Episode 125: Principles of Successful Marketing and Common Mistakes People Make in Marketing with Bryan Driscoll
The Profit First REI Podcast
October 31, 2022
David Richter
Summary:
Today we’ve got real estate investor and expert marketer Bryan Driscoll on the show. He is the CEO of Motivated Leads, a digital marketing agency dedicated to helping real estate investors handle their online marketing efforts to generate leads.
Bryan’s expertise gives us a unique, marketing perspective on real estate. He talks about how to improve your marketing efforts in both methods and documentation, and the lessons and mistakes he’s encountered both in marketing and money. Check out the full discussion here!
Key Takeaways:
[00:51] Bryan Driscoll on Real Estate and Marketing
[03:46] From Digital Marketing to Lead Generation
[05:07] Getting Consistent With Your Digital Marketing
[06:45] On Tracking Expenses
[09:25] Lessons Learned on Money
[11:05] Knowledge to Share With the Next Generation of People Going Into Real Estate
[12:07] The Principles of Successful Marketing
[14:31] Common Mistakes People Make in Marketing
[16:24] Advice and Actionable Marketing Decisions for the People in the Real Estate World
[18:01] How to Connect with Bryan
Quotes:
[07:12] “Make sure your messaging is extremely direct.”
[12:48] “Track data sources so you can tell which sources give you good traffic, [and] which sources are giving you bad traffic.”
[17:17] “Get outside of your head, don’t don’t overthink it–set up a [marketing] campaign. Even if it’s two bucks, or five bucks, go in and set it up.”
Connect with Bryan:
Website: motivated-leads.com
Tired of living deal to deal?
If you are a real estate investor or business owner who is tired of living deal to deal, and want to double your profits, head over here to book your no-obligation discovery call with me. Either myself or someone from my team will hop on a short call with you to get clear on your business goals, remove any obstacles holding you back, and map out a game plan to help you finally start keeping more of the money you work so hard to make. – David
Transcript:
Bryan Driscoll:
Say you have money, you wanna invest and there’s somebody over here that’s crushing it in a space and they’re really educated in that space. I find that’s really good cuz it’s like, okay, I can take the money, they can take their knowledge and we can do good things versus Hey, we got someone over here pitching me that they never did real estate before and they want me to lend a hundred grand to do something that’s very high likelihood we’re gonna fail. Right? You know, So different things like that on the money side,
Intro:
If you’re a real estate investor who’s sick and tired of living, deal to deal, then welcome home. Hear from everyday real estate investors just like you, and discover how they’ve completely transformed their business by taking a profit First approach. This is the Profit first for REI podcast, where we believe revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, It’s time to start making profit a habit in your business. So here’s your host, David Richter,
David Richter :
Everyone. It’s David Richter here again with the Profit First. R i podcast have Brian Driscoll here today and he is, he’s got some interesting background because he’s been in the marketing space, but he also does real estate investing as well too. Buy and selling and a lot of cool stuff. And they’re pretty heavy hitters in the real estate space. Got to meet them officially at a mastermind that we’re a part of, which was awesome. I love meeting people at like-minded meetings like that. Chose the, the level that people want to be at and want to grow and be around those type of people. So Brian, great to have you on today.
Bryan Driscoll:
Hey man. Thanks. Thanks for having me. It’s gonna be fun.
David Richter :
Yeah, yeah, for sure. So why don’t we just let people into your background, like what you’re doing now and how you got started in real estate and you know, kind of just telling your journey.
Bryan Driscoll:
Yeah, sure thing. So as it’s a open ended question there, so get into, Yeah. So getting into, I do two different things. I do marketing and then also I do real estate. I do a lot of buying, not a lot of buy and hold, but I buy places around where I live and rent ’em out, right? Yep. So on the marketing side, I got involved in that back probably like 15 years ago. I was hanging with a buddy of mine. He sold, uh, tool blades and he was selling ’em on eBay. I’m like, Hey dude, let’s, let’s stick up a like a little WordPress website for you. We stuck it up. People started buying him. We were doing Google Paper per click and he’s like, Hey man, you need to start doing this for other people. So that’s how I got involved with, uh, marketing. Like way years ago I was doing, uh, I hopped on Upwork Freelance Channel, started doing that, and then it evolved into dealing with like Fortune 500 and like big international companies. And then, uh, about eight years ago I got involved with real estate. I was, uh, I was looking for a house to buy. So I, I lived in a house. I was having another kid. I’m like, I need to buy another house. So I went on Craigslist and found a wholesaler.
