Would you like to get more bang for your buck on Facebook ads? What if you could reduce your cost per lead (CPL) from $12 to $3? There is a simple way to make the most of your online ad spend in 2019, and it begins and ends with consistent, quality content creation.
Travis Thom is the marketing strategist behind Elevated REM, the premiere Facebook advertising agency and coaching platform for real estate. With 250K Facebook and Instagram leads to their credit, Travis and his team are experts in advanced Facebook retargeting campaigns. He cut his teeth in real estate as an agent, struggling for three long years until a Rottweiler taught him the importance of providing value first. From there, Travis leveraged educational content marketing to build a successful business focused on new construction developments. He transitioned to marketing in 2014, founding Elevated REM to support realtors in generating leads online.
Today, Travis joins me to explain why content creation is crucial for Facebook in 2019. He describes how posting consistent, quality content can significantly reduce your CPL on Facebook and discusses the value of authenticity and storytelling in getting your audience to engage. Travis also shares his BURST system of retargeting through Facebook ads, offering insight around the role of educational content in building trust. Listen in to understand how to use Facebook to provide highly-relevant content to the right audience at the right time—and make the most of your social media ad spend!
Today’s Topics
- How consistent, quality content reduces an agent’s CPL
- How Facebook defines your business page quality score
- Travis’ take on the value of authenticity and storytelling
- Why engaging content gets served to more people
- Travis’ BURST system of retargeting with Facebook ads
- The difference between passive and active content
- How a Rottweiler taught Travis about providing value
- How educational marketing transformed Travis’ career
- Using Facebook to provide highly-relevant content
Connect with Travis Thom
Learn more about how Travis and his team can support you at elevatedrem.com.
Resources
A good realtor will spend three hours a day calling. This is not your typical boring real estate show. This is real estate marketing redefined, uncensored and unedited in what’s working today in the market minus the fluff. This is real estate marketing dude, because just having a license isn’t enough. Now please welcome your host the unprofessional professional Mike Cuevas. Goo Hey,
what is up everybody, welcome to another episode of the real estate marketing dude podcast. And we’re here for the last episode of 2018. And I think we’re gonna be talking about a subject and a topic that will be very relevant in 2019. So for those of you have not checked out and are actually ready to make a difference next year, you’re gonna really want to pay attention to this podcast because what we got today is very, very good. Folks, I don’t need really an introduction for this guest most of you know who he is. And if you don’t know who he is, Where the hell have you been get out from underneath your rock. And, you know, take a take a look, because if you’re gonna plan on doing anything in Facebook, you’re probably looking at and talking to the best number one source of doing it today in his name. Without further ado, is Mr. Travis, Tom Travis, how are you? Welcome back to the show. Thank you, Mike. Always, always a pleasure. So Travis, please, for the people that don’t know you, for the one or two people who don’t, can you please introduce yourself and give a little bit of background on who you are and what you do?
Apparently, so um, I am a Facebook marketing strategist, I run a Facebook advertising agency. We’re a International Agency. So we create Facebook campaigns for the real estate industry, all New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Mexico, throughout the US, we we get to see all the different types of campaigns that are working with strategies that are working right now. So the best targeting or the best type of headline, whatever might be. So over the past couple years, we’ve now surpassed over 250,000 leads that we’ve generated through our campaigns and helping our clients. And you know, we handle ad accounts, they’re spending large ad spend. So sometimes they’re spending 40 50,000 a month in ad spend, and some clients are spending 500 to $1,000. net spend, it just depends kind of where they are within their business. But that gives us really kind of a 30,000 foot view and deeper insight. And the different strategies that I deploy, are things based on persuasion and influence through the consumer cycle, right? how people actually think what gets them to click, what is the decision cycle over the next 60 to 660 days at six months? And what kind of content do we need to do? So that in a nutshell, that’s kind of what we do? Yeah.
