5x Your ROI + What’s New In PPC (pay-per-click)

Steve Trang: Everybody. Thank you for joining us for today's episode of Real Estate Disrupter. Today, we have Brandon Bateman back with Bateman Collective, and he flew in from Salt Lake City to talk about what's changed since you last came on to the show. When he was last came on, you know, we talked about Facebook and this and that. I told him that Facebook is a terrible idea, and it turns out that was one of our best ROI.

So we're gonna talk about that. If this is your first time tuning in, I'm Steve Trang, sales trainer, and we've helped hundreds of people every single month buy more houses at deeper margins. And I'm on a mission to create 100 millionaires. The question here all the time is how to become one of 100 millionaires, and information on this podcast alone is enough for you to become a millionaire in the next five to seven years. If you'll take consistent action, you will become one.

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And as a friendly reminder, this is a live show every Wednesday, 02:00 Arizona time. We don't change with, daylight savings. So 02:00 Arizona time, and we are hiring. So if you guys are looking to work with me and my companies, go to disruptors.com/hiring. And this is a live show, so please ask your questions for Brandon to answer.

You ready?

Brandon Bateman: Ready.

Steve: Alright. So first of all, welcome back.

Brandon: Thank you so much, Steve. Happy to be back.

Steve: The last time we did a show, there was a ton of questions and a ton of value. And, a few things have changed, since you were last on the show. So I remember we had a debate or I was unconvinced on Facebook. Mhmm. But you made a claim, right, at a mastermind that Facebook was the best.

You wanna elaborate on that?

Brandon: Yeah. I I remember that because that's where we met actually. Yeah. It was at that mastermind. Yeah.

I mean, Facebook I'm not gonna say it's a perfect marketing channel. Right? Every every marketing channel has its its has its problems. However, we do see that Facebook is our highest ROI channel across clients. Mhmm.

Last time we talked, I told you that was true in 2020. Now I'll tell you that was true in 2021 as well. Yeah. It's a it's a really strong channel. Now it's not the most scalable of all marketing channels.

Mhmm. It's not the highest lead quality. You know, that's why people that love Facebook, it's like it's almost like there's PPC junkies. I don't know if you noticed that. Like people either like the people that like PPC Yeah.

You know that they like PPC because they won't ever shut up about it.

Steve: It's like a CrossFit or vegans.

Brandon: Vegas. Yeah. Exactly. That's that's exactly how PPC is. Yeah.

Facebook doesn't have that cult following like those other channels do. Yeah. Because like the leads aren't just they're not quite quite as high quality as those other channels, so they're not quite as addictive, so to speak. Right. But the cost is good.

Yeah. So if we're looking at it overall, it tends to be the highest ROI channel. I consider it low hanging fruit in any market,

Steve: you know.

Brandon: So we love to integrate that in.

Steve: So but the reason why you think is the highest ROI what what what other reasons why it's the highest ROI?

Brandon: So, if we just look at the numbers, and these are kinda round numbers, but they they tend to hover pretty close to this. The the Facebook cost per lead on average is about one third of a PPC cost per lead.

Steve: Yeah.

Brandon: The lead conversion is about half of of a PPC lead conversion. Yeah. And the deals tend to be a little bit bigger than PPC deals because they're not quite as competitive.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: Yes, they're less motivated. They're also less competitive. In most markets, the fact that they're less competitive is a bigger factor than the lower motivation, and therefore the deals are bigger. So you add those things together and you say it's a third the cost but half the quality, and maybe the deals are a little bit bigger. That's what tends to make the ROI a little bit better with

Steve: So I guess

Brandon: for me,

Steve: you know, the biggest thing, the reason why I like Google, you know, big nerd on direct response marketing.

Brandon: Mhmm. Right?

Steve: Like, hey. These people want to do something. They want to take action Mhmm. Right now. Right?

So let's talk to them. And so your argument is that, yeah, they wanna talk to somebody right now, but it's not just one person. I'll I'll talk to a

Brandon: lot of people

Steve: right now.

Brandon: Often, yes. Right. Anybody who's listening to this who has managed PPC leads can probably attest to the point that it's pretty rare Yeah. That that seller is just just reached out to you when they saw that whole list of 10 different people to reach out to on Google.

Steve: But on Facebook, when they show up, there's not a lot of other competitors.

Brandon: That's right. I mean, your ad shows to them and it doesn't show next to someone's ad. Yeah. So, I mean, you'll you'll reach them. Your competitor could target them too, but they won't necessarily target them at the same time as you versus PPC where you're going to have four of you just showing up right there in a row, right when someone's looking.

And, you know, that encourages people to to look around a little bit more. I love PPC too, you know, it's it's different. I I love that direct response aspect. That's the reason that the leads are way better quality, but everybody also likes that. And because of that, it gets expensive.

Steve: So I know that, you know, we kinda had an moment last month. Right? Because we sat down and we looked at all the revenue. And we should do this more often, but, you know, we actually had some technical challenges. So we're able to just sit down and break out.

Brandon: Mhmm.

Steve: So for 2021 and you get again, you say it's hardest to scale. So last year, we did, I wanna say, a 150,000

Brandon: Mhmm.

Steve: In wholesale revenue for Facebook off of 28,000 in spend.

Brandon: Mhmm. So it's

Steve: a five x ROI. Is that what you find consistently with your other clients, or what do you typically find?

Brandon: In terms of, like, the the ROI multiple? Yeah. The really tough thing about the ROI numbers is it's incredibly dependent on what else you're doing. Mhmm. So let's just say, theoretically, you're going to be flipping things instead of wholesaling them.

Bam. Your ROI just doubled. And the marketing did the exact same thing. Right? Or if you're twice as good at closing leads.

Steve: Yeah.

Brandon: Or if you're better at buying lead buying deals deeper Mhmm. Than someone else. So the I guess my best benchmark could be on wholesale. Yeah. Just because the way I encourage our clients to calculate ROI if they are doing flips is to think what would the wholesale have been on this property, and then calculate the ROI based on that.

Because they always have the opportunity of buying a property from another wholesaler. Right. So based on that, five x I'd say for Facebook for the kind of budget that you were using Mhmm. Is I'd I'd say relatively typical. We see Facebook anywhere from three to seven really commonly, and five's right in the middle.

