10,000 hours just generating motivated seller leads and today he is going to give us his expert insight.

Three Things You’ll Learn in This EpisodeHow you can crack seller lead generation in your businessDifferences between Facebook, pay per click, and SEO on websiteWhat works when it comes to advertising

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Transcript:

So how do you attract new business, you constantly don't have to chase it. Hi, I'm Mike way ambassador, real estate marketing. And this podcast is all about building a strong personal brand people have come to know, like trust and most importantly, refer. But remember, it is not their job to remember what you do for a living. It's your job to remind them. Let's get started

What's up ladies and gentlemen, welcome another episode of the real estate marketing dude, podcast what we're going to be doing today, folks since December what we're talking about all month long shit we need to be getting into for the following year. And if you've been following the show, or following our blog, or noticing some of the products we built, not too long ago, we launched a product called listing advocate. The reason why we launched this product was because a lot of real estate agents. Everybody in the world wants a cash offer today, you have ibuyers infiltrating every single offer. And we just created a solution for you to compete back against big tech assholes like Zillow, and all the above. And amongst that, one of the hottest tickets and one of the things if you can crack, if you can crack seller, lead generation in your business is very advantageous because that's what everybody's trying to do. So what we want to do is bring on a guest today, who's an expert, and we're going to talk about the pros and cons of different digital marketing. We're going to talk about Facebook, we're gonna talk about pay per click, and then we're gonna talk about SEO on website, we're gonna disguise or call it, divide the differences between all of them, so that you can get an idea you know, off of which is right for you. Once everything goes digital things change. The truth is that 99% of you don't have the skill set to even know what the fuck we're talking about. That's why guys like this exists, because he does a lot of this stuff for you. So we're gonna get into it and show you exactly what he's doing.

And see how this rolls. Brandon. Say hello to our guests. This is Brandon Bateman, ladies and gentlemen. Yeah, thank you for the introduction, Mike. Happy to be here. Why don't you tell everybody a little bit about who you are, where you're from, what you do. And then I got a bunch of questions for you. Yep, let's do it. So my name is Brandon Bateman. I live in Utah, good old coastal Salt Lake City. Anybody knows that crazy market. I have been basically in the game of generating motivated seller leads for almost four years now. A little bit less seriously at first and a little bit more seriously, in the past few years or so. And I am proud slash embarrassed to admit that I've spent over 10,000 hours just motive generating motivated seller lead myself here that makes me an expert, but it also doesn't reflect highly on my work life balance. So that's, let me just ask you a question. So he's gonna share within the next 30 minutes what he's learned in 10,000 hours, but how much of that 10,000 hours of trial and error cost you?

Oh, man, I mean, like my life. And then of course, like we've spent, gosh, our company like through through the consulting projects, and companies are working with spending their budgets, like literally over $100 million in advertising spend. So folks, the students spent over $100 million in digital ads, pay attention, take notes, because we're going to sort of figure out, when you get to that level, you actually really do see what works, what it's very hard to determine what works when you're not spending a lot of money on ads, especially nowadays. So what we're going to do is dig into that. So what would you like to start with, cuz I want to hit all three of these. And I want to dumb all of this stuff down. I'd like to start with pay per click if you're cool with that. Yeah, of course. Let's talk about it. Better. Yeah. What did you start with?

What did I start with? What was your What was your first and what do you think is actually it was putting this to you? What do you think is the easiest channel to start with? If you're starting in the motivated seller? If you had to pick between SEO Facebook ads, or pay per click your top three here what you're an expert in? Which one would you choose?

You know, it's gonna depend a little bit on the individual situation, I think a blanket statement that would apply to the most people would be Facebook ads as a place to start. So to give you a little bit of context on that maybe we just dipped super late because I'm sure there's into all three of them because I'm sure there's some people here that don't even understand what these things are. Right? So that's uh, at least give like a high level overview.

The Facebook ads is basically the the paid advertising inside of Facebook. It's where you're actually paying to have your ads show up as sponsored posts on someone's newsfeed. So if you scroll through Facebook or Instagram, you see these random posts pop up with these call to actions. That's basically that's basically what Facebook ads are. And the for real estate. And say for a lot of people, they should start with Facebook ads if they have a small budget. And the reason being a small budget stretches the far this with Facebook ads.

And Facebook is a channel that that tends to get you out

A lot of leads for the money that you spend on it in comparison to the other channels. It tends to get you those leads relatively quickly in comparison to say SEO that just takes a really long time, pay per click will be quick too. But like I said, less leads. Facebook also produces a lower quality lead. But the magic of Facebook ads is you'll get some junk leads. But there's good ones in there. And those good ones tend to be your largest deals in your business, we see it over and over again, our clients, our largest deals come from Facebook ads. So if you have a small budget, Facebook ads is great. The problem is if your budgets bigger, you can end up pushing Facebook ads into an area where you're just getting really diminishing returns with it. And that's where some of these other channels are better. And also from the lead quality standpoint. Because maybe Facebook ads have a little bit of a better ROI than PPC with a small budget. A lot of times with larger budget, PPC might have a better ROI. And in any circumstance, PPC produces a much better quality lead, which means even though your ROI and your money's a little bit lower, sometimes you spend a lot less time chasing down bad conversations. That is the brilliant thing about pay per click and SEO. Just so you guys understand why.