So basically, you’ve seen a lot of different shit, and you know, what works and what doesn’t, because you have the ability to be a fly on the wall of so many different ad campaigns, essentially, I mean, you’re not the fly, you’re the guy, mixing the potions up and creating the magic behind it. Right? So folks, that’s what we’re gonna talk about today, we’re gonna talk about the who, what, when, where, why Facebook ads, and what’s coming, because Travis, let’s be honest, this shit has changed in the last three years. Like I remember back in the day, actually, right? When I started to get even a little bit for you. And I met I remember, just, hey, let’s run some CMA ads, and like, no one else was doing them yet. And it was just like, you know, like, seemed like the easy days of Facebook. But, you know, then slowly, what happened is that everyone started doing them. And then they weren’t very, very stale. So what we want to get into today is sort of, Okay, what’s coming? What should people adapt? And because if you guys haven’t noticed the platform’s change, and along with change is you have to change. And that’s what this is all about. So let’s start the beginning here, Travis, what do you think is, you know, there’s a difference between agents who create content and agents who don’t even know how to create content, there’s a difference between marketing content on Facebook and then just going in acquiring just direct leads. And they sort of work hand in hand, right? So I want to sort of dumb that down for everybody and walk through sort of how that works, and what you believe is going to happen, going forward with content creation and Facebook and why people need it. So before we get started on that, what’s content creation? Let me just define it really stupidly for you guys. Content is anything that you guys do in your daily business that reflects a story that reflects your service, your persona, or anything, it could be creating a case study out of a client, you just helped downsize into a house. It’s not just sold, it’s I just helped this old man spend less than $1,000 a month on their mortgage payment. Here’s how, right so we’re talking about storytelling content, think about Ah, fucking GTV folks, and that’s what this is. HGTV exists only because there’s a huge huge appetite to consume the stuff that we do on a daily basis yet, you’re not frickin doing it. So by content storytelling through the way you’re serving through the way helping others. So Travis, let’s get into it if that sort of,
yeah, so the the biggest one of the biggest benefits with good storytelling and good content that you’re consistent with, is the ability to build your own tribe, right? The people that really like what you’re putting out what resonates with them. Now, there’s a whole kind of deep psychology behind this and methodology that we use. And before we can tap into that, one of the things that we’ve seen, and it was about for the past year, we tested around $80,000, in ad spend on a few different campaigns, that indicated to us the quality of content and the consistency of it, what that actually does to the cost of your campaigns cost per lead. So there’s a difference between just you know, posting content, and then running campaigns, regeneration campaigns and posting content. That’s good content consistently in the running campaigns. So to kind of give you an idea, we have one client that was spending around four to 5000 a month, and they were posting on their business page, right organic posts, maybe about once a week, and then we had a campaign for them. That was, you know, spending four to $5,000 generating leads, those leads were coming in around $12 per lead, then we have client B that was spending same four to 5000 a month in ad spend. And they’re posting organic posts on their business page, about three to four times a week. And the content was a little bit more refined, a little bit deeper, a little bit more relevant to the actual audience. And what we saw over those campaigns, and that kind of a few others kind of fragmented out that we split test is that very similar markets, very similar campaigns is that the basically the agent that had the campaigns that were putting out content consistently, they were generating leads around three to $5, a lead versus the one agent, a write it was only posting occasionally, and they were generating leads around $12 per lead. So we kind of reverse engineered that a little deeper, and then tried it even on our own accounts, and basically kicked up the posting kicked up a few different things, and kind of had a mastermind about it with a few other types of Facebook, experts in the world. And we were all sharing this data kind of seeing that, you know, there’s a consistent type of data we keep seeing, which is that the more we post, and the more quality content we post, the lower the cost per action on the campaign’s lowering the cost per click lower the cost per lead and lower the cost per just pretty much every kind of action that’s that’s out there. We thought it might be an anomaly first, but then you know, once you kind of get over like 20,000 ad spend on these different kind of things, you start to see a lot of data coming in. With that, what we still decided is that, the better the content, and then we kind of went through a reverse engineer it again, is that Facebook has what they call a quality score attached to your page. The quality score isn’t something that you can physically see, it’s basically, you know, kind of behind the blue wall with Facebook, that the quality score attached to your page is based on a few different factors. Your ad spend you consistently putting ads out there. Are you paying your Facebook ad spin bill, that’s important. Yeah, well, you’ll get flagged, it doesn’t count against you over time. And then are people engaging with the content, right? And then are you posting organic posts consistently with healthy content that people enjoy? That increases your page quality score. And with that your ad account is attached to your business page, right? So did any kind of ads you’re putting out there. It’s saying, Oh, this person has participated. They are well vetted advertiser that is giving content out that people really enjoy and want to consume, we’re going to give them a lower cost per action. Now, there’s seven different factors to kind of move into that. But the key underlying thing, right to kind of take away from that is that you should be posting more content that’s more relevant to your specific audience over time. That’s going to be one kind of major benefit that gets squeezed out of that consistency.