Hmm. I didn’t know as a wholesaler at the time. I go looking at the house and he is like, Well I got this property. It’s like, you can buy it, but you gotta pay me $10,000 and this and that. I’m like, Okay, cool. And I started learning about that. I’m like, Dude, there’s a huge spread on these types of things. So I started looking at doing my own marketing to get those types of deals, fixing them and then running ’em out. So, and that’s kind of the short version.
David Richter :
Awesome. So you also, you’re still buying properties today. So you are also doing that because you, the marketing that you do. Can you explain more about how that ties in with your real estate and with real estate investors right now?
Bryan Driscoll:
Yeah, sure. So, so I do digital marketing specifically for real estate investors. So, and what we’re targeting is we’re not targeting just people that wanna sell their house. We’re targeting people that are motivated selling, usually a distressed property, like they inherited a home, might be a hoarder’s house. Usually it needs more work than they want to put into it. So they’re just, they’re saying, Hey, you know what, if you can make this convenience, I’ll sell it for a fair price. We get a good deal on it. They get the convenience and everyone wins. Um, we do the marketing, we, we do that targeting through like Facebook, Google, Paper, click, uh, seo. It’s all digital stuff that we do on this side.
David Richter :
Awesome. So where was that progression, uh, from selling those tools and stuff to now, you know, helping get the motivated seller leads into in the door?
Bryan Driscoll:
Yeah, so, so that progression was, um, we were dealing with like the large, large tech comp, large e-commerce companies, all that kind of stuff. And I got the wholesale, I got the deal off the wholesale. I’m like, Dude, there’s like 10, $15,000 spread on each of these. And I stuck up a carrot website. I just stuck one up, just throw some stuff against the wall. I’m like, I’m gonna see what happens. Started putting some traffic to it and people were hitting us up wanting to sell their properties. So I’m like, okay, this is cool and I only wanna invest. I’m a little bit different than most investors. I only wanna invest in a one zip code just cause I don’t wanna drive real far. So all of my properties are within one mile of where I live. So we got an overflow of leads, like cuz there’s a, it’s a whole city at Pittsburgh. So what I did is I started finding different wholesalers and I send them leads, like I’ll just send them the overflow. I’m like, Hey, I’m gonna shoot you leads, Let’s just split it 50 if you wholesale it. And most of them burned me and then I hooked up with one guy and he didn’t. So now we, I just send him all of our leads. We do splits and then I get the cherry pick, the ones that come in our area.
David Richter :
Wow, that’s awesome. And know that you do this for a lot of investors and that’s what, that is the number one most requested thing because everyone needs the leads. I mean we talk about keeping the money on the other side, you know, like with profit first, but you have to have the leads, you have to have consistent leads and you have to have that keep coming in. So I guess with your, with your expertise, what would you say is some of the things that, you know, to get that consist lead flowing, especially with what you’re doing? Is it the long game, the short game? Like is it, well you know, like seo, ppc, like a lot of people might not even know that terminology if they’re just starting out. So can you just explain that a little bit in the mindset behind it?
Bryan Driscoll:
Yeah, sure. So it really depends on where you’re at and what your goals are. Yeah, so Facebook, just to break it down, for people that don’t know much in the digital side, Facebook, you’re paying to put an ad on Facebook in the feed you’re paying Facebook, it might per impression. So you might pay $20 per thousand people that see your ad, Google paper click, you’re paying every time to put your ads at the top of Google. Say for example, in a keyword, sell my house fast. Every time someone clicks that you might spend 20 or 30 bucks. Facebook and Google paper click give you quick result. I look at it like Facebook and Google paper click are like renting a house. SEO’s like owning the house. Hmm. So once you pull the ad spend from Google and Facebook, your traffic immediately dies. Uh, seo on the other hand, you’re organically and optimizing your website to rank in a free section of Google. You may not see leads for six months, but once you rank, you’re not paying for those leads. So even when you quit doing a marketing campaign, you’re gonna hold those and you’re getting free leads all the time. So there’s multiple different ways there. And it depends on everyone’s goals. Like it’s, it’s usually good to do a hybrid and then even add like mailers and texting on top too. Like it’s good to have a presence everywhere if you can afford it.