We're better. Yeah. Why don't you tell them why that is? You're reaching people that based versus not intent based looky loos. Exactly, yeah, that's what it is everything else that you do. It's all people based, you're looking for people based on their situations, and you're trying to target them, there is no channel that you have in your business right now, most likely, that's intent based, meaning you're advertising to people based on the fact that they have intent to sell their house, which is just a completely changes the game, because now this is like if you could put all marketing channels on a scale from outbound to inbound, you'd have like on the far outbound side, like your text, cold call, and the middle you have like maybe direct mail, Facebook ads, stuff like that. TV, maybe like some of these channels where you like, it is still inbound, because the person is coming to you, but you went to them first still. And then you go far to the other side, you reduce inbound channels, 100% inbound, like pay per click and SEO. And it's just a whole different kind of lead that goes faster. And they tend to be more motivated. However, the this is where people get screwed up on PPC though, it's expensive, and highly competitive. So you have to be ready. Like obviously, if these people are just searching on Google and looking for ways to sell their house, and they're the most motivated leads, which they tend to be

other people want those to you're not the only person who had that idea? Well, here's what a lot of times, you'll pay more. So you're saying you're gonna pay more on PPC bringing the higher quality lead Facebook and get a bunch of leads, it's gonna feel good, it might stroke your ego a little bit, however, just be prepared to work for but in exchange for spending less money. So make sense.

What do you who and how do you target on Facebook nowadays? When you're targeting these people? And are you writing in being an investor? Are you writing in special ad category issues? With all of that? So let's do one first.

Yeah, the basically who we're targeting, it comes down to whoever we believe to be most likely to be a motivated seller. And I know that's like, really like fluffy. But but when I answer your second question, I understand why that's so fluffy. And what you're kind of hinting at here is, I don't even know when the change has happened. It's probably a year and a half ago, there was introduced to Facebook, basically, Facebook got sued. And someone said the fact that for a housing ad, you're showing it to this person who's older, but not this person who's younger, or this person who's a male, but not the female, or the person is a good one. But as it go to all that kind of stuff. They said That's discrimination. And I think anybody listening this podcast knows that that's the joke. But that's not to be PC nowadays.

And in Facebook has to play by the rules, because they've gotten in a lot of trouble not doing that before. So if anybody knows to take this stuff seriously, they do. So we have these restrictions, and a lot of people basically mark that time is the time that Facebook ads stopped working for real estate investors, because you no longer can target your target person.

Here's the thing about what we do. The strategies that we use retargeting on Facebook, we used before that change, and after that change, it didn't affect anything that we were doing. We did all kinds of hyper targeting based on all these different factors on Facebook, if I can matter is the strategies that we used today, even back then worked better than the strategies that most people were using at that time. And when that change happened, it didn't affect us one bit because we weren't doing that stuff. And it might sound a little bit crazy, because I guess I'll just say it. Our number one audience that we target on Facebook ads, from a performance standpoint is a 100% broad audience restricted only by the boundaries of where you want to get leads.

The the caveat to that is we don't do targeting through targeting, we do targeting through optimization. So the way that Facebook works Facebook's a very intelligent platform with some very advanced machine learning built into it. The way that it would work business, say, you know, we equate marketing campaigns to phishing. And you say that, like you're doing a direct mail campaign and to the entire ocean, what would happen is you would make a cast somewhere, you know, drive the boat down 10 feet, make another cast do that for the entire ocean, that's what a direct mail campaign a direct mail campaign to the ocean would be, when you might choose to, you know, target the areas with reliefs because you know, that there's more fish there and whatnot. Right? The The difference is, and this scenario, Facebook doesn't just cast and then go 10 feet and cast again, Facebook kind of looks at the lay of the land that uses data that you feed it to kind of determine where do we think these fish would kind of hang out. If you're smart with your Facebook ads, you can kind of put the kind of bait out there that only the right kind of fish would actually bite. And that will attract the right kind of fish. And Facebook starts to learn they when I cast neoreef, I tend to get more bites than when I cast other places. And it starts to double down. So what happens is you target the ocean, but you only fish the leaf. And that's exactly how it works on Facebook ads. So but to do that, you need to know how to put the right bait out there. And you need to make sure that you're giving quality feedback on what actually is a fish to Facebook. That's where 90% of people get it wrong. So you're saying like on on the actual targeting, you're just targeting anyone and everyone, but it's the copy and the imagery that you're using Facebook's going out there and finding them for you.

Yes, it's about the it's about the copy of the imagery. It's also about the ad experience after that point.