But if you remember, we also did kind of a forward looking analysis with that Yeah. Where we looked at how should your ROI change if you were to change your budget.

Steve: We did. We saw that.

Brandon: Yeah. And there are actually, when we looked at it, you'd make more money if it wasn't a five x. We were shooting more for a three x Mhmm. But you would have a lot more volume. Yeah.

So there's always that trade off, like budget's a big factor there.

Steve: Yeah. I think when we looked at it after breaking down numbers, you know, we we've been spending about 3,700 a month. Now we said, you know what? If this is what we're getting for 3,700 a month, let's go to 5,500 a month. Right?

Our ROIs can go from five to four, but it doesn't matter because we're gonna be making a lot more money off this channel.

Brandon: Yeah. Exactly. So we've modeled that out. Right? We showed this is kinda what the ad spend is.

This is the money you're paying your acquisitions managers. This is how we expect the diminishing marginal return to take effect, just based on our data from other clients of how strong we see that being. And then you can kinda get at, you know, where do you maximize profits, where do you maximize ROI, all that kind of stuff. Well,

Steve: that kinda goes back to you're saying, like, it's easier to scale Google PPC is a little harder to scale Facebook PPC.

Brandon: Well, actually, Google scales more than Facebook does. And it is backwards because most industries, that's not true. Because Google, you're limited by search volumes versus Facebook, you're theoretically only limited by the number of people in the world. So if you're looking at most industries, Facebook, because that's demand generation versus demand capture, which you have on Google, you can generate unlimited demand virtually. But the weird thing about this industry is PPC search volumes are high enough, and it's competitive enough and expensive enough that you can spend a lot more money on it.

Where on Facebook, you'd just be reaching the same people 15 times and Or

Steve: you're gonna show the ad over and over again?

Brandon: Yeah. Exactly. Because Facebook's just so cheap, and markets are only so big. Yeah. PPC, there's a lot more volume.

So there.

Steve: For people that are doing PPC right now. Right? So, because there's a good argument to be made if you're smaller and maybe you wanna do this yourself initially. Right? Because it's not cheap to get a quality, manager.

Brandon: Yeah.

Steve: Right? So if you're learning on your own, whether you're reading Perry Marshall or you're reading some other stuff on on on PPC, what is it that you commonly see when you're consulting or taking over account that most people get wrong doing their own PPC?

Brandon: This is a tough question. Because the thing about PPC is there's a 100 things to do right, and if you do one wrong, it's all screwed up. Yeah. Right? So there's, you know, I I can list a bunch of things here, and people will do those, and that won't necessarily get them in a good spot because there's just so many things you have to get right.

But looking in general, you know, because we're I mean, we work with people who have worked with other agencies before working with us, done it themselves, all that kind of stuff. What do they need to do to to be successful? Number one, get the marketing right. And I know that sounds almost like a weird answer to your question, but it's because we see that a lot of people are are screwing up on the back end when they get the leads too. But when it comes to getting the marketing right, I think the easiest way to do it is to hire a professional and actually listen to them.

You'd be surprised how many people hire a professional, but when they give them advice, they don't actually listen to it. So listen to them. That's that's a prerequisite. Right? You have to you have to otherwise, don't hire someone.

Right. And and a lot of those things will be taken care of. But beyond that, as for what people are doing, I go in accounts all the time, and we see that in this past year, Google has changed their their definitions of keywords a lot. So they're matching a lot of what's called search terms to keywords that they weren't previously. Meaning, let's just say you tell Google you have this keyword, we buy houses.

Google might match a search term. A search term is what someone actually searches into the search engine Mhmm. To that keyword. And they recently, not super recently, announced that, yeah, we're gonna kinda listen to what your keywords are, but also just anything else that we think we should put into that bucket with that keyword. So maybe someone searches buy houses instead of we buy houses, and Google says, oh, the we What's that?

That's not, it's not that important of a word, right? Yeah. You just that's fine, yeah. We'll pay $50 for the click. Let's do it.

And you just paid $50 for a click of someone who actually wants to buy a house. Potentially a Okay. Or something like that. So I see so many accounts with just screwed up search terms, where they're paying for all this stuff that they don't mean to pay for, and their keyword list looks fine, but their negative keyword list is far too small.

Steve: Got it.

Brandon: So what we do, just to to give you a little bit of insight into the process, we analyze frequently all of the search terms from all of the accounts that we manage. Mhmm. And we do this in more than 80 markets right now. And we aggregate all of that data. Anytime we see something triggering for a keyword that we know isn't good, we will exclude it from all of those accounts at the same time.

Steve: So you have a master negative list.

Brandon: And we've been doing that for three years.

Steve: Yeah. So it's pretty clean.

Brandon: So there's a lot of stuff. Our our our negative keyword list is at least a 100 times longer than our keyword list.

Steve: So let's explain to everyone what a negative keyword is because I think we're playing some inside baseball here.

Brandon: Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. So a negative keyword is when you tell Google that you don't want something in particular. So let's just say your keyword is we buy houses.

Google says, buy houses close enough. We'll take that. Then what you can do is you can add buy houses as a negative keyword. Mhmm. Another thing that we do, for example, something that anybody could do, When we launch for example your ads in Phoenix, we add as negative keywords every single state outside of Arizona.

Because if someone's in Phoenix but they're searching sell a house in Florida, you don't want that lead. Right? We also add all the abbreviations of the state. We also add every major city that exists in The United States outside of your core area. So, like, that's another example of where negative keywords could be relevant is is controlling those locations.

Steve: You know, I remember long, long time ago when I was doing my own stuff doing my own management. I still remember, like, I would have to go in, add all the negative keywords, like, even, like, mobile, like because we weren't doing land or mobile homes, so I had to go add mobile. I had to add land.

Brandon: I

Steve: had to add cars. Right? Mhmm. And I don't know why, like, Toyotas and Hondas are showing up. Like, I'm not bidding on these keywords, but, you know, like, I do the broad match just kinda do a catch all and then add the negative keywords to get remove those.

But to find what other words people are using and man, I had all these different makes and models that had

Brandon: to Yeah. It takes a really long time. That's what people don't realize about that whole process, is if you're gonna do it yourself Mhmm. You've got to be prepared to be in Google every day adding negative keywords Yeah. For a period of many, many months until you can actually clean up your traffic.