David Richter :
Awesome. So I love this because this is, this is exactly what people are always looking for. You know, they’re always looking for how do we get that, how do we get that consistent deal flow? Then what would you say on the back end, cuz we talked about this a little bit beforehand about tracking, you know, like tracking and making sure that you’re spending the money in the right place and you know, like you might market it now, but not, it doesn’t close for three months or you know, like things just pop all the time. So how do you help track or how do you track those types of things to make sure people are spending the best money in the best area?
Bryan Driscoll:
Yeah, sure. So, and actually to answer to your product question first a little bit better too, when you’re doing it, if you guys wanna do this yourself, make sure your messaging is extremely direct. Mm. So cuz because you’re gonna wanna look at the numbers, it’s like don’t app tell people, Hey, um, we’re gonna give you a value on your house. We’re gonna tell you how much your house is worth. Tell them, Hey, we buy houses, we pay cash, we close fast. Things like that. Be extremely direct with the messaging. But then once, the one thing that I see more of the guys newer in the space, they’ll do marketing for like a month or two and be like, ah, this didn’t work. So what, what, what you need to do is you need to attribute, So say you get a deal, you need to keep track of when people, when leads come in, which source they come from.
And then also whenever your deals close, you need to look back. Say you’re spending three grand a month for six months, you need to look and if you close a deal on the fourth month, don’t credit that profit to the fourth month. Look when the lead came in and attribute that to the ad spend. So you can look back and say, okay, this specific ad is converting, it’s making us money, but our li it it, it takes us four months to even see it so that we know the money we spend today. If we wanna double our income, we need to double our marketing now, but we won’t see the results for say four months or whatever the timeframe is. You’ll know your numbers, then you can make educated decision on if you wanna scale things like that.
David Richter :
Yeah. Well we’re all about knowing numbers here. That’s why. Yeah,
Bryan Driscoll:
In order to,
David Richter :
In order to know where you can go and what you can spend and what you can do, like we have, you have to know those numbers. And I think that’s paramount. And I love, I, you know, I like the principles of marketing, you know, just the learning about those and where every marketing person out there says you have to know those numbers so that way you can track exactly what’s going on. And I think that might get lost in a lot of the real estate world because it’s like, hey, we’re just buying the house. You know, a seller called in and I, I love what you said there, track where it came from. Track exactly. Like from every lead that comes in, especially every deal that you close, where is it coming from? So we know what to spend, where to spend it. And then being able to scale intelligently.
Not just throwing money at the next marketing campaign, but saying where did the bulk of our deals come from and what sources do we actually need to reinvest back in to get to double or triple or whatever you want to go. So can’t, can’t uh, endorse that enough. I love that mindset. Awesome. So as far as this goes too, like I wanna talk a little bit about the money side of things since this is a first I podcast and just a general money question. So this is kind of one of those open ended questions too, but lessons that you’ve learned about money, maybe past lessons that you’ve learned compared to how you think about money now, like being in real estate and having success in, you know, doing those types of things.
Bryan Driscoll:
Yeah, sure. So a couple of the most important things I’ve learned, always pay yourself first. Hmm. So you bring money in, at least pull 10% up. Like pay yourself first, take it off the table, put it wherever you want, buy real estate with it that you’re keeping, put it in the market, whatever you wanna do. Uh, just because I see a lot of times and me even, it’s like, hey, we wanna keep spending and doing this. What happens if like I’m in a digital marketing space, what happens if something happens with Facebook and they turn into my space? Right. Or you know what I mean? Like anything or what happens when covid happens and you’re a contractor and you can’t leave the house for six months and you need to live.
