Latest / Cash Flow for Life / Chapter 24: Create a Marketing Presence
Transcript
- 00;00;00;06 - 00;00;27;03 Chapter 24 create a marketing presence. Marketing is an ongoing function of putting yourself and your business out there for the world to find, learn about, and do business with. Advertising, which is one facet of marketing, involves the placement of ads in media. We're going to talk about your overall marketing plan and the ways in which you will use it to grow your business. 00;00;27;05 - 00;00;49;24 And it's not just about growth, but also about presenting a professional image and a big business image, even if you're working out of your spare room. Very important. Develop your own business acumen. We're all about not spending a lot of money to present a professional image to the world, and we're all about doing it as efficiently as possible. 00;00;49;26 - 00;01;10;29 The good news is that most marketing has moved online into social media channels, which are often free for you, and they work right into your marketing plan. Another thing you'll find as you go through this chapter is that there is a great deal of interaction among the different places online where you'll be marketing. When you read the website section. 00;01;11;01 - 00;01;34;24 Get ready to hear about it again in the discussion of blogging and social networking. These come together in a way which makes it more efficient for you. Write it once. Use it multiple times. First though, let's look at print and other offline marketing because much of the good old standby stuff still works. Even in the age of the internet. 00;01;34;27 - 00;02;04;12 Business cards. Business cards are a portable billboard that shows you're really in business. When you meet contractors, property managers, mortgage brokers, insurance agent, and tenants. Having a professional looking business card with your business to aim on, it is often the first exposure they'll get to your business. Make it a good one. Classified ads. We discuss classified ads in the newspaper earlier, but we should talk about them again. 00;02;04;12 - 00;02;35;25 Now that you have much more business information under your belt with a frequency discount. Classified ads are not too expensive, and they can help you contact sellers, renters, and buyers. When using classified advertising to focus on building business instead of renting a specific property. Consistency is key. If you decide to place an ad saying that you buy houses, make sure that it runs in the same classified section on a regular basis, or at least weekly. 00;02;35;27 - 00;02;44;23 People get used to it being there, and you'll get business because they knew where to find you when the need arose for them. 00;02;44;26 - 00;03;19;09 Online marketplace platforms. We talked about the advantages of Craigslist and Facebook marketplace advertising earlier. We also mentioned using the search function to look for sellers and renters who have posted their ads or needs on different social media platforms. You'll want to run regular listings on different platforms, but be careful to abide by the site's rules, or you risk getting negative reactions from the other users, or even banned by the site administrators because it's online and has an excellent search utility. 00;03;19;13 - 00;03;41;23 You must place your property specific rental ads here. People will find them and you will get tenants and it's free. If you want to use your marketing to effectively build a buyers list, a seller's list and attendance list. Be sure to read our companion book, Quick Start to Cash Flow, where we go into building these lists in great detail. 00;03;41;26 - 00;04;13;15 Website. Now we're getting to one of your major marketing venues a website. The first myth to get past is that if you build it, they will come. Many people have an inflated idea of how a website will bring traffic from search engines. It can take months or years for that to happen if it ever even does. However, there are a number of excellent reasons why you need a website for your business, as well as other ways in which traffic is built. 00;04;13;17 - 00;04;52;23 Image marketing for the business, specific property marketing, photos, descriptions, etc.. Lead generation for tenants. Buyers and sellers. Tenant communication and interaction. Networking and community involvement. Saving you lots of time in the future. A website will allow you to present your overall business and showcase each rental property with multiple images and unlimited descriptions. You can even post videos of your properties, making that personal connection with someone before they decide to do business with you. 00;04;52;26 - 00;05;14;17 This is where the time saving factor comes into play. It is almost impossible these days to find someone who doesn't have high speed internet access and an email account by placing descriptions, photos, and even videos of your properties on your website. You can easily send a link to a prospective tenant that will present your property in its best light. 00;05;14;20 - 00;05;42;06 You could show the details without trying to explain it verbally or typing in a long email. There are more reasons for having a website, but just be assured that you should have a website if your business is to be taken seriously in this day and age. What's the cost? Websites, particularly template style sites that are simple to use, can cost as little as $10 a month or less, which includes hosting the site. 00;05;42;08 - 00;06;20;15 That space on a web server where the site lives. However, before you think about cost and before you think about the format of your website, you'll want to go through the next section. Let's see why. Blogs and blogging blogs, short for weblogs, came into being as online journals for people to share personal things with the world. However, once businesses found out all the benefits, blogs were catapulted into the mainstream and became very big players on the web, what benefits do they offer? 