Right. And some people just aren't prepared for that when they start doing PPC. So it's So it's a it's a barrier.

Steve: So just to dumb it down real quick, the difference between search terms and keywords.

Brandon: Mhmm. A search term is what someone actually typed into Google Mhmm. That triggered your ad.

Steve: Got it.

Brandon: A keyword is what you told Google you wanted.

Steve: So search terms is what you they intended. When they typed it in, they went to google.com. What they intended, that's the search term.

Brandon: Exactly.

Steve: Keyword is your is the list you give to Google. It's like, hey. If it matches any of these, send it to me.

Brandon: Yes. Exactly.

Steve: Got it.

Brandon: And the really weird thing about this I mean, you'll hear people talking about long tail keywords and and stuff like that. I don't think anybody realizes how different people are. Like, we like to put people in boxes. We like to say this person's gonna search like this. These are the things that we wanna show up on.

The the crazy thing is over 80% of the leads that we generate for clients are leads are search terms that only got one click in the entire history of the account. Some weird thing that you never thought of before. Mhmm. And it's it's crazy. So that's where you have to always think, like, over I calculated once, 88% of the traffic in Google Ads is, if you're doing your keyword strategy right, is stuff that only has one click in the account.

88%. Yeah. It's insane, you know? It's only 12% of the stuff that's like sell my house fast. You know?

Exactly like that. Or we bagged the houses or Yeah. You know, some of the stuff that you think is, you know, the stuff you want.

Steve: Well, because I know I I I love this conversation because, you know, I was gonna bring up, like, because, Robert Wenzel's on the show when he talked about, you know, returning ad spend. We'll get to that in a bit. But I still remember, like, there were some certain keywords like, oh, man. Like, that is an

Brandon: awesome long tail keyword.

Steve: Let's put that in quotes and brackets Mhmm. And it's bid really high on that. Mhmm. And then it never it gets clicked on again.

Brandon: Yeah. Because it doesn't have a yeah. It doesn't have the volume. Right. So, I mean, we could get so deep into this.

If anybody really, really cares about this, reach out to me. We've got, I mean, we've got a whole methodology called minimum viable volume around this. We built a software called Lever 11. That's a machine learning analytics software that that predicts basically the likelihood of someone selling their house based on the things that they type into Google, even for things that have never been been seen before, based on intent. So there's there's a lot of, you know, you can get so deep into this.

It it's ridiculous. But the point is, you know, bringing back to what you what we were talking about, it's it really is about, can you get the right quality traffic? But the thing is when I'm going in and I'm auditing these accounts where that's the problem, you know, we could talk all about, like, the campaign structures. We could talk about the bid strategies, about the ads, if the landing page is good, but none of that even matters if your search terms aren't good. Yeah.

So it's like, I'm usually just like, oh, I'm sorry, but this this is junk and therefore, nothing else matters. Fix this.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: And then we should talk about the other stuff that you can do. So that's, like, probably, like, the the most avoidable one that I'm seeing. Mhmm. But there's all kinds of

Steve: Yeah. So that's the one you see typically the search terms are not excellent, and maybe they're not listening to their consultant that they paid a good amount of money for. What else are you seeing that's a big big mistake?

Brandon: This one's almost a little bit unfair because you can't exactly do this yourself.

Steve: But Right.

Brandon: But the the tough thing is you need a lot of data in in Google Ads. So I see a few things happening. One, people just putting random bids for their keywords because they don't know what they should be, or even worse, just bidding whatever you have to. Just what what what are these going for? Yeah.

I'll just pay that.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: As if that's, like, a strategy. Right? Like, what's what someone else is willing to pay? It has nothing to do with what it's worth, in my experience.

Steve: It's, it's not ideal.

Brandon: Yeah. It's not ideal. So so I think you I think a strong strategy behind the bidding Mhmm. Is is really important. Something that has changed since we last talked, actually.

We last talked in February 2021. Okay. Google in February 2021 released something called cross account portfolio level bid strategies. And I know it sounds like a whole bunch

Steve: of Sounds really fancy.

Brandon: Mumbo jumbo, but Yeah. The the point is these these bid strategies are the the single most effective thing that we've been using in accounts recently. Mhmm. Basically what this does So to give you some context of the landscape of PPC and what you were stuck doing before. You had manual strategies, which I'm sure you're very familiar with because that was kind of like your age of Google.

Steve: Yeah. When I'm dating myself. Yeah.

Brandon: Yeah. So that's like you say, I want to pay for this keyword and I want to pay up to this much. And if you get the, you know, if you win the bid, you win the bid. There's also automated bid strategies.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: The way an automated strategy works is you tell Google what you want.

Steve: They're like the valet service. Like, here's my keys.

Brandon: Yes.

Steve: Go ahead and run this campaign you think is best for me.

Brandon: Mhmm. Exactly. So there's different ones. Like, popular ones would be, like, maximize clicks where where you just tell Google, here's my keyword, here's my keywords, just give me as many clicks as you can. Mhmm.

Or you say maximize conversions, I want as many leads as I can Mhmm. Given this budget and given these keywords. The the thing about those bid strategies, if you talk to people that spend a lot of money in Google Ads, because I came kinda from that side of the world. Yeah. I I worked with companies before I focused on real estate spending literally millions of dollars a month in Google Ads.

You talk to anybody in that range, they don't touch manual strategies. Alright. And the reason is the automated strategies work really really well. The problem is, if you just start up a Google Ads account and you turn on, maximize conversions bid strategy, you are going to be appalled that you just paid $400 for that click. Because the algorithm's learning, and the sad part that they don't tell you is with the amount of data that you get in this industry every month, the algorithm's gonna be learning for, like, two years.

Got it. It's not gonna really get there. Now, of course, you'll be better off in month two than you were in month one, etcetera. But

Steve: this goes back to what you're saying the cross

Brandon: Cross account. So so how this works is we have an account with Google.

Steve: Mhmm. It's

Brandon: called a parent account. And it has child accounts.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: Those child accounts belong to our clients, but they utilize bid strategies that are held on the parent account level. So all of our clients pool their data into this bid strategy and essentially can feed the machine learning about the different likelihood of conversion for for these different keywords and and stuff like that, where where you need to be bidding. And then the algorithm gets extremely smart.