Very interesting. So let’s talk about quality content versus just checking a box let’s be honest, most of us are D personalities. Would you agree with that Thomas you work with a lot of real estate agents would you say was a lot of them are D personality which means most of our brain work off of a checklist. Yeah, we just want to check that box. And what Travis is saying that this is something you don’t just check the box with, like, you got to spend some time writing these contents, I’ll give you a perfect example. I made a post on Christmas, you know, I’ve had a, you know, I went through a lot of challenges in 2018, even the year before and whatnot, I made a post and I wrote a store and I spent about 30 minutes writing that post. And because it was real, it was raw, I’ll generate over 300 comments just on my personal page. And it’s just there wasn’t an image even associated with it. It was literally just words that shows you the power behind words and what people say and, and really all it was was my story. I was just telling the truth, like, right, I was just being me. Yeah, so the content was real, it was authentic. It was raw, and it meant something. And, you know, take that, and I want to compare quality content, versus just checking a box, because there’s a lot of services that will post for you, right? But never been a big fan of these things. And you know, you cannot outsource authenticity. No, no, you cannot like have somebody. That’s why I hate when people ask us the question, okay, do we just run my social media? I’m like, No, I’m not you. I’ve never lived walked a day in your shoes. How the hell do you want me to run your social media for you? Dude, I talk with Elliot right? Yeah, tell me what works. Right? Here, you got to do your own shit. So tell me that about that. Because there’s a lot of people who say, Oh, God, instantly, they’re going to hear that. And they’re going to go out and try to find a service that can post for them. So let’s talk about quality content, what that means, in your eyes, what is quality content,
in my is quality content is something that just like you mentioned, it’s going to be an element of storytelling, it’s going to be an element of actually showing some authenticity, behind the scenes. And it’s going to be engaging, right, it’s going to be thought provoking, it’s going to get people to comment and like it or share it. And Facebook views it in the same kind of way, which is in when they made the changes to the algorithm in January 2018. And then in March 2018, they made some pretty significant changes, where the suppress the organic reach of business pages. And that basically, you know, we used to be able to create a post, and it would then be shown, let’s say you had 5000 people liked your page, and to be shown to maybe two or 3000 of those 5000 people, well, you do a post on your business page today. And it’s only gonna maybe reached let’s say, you know, a to 200 people out of those 5000. Right, what it’s 5%
maybe five, five to 7%, right? Not a lot, right? And is it showing it to the right people within that audience. And Facebook is for a couple reasons, one, to free up the Facebook newsfeed to be able to allow more posts, because there’s 1500 different stories, right, that are competing for people’s attention every day in the Facebook newsfeed and only 300 of them actually really make it inside the Facebook newsfeed for for that, and then a mix of them are ads. So the business pages, basically, they did that because it reached max ad mode. And they needed to free up the newsfeed to be able to have more placement in there push people to the ad manager. But Facebook also said that they did it to get more quality content to connect people to family and friends and have a deeper engaging relationship online, right kind of one of the main purposes, they created Facebook, right, this social network. So with that in mind, when you get content that’s out there, and people are commenting on it and liking and sharing it, that sends signals over to the Facebook algorithm. It says this is content that people like and enjoy. It’s relevant to them. So it’s actually meeting the expectations of the algorithm, right? is an optimal consumer experience. And they have their own formula, which kind of goes into the bear, right, the Facebook algorithm bear, which stands for bidding expected action and relevancy. But when you’re creating engaging content, basically looks at the use of look at it as shares likes and comments, they no longer look at the likes, they look at shares and comments, it was getting shared, that’s kind of at the top tier, right? If it’s shared fate, that’s a kind of a high signal to the algorithm that says people like this, it’s optimal content for the consumer base. Let’s put it out to more people. So the more people that actually engage with a post that comment on it, and share it, then the more that it’s going to actually feed out and reach out to more people and it’s gonna get served out to more people creating more opportunity to get more engagement. And Facebook is designed to get people to stay on there longer. So the better the content, it’s actually telling Facebook Oh, this is going to help people stay on the on the platform longer and create that deeper relationship right to keep that kind of connected loop. I think even in that that cycle. So content that I view as in terms of Real Estate is being able to actually kind of peek behind the scenes a little bit sometimes where you demystify and take off that kind of shellacked type of fake atmosphere that I think a lot of social media it has, which is that it’s hyper curated. And people feel like that’s not maybe real life, but they still want to be able to see a little bit of the show business behind it, they want to see mistakes, right? They want to know that