00;06;20;17 - 00;06;57;07 Well, here are a few. Helps drive traffic to your website. Helps convert traffic to leads. Helps establish your authority as a professional. Drives long term results. Content is easily created and managed in blog software. Unlike most websites, blogs don't require you to know or other programing language. The blogging software takes care of all of that. All that you need to do to pose a blog is use a page that looks very much like your word processor. 00;06;57;13 - 00;07;24;28 You can drop in text and images without any special formatting or coding knowledge. The ease of use of blogs encourages more frequent addition of content. Search engines like blogs for this reason, so blogs have become a good way to get better search engine position. Blogging platforms have now evolved to the point that the average web visitor can't tell the difference between a blog site and any other website. 00;07;25;01 - 00;07;52;00 Blogging allows you to easily post regular commentary about your business, the local market, improvements to your properties, and more. Basically, the things that your ideal customer will be looking for. The comments section of the blog platform encourages interaction with site visitors and with your tenants. If you're posting information for them from this point on, we're talking about WordPress features. 00;07;52;02 - 00;08;19;10 WordPress is now the most used blogging platform. It's used by millions of companies whose sites you visited and never even realized they were built on a blogging platform. So for your purpose, there is no need to differentiate between a blog and a website because you can get the benefits of both. If you build your site on WordPress, without going into technical detail, there are two ways to get a WordPress site. 00;08;19;12 - 00;08;48;00 WordPress.com. This is your all inclusive solution for a small monthly fee. Hosting site. Platform. Themes for design. The whole thing. You go to HTTP, colon, backslash, backslash, wordpress.com or simply just Google search WordPress.com and you could set up a site in minutes and then just learn how to use it from the help menu and the many books and websites on the topic. 00;08;48;03 - 00;09;09;11 WordPress.org WordPress is the site that supports self-hosted WordPress users. This means you aren't hosted by WordPress.com, but instead pay to host your site elsewhere. You gain some more control this way, as well as the ability to customize and enhance your site in almost any way you want. 00;09;09;14 - 00;09;38;01 There are numerous hosts who offer a quick and easy installation for free for WordPress software on their sites for as little as five bucks a month. So for an investment of as little as $60 per year, you can have a full featured website with huge storage capacity under your control. The website that's a blog. Remember, the visitor can't tell the difference, and you can do everything with a website hosted on a blog platform that you can do with a regular website. 00;09;38;06 - 00;10;00;10 Plus more. So let's assume that you're going this route and setting up your website on WordPress. The remainder of this section gives you ways in which to use the site for your business. We've already mentioned that you can upload great rental property ads with multiple photos, lots of descriptive text, and even a video of the property and neighborhood. 00;10;00;12 - 00;10;07;08 This much in a newspaper ad would cost hundreds of dollars, especially in color. 00;10;07;11 - 00;10;30;26 Documents and forms. You can host your documents right on your site. Let's think about prospective tenants who see one of your ads somewhere or arrive at your site. If they sent you an email for more information or an application, you can send them back to a download link of the application and a PDF form of your site. They then just print it and fill it out. 00;10;30;28 - 00;10;54;16 If they found your site and they're looking at a specific property, you can keep it up to date as to when it's due to come vacant. If this fits their timeline, they can go to the links right there with that property and download an application that's already set up for that specific unit. Requests for maintenance forms or any other form you would like for your tenants to use to communicate with. 00;10;54;16 - 00;11;21;10 You can be embedded to your site and filled out online. The completed forms show up in your email immediately and you can take action immediately. Providing a best in class service for your tenant customer. You can place links to pay via PayPal or any other system to collect rent via credit cards, debit cards, transfers, or checks. You can make announcements about property improvements as blog posts on the site. 00;11;21;13 - 00;11;52;20 This is both an advertisement for the unit and a marketing tool to show the world how well you maintain your properties. Action steps. Jot down a tentative marketing plan. Not too much detail yet. Just what you want to do and how quickly. Two research website and blog platforms and learn more about RSS, Facebook and Twitter. Three. Do some tentative wording for online advertising. 00;11;52;23 - 00;12;22;13 Look through different platforms for ideas for. Do some research on different advertising platforms to see what others are doing. Read lots of ads. See what works. See what you respond to and see what doesn't work. What's next? You've been introduced to and trained on effective and profitable techniques for your rental property investment business. It's now time to take a look at some more advanced property purchase techniques.