Steve: Got it.

Brandon: And those strategies have been beating anything else we can do.

Steve: Because they have they have more data to feed the beast.

Brandon: Yes. The algorithm's always gonna be better at bidding than even the best manual bidder. So it has enough data. That's the qualifier.

Steve: But manual still exists.

Brandon: Yeah. And and we actually do have manual working better in some markets. It's it's rare, though.

Steve: I'm asking this question because, like, one of the best things I did right? Because I'm gonna ask you a question about, like, if you're new. One of the things that worked really well for me Mhmm. Was I was bidding on the keyword, we buy ugly houses.

Brandon: Mhmm.

Steve: Right? And I was paying up to $10. Right? And for me, I didn't care if someone clicked on that day that day or not. All I wanted was that one moment

Brandon: Yeah.

Steve: Where everyone's ads were spent for the day, and then my $10 would show up. Right?

Brandon: Yeah.

Steve: It wasn't a lot. But for $300 a month, I was getting a decent amount of leads.

Brandon: Yeah.

Steve: Right? Because I I was converting. I don't know what your conversion is right now, but when I was doing myself, it was I was converting about, I wanna say, one in six people that land on the site, gave me their information.

Brandon: That's good.

Steve: Right?

Brandon: Yeah.

Steve: So for $10, I was spending about $60 per lead. So that's something that I did back in the day when I was budget limited.

Brandon: Mhmm. So Yeah. Google's gotten a little smarter, unfortunately. They, you you know, apparently, they just want revenue to increase. There's some pressure from certain stakeholders or something like that.

You know, the profits, weird company stuff.

Steve: Profits of everything. Yeah.

Brandon: For sure. So so anyways, they're they're a little bit smarter than that. There used to be almost, like, two methods that you could bid with. You could have accelerated Mhmm. Or standard bidding.

And and accelerated worked as, you know, you just spend your budget as as the opportunities come. Standard spread it out a little bit more. And Google used to be cheap at night when people's daily budgets ran out. And then Google looked at that and they're like, that doesn't make any sense. Right.

So now what happens is people's budgets are spread out a little bit more. Mhmm. Let's just say your bids were at a point that you were gonna run out of budget halfway through the day. Mhmm. What happens instead is that you just get entered into every other auction instead of every auction.

So there really isn't like a cheaper time of

Steve: of day and night. That's unfortunate.

Brandon: There are a fair number of invest of investors that only run their ads during business hours. Mhmm. So it does tend to be a little bit cheaper in the times when other people don't want to be managing leads.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: So there's there's a little bit of truth to that.

Steve: Because it is it makes sense if you're running an operation without VAs to take calls at all hours of the day to not be bidding at 02:00 in the morning. Yeah. Because for me, I used to again, back back in the day, like, I always have my ads turned off at 10:30 at night and then turned back on at 8AM.

Brandon: Yeah.

Steve: Alright. So, right now, you're probably familiar with this, and this might actually be health free business. I don't know. But, a lot of providers are stopping texting.

Brandon: Yeah. I I'm aware.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, TCPA, whatever and this is not like it's new. It's just people are finally, like, saying, hey. Let's not do this anymore.

Brandon: Yeah. Yeah. Because I remember last time I was on this podcast, almost a year ago Yeah. I got I I talked to at least 50 people that reached out to me from that podcast. They were like, texting is gonna go away.

I need to fix this. And then it just didn't. What was it? There was supposed to be something that happened in June or something. It was

Steve: supposed to be January. Right?

Brandon: The whole Oh, it was a June.

Steve: It was supposed to change, but it didn't. But anyway So

Brandon: it's just overdue. But

Steve: So then come December, some major providers have said, hey, guys. If you don't wanna keep texting, go somewhere else. Right? So I've gotten messages, you know, on Instagram and Facebook and so on. Like, hey.

What should I do now? And I've been advising them, so I could be totally wrong here. I say, hey. You can do PPC because I can't direct them to TV. Right?

That's too expensive. I can't direct them to direct mail because direct mail, you gotta be ready to spend for six months. If you're not ready to spend for six months, it's kind of a huge commitment, especially talking about the list providers. Like, the list providers are not a low barrier to entry. Right?

Brandon: Mhmm.

Steve: So then there's cold calling and there's PPC.

Brandon: Mhmm.

Steve: So I've been directing PPC. Am I giving them bad advice?

Brandon: So this is for a newer investor?

Steve: Not a newer investor. Someone that's like, hey, texting has been my main source of business, and that is gone.

Brandon: Yeah. This is a this is a hard one because we've worked with a lot of people like that. Here's what I can tell you. Texting is cheap. Mhmm.

It's cheaper than PPC.

Steve: Right. But if texting is

Brandon: the dialed out Yeah. There there's a few things. One, I mean, cold call is gonna be an easier transition from texting than a lot of other channels because you're used to skip tracing, getting the data. You're used to those low quality prospecting type leads Mhmm. And your acquisitions process might be built for those.

So that's kind of the first thing I would look towards. Mhmm. But there's something about being in a marketing channel where you're doing something that people don't really want you to be doing that's not very comforting. That's the reason texting is going away. Right.

And cold calls are not necessarily immune to that. Right? I'd like

Steve: to It's not. But people, are tolerating it.

Brandon: Yeah. People are tolerating it more than they did texting. But Yeah. My point with that being, I, when selecting marketing channels, would look beyond next month. Mhmm.

I know it's kinda hard, but I would look far into the future. And when you're looking far into the future, digital channels are growing. That's the trend. Right. Cold call, texting, telemarketing is dying.

Mhmm. That's the trend. So there's theoretically a lot of value there. But to switch from a texting driven company to a digital marketing driven company is a lot more than just taking some money and putting it into a different channel.

Steve: So taking 1,500 from texting, which we were doing before when you're running, like, solopreneur or a small operation.

Brandon: Yeah.

Steve: Take 1,500 from texting, you know, pulling a list, skip tracing it Mhmm. And text blasting it. Taking that and just dumping in the PPC, you're saying, is not necessarily Mhmm. A a a the the wise thing to do.