And it's about the feedback that you give to the Facebook pixel to Facebook, telling it that you had a good lead. So to give you some examples of where people go wrong with this,

one scenario would be just telling Facebook that you want to get a lot of people that you reach with your ads, you know, you're gonna get, you're gonna take a lot of casts in a place that nobody wants to take a cast in the middle of the ocean with Iran bait. one's ever gonna bite that. But basically, you're going to look in Facebook, and you're like, Wow, 200,000 people. That's awesome, right? Right. But they'll give you what you asked for, you could do the same thing with link clicks, you will be amazed at how many clicks you get to your website, and how few of them actually turn into any type of revenue for you. You can even do with leads, a lot of people are using Lead forms and Facebook. And what happens is you have this form that when someone clicks on your ad, it just pops up, it auto fills with the information and click submit, it's extremely easy to do. So it's a low friction process. And it degrades your lead quality and tends to get you the wrong kinds of leads. And then you're still giving a feedback signal back to Facebook, that's not quality. The way that we like to do it is through a dedicated landing page on a website that qualifies the lead appropriately. And only when that happens, do we actually give the feedback to Facebook that it was a lead? So then we're using quality information to do that. And then it's also about the ad, like I see all kinds of people because because here's what marketers do. Marketers put out there and ads, things like get the most leads where a B testing things all the time, right? You know what happens if you do that in this in this industry, you're going to end up with everything that's flashy, and aggressive, and tends to say things like will pay more than other investors and stuff like that. And what you end up doing is attracting the wrong kind of seller, because you're you're looking for a very specific kind of seller, that's not most sellers. If you have

that makes I want you I want to repeat that really quick. So that was a big nugget for you guys. He's saying like, if I'm if I'm like, hey, we'll buy it for less, or we'll get you more money, right, you're targeting the person that wants the highest and best, which isn't quite the best option for real estate investor trying to find a rehabber flip, right? Yeah. Or even if you make it like all about the offer, for example. And then you complain when you get these leads that are calling you and saying, Hey, will you give me for your house for my house? Like I don't want that? Would you advertise for you said, everything's about, you know, let's just take another hypothetical. So let's say we'll just use my market day I'm in San Diego, I want to target motivated seller leads. So I'm guessing the ad is somewhere I have a cash offer something along that lines like that right instant offer, or we'll get to that next but whatever the ad is, but I'm going to target I live in North County. So I'm going to target all the areas that I want to work in. And that's other than that, that's the only targeting I'm using.

In reality, we use multiple forms of targeting. We're always testing at least three audiences at any given time. But the highest performer that we have, on average across markets is that broad audience and it really is and they find them because I've heard that quite a bit.

I've heard that with a couple of the last few guests are like dude, just let Facebook do its thing, bro. But people have said that let them do its thing. How long does it take for them to do its thing

It's astonishingly quick, actually, I'm surprised, and this is a

thing is you have to monitor its thing.

So to give you a little bit of a picture of machine learning, a lot of people assume that if you run the same campaign twice, that you're going to get the same result. It's not true. Because the way that the machine learning based targeting works is you could say you're using the same algorithm. But the thing is, the first data points given to the algorithm determine which way it's going to go. And from there, it's a whole different story. So just imagine, you know, your, your algorithms, just trying to walk a straight line, the way that machine learning works, if it starts to veer left, it's going to spiral left. If it starts to veer, right, it's going to spiral, right, the fact that it turns left or right at the beginning is completely random, you started out going straight, it could just be like the first people you reach just happened to be of a certain type. So what we see is like, I can get in ruts. So it tends to be it tends to be pretty effective out of the gate. But you have to understand the issues that you can run into, like we commonly run into issues where suddenly, despite the ads being incredibly clear, the landing page be incredibly clear, we start getting a bunch of buyer leads and renter leads and stuff like that it happens. And we've had clients get to this point, we get like 80% of your leads are like buyers and renters. And you look at the ads, like I have no idea why some of the things that are looking at this, but it's the algorithm found that kind of person that misunderstands it and that way, and it started getting that feedback, and then it starts spiraling that direction. And what we do is we pick it up, put it right back in the middle, and we get it going straight again and hope for the best that time. And stuff like that happens all the time. So you have to do that.

Would you have to switch up your ad copy in that? No, you literally would say my ad cuz I've seen that on so my answer guys, I'll target some of you guys. And I'll be like, Hey, I'm running this ad and I run the same ad. But I'll get two totally different results.

You can do it because the algorithm learns differently each time. So that's where a lot of people would say like, I'm not 100% on the side of like, let Facebook completely do its thing always. Because if your feedback, signal breaks, then suddenly your Facebook ad campaigns broken. Right? If it doesn't get what you're looking for, that's the problem you have with lead generation, if you're an E commerce company, they don't have to deal with these issues. Because a purchase is a purchase, Who cares who that is. But not all leads are created equal. So you have to you have to be really careful about that. But so it's about understanding those things. And like what's just basically quality being what it is and what's you know, an actual problem that shows the algorithms and misunderstanding something. And as long as you do that letting Facebook do its thing is really powerful, you just have to understand that the feedback you're giving, it isn't like closing deals often

monitor it, you give it a week to start. You can we like our standard processes, we meet with our clients once a month. And we kind of review all those things and determine if we need to change course, there's other little things like you know, tweaking how much money is going to each audience in the creative and stuff like that, that just happens like throughout the time period. As a business owner, I think you need to be in it once a month. And burn from lead quality standpoint, it purely depends on your budget, but most of our clients don't have a large enough budget that they really even have a big enough sample size to measure lead quality on a weekly basis. Or else you're just going to end up making lots of like really emotional, non statistically significant, non data driven type decisions. So usually a month like gives you enough data, although we'll give our clients guidelines like if more than x number of X number of leads is of this category, let us know. And you know, we make an adjustment accordingly.