you’re, you’re real, that your actual human in a bad story makes a good story sometimes. Yeah. And if you could peek behind the curtain and say, take a look at our staging that we’re doing behind this house, you know, take a look at this new open house that we were walking through, you know, show elements of your daily life, but then put content out there, like you mentioned, which was really good idea, case studies, that shows the actual social proof. And so we created our own methodology a couple years ago for this type of content that we use in our advanced retargeting campaigns. And so what we do with those campaigns, we drip out ads in a delayed sequence, kind of called a push along funnel. And we’ll get to deepen into it. But basically, what we’re doing is we’re taking people through this indoctrination process, after we have used some sort of top of funnel type of ad that triggers the tripwire right, based on the behaviors and the actions online, they interacted with a video or an ad with might be another gonna see a series of different retargeting ads. And those ads are typically a little bit more of storytelling type of content. And that what that’s going to do is a couple of things. So the acronym that we’re using is called burst, and you will be able to tell your brand story or brand introduction, that can be a via video or short story on, you know, we’ve been in the business for over 16 years, we’ve helped over 5000 families move and you know, it never, you know, it never gets dull, right? We love it, right? Whatever it might be that you can get to cascade that, then from there. So that’s burst, so brandstory. And then we have untapped opportunity, which is typically an opportunity to see a list of homes or off market properties, whatever it might be an opportunity that aligns with something as property centric, that they actually offer. It’s not about them, right as the brokerage or the team or the agent, it’s more about the needs of the consumer, right, so you’re pulling the back end a little bit. And then reciprocity. So reciprocity is giving them an item of value. And this is really important, when you have an audience that doesn’t know you and their awareness level is really low, in terms of where they are right. If the audience is really hyper aware of you, then it’s more about personal storytelling. But if an audience is not aware, then you need to give them items that are more educational type of items, right, top five ways to buy a home as zero down or top 10 mistakes home sellers make when trying to sell their home. So you know, selling is gonna actually educate them, and positioning you as the authority figure, right. And then there’s social proof directly after that, that builds trust. Social Proof part is typically testimonials, more about your market share market production, but ideally, some sort of testimonial or case study that you can give them, it’s going to build that trust because you have someone else vouching for you, right setting the stage, and all that really just kind of persuasion and influence where you take into this indoctrination process, dropping quality content over time, pre framing in their mind that you are the solution to their upcoming problem. And that essentially by heavy brand awareness, and haven’t been omnipresent, and if ideally, if you’re getting texts and emails at the same time, and seeing all these different ads, and Instagram and all these different kind of posts from you, it creates this overwhelming presence, that you are the authority figure, you’re the right choice. Now, the opportunity, and the goal is to really be in front of them during their decision cycle. Right. So that’s why consistency is key. Because a good majority of the prospects out there that are on Facebook, there are different life stages, right, they are moving at different speeds and paces based on the psychographic profile that’s been assigned to them through their actions. And so if they’re a baby boomer, right, that’s downsizing, or they’re a young couple that just had a baby and they want to move up to a larger home, you need to still be able to stay in front of them during all those decision cycles so that you him at the right spot. And then a lot of that is just based on constantly being in front of them with content. So there’s passive content where you’re just posting it. Then there’s the active content where the new taking that warehousing it and putting it into some sort of funnel so The Facebook ad campaign funnel and in making sure that content is really put to use and is squeezing every ounce of the best and highest use of that content by telling the same story again and again and again through a series of different ads, right? That are retargeting these prospects. So your content, good content is storytelling, peeking behind the scenes, and then being able to really showcase your strengths in the benefits, you can provide those people’s lives right giving value, because at the end of the day, if you’re not giving value, then you’re just making a lot of noise. And people are not going to gravitate towards that, right? They’re gonna gravitate the ones that, you know, when you were in school, who would you ask? You know, the biggest questions to is probably the teacher, the professor or the educator. So I think today, especially would be in 2019. When there’s uncertainty and questions, there’s educational marketing, and that’s really what you really need to focus on is educational marketing and positioning itself by telling the story, giving them something value that actually makes a difference in their life, right, you have to actually do that. And then you create a bond through educating. If you’re not educating them, it’s just about me, me, me, you know that that’s gonna just position you into a corner. If people are gonna ignore you.