Brandon: Yeah. I don't think it's a plan for success. Okay. So you need to if you're gonna do digital marketing, you have to prepare your business operation for digital marketing. I can tell you the the operations that you would have from texting are gonna be way different.

You're gonna be way heavier on staff, and you're going to be it's almost like the with texting, you start with the leads. Mhmm. Right? And your whole job is to sift through those and find the good ones.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: And you assume that every lead is crap until you can prove that it's not. Digital marketing just it's different. Right. You have to train your team differently. You have to assume that a lead is motivated until you can absolutely prove that that lead isn't.

You have to go on every appointment. You have to be quick, like and we could talk about all the stuff, but you need to retrain your team on that kind of thing. And the other thing is, for most people, I wouldn't recommend PPC specifically in that scenario. I'd say Facebook is the channel to look to if your budget is small. And to give you an idea of like what I consider a small budget, the minimum budget we work with as a company is like $3,000 a month all in.

By the time they pay for our fees, by the time they they pay for ad spend, all that kind of stuff. And at that budget range, I wouldn't really recommend PPC. I think PPC often needs a little bit more budget. The only exception there being someone who does some type of wide form of advertising geographically. Like if you're doing it like on a nationwide basis or Got it.

In several states or something like that, which can be a good strategy. That's where PPC is a little bit more, a little bit more forgiving. But the tough thing with a small budget on PPC is you get a small number of leads. Mhmm. And it's, I mean, the return's there.

If you look over a really long time period, people don't tend to do that though. Alright. And it's just like you said with mail, It's the same thing with digital. You gotta give it that

Steve: six months. Of the belief that if you're gonna go into digital, like, strap on, this is gonna be a ride. This is not, like, an instant, it's not instant noodle. This is not microwave success.

Brandon: Yeah. I mean, the thing the thing about it is I am I'm a very conservative person. Right? You're gonna probably talk to a lot of people who will tell you, oh, it's super easy. You just turn it on and I got all these deals.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: And, you know, that does happen sometimes. Mhmm. But to have that as your strategy is to put the success of your business in the hands of luck Right. Basically. Because things don't always work right away.

I prefer to use a repeatable process that consistently produces success. So if you look at, I'm like, some people will have success in a short time period. But if you look at the percentage of people that will be successful in a longer time period, basically the longer the time period, the more likely it is. Yeah. And I would rather bet on something that's more sure and be more into it than I would kinda dabble and pull out if it doesn't work right away.

Steve: And, guys, this is a very technical topic, so please ask your questions. Do not be shy to to ask. So Mhmm. Corey L. Lincoln on YouTube.

Is digital marketing an expensive avenue more so than texting and cold calling?

Brandon: I could tell you, if you look at a bunch of companies and you look at cost per deal, most often digital marketing is a higher cost per deal. Mhmm. And that's what how a lot of people consider expense. But that doesn't take into account all the factors. There is a silent cost to any marketing channel in the focus that it takes from you as an entrepreneur, from your management team, in the resources that it takes from a lead management perspective, from an acquisitions perspective, in the time that it takes for the money to turn around Yeah.

In the size of the deals that you get. So that's the thing is digital marketing is gonna be better on all of those things I mentioned

Steve: So margin.

Brandon: Except for

Steve: the month per deal. Margin, cash conversion cycle.

Brandon: Mhmm.

Steve: The managing the the people.

Brandon: Yeah. You'd be surprised how many people I talk to Mhmm. That are just stuck with cold call. And they have success and their cost per deal is low, but they can't scale their company because it's difficult to scale cold calling. You you think you have it figured out and then someone quits.

And you can't seem to train people more at scale, and then of course you have that hypothetical cold call manager position that exists in the company that unless you're gonna hire someone for that, you're gonna be doing that. And by the time you hire someone qualified for that, the cost per deal is not gonna look as good. The thing is I I feel like cold call is a really good return on your money, and that's why it's a high ROI channel. Mhmm. It's not as good of a return on your time.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: I think of digital marketing as a way to make your money work for you. Stack incremental success, incremental deal flow, and incremental profits on top of whatever you're doing for those channels. Yeah. But it's not gonna be as cheap on a per deal basis. You get bigger deals.

I mean, I have clients that have a single acquisitions person that does a 100 deals a year. Wow. When they rely on inbound marketing.

Steve: Got it.

Brandon: Outbound, you're never gonna accomplish that. It's impossible. Right?

Steve: Yeah. So They're gonna burn out way before then.

Brandon: Yeah. So the point there being, there there is way way more to a marketing channel than the raw cost of, you know, your data and your ads and all that kind of stuff versus the amount of money you get in.

Steve: So if you're having done PPC before and you're transitioning, don't jump into Google PPC if you're just transitioning from texting. And you've been if you're spending $2.02, 3,000 a month, don't just dump it into PPC. So whoever I I gave that advice was really poor advice.

Brandon: Well, I'm not saying you were wrong with that. I'm just saying it's more than just taking money from one place and just spending it somewhere else.

Steve: There's gonna be a lot of other things you're gonna have to overhaul.

Brandon: I would invest because because we talked before about and we didn't finish that part, but I I talked about the two things that you need to do to be successful. Mhmm. It's basically those are gonna be true for for someone doing this. Number one, you're going to need to get the marketing right. I honestly don't recommend dabbling in PPC because it'll steal your money.

Yeah. You need to Google has a way of maximizing your expenses. Yeah. I talked to someone the other day that spent, like, $30 in three days on accident, and then they're like, oh, shoot. PPC doesn't work.

It's now, of course, your story could be less tough than that, but, like, the the thing about hiring an expert is sometimes people look at it and they're like, it's not cheap. That's the reality of it. But you know what's more expensive? Marketing that doesn't work. Yeah.

So hire a professional, get it done right, and then number two, get acquisitions done right. And to to I know we kind of, like, danced around a little bit, but just to provide, like, the the full insight of what we're seeing there. So we we are doing this in more than 80 markets. We have our clients report to us how many leads they're closing. And we, of course, know what keywords they came from and audiences on Facebook and all that kind of stuff.

And pretty much everybody I work with thinks they have the best acquisitions team that has ever existed. And to be fair, if you're gonna have the best acquisitions team that ever existed, you have to think that way. Right? So so I don't blame them. Right?

