Cost Effective Lead Generation Techniques
Not all lead generation techniques are free. Some of the best are free, but it is wise to intermix some paid forms of lead generation into your marketing mix as well. Let's talk about a few very "cost effective" ways of generating motivated seller leads.
Bandit Signs - Bandit signs are great way to generate instant leads from motivated sellers and I want to give you a few pointers to help you maximize this from of lead generation. Before I do that however let's talk about cost. Raw material cost, the sign itself will cost you about $2.50 a piece. That's for an 18 x 24 corrugated plastic bandit sign. I suggest getting horizontal flutes so they don't bend or wrap around the poles [if I just lost you don't worry, just tell them horizontal when you order, they will know what you mean]. I also recommend keeping your message simple. My signs read:
Yes, We Buy
Houses
1-800-Yes-We-Buy
I do not include my website address on my bandits. I feel it is too cluttered and plus, for this audience, my toll free vanity works just fine and is easy to remember. OK so lets talk about how to maximize your effectiveness with this type of lead generation.
Quality NOT Quantity - It's not about putting out ten gatrizillibillion signs! All that is going to do is piss people off, including neighbors and code enforcement officers. It is better to put out 50 quality signs than 250 crappy signs. Here is what makes a bandit sign location quality:
- High traffic location
- Reader must be at a stop - Traffic lights or stop signs are great.
- Angled correctly for easy reading
- High enough to not be ripped down by anyone walking by
When putting out bandit signs don't do it during the day. It is best to place bandit signs out at night and on Fridays in order to take advantage of the weekend traffic, plus code officers don't work weekends.
You can buy bandit signs at witness designs dot com for about $2.50 a piece.
Yard Signs - Next on the list of cost effective lead generation techniques are yard signs. Yard signs are a great way to get the word out that you buy houses. We suggest going with a 24 x 36 corrugated plastic sign with a steel frame. Total cost, including frame should be under $50 a piece. Our signs read:
Yes, We Buy Houses
Any Condition Any Situation
Call NOW! 1-800-Yes-We-Buy
www 1800YESWEBUY com
OK, so getting the signs made is easy. Now its time to put them into action and get them suckers making you some money. Here's where we place them:
- Small, privately owned business in high traffic intersections - typically we will pay the business owner $50 per month to allow us to place a sign in their yard. We also mandate that they allow us to place flyers within the business as well.
- Friends and family yards. My wife's grandmother lives on a very busy intersection and guess what sits out front of her house? You guessed it!
- All of your properties you own and / or have under contract better have a yard sign.
Banners - Banners are the same concept as yard signs but they are used when there is no place to place a yard sign or when you simply want to mix it up. These are made of vinyl and will typically cost around $200 a piece. We get 3 high and 6 - 8 foot wide.
Vehicular Advertising - Vehicular advertising is one of the most overlooked forms of lead generation out there. In my business right now we have 5 vehicles on the road at all times. I have 3 fully converted wrapped vehicles, 1 with banners affixed to the sides and 1 with magnets.
- Magnets will cost about $100 a set.
- Banners, depending on size will run $100 - $200. We affix them with Velcro tape.
- Fully converted vehicles and vehicle wraps will cost between $1,000 and $3,000 depending on the type of vehicle. Our way of doing it is simply taking it to Maaco, getting the vehicle painted "Saturn Yellow" and then having Fast Signs place vinyl lettering all over the vehicle.
At bare minimum you, your spouse, your kids, your staff, your friends, your contractors should have magnets and / or banners on their cars if not at all times, at least a portion of the time. OK, so maybe you take the magnets off of your sons car Friday night before date night, but besides that, they better be on there! And you my friend should have at least one fully converted vehicle that you drive around town all the time. Because I like luxury cars / trucks and cant drive junkers I bought a Toyota Landcrusier and had it completely converted. People around town thought I was nuts, and I guess I am.
Print Media -
Classified Ads - For the cost, in most cities, can you really afford NOT to be running a classified ad? In my town, it costs me $35 a week to run an ad in the Sunday paper that reads:
Yes, We Buy Houses
Any Condition Any Situation
Call Now 1-800-Yes-We-Buy
www 1800YESWEBUY com
Display Ads / Inserts / Post It Notes - Most publications offer a variety of additional options to advertisers, such as insert's, display ads and post it notes on the front page. While I have not had success with these types of advertising, I have a friend who finds 1 -2 deals per month, every month, by simply placing a display ad, 3 x 5 inches, on the front page of his real estate section of his local newspaper. Amazing!