There’s so many golden nuggets. And now that he said, folks that I hope you were writing that all down, and if not, go ahead and rewind and press replay, and write it down and then listen to it four or five more times. It’s super duper interesting. You mentioned a couple key points I want to break down. All right, you have passive content versus real estate context. I know people like holy shit, how much content I create their heads are blown up, right? passive content and storytelling, we call it like transactional content, right? So I want to give them some live examples of stuff they can be doing, and how they could carry the story. So how many you guys are working with rehabbers or investors or developers like, and I’m very biased with video, I’m not gonna lie. I’m gonna give myself a shameless plug in my own podcast right here. And I’m not gonna feel bad about it. But using video through stories exactly how I believe you can accomplish this because it’s the easiest way to go about doing it. But let’s just take a rehabber. Right? So I crafted out a script series for rehabbing company here in San Diego. And it was really simple. We’re actually taking one rehab and turn it into three different pieces of content. So the first one was okay, Hey, guys, I’m standing in front of this house. I just bought it for $400,000. And it is a complete shithole. We’re gonna go inside and look at all the rats in just a second, I’m gonna tell you what my vision for this house is. So that’s the coming soon plan, right? Oh, and by the way, if you want to buy this house, and you feel like customizing it yourself, we can still do that. Come on, and give me a call. I’m right here, blah, blah, blah. That’s video number one. video number two comes through sort of the progression of it, right, video number two, part two of that series. Hey, guys, everything is almost done right here. Check it out. This is the before this is the after with a lot of video editing. So you can make it really easy, right? And then video three would be the actual finished product today of the open house. Now when we’re done with that, we would take all three of those videos and combine them into one HGTV like story and then market that whole case study. Eventually, however, I just made four pieces of content out of one property. Right. The other way you guys can go about doing this is just think about all your just sold Travis’s exactly right. No one gives a crap about how many houses you sold, or how much money you made this week, when your posting just sold. What you’re really saying is I made 20 grand this week, and you did it, I’m better than you are in my eyes. I hate when people brag about making money. It depends on how you do it. You know. And if you think about it, when you there’s a different way to position the way you speak to people and storytelling is all of that. So if your goal with your just listed post is to say, Hey, I just sold a house. Let’s be honest, that’s what we want to say, Hey, don’t forget I exist Don’t forget to exist. I just sold a house and saying how much money you make start saying I just helped this 49 year old homeowner who just got divorced get rid of not only his wife, but the house that causes divorce in the first place. Here’s how. Right so I would put it into a story because that would go in and Travis knows we would turn that into it’s complicated people right or the other way out that are getting a divorce. The other thing is is so that’s one really, really cool thing. Now, I know people are also going to talk about real estate on every bit of freakin content. I do know your shit. Please don’t. If you’re constantly selling like let’s put it this way. 70% of people use the first agent they speak to right? At the same time over 60 70% of business comes from people we already know. Okay, that’s a mathematical fact. So the question is do you talk to your best friends about real estate all the freakin time. When you go out tonight and you guys go have some wine maybe because we’ve made some friends and yours are just going to talk about Facebook ads the entire time
25% of it I’m going to talk about and Facebook ads, and then everyone’s gonna get real quiet. And then I want to talk about effects. Yeah.
There’s a way through storytelling to infer To remind people sort of subliminally what you do without hitting him over the head with your lockboxes. All I’m saying, because that shit is annoying after a while,
but at the end of the day, it’s so I used to run a real estate brokerage. Right? I grew into three different companies. As soon as I started when I was 19, way back in the day, and at the height of will be a team of three people. We had 271 listings. And we had we started though, from pretty much absolutely nothing. And a lot of what we did was educational market. So my first three years of studying real estate were painful. They were really, really awful. I was super broke. Everything I tried, it just just didn’t seem to work, right. And I had a lot of energy. Trust me, like at that age, I was like, let’s do it all. But what started to work, though, was actually helping people and demystifying what real estate was to them what they thought it was right kind of debunk myths. And so you’ve probably heard me tell you the story. But you know, I was door knocking and the first like, 24 months door knocked on over 2000 homes. And not one of them said yes. And my brother was telling him like, Hey, I thought about quitting real estate. He’s like, Well, you know, let’s kind of talk about like, what are you doing? As if you want door knocking and I just basically asked people to sell their home and he said, so you don’t give them anything you just asked to be able to
show up in the front. You know what happened if some of the dads Chicago, you would get shot? I yeah, I
came close. I get close to that. Yes. So one without the Rottweiler, actually. And I heard what because I was carrying out this little American flags. So it was it was July 3, it was wearing, you know, full suit dress shoes. And I was determined to like, take over this neighborhood had like 400 homes in it. And I didn’t really think about my you know, whole setup there. But how these all little American flags and holding and putting them in the mailbox and then knocking on the door in the NASSCOM? Well, it got to a certain kind of point in the night where the sun was going down. I took out my shoes because I’m exhausted from walking around and dress shoes just really wasn’t thinking straight. And I hear this gate Creek open after I kind of put little American flag in a postcard. You hear like the scraping gun. And I was like, What is that? And then I turned to realize, well, it’s this giant Rottweiler that this family led axe, I thought it was breaking into their house. And so I ran with my dress shoes, all these little American flags, kind of like fluttering behind me. And I ran probably about I think three blocks down the car got into it and took off. And that that basic kind of summed up like three years of my real estate career was was a big one.