I think that's great. But bringing it back to reality a little bit, some of them statistically do significantly better than others. And just having a good acquisitions team doesn't mean you have an acquisitions team that is good at digital marketing. So there's three things that we find our clients that are doing exceptionally well have in common. Number one is urgency.

When a lead comes in, you remember this when you had Cody here Yeah. Last time, how how much he harped on this. Urgency is so key. Like if you go go to his office, his acquisitions people literally, they don't even put their phone in their pocket. They have it on a holster.

It's like a quick draw when a lead comes in because they are so fast, and and they wanna be at the other guys.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: Because if it's a digital lead, they know it's more likely to be a deal Yeah. Than some other lead, and it's more likely to be a big a big commission. But urgency is really really important. And the crazy thing about this is I I talk to people sometimes, they're like, oh, I get to the lead super quick, like always within an hour. I'm just like, oh my goodness.

Like, yeah, like like four years ago, sure. That that would have worked. But the the thing about urgency on PPC is that you have to assume that other people have the same lead.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: So just just picture it like this. Maybe someone's going through the PPC results, they reached out to someone else. Mhmm. Now sixty seconds later, they reach out to you. Yeah.

For you to call that person before they call that person, if they're gonna call that person in two minutes, you have to call them in one minute because you already have a disadvantage. Mhmm. And there's gonna be someone else who they reach out to after you. Yeah. Unless you can call them before they can do that.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: The point is urgency gets rid of competition. It's not about the patience of the seller. It's not like they're just gonna be upset that they had to wait five minutes to get a phone call. It's that their phone's gonna be buzzing in their pocket while they're signing a contract with your competitor. Yeah.

I just talked to a client the the other day that said they got this lead, and they they called the seller right away. And the seller said, I don't have time for an appointment today. Can you come tomorrow? Tomorrow comes around, they go there, They say, I'm sorry. I sold the house.

So it's not just on the leads. Yeah. It's on the appointments too. There's there's a lot of urgency to that. So I think urgency overall, extremely important.

Steve: Sure.

Brandon: The second thing, assuming motivation. If we look at our clients that are, like, just the mindset of the teams of those that are doing really well with lead conversion versus not as well. We consistently do have teams that were heavy on cold call, heavy on text, struggle with the idea of assuming that a lead is motivated until you can prove it it's not.

Steve: Right. Well, they've been programmed and trained Mhmm. To, like, really disqualify or really qualify and make sure this guy is a real not a tire kicker.

Brandon: Yeah. Assuming motivation Mhmm. In cold call is a recipe to put yourself out of business because you're gonna have a thousand appointments and you're gonna close two

Steve: of them. Heartbreak and stress and

Brandon: It's it's really hard. Yeah. In digital marketing, this is a whole different game. To tell you a story, we worked with a client recently. They were doing Facebook ads.

They we spent a lot of money with them, probably $40 over four months. Mhmm. And they had zero deals. And I asked them what's going on because I saw tons of leads. And they said, the leads aren't qualified.

So we dug into what exactly are your qualification criteria. The only thing that we changed is we told them when a lead comes in, we want you to set an appointment if it's someone who has a house to sell. Yeah. Don't worry. We just did a thirty day challenge at first.

We're like, just I know you're afraid of wasting time. Mhmm. Just do it for thirty days, and let's see what happens. Yeah. Turns out their appointment after they started doing that, their appointment to deal ratio was between 2025%.

Yeah. Not not horrible. And they did 17 deals over the next four months as opposed to zero Wow. In the four months prior. It was like a night and day difference.

And all they had to do was just assume that every lead was smoking hot until they could prove that it wasn't.

Steve: Just go.

Brandon: Just just go on the appointment Yeah. And make it quick. So so that's the other thing. It's it's it's just a mindset thing, you know. You you just have to treat the leads a little differently.

Steve: Yeah.

Brandon: The last thing is problem solving immediately. We find, like, the I guess the tactical part of this is we find that our clients that have leads going to a lead manager Mhmm. Don't close nearly as many leads as those that have it going to an acquisitions manager. And what I think this comes down to is just just put yourself in a seller's head and just say you're searching on Google. You have a problem right now.

Yeah. Right? You're motivated enough to go to Google. You're searching for a way to solve your problem. You find the company that you might wanna work with.

You reach out to them. And what ends up happening is instead of solving your problem, they set an appointment to solve your problem later. Mhmm. In your mindset, you search until your problem is solved.

Steve: Right. You got pain. You wanna solve the pain. You don't want have an appointment to solve the pain.

Brandon: Exactly. So you're going to keep on going through the Google search results. You're gonna reach out to other people. Our clients that are good at getting that person on the phone and making them feel like no matter what happens, they are the person that they're gonna work with. They're gonna connect them somehow.

And making this other feel like, you know, my problem is not solved, but I know that Steve's got my back and we're gonna work this out. Mhmm. They don't feel like they have to go to the rest of Google.

Steve: So it's the assurance component Mhmm. Which, you know, so my daughter is sick. Right?

Brandon: Mhmm.

Steve: And yesterday, looking through you know, I'm going through I got concierge medical service who can't see her for four days. Like, okay. This doesn't feel like concierge. I'm calling in Mesa Pediatrics is where we go. And, like, well, we can't see her till 03:45.

I looked a couple other options. Okay. Well, 03:45 is that's the earliest one, so that's the one, you know, I'll go. But it wasn't until I got someone on the phone that I knew I could see a doctor today that I stopped searching. So I kept searching until I found someone.

It's like, okay. This is someone that could see my daughter today so that she can sleep through the night so that we can sleep through the night.

Brandon: Yeah. Because you had a problem. It was important to you. And, I mean, I don't think that these medical companies are quite as aggressive in sales as as some real estate investors for a fair reason. Yeah.

But just imagine they are for a second. You know the story that those other people are gonna tell themselves. The lead ghosted me. Mhmm. I guess they weren't that motivated.

Steve: Right. Yeah.

Brandon: A lot of those people that ghost you, you just didn't impress them. Right? Yeah. Then you weren't there to solve their problem quick enough when it comes to these kinds of leads because they're working with a lot of people. Right.