What are your opinion on look alikes? Yay or Nay? Are they good? Yeah, mixed reviews on the show. Some people said they used to be good. Now they're not good.

What is your opinion?

They they have come down from their peak look alikes were amazing before iOS 14, they're not quite as effective since then. They're still good. In this particular industry, you can even use look alikes, technically, you have what's called a special ad audience, which is really the same thing. It just doesn't include, like you picture this model, this machine learning model has these 1000s of different features that it uses as predictors. And among those are just not age, gender, zip code, that kind of stuff, right? So I just remove those. They don't predict based on those. But the those audiences have been, I can tell you, it's a in the industry in general on Facebook, they're good. If we're talking just real estate, they've been hit or miss for us. We have some time to do well with it. On average, our broad audiences are performing better than our special ads audiences. But sometimes they work really well. If you're going to do one, I think it's great to do one that's on a previous lead list. Those are by far our most effective. So you take like for example going to your CRM, every hot lead you ever had upload that make a special as audience based on that. Those tend to be pretty effective

and nice people. Sometimes people like to like copy and paste their strategies from other marketing channels.

Like mail or cold call into digital, and try to make like those look alikes, or those custom audiences based on their cold call lists and stuff like that. That has been for the most part very unsuccessful for us. We've seen, we've seen a break here or there with like a special ads audience based on that list. Custom Audiences based on those lists have never in like 25 attempts ever produced anything. And that's

a custom audiences. You're just saying no?

Pretty much. Yeah, Facebook needs room to do its thing. When you give it an audience you restrict back. Is that because of the special ads? Category? I don't think so. Because even before then we didn't have great success with it. It's, it's really about audience size, there isn't. Here, a lot of companies that are like maybe even your company, companies advertising nationally use that stuff a lot more, because you could use a 1% look alike. And that's going to be 2 million people. And that's good. But if you constructed that to just a small market, then you're just dealing with a really small audience sizes, and Facebook doesn't work well with a small audience size. It's like some big expense. And you'd like to see what the beginning of a campaign for coal but million, 2 million you want to see that I

I mean, that's great. Not every market makes that possible.

Population 500,000 markets where it's literally impossible to have a million or 2 million. So really, like it's a factor of what you can do in your market. We definitely like to go live, like our clients that go wider, geographically, they get more leads for the money and that leads tend to be higher quality. Narrow can be okay. But it's uh, yeah, in general, I'd say. Like, for your average, like, wholesaler, I'd say if you have a buyer, if you're anywhere your buyers run your ads, because you want to get as wide as you can. You don't want to get a property under contract and not be able to do anything with it. But you want to go as wide as you can. If you're a flipper, like anywhere that you know, you can comfortably do your business well. Sometimes we have flippers that will be more narrow than our wholesalers are in targeting but in maybe they pay like a 30% higher cost per deal because of it. But they have all the operational efficiencies that more than make up for that because cost per deal is not the biggest problem you know.

So you have to kind of consider it with your with your business but we do have clients doing Facebook ads successfully and markets as small as 200,000 population.

We love to see more than half a million

interesting.

And then I imagine when you're you have retargeting ads you're hitting as well on these people. How many retargeting ads are you going deep and then how important is that so everybody understands?

Yeah, retargeting I think is like far and away the best money you'll spend on Facebook ads. Facebook is the most robust retargeting platform that has ever been created. It's amazing. And basically that the concept if someone's not familiar with that, is if someone visits your website, you can basically flag them and then reach them later. So think of retargeting like follow up that you can do even if someone didn't fill out the form, because all the time you'll have people coming in through pay per click, and you pay $50 for this click to get someone to your website, and then they don't fill out the form. And then you can reach them for like a penny or two each time on Facebook to follow up with them. And it's like no brainer money spent. Where people go wrong with retargeting is assuming that it's going to change their business from a volume standpoint. It's a it's a really realistically for companies in real estate. It's a low volume play. You don't get tons of website traffic, or clients from retargeting get a handful of leads a month at PAX usually, it depends on your website traffic, because that's the thing. You can't just scale retargeting so you have to think of it like something that amplifies the rest of your marketing, not something where you see that you get a good return, you're going to 10 exit, because you have to text everything the next year retargeting

but it's all for free for dollar. It's great.