All right, folks, we’re talking about creating content. That is a story that I would tell right off the bat right there is just what Travis said, like, but this is what way back when you probably didn’t have the time to do that story effectively, like your cell phone wasn’t the camera quality was today. I want to title that I just got chased by a Rottweiler working. Here’s how I’m sorry, but everybody on your feed is gonna watch that shit.
Well, so the next day, I went in to the office, and everyone was gathered around the front desk. There’s like 17 people, because there’s a Monday, you know, that were the meeting that was coming up. And the receptionist was playing the message that was left by the guy that left the Rottweiler out saying, I just woke up check my mailbox. Thank you so much for the postcard. I just want to check on your agent and see if he’s okay. I think it’s so it was like right fit in there. I kind of made this decision. Um, okay, I’m not putting out quality content. I’m not actually doing any hard work except exhausting myself, which is really the fastest way to burn out. So I remember going up, we were hanging out with my brother. And I was telling them like, Hey, I’m gonna tell Mom and Dad, you know, that basically got a piece out of this whole real estate gig. And we were chopping wood up and up in the mountains, because that’s what we did up there is Yeah, we had chores. So he said, well, let’s let’s talk about what you know what you’re doing. This is one of the questions are getting a lot Messier deal. There’s a lot of people that are my age that are in moving into college, and they’re wondering how can they get into a house? Is their financing available? And he said I will tell me like so when was the last kind of homes he doordachte on and Did you do anything that kind of contributed that? Well, I was with a lender for the last 500 homes at door knock. And he had what’s called a kitty condo loan. And the kitty condo loan basically was this loan that you would cosign With your parents, as a college student, and they will give you basically a third kind of piggyback on their credit, and allow you to then buy a house, which is a countrywide product, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For those that read through it, and so, if that program, it was it was like 2.5, or 3%, down, FHA kind of loan. And so he helped me basically design a guide, because it gives me these questions from a from college kids, like, what’s equity? So like, what, why is it important, you know, or what’s a mortgage or what’s appreciation? And I think, you know, what, we need to really educate them. So they can, they can see the opportunity. So we created a guide called the basically, how to make those four years very, very profitable. And it was a guy that went over appreciation, equity and how to buy a property and over the next four or five years, what the average appreciation rate is how you’re going to basically make it out on top, right? How are you going to be able to make money to pay off your student loans, and that guy recreated it, and since then, we have a link to a website where they can then download a list of homes that qualified for all the properties, that would be FHA indicando, kind of approved around the local university area, which had 26,000 students. So last ditch attempt, you know, they had a couple of grand to spend, there was like the last of the money out there, put that out, we had the website that it was linked to that content, is what changed everything for me in my real estate career, people started reading it, they would go to the website, request a list of homes, they would, they’d contact their parents contact me. And then I sort of showing homes to the students around the local university. And they would want to see condos and townhouses. So basically taking these kind of projects and tenants projects in the now would bring more buyers there than the actual sales team to the point where where the developer said, he fired everybody on the spot, and said, I will give you basically the higher percent commission, right 7%, if you sell the whole building out in four months, if you don’t, your commission goes down, basically month by month directly after that. And so I did, and I sold the building out. And then because of that, I got another building, and then another building, to the point where we had over 100 million in inventory, kind of antennas projects over the next three to four years. And then that built all these different companies. And that’s basically where I cut my teeth on internet regeneration, basic marketing, landing pages. So when you talk about educational kind of content, think about the people that are posting just generic stuff out there that boilerplate, you know, kind of talking about interest rates, or some of those things, those that have a place in marketing, but typically, it’s not the kind of marketing that’s going to be able to solidify a bond relationship through digital marketing, where people are going to then comment, share, message you right and kind of ask questions. That’s more of like the direct response, Bond funnel type of content you send out via email or text, like, hey, just want to catch up and let you know, if you think
more database stuff to something to stay in front of your database, but not new customer acquisition,
no new customer acquisition. So I tell the story to really kind of position people’s brains, the you need to become the educator with part of your content. And then the rest of the convention be more of the humanizing element of storytelling, right? You know, the neighborhood that you grew up in a video of you walking through a community of a family that you just helped move in there in the school district, right information that people actually want to know that they’re too busy to actually research or digest in some sort of way. You need to be the steward of your community, and be able to position yourself as a tour guide. That actually happens to sell real estate.