Direct Mail - Direct mail, done correctly, can allow you to locate some of the best deals available in your market. Direct mail is so effective because you as the sender, have the ability to target specific groups of people who are likely to be receptive to your message. There are 3 key elements to successful direct mailings. They are:
- Market - Who are you sending this mailing to?
- Message - What are you going to say to your market?
- Match - Your message better match your market!
In today's day and age you can pull lists of all different types of possible motivated sellers. We use "List Source"to pull our lists. List Source is a service offered by First American. So let's say we pulled a list of all absentee owners in zip code 17109 who owned a multi unit property. What should our message say?
First off, you want to customize your piece as much as you can. You can accomplish this by having your print house include "variable data" into your piece. For instance instead if saying Dear Seller, you can pull data from a column of your list that says " Dear 1st Name" such as Dear Judy. You can also do things like mentioning the exact address the seller owns. So you could send a mailing that says
" Dear Judy. I am really interested in talking with you about your property located at 3421 Cashflow Street"
Isn't that a lot better than sending a piece that says "Dear Seller I want to buy your property"? Of course it is, and it is very easy to do in today's day and age. Now, back to the list. We have pulled a list of absentee owners in zip code 17109 who owned a multi unit property. Knowing this is our list we could send a mailing that looked like this:
"Dear Judy,
I am really interested in talking with you about your property located at 3421 Cashflow Street". I specialize in buying properties in the 17109 zip code and absolutely love Multi Unit properties, like yours!"
WOW! We called her by her name, mentioned the address she owns, told her we like the zip code her property is in and even mentioned the type of property it is! Now that's a custom direct mail piece, and doing your mailings in this manner, will drastically increase your response rate.
There's a bunch of different mailings you can do but most of them will fall into one of two categories. You'll either mail postcards or letters. If you are just starting out, I would recommend you mail postcards. They are easy to do and the cheapest. Costs are as follows:
Postcards -.35 -.50 each including design, printing, postage and delivery
Letters - $1.00 - $1.50 each including design, printing, postage and delivery
Door Hangers - Door hangers are a great way to target specific areas of town in a unique manner. There easy to do and very cost effective. You can buy door hangers for $400 or so for 1,000.
We usually pay our friends and family, especially starving college students, a $100 or so to canvass an area for 4 or 5 hours. They love the quick money and it gets our message out to hundreds of people instantly!
PPC Campaigns - PPC or Pay Per Click campaigns are an absolutely terrific way to drive motivated sellers to your website. Think of pay per click this way. If someone were to sell you advertising and ONLY charge you when a prospect walked into your store, would it be worth it? Of course it would, it's an advertisers dream come true and it also happens to be what Pay Per Click advertising does. Using PPC you are ONLY charged when a prospect shows up at your website. PPC campaigns can be complicated and you really need to know what you are doing but here's a few quick tips to help you begin this type of lead generation.
· There are 4 major sources of PPC traffic:
- Yahoo
- Bing
· You can set up your campaign so that only people in your geographic location see your ads, therefore you are not wasting money targeting sellers who live outside of your area. We call this "Geo-Targeting".
· Make sure your "Ads" match your "Keywords" you are bidding on. Example: If you are bidding on the keyword phrase: "Facing Foreclosure" then make sure your ad reads something similar to that. For instance your ad's headline could be "Are You Facing Foreclosure? The ad should always be relevant to the keyword you are bidding on.
· Set a small daily budget and see how it goes. You can spend as little as $5 a day.
· Set up "maximum cost per clicks". You can set it so that you never pay more than a certain amount of money for any one click. For instance you can set it up so that you never pay more than.50 per click for any keywords you are bidding on.
OK, so that does it for what I consider "cost effective" lead generation techniques. Our next topic, in our next article in focused on big baller type of advertising i.e. expensive stuff! Most of you won't use expensive advertising out of the gate, but its good to know about it and we'll cover that next.
Written by Zack Wiest
CEO of The Investing Cube
Zack Wiest is the Founder of The Investing Cube. The Investing Cube is believed to be the first ever full fledged Real Estate Investing Franchise Company dedicated exclusively to the business of wholesaling real estate. Zack has wholesaled over 811 properties since 2000 and continues to wholesale roughly 100 properties per year. His unique way of wholesaling has positioned him and his company as the premier wholesaler in all Pennsylvania, maybe the entire country. Zack has gone on to diversify his investing techniques to include rehabbing properties and long term buy and hold rentals. Zack is the definition of a true success story, someone who came from nothing and made a success of himself. To learn more about his company and the unprecedented real estate investing wholesale opportunity they offer, visit http://www.investingcube.biz/ right now. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Zack_C_Wiest |