There's so many golden nuggets in this show. If you guys are paying attention. There's just a ton I'm taking notes as we go. And we haven't gotten the PPC yet. So one more question cuz I know this is gonna ask me next video versus image on ad number one.

When you say on ad number one, what do you mean on your cold audience ad? Or in Oh, God, like what are you seeing performing? But we get that question all the time. I my opinion, but I'd love to hear yours. Yeah, I have her. I apologize that this is going to be a more complex answer than you're probably looking for.

The answer is both. And the reason is, there's people on Facebook ads that are more likely to respond to certain ads and others where a lot of people go wrong with Facebook ads and when it comes to like a B testing

is misunderstanding the difference between predictive optimization versus an inferential form of testing which is more like statistics that everybody knows and learns about. So with Facebook ads the most powerful

way to do this kind of stuff isn't just I run ad a and I run ad B and I observed which one works better. It's to actually like when someone's going to be reached by an ad predict for that individual person, which ad is more likely to influence them. And you will find that by having images and videos, you'll get better results than by having images alone or videos. Although, that said, on average videos are performing better for us. I think they, they act, we've tracked to videos, an increase in lead quality and in the quantity because there's something amazing that especially if you're like us, where we've seen, like some brilliant results with this is if you can have like the person who's going to knock on someone's door later, be the same person who's in the video ad. Yeah, because a couple of things happened. Like you build that consistency, you build that trust that credibility, and you qualify, like a lot of people forget that you like qualify as part of your ads, if someone is just going to be because as tough as it is, that this is the case it is the case that when you see someone you generate your own bias about that person immediately. If you reach someone with the ad that sees your acquisitions person and thinks poorly of them because of how they look or they don't naturally trust them, whatever the case is, they're not going to fill out the form. Yeah, you can naturally attract the kind of people that you're going to have success with. So what happens in our business like the video doesn't create the lead you guys the video creates the humanization

and it gets people to like see you're like a living breathing being almost always comes our company and say, Hey, we want to get videos we want to generate leads. Like if you start with the mindset you're gonna generate leads off a video you already shot yourself in the foot. It's more like you need to generate attention with the videos that we're creating. And use it as a way to get people not to think you're such a frickin blood sucking investor a real estate agents with a bunch of commission breath, spitting out fire out of your mouth. That's what the average consumer feels about us. Like, especially if you're a distressed if you're breaking into bankruptcy or divorce or something, and you just get this guy wants to buy your house. Like let's be honest, the very first impression I have is this motherfucker wants to take advantage of my misfortune. Yeah, I haven't got there. Right and

yeah, and when you get to know that person, you you start feeling less like that. Right? Like that's, that's what you feel. Yeah, the video helps that. Yeah, so there's a lot of value to video for sure. I think. I think brown belt I guess is the summary. I wouldn't just run with you and how many ads you have going. Last question. I got them all when you're running obviously you have your your wide ad so like when he's saying you cast in that guy's he's got ad number one. It's probably going to like couple million people or a large audience and the people who engage or visit site that's who he retargets list. So how many retargeting ads you have a retargeting funnel, so to say already just one ad is just like a one two punch. I think with retargeting variety and creative is important. Because when retargeting more so than any other place in the funnel, you're likely to get fatigue. Yep, because if you're doing retargeting, right, your frequency, which is the average number of times that each person sees the ad should be usually we're targeting something like three or four per month. Right? So with that, if you're showing the same ad over and over again, you kind of become a crazy advertiser, just assuming that you showed on that same ad for a 16th time This time, it's gonna make a difference. Yes, it's probably not. So I think I think retargeting having a good amount of variety is important. A lot of people will always think about it from the standpoint of like, I gotta change out my retargeting ads every two weeks or something. I don't think of it that way. I think of it as like, I need to have like 10 ads in there. You know, cycling through because more evergreen.

One adds a ton. Yeah, and then what? What you do after that, like, I think videos are great and retargeting. I'd love to use testimonial videos, because you have to think like if someone came to my website, but they didn't fill out the form, but they came there with intent to sell their house, what would be the reason that they didn't fill out the form. The only reason would be that they don't believe that we're credible, they don't believe that they can trust us. Whatever the case is, so you just kind of have to like you know, feel those things out. And I think your videos targeted around those those things like testimonial videos, review videos, that kind of stuff can be excellent. Even if like someone already filled out the form right? Maybe that video could make your acquisitions appointment later do even better. That's part of the thing with retargeting like, it's hard to measure all the impact that it has. But our average client spends less than 50 bucks a month on it. So it's like it's a no brainer for what you get.

You know that it's a bit it's producing something good. It's just not a huge volume driver. Got it? But I'm sure the quality though is there and silent about getting as many Alright dude, this was like great any I think you've frickin nailed Facebook. Let's go on to PPC. I noticed with PPC with Facebook but um alright, let's switch gears guys. So like basically let me put this in real estate layman terms. Facebook people aren't like checking out to see what the hell you ate for breakfast. But when we go to PPC

We're switching the game like people are searching you out.