Yep. And put it think let’s get out of real estate though. Just folks think about going to like, maybe you have to go to like a plastic surgeon, for example. And maybe I wanted to get my nose fixed or I don’t know, maybe my ears like hanging out here or something and I needed to get some fix. Now I don’t just go to any it’s like I’m not just gonna go and cross the border, go to Tijuana and be like, Yo walk into a plastic surgeon’s office but Yo, bro, you got me. Alright, cool, how much does it cost done? I’m gonna do my research and because that’s an important decision to make and because that’s a very emotional decision to make see the similarities here guys? I’m going to look for an expert. And I’m going to go online and I’m gonna start typing in a bunch of different shit how to fix your nose, how to DIY your knows how to do this, I’m gonna type in a bunch of questions. So what we’re talking about is creating content that people actually search for that creates value because when you answer someone’s question online, you become not just respected you become their fucking hero. That’s what we’re talking about. Let’s put this into perspective for real estate in the divorce market. So obviously Facebook, you can target people getting divorced and or whatnot. Now, if you are a realtor that has actually gone through a divorce scenario yourself, I’m sorry, but this is the only atom running because you don’t need more than what 2030 deals a year to have a good year. And in any given market, there’s well more than that many people getting divorced. Now, in a divorce situation, you know, people are going through what’s happening, they’re mad, they’re angry, the house is usually a cause of the issue and whatnot. So if you’ve gone through this story, I would create a video that says something like, hey, yeah, I, I’ve gone through divorce, too. And first off, you’re looking at me thinking like, hey, how do I know that? Well, I’m just targeting to do on Facebook, because I think it’s important to share the story with you, because I think it might help you out. Anyways, if you’re interested, here’s how it goes. But please write down right now. And I would just tell the fucking crying story, I’ll tell the whole sob story. I would not hold anything back. And I guarantee you through that own experience that you may have had going through divorce yourself. There are so tidbits of information that no other real estate agent and the best realtor in your market can even answer because there’s some stuff that you just have to experience to be able to teach it and live through it and share it.
Right. Yeah. Which one? Are you going to choose? Are you thinking of buying and selling in 2019? Or are you going to look at the one that says, how to sell your house during a divorce and make sure that everyone ends up happy?
Yeah, how to get rid of your husband, your house and your headache at the same time and make money. I’m clicking on that all day. That’s so funny.
Yeah, that’s the one you’re gonna gravitate towards, right? Because it solidifies that bond. It’s relevant, right to the actual audience, it’s those that are gonna still unaware of how Facebook marketing works. And targeting interests is that Facebook ad is an enormous amount of data, right through the behaviors and habits that you do online and offline. It’s so what happens there is that as you go through emails and messages, and type on comments, and like things and browse the internet, look at certain types of things that may interest you, all that data is collected, it basically kind of sifted through and put into a different category interest. So as you go through a certain life stage, and you may be going through a divorce, or you just have a kid or you just graduate from school, you become an actual targeted interest during the live stage. And then a couple of layers deep, you actually looking online@realtor.com, you downloaded the Zillow app, you’re starting to, you know, watch a few things on maybe Instagram of HGTV and chip into any gains, because you’re interested in redoing some of the living room to get ready to sell. But all of those things are clumped together and then put into different categories interests, that Facebook marketers like myself, then go in and select in a position that content to you at the right time, right, the right ad at the right time in the right place. And it needs to be highly relevant. So when Mike’s talking about you know, divorce couples and targeting them, well, that’s that’s part of it right is making sure that you have the right content that goes to the right audience. Now, that’s more targeted type of content. And when you target people like that, you’re gonna have a more refined and actually higher quality audience. But you can take that same type of advice and content in the drop that out organically to your personal page, your business page, and let people comment, like and share on that. So there is more, you know, more of a refined type of targeting when you really pull back the layers and Facebook and actually make sure that all right, do I have the right content to show to the right people to attract them? And how do you tell the story about you and how you can help them after that? Yeah, right. And this is what we call a funnel. So you have your top of funnel, which is that maybe that divorce engine, right? And then they download that guide, now you put them into a CRM, you have them on your facebook pixel, and then you retarget that audience with content that’s going to be relevant to their first touch point, right when they first did. So beyond that, then some of the content should probably be you know, based on will alpha stemming, essentially, from that original content and kind of cascading from it.