Cody, who was here last year, we didn't exercise with them once, where he looked through all of their digital marketing leads and how many of those ended up being deals for someone else. It's extremely humbling. Yeah. When you do that kind of exercise. And you realize that person who I marked as not that motivated was a really good deal for my competitor.

Yeah. Or that person that just never answered their phone, they just came out of my competitors list yesterday. How did that happen?

Steve: Right.

Brandon: It's PPC probably of any channel has a greatest number of leads that actually end up turning into deals for someone. The clients that we work with that do exceptionally well are good at making sure that that's them.

Steve: Yeah. And one thing I liked, you know, because and this is, you know, for you guys that have teams is I see this happen a lot where the inbound leads is like a a round robin.

Brandon: Mhmm.

Steve: And I think there's no nothing more damaging to your business than to treat these leads as a round robins.

Brandon: So I don't have to get to it quick. It it'll be there in an hour. Right?

Steve: It'll be there in an hour. Like, hey. This is my lead, so I'll get to it to whenever Yeah. Versus, like, oh, the phone's ringing. I have to answer this one right now.

It's a different experience for the seller. But as a business owner, you have to get your team's behavior to act as if this needs to happen with high urgency. If you have this thing where, like,

Brandon: oh, yeah.

Steve: Just get to whenever you get to it.

Brandon: Yeah. And that's those

Steve: ones don't get to it.

Brandon: And that is an incredible method to like, a tactical way to increase speed. Mhmm. The other thing that we see is a big differentiator between our clients that are doing well with speed and those that aren't, is just measuring it. Mhmm. If if you measure I know like you use Left Main for example.

Yeah. With Left Main and with many CRMs, you can measure the time between when a lead comes in and when that first call happens. Yeah. And the crazy thing is, if you just start holding your team accountable to it, and you say, last week our average time between when a lead came in and when we contacted it was three minutes or two minutes or sixty seconds. Mhmm.

It turns out that number just get better.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: It's crazy how that happens. But the the thing is I realize a lot of the way that our clients are measuring it is they ask their team. They're like, you're getting to those leads quick. Right? And they say, yeah.

Of course. But then when we actually look in the CRM, it's not true.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: So the the point with that being, I think, like, as for tactics for getting quick to your leads quickly, I agree. I think the free for all is better than the round robin. Mhmm. And I think holding your team accountable to an actual measured metric for how well they're doing on that, that is something that all of our clients that are the absolute best performers are doing.

Steve: Yeah. Well, I guess it's really fortunate that we have, a crazy person like Cody Hoffine for you to kinda, like, test

Brandon: on. Yeah. He he's a little bit crazier than than than most. And and he takes this to levels, like, I mean, you remember last year when we were talking about this, like, they will drive by their house. Yeah.

You know, they've even changed the process now to where not only will they drive by their house, they will drive by the house until they get the person,

Steve: like, up like, five drive bys. That's why I call it times five drive bys. I love it. That's fantastic.

Brandon: They and they do really they they pick up a lot of extra contracts with that. But it's that is extreme. It's it's not all of our clients do that, but I can tell you that the crazy thing, about Cody is he gets a really good ROI on his PPC and had a lot of volume. And part of that is they just they just close leads, like, at a better rate than almost any of our clients. Yeah.

Steve: That's that's phenomenal. So you mentioned earlier, nationwide. Mhmm. So are you managing nationwide for people?

Brandon: We are. Yeah.

Steve: Okay. So what is your opinion? Because there seems to be kind of this evolution. Because Nick Perry, I think, kinda let spearheaded this model. Right?

I mean, he was doing multiple 6 figures every single month because he was doing it nationally.

Brandon: Mhmm.

Steve: Right? And then now it seems like multiple people are going nationwide.

Brandon: Mhmm.

Steve: So what obviously, you're you're helping people doing it. First, can you explain what it is to do nationwide PPC and then b, just what you're what you've learned from doing

Brandon: it. Yeah. This is a this is a fun topic, and you'll find a lot of people have very strong opinions Yes. About this topic I have

Steve: noticed this.

Brandon: In a lot of ways. So I'm hoping I can just kinda condense all the information into something that's actual actually practical and makes sense.

Steve: So I was asking you what your thoughts were versus picking a side.

Brandon: Yes. I mean, I think the the important distinction with the nationwide model is that's a different business. It's not a marketing strategy. Mhmm. So that's why I see a lot of people going wrong with this.

They're like, oh, yeah. That works. Let me just bolt on these leads into my existing business Mhmm. And it flops. Right.

Steve: So this isn't just add on to the business. Let's just go ahead and turn this thing on

Brandon: Yeah.

Steve: And then we're gonna scale and crush it.

Brandon: You're starting a new business. Think of it like that. And with starting a new business, you expect to have a ramp up. You expect to run into challenges. Mhmm.

The theory behind this is that if you advertise across wider areas, you get cheaper leads. And it's absolutely true. Mhmm. We see that trend on both

Steve: Facebook and mid markets, or medium sized markets is not as competitive. Like

Brandon: Mhmm.

Steve: Markets that aren't Phoenix or Houston or Salt Lake City.

Brandon: And here's the other thing that a lot of people don't get about it. A lot of people think that the game is that you're going for smaller markets. That is a small piece of it. Yes. That matters.

Mhmm. The other thing is, it's not that you're just going wide so that you can find the small markets, it's that when you cover all the markets, the leads are cheaper in those markets collectively than they would be in any one of those markets individually. So the game is you could take a 100 counties that each would have a $300 cost per lead on PPC if you were to market in them. And if you advertise across all of them, you might get those leads for a $100 instead of 300.

Steve: How is that possible?

Brandon: It's possible because digital marketing is really good at finding the low hanging fruit. Mhmm. Maybe comparing it to something that you did that isn't really viable anymore. When you talked about how you put that really low bid and you just got a few of those clicks at the end of the day Right. And you spent $300 a month.

Mhmm. Imagine if instead of doing that, you spent $10,000 a month, but you did that by having it in a whole bunch of different markets.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: You'd be getting a better ROI than anybody in a single market, but you'd also do it at scale. That's kind of the name of the game. Or if we're looking at for example that that spreadsheet that we made you, looking at your Facebook ads data. Yeah. You remember as you start to go to the really low budget range, what happened to the ROI?