So one of the questions we get all the time is Hey, Mike, I'm going to SEO my website. And I'm always like, dude, do you even know what SEO means? There's a lot of work there. Like if you just SEO one blog post doesn't mean you're going to become the top of the search rankings for the rest of the world. Right and become the number one agent people are under that impression. SEO is a very long term game

of what pops up natural when people are searching, but PPC is what pops up paid. So can you walk us through

PPC? Yeah.

Yeah, so really PPC, called PPC stands for pay per click. The reason is, you basically pay Google to be at the top when someone clicks, that's when they charge you. So it's, it's pretty simple in that sense. So the targeting on PPC is keywords. What are basically what are people searching? Yep. And then what you do is you write ads that are hopefully going to attract those people. And you create landing pages that are likely to turn those people once they click into leads. And that's the whole game of PPC, biggest mistakes I see people making with PPC, it's easy to just like sending PPC traffic to the homepage of your website or something. And you get a horrible conversion rate with it, I see so many people just sending traffic to their main page or website. And the problem with that is there's distractions, PPC is a really high cost, click and you want to contain it the best you can. So we like to use single action landing pages, where the only option is that someone fills out the form where they leave, and there's not really the there's not really a second option, you're going to convert, you're gonna be gone. And you get a better conversion rate doing that, you get more of those people to give you the information. And then the other thing about PPC where people go wrong, is bidding irrationally happens all the time. And this just happens in a whole bunch of ways. Because when they say pay per click, it's not like Google tells you what it costs for that click, what happens is you bid what you're willing to pay for that click, and you hopefully get clicks at that price. And there's a whole bunch of stuff that happens there. Because the price of anything is just determined based on the competition and what you're willing to pay. Those advertisers that are number one and PPC, they pay a lot more for each individual click, then the guy who's at the bottom of the page that steals a click occasionally doesn't get that much volume, but pays really low for that. So you have to understand there's like that, that diminishing return and everything. But we have clients telling us like I just want to be number one on it. Yeah, that's irrational, right? Because it has nothing to do with the value of those clicks. Sometimes the guy number one's losing money, he might do the most deals, but he's got a crazy high cost per deal. Sometimes not sometimes that's a good place to be. It depends on where the prices are. I kind of think could pay per click, almost like Wholesaling Houses. I could go into a market. And I could say I want to wholesale. And I could think well, what do I want to do, I want to make lots of money by selling the houses for top dollar. Therefore, I want to find the most expensive houses in my market that I think will sell for the most. And I'm just gonna pay really high for them. And that would be an absolutely horrible wholesale strategy. But that's exactly what people do with pay per click, they look at keywords, they think, what are those keywords that are the best keywords, and then I want to be at the top for those and a drag to the top and the price up. Realistically, what you should do in your wholesale is you don't look for houses that are high value, you look for houses that are undervalued. So it's not about what the price is, it's about what the price is compared to what it's worth. Where does the market believe? So what we do is we look in for each individual click, we're looking at what is that click worth? What do we think that's actually going to turn into in revenue. And we're bidding according to that. And sometimes the whole market is just way too high, you're gonna see a good keyword, you don't even show up, because everybody else is just paying ridiculous prices for it. They're all busy. And sometimes everybody else doesn't think it's that great. But our data shows that that's actually a really high quality click. But the whole deal is trying to like it's not about the best clicks. I don't mind paying $10 for clicks that are worth $100 Rather than paying $50 for clicks that are worth $120 What do seller leads? What are seller leads selling for right now.

Right now on on pay per click our average across the whole United States is about $260 across all the markets we're in. It could tell you San Diego would not be that. Yeah.

Probably, probably honestly, here's what I was. The person I want to mention this is because like people always like oh want to get a lead gen game lead gen game like you're gonna have to invest.

And when people are like, like especially in the real estate industry, they don't realize $260 per lead.

Well, when you're buying an opt in, you're not buying a leader buying someone who has requested a cash offer

on their property, so you're buying almost an appointment or conversation. And yeah, if you guys you guys plan on spending some dough, like it's not going to be cheap, but lead generation number is as it there's a reason why Zappos and, and Bed Bath and Beyond like put so much money into marketing their past customers is because that drives more sales and acquiring new ones we talk about this every week on the show you guys. There's branding and there's there's marketing, there's advertising, they're not the same, but they sort of work together. We're talking about today's advertiser go right at that lead generation. And yes, it works. But you got to have guys like this or you got to have like the right, you got another eight ads, right copy and all that stuff before you dive into it. I've seen so many people lose a lot of money pressing like a boost button. Right? Yeah, I mean it and it just like, you don't want to do that, like Facebook from when I used to be really heavy into Facebook six years ago. And then I stopped it for about four years because I didn't have anything to really sell is building my business.