David Richter :
Yeah. So
Bryan Driscoll:
I always say pay myself first and then, uh, another thing is I’m always looking, which I don’t know if you know about the five laws of gold, uh, but I’m always looking like, don’t get with this, the tricksters. You know what I mean? Like yeah. If something looks too good to be true, it usually is. Um, so, so like I’m always hesitant on that but I do like partnering up with if you have, say you have money you wanna invest and there’s somebody over here that’s crushing it in a space and they’re really educated in that space, I find that’s really good cuz it’s like okay, I can take the money, they can take their knowledge and we can do good things versus hey, we got someone over here pitching me that they never did real estate before and they want me to lend a hundred grand to do something that’s very high likelihood we’re gonna fail. Right. You know, so different things like that on the money side.
David Richter :
Awesome. No, I like that a lot. So how about this with where you are right now, like what lessons would you wanna pass on to that next generation about around money and like, you know, especially like people that are coming up now just getting into real estate, like you said new people. What would you want to give as far as like making sure that they understand and can take from
Bryan Driscoll:
That’s, that’s a good one. So number one. Yeah, like save and even on the money side too, it’s weird. Like I like to, I like to give, I like to give back. So, and it’s weird, it’s like if you give money out there, it’s like the universe kind of repays you back or something. Like no one even knows what you did. But there’s one thing on money because you get more from that. You actually get more from giving money than the people that get it a lot of times cuz you get the gratification or whatever you want to call it. Yeah. Um, so I would say do that save and then also, um, invest in yourself. Like take that money and invest in yourself. Don’t make, don’t make a couple bucks and just spend it like invest like even in knowledge, things like that.
David Richter :
Awesome. Nah, I love that. Love, I love the principles there. So speaking on principles since you’re, well, let’s switch back to the marketing, marketing conversation and would you say that there are principles of success in marketing? You, you mentioned one big one I think is that messaging, being direct, telling them exactly what you’re doing. But would you say that there’s other principles as you’ve been in the marketing space for quite a while now that you know these are some of the just foundational things no matter if you’re doing seo, PPC or whatever, that you need to have, you know, some core elements?
Bryan Driscoll:
Yeah, so you have to have like, especially if you’re gonna do this on yourself too, number one, you gotta tracking, like you’re tracking your numbers. You also have to have their scripts like Facebook pixels, Google, Google Analytics, stuff like that. You need those on your website. So you can track the data, track data sources so you can tell which, which source is giving you good traffic, which source has given you bad traffic, Things like that in the housing industry, especially on Facebook, you need to opt into the housing category else you’re gonna get your accounts banned. Um, so there, there’s one thing that’s uh, that’s a tip if you guys are doing it on your own, uh, obviously the messaging and I’ve found two, whenever you’re gener trying to generate leads, like motivated leads or different type of leads. So I’m more focused on the deals I want to pre, I wanna disqualify people.
So like what I’ll do is I’ll have a direct message, I’ll send ’em to a lander, ask ’em for their name, phone number, email, that kind of stuff. Then I want to ask ’em like 10 questions, like how fast do you wanna sell? How much work do you, does your property need? Things like that. And what I wanna do, I’m not, I want to weed the people out that aren’t qualified so that I don’t have to talk to ’em. Yeah. And then I’d like to take it to one step further there is after I get the lead, send them a text or give them an option to book an appointment for you to come visit their house and give ’em an offer. And what that does, that’s also gauging their motivation. If you have somebody that gave you 10 or 15 pieces of information, then book the appointment for you to come see them without even talking to you. They’re highly motivated. Well you would assume they’re motivated and wanna, wanna make something happen quickly.
David Richter :
Yeah, no that’s really good advice. I’ve heard a couple people doing that and that’s, you know, drastically improved like closing ratio and like the people that are ready right away that, especially if they’re filling out a form, instead of them waiting on that next step, they’ve already gotta like, here I’ll just book that appointment and now you’ve got your acquisitions people running out there to those warm release. I really, really like that. That’s really good. So what would you say, especially in the marketing world, I’m sure, I’m sure you could go on and on about this, is some of the mistakes that people make if they’re trying to either do it on their own or like as they go through and are starting to market, you know, maybe online with some of the stuff that you do.