Totally, folks, that is a lot of info. There. I want to end this by just mentioning one thing. Don’t be scared to be who you are. I think when when we’re talking about this content and being authentic, like Don’t be scared to turn someone off. And remember this, you know, this quote is famous for a reason is that the jack of all trades is the master of none. And when you really try to target everybody, I don’t think you resonate with anyone, and you end up doing yourself a disservice. And even your clients at a service because you’re truly in your heart and you’re in you really believe that your involvement in the transaction actually helps people then it is your moral duty to get in front of the people. You want to help. That’s how an entrepreneur thinks that’s how a business person thinks. So don’t be scared to be you and ditch the front. That’s not working anymore. These busstop type of mentality and he’s billboard ads and all this other crap. I’m the best. I’m the best. No one gives a crap people care that you care. That’s it. All right. So Travis, awesome podcast. I love this topic, I think we could probably go for another 45 minutes and geek out. But I want to go ahead and leave a little bit of time to give you the floor. Go ahead and let people know how they can view how they can engage with you. And if you guys don’t know, if you want someone to run your Facebook ads for you, Travis, Tom is the guy to go ahead and do that. If you want us to create content for you, then we do that. But Travis is the guy with the Facebook funnels, and we can marry the two of them. Yeah, make a really awesome Facebook baby. Yeah, absolutely. We can make Facebook babies together. But Travis, go right ahead. log is yours.
If you are starting to venture into Facebook ads lead generation or you’re kind of a veteran and you’ve been doing it for a while but you want someone else to take it over. We are more than happy to talk to you and do a strategy call and kind of go over where you are what your process looks like. We run all kinds of campaigns, a job recruitment campaigns, buyers, lead generation campaigns, you name it, we’ve done it in some form or fashion. So more than happy to have you guys investigate with us and jump on the phone and talk to you and kind of go over what your goals are. If you want to get more information on what we do. Elevated our e m.com. Is our website. So elevated rem.com. That’s where you can see all of our services, we also do coaching. So the coaching is Facebook, lead generation coaching and Instagram, showing you the best type of marketing, we show you what we do in our agency, and then actually show you what’s working now, right best strategies updates. And then we actually have live support calls where we actually go through your ad campaign, and walk you through it or help you create that. So some of that we love doing very passionate about it. And if you have any questions just head over to elevated REM COMM And there’s a form on there, you can actually submit, talk to me. Cool, cool. And folks, thank
you for listening to another episode of the real estate marketing dude podcast. Thank you for making the show one of the tops this year and we’re continuing to grow it and this whole show has been done organically informed people like you. We’ve never promoted the show he never do anything with it. As you can tell, sometimes I film these in my bathroom. And that I want to say thank you for because you know if anything from what we’re talking about is quality content, we bring quality content on the show, and that’s why it’s done what it has done today. And I’m walking proof of what we’re just talking about right now because that’s when people can do that. And it’s all about quality authenticity. So folks, you guys know where to find us real estate marketing do.com show us some love leave us some reviews on this podcast. I’m actually am going to start promoting it this year. And show some love also social foster YouTube channel follow us on Instagram, Facebook, you name it. We’re there and if you want to see all of our content and what we’re doing to create content, follow us and you’ll be retargeted by us or by Travis we appreciate your time and if you guys are looking for video work personal branding, visit our site set up a demo with a dude and we will be in touch real estate marketing dude calm and thank you for listening to their episode and making the show this year what it was and we’re excited to keep going with it. It’s Travis pleasure, buddy. It’s always a great time. Happy New Year. Merry Christmas new your time off, guys. Thanks, guys. Bye.
Today’s episode may be over but we have plenty more to keep you busy. To get your complete blueprint for building out a real marketing plan for your real estate business. Head over to real estate marketing dude calm and see if you have what it takes to really become more than just a typical agent. Are you the next real estate marketing dude? Find out here next time on real estate marketing