And I didn't mean to build on so when I came back to it, it was night and day different dude. Night and day different. Six years. Yeah, that's that's about it. Yeah, and phases, totally reinvented itself. So like what worked back then doesn't work today. And vice versa. This stuff's always changing. You just have to know how to change with it. PPC, and when you guys log on to the backend of like Google ad platform, you know, everything you say in here, I'll verify because I could tell you that my YouTube ads and my PPC ads are more expensive, but they're way more quality. Like, I'll spend double or triple the amount of money on those platforms. But I get people they're like, Hey, Mike, what's up? Like we get, we'll get clients directly from it. And we do notice the intent based on our end, and we're not selling houses, we're selling video services, right. So um, anything else you want to add on PPC?

No, really, is really just that negative copy magic. The simpler the better, like guarantee, like, walk me through some headlines that people try to get over create this stuff sometimes. And sometimes just the simplest thing is like the best, isn't it? Yeah, I guess I can tell you kind of where people go wrong. People assume that creative is better than clear. And creative is never better than clear. When you're searching for something on Google, you're scanning on the page, that thing that most closely matches what you're looking for. Yeah, you don't care if they have like a pond in their headline or something. And that can actually probably confuse you and deter you. Because you're going to give about two seconds of effort to each one of the ads, if that. So the key point there is it has to be stupid, clear how relevant what you're saying is to what the person searching for. We use that we do that a lot by putting like the exact phrase in the ad because even if you say the same thing with different words, it's harder for someone to make that connection. And then you want to do the same on your landing page. Because because you want people to feel like exactly what they find on your landing page is exactly what they searched. Other like little little tricks. We've done a lot of taking someone's precise location on on Google and displaying that to them in their ad. Because let's just say you search and like I live in Lehi in Utah, right, we're suburb sort of Salt Lake City. Most markets have a lot of that, right? You have salt lake city nearby the other areas. Let's just say I search right here. And I search for like how to sell a house fast.

And one of the ad says how to sell your house fast in Utah. The other one says how to sell a house fast and in Salt Lake City. And then the next one says how to sell your house fast and Lehigh. Which one of those am I going to click all things equal? Probably the one talking about Lehigh, because that's really relevant to where I live. So that's that's another trick that we're using help help improve a lot from a copy standpoint is we will dynamically insert whatever town even if the town of 200 people, whatever town someone's in, we will insert that into the headline of the ad when someone searches from that precise location. Have you guys done any YouTube ads?

YouTube? Yes, we have. However, for motivated sellers, it hasn't been our best channel lead cost has been closer to PPC lead quality closer to Facebook. So it has, it has not been our most successful channel. Maybe we just haven't cracked the code. My hypothesis is I don't think a lot of the demo target demographic is spending a lot of time on YouTube. And like the target ability, there's just as isn't working as well as like Facebook, which sort of has a similar way of doing it. But just I think targeting is a little bit better.

And YouTube's a little bit tougher as a direct response platform just because the call to actions aren't quite as obvious. You probably like you think there are other companies you know about YouTube ads, you probably had a lot of awareness. Not quite as many that you've actually like, clicked through the YouTube ad to do business with. I think YouTube really shines is an awareness booking platform moreso than like a direct response lead gen platform. Nothing it doesn't work. It does work. It just in our experience has been more and more expensive. Yeah, yes. I concur.

Without 100% And I'm not spending crazy amounts and I'm not like super duper marketer, digital wise, I'm just I could be all those things are saying our checkout 100% Um, let's get into SEO really quick and wrap it up.

SEO What the hell does it mean Search Engine Optimization? Guys? There you go do it, how do you do it? You create a shitload of content. And you have to be creating content. And then you have to know how to keyword the content, then you need to know how to structure it. You need to know how to blog, you need to add meta tags, images, link backs, like there's a science to this. Can you walk us through that? Yeah, SEO is an interesting thing. And just to kind of like summarize what it means Search Engine Optimization. Google exists for the purpose of providing the most relevant results to someone when they search. And there are tons and tons and tons of websites, at least 10,000 that talk about selling a house for cash, or fast or we buy houses or whatever the case is? How do you convince Google that your website is more relevant for someone search than one of those other websites? That's basically the artists search engine optimization. So you need to think about what does Google want Google wants to put websites goes to the top that are the ones that provide relevant responses. And the ones that they think are, are actually like companies that they can trust. Because if people always have a bad experience with companies that they find on Google, they stopped looking on Google for companies. So it's all about being relevant and authoritative. being relevant is the content game that you just talked about. It's it's about like, like, for our clients doing SEO, we do lots of blogging. Blogging is really effective. And sometimes not even because people read the blogs. But because the blogs add strength to the other pages on the website, and those ones rank. That's a lot of what it is. There's a lot of technical stuff, like for example, if your website loads slow, Google's not going to rank it as easily as someone whose website loads quickly, because that's a better experience.