Bryan Driscoll:
Yeah, so some of the mistakes are uh, not u not understanding and using the algorithms. So say on Facebook, Facebook will give you different options to market. You can say you want link clicks, you want people to watch videos, you want to get reach or you want conversions, different things like that. Facebook’s algorithm knows what people will do specific things. So if you say, Hey I want link clicks, you’re gonna get a whole bunch of people clicking your link for really cheap, but they do nothing else or video views unless you’re trying to brain yourself video views. People will watch your video but they’ll do nothing else. Right. So, uh, my tip on that is if you have the proper tracking on your website, like a lead event pixel, uh, so let me even take a step back on that. When you send someone to a website, you have a form after the form, you have a thank you page, you want to snippet a code on there, it’s called an event pixel that tells Google or Facebook, hey this specific person converted into a lead. Hmm. So, and uh, I see people, what you want do is when you’re running the campaign optimize for that specific event, tell them, hey, we want leads because then their algorithm will try to put your ads in front of those specific people that are highly likely to convert versus clicking links, things like that.
David Richter :
Okay. Now that’s really good advice because you <laugh> that’s I think where I think just the marketing messages that we hear depending on who’s doing what. It’s like, oh the branding and getting the videos in. It’s like, well no that’s not what it’s about. Do you want these people to buy your, you know, do you wanna buy their house or do you wanna sell a house? Whatever that you’re looking to do like with what you’re doing in real estate investing. So no, I love that. That’s great advice. Just got a couple last questions here. Number one, what general advice do you have for the real estate investing world that’s listening to this audio? You know, this podcast right now?
Bryan Driscoll:
Yeah, general advice is keep failing. Like I, I’m a big believer in keep pushing yourself and then like I always look at it, you don’t have to try like a whole bunch of more times, just try one more time. Yeah. So every time you’re getting punched in a face, just all you gotta do is try one more time and eventually if you keep trying you’re gonna get it. But like I’ve failed a lot of times and that’s why I just told myself I gotta do this one more time. Cause that’s, that’s bite size. I can do that. You know, so that’s my advice there.
David Richter :
Would you have any one action item that people can take on the marketing side? You know, obviously they need to connect with you, but is there something that they could do? Like is it one post or like what, what would you say is something actionable they could take like just to start doing so that way they can get another deal or another lead or something?
Bryan Driscoll:
Yeah, what I would recommend is get outside your head. Don’t, don’t ever think it set up a campaign, even if it’s two bucks or five bucks, go in and set it up even if it fails, even if it flops. Because once you start and once you get that going you’re gonna figure out, okay, that didn’t work but let me try this and your wheels will start spinning. So get out of the books and actually just go set something up. Even if it’s only for a dollar a day, set it up and then look at the data and posi and tweak.
David Richter :
That’s awesome to go out there and do something. Don’t just listen right. Take that action, get out there and then so you’re just gonna get better from there and then you’re gonna find people like Brian that can help you as well too and get it even more refined as you get up and running. So this has been awesome. So then how Brian, I always ask at the very end is you provide a lot of value here. How can people provide value back to you? Meaning like you’ve got the motivated leads, like how can they connect on that? Is there other connections that you need or anything else that we could help you with?
Bryan Driscoll:
Yeah, mainly if anyone needs any help, just go to our website, it’s motivated-leads.com, hit us up, we’re here to answer questions if you need help running it or different things like that. Yeah just reach out.
David Richter :
Awesome. There you go. So motivated-leads.com. So it’s an actual dash in between there. There’s motivated-leads.com. I love that. I love the simple, simple websites. These are very simple so I love it very much. So if this has been incredible, this has been an education in marketing, something actionable that you could go do, go to Facebook, run some ads, you know, just, just getting in that habit of being able to go out there, take that action. Then also just uh, making sure you’re tracking everything, track everything so that way you are a data master so you know what to invest in. If you wanna work with Brian, that’s motivated-leads.com and they’re doing a lot of cool things out there, so make sure to follow them. And thank you so much Brian for being on ton of value here.
Bryan Driscoll:
Hey, thanks man. We’ll do it again sometime.
Intro:
This episode of the Profit First for REI podcast is over, but there are plenty more where that came from. Are you ready to learn how David and his team can help implement the Profit First system in your business? Schedule a discovery call at simplecfo.com right now. We’ll see you next time on the Profit First for REI podcast with David Richter.
If you Want HELP
implementing Profit First...
Our team of experts would love to help you
make and keep more money in your business!