It's, it's about making sure that you're technically there, you give Google a sitemap and how to crawl your website. It's an from an authority standpoint, it's kind of a popularity contest. It's about getting backlinks. And backlinks are basically links from other websites to your website. And not just a lot of them, but really good ones. Because a backlink if I have a website that Google considers to be very authoritative, and I decide to link to your website, the assumption is I'm doing that because I see something of value on our website. And I'm the popular guy that votes that this guy is worth looking at. And that tells Google that maybe it really is. Yeah, so isn't all that stuff. The reason why like like, Brandon wants to even probably appear on this podcast, he wants to link back from my site back to his site. The reason why I appear on another podcast is I want the link backs from their sites back to our so that you get that authority, but it is a long game to play. So it's just telling you guys for those your SEO, SEO SEO works, I hear it all the time. No, I'm just gonna SEO that fuck out of that page. Yo, bro, I'm just gonna go ahead and SEO the fuck out of my site. That doesn't mean anything. Like it's not it just doesn't work that way and realistic. Like, I've been blogging for frickin eight years, I actually had my real estate site up to 10,000 searches a month, organically back in the day, and Chicago.

And even real estate marketing, I had to 10,000 Organic hits a month, why haven't blogged in a year and a half. So I haven't had time and my traffic slowed down a bit. Right? plummets, yeah, there's a game there. You gotta have consistency with it. And it just, most people don't have the assets or the resources to do it right as my point. Unless you're gonna pay a team to go out and do it for you. Like, if you're not a writer, you're not a content creator. It's all that stuff. There's just a lot to consider when you're doing it. I don't think it's anywhere anyone would start. I think it's a game you play over long term, if you're going to commit to it. Person, yes. For this topics and purpose. No, I agree. It's not usually a recommended starting place for a client unless, like, we would start out with an SEO strategy. If we're working with a client that really has that long term vision. And we have we have a bunch of companies like we're doing SEO, and I think 30 Something markets are now we do a lot of it, because it does produce like the thing is SEO over the long term produces the best ROI of any jazz we talked about. So it's amazing. But But what happens where people go wrong is they spend money on SEO for three months. And then they look back at it and they're like, Oh, the numbers don't lie. This doesn't give me a return on investment. And they give up. But they don't understand that the game of SEO is a really long term game and you have to be consistent with it. And you have to fund it well. So it's a it's a channel where like, I it's not cashflow friendly. But if you compare it to other long term investments, I would invest my money in SEO before buying a rental property hands down. Because SEO compared to the rental properties can perform way way better in the long term. I don't invest 50 grand

And then to the downpayment on a rental property, and then expect that I'm going to have a 300% return next month. But people do that sweat after March. Yeah, yeah, exactly what equity. Yeah, I agree with everything that you said there. This has been awesome. We went a little bit over, but the content was so good. We just kept on going. So I want to respect your time, Brandon, we appreciate you coming up on the show. sharing all this insight ton of nuggets on there you guys go back and listen to this one more time. If you guys want more about SEO, content, research to the blog and podcast episodes, we've gotten Trevor, Trevor mock from Karen, they have an amazing SEO website platform, he's really sharp and all that we have a bunch of other individuals that you can reach out to if you want to learn more about SEO, or call Brandon here, because these guys do all that stuff, too. But dude, you are a freakin killer, amazing show. Why don't you go ahead and tell our listeners how they can reach you if they need. They can check you guys out further. Yeah, I appreciate it, Mike. So the best place to check us out would be Bateman collective comm slash our ELP. That's, that's a page and the reason I give you that page specifically is you can go right on there you can schedule a call with with me or someone on my team to talk about

to talk about what this is for your market. The really cool thing that we have that no one else has is the largest database that exists in this industry about what generates results for motivated seller lead gen, and how that is different across different markets. So we can give you a lot of insight into what might be the best strategy for you.

And also, I know there's some people listening here who have tried these channels before, and you haven't had success.

Our offer for that is basically a free audit. Like we can jump right into your Google Ads account right into your facebook ads account, right into your your website for SEO purposes. And look at exactly what he did. Where people go wrong with this as they keep on just like throwing money at things and then throw money at something different and throw money at something different. And just hope it works. But they never understood why something didn't work in the first place. The first step to actually finding success, if you haven't had it yet, is figuring out where you went wrong. And we can help you figure that out. It's a free service that we provide. Brough I personally will take a look at your campaigns. So that's uh, yeah, that's something that we're willing to do and I'd love to help you out.

Thank you, man. Appreciate it. Appreciate you guys. Listen to other episode of the real estate marketing podcast. You guys know where to find us connect with us on social Facebook IG connect on our YouTube channel, make sure you subscribe, and check out the rest of the content on our site. And if you're stuck trying to figure out what the hell you're going to do in 2022 and you want to build your personal brand, get your ass on video and call up a real estate marketing Dude, we will script edit and distribute your video content and we make the process really fucking simple. Don't overthink this stuff on content creation 80% of your business is going to come from the people you already know videos how you stay on top of them and nurture that audience it's very simple formula. So appreciate you guys have a great rest of the day and we'll see you guys next week. Peace. Thank you for watching another episode of the real estate marketing dude podcast. If you need help with video or finding out what your brand is, visit our website at WWW dot real estate marketing do.com We make branding video content creation simple and do everything for you. So if you have any additional questions, visit the site, download the training and then scheduled time to speak with the dude and get you rolling in your local marketplace. Thanks for watching another episode of the podcast. We'll see you next time.