Steve: That was better.

Brandon: Super high. Yeah. Better. We got really high. If you think about it, targeting your area plus all those other ones is kind of the equivalent of just having a really small budget in

Steve: this area.

Brandon: Right. Which means you're taking the absolute best opportunities. So digital marketing is really good at that. And because of that, you get cheaper leads if you're willing to be less picky about where they come from than otherwise. The Where people go wrong with this model, because to be transparent with you, I've had clients that have failed in this model.

Mhmm. It's if they don't align their marketing and their acquisitions and their dispositions. So, for example, I have this client that starts out. They were so excited week two when they were on track to have 20 contracts their first month, and they did get 20 contracts that month. Guess how many they closed?

One or two? Zero.

Steve: Sounds like our experience initially in Albuquerque.

Brandon: Yeah. Yeah. Probably. And the thing was they didn't they didn't have the dispositions figured out. Yeah.

You can get contracts all day long at 50% of of market value Mhmm. If you want to. But if you don't know how to find someone to buy that, and if you just dump on your already busy dispo person 20 new contracts in places they never heard of, you're you're not you're not gonna It's not gonna work. Right. So the the point is, your marketing has to align with places where you can actually acquire properties, which has to align with places where you can actually disposition properties.

Mhmm. If you market to a place where you can't move a contract, if you got it, you will fail. So, what we would recommend is that you figure out what that is. We do have clients that will just target 48 states and just get tons of leads. Mhmm.

And you know what, it can work, but they invest a lot of time and money into their dispositions process. Yeah. And we have some that'll target for example the top 1,000 counties Mhmm. In The United States. Acquisitions just got a little bit harder for them, marketing cost per deal a little bit higher, dispositions a little bit easier.

Yeah. We have clients that will target the top 50 counties in The United States. Acquisitions got harder, dispositions got easier. Yeah. So you have to kind of pick your poison, but you have to have a solid disposition strategy and make sure that you're not targeting the wrong areas.

And I think a lot of our clients are finding success kinda somewhere in between there. Because if you get a lot of leads in Padunk towns, it's kinda hard to

Steve: So let me ask you this because you have multiple clients that are nationwide.

Brandon: Mhmm.

Steve: You know, initially, one of the people I saw investor lift partner with was Nick Perry because this guy is the poster child for Nationwide PPC. Right? So the clients that you have that are having success doing Nationwide PPC, is investor lift part of their disposition process, or is that something where they have their own proprietary? Like, what do they do there?

Brandon: I don't know that we have any clients that aren't using InvestorLift.

Steve: That aren't?

Brandon: Aren't. Yeah. Got it. InvestorLift is a huge staple for people doing nationwide.

Steve: Got it.

Brandon: We I guess, we we did have one client once that just JV'd. Mhmm. Like they're well connected. Yeah. And they're just JV with someone, and they just knew someone in every market.

I mean, you you can do that, but of course you're leaving some meat on the bone Right. Compared to dispositioning them yourself, and then they move to investor lift. So I think if you're gonna do a nationwide model, you know glowing testimonial for investor lift. It's Yeah. It's a a lot of people are using it and they're having good success with it.

It's not perfect. You won't find buyers in every little place.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: And it's not necessarily easy to find those buyers. You know, a lot of our clients are having to cold call through the buyers list.

Steve: Still have to work it.

Brandon: Stuff like that. You gotta work it. But it's probably the most viable option, especially if you're looking quickly. Yeah. I mean, maybe you could build your own buyers list in 50 states, but how long would that take?

Steve: I don't know. I know that Nick initially did invest in that. Yeah.

Brandon: Which is great. You know? It's a model. It works, but that's that's extremely difficult.

Steve: So was there any other thoughts on on Nationwide PPC, or those are the, like, those are the pros and cons?

Brandon: I think I think we covered it pretty well. Okay.

Steve: Yeah. So Steven Calder on Facebook wants to know, if you wanted to scale, would you commit 20 k a month to a new operation for marketing, and and how would you break it down?

Brandon: If you wanted to scale, would you commit? I I don't understand the question.

Steve: To commit to a new operation for marketing, how would you break it down? So I guess yeah. So if you're in one market right now, right, and you wanna scale your business, to a new operation, would you commit how would you how would you commit 20 k?

Brandon: No. How would you break it down into channels and stuff like that? Okay. Good good question. And this is a good opportunity to kind of introduce the three channels.

We kinda dabbled around it a little bit. Sure. Pay per click, which we talked a good amount about. If you're in one market and you have $20, I can guarantee you a big piece of that's gonna be pay per click. And the reason is you're probably not gonna spend $20 on Facebook ads and SEO.

So especially when you're dealing with budgets more in that range, pay per click is a staple. People tend to love it in that range. So pay per click would be a piece of the strategy. Facebook ads would be a piece of the strategy. And SEO would be a piece of the strategy.

And I know we haven't talked about SEO. Mhmm. So so maybe I can just share like why probably the single channel that I'm most excited about right now is SEO.

Steve: Okay.

Brandon: And the the reason for that being, if you look at all these marketing channels, SEO is the only marketing channel that I know of that's an actual asset. Yeah. The other ones, you spend money, you get leads.

Steve: Pay to play.

Brandon: Yeah. SEO is an asset, and and that's I mean, you know from having this podcast for example that's an asset, it could pay good dividends to Right. To have that kind of traction online. Sure. So the thing with SEO is it does take longer.

It takes time to build. But when you have that ranking, you can do kind of with SEO what a lot of people do with real estate. Owning assets, generating cash flow from those assets. Mhmm. So if you look at a ranking in Google, it's hard to get.

Very hard to get. Yeah. It's much easier to maintain, especially if you did it in the right way. If you're doing weird black hat stuff that Google's algorithms is gonna update and then they're gonna ban you, yeah, you're gonna lose it. Right?

But if you're doing it the right way, you're going to maintain your rankings fairly well, much easier. And what that means is you essentially own that real estate on the search engine results page. What that means is when people search, instead of having to pay for those clicks Mhmm. You earn those clicks. Yeah.

And each time someone clicks, if many people just wanna click, you don't pay for that. So if we're looking over the long term, like our clients that have been with us for many years, they are doing really really well with SEO. It is often the highest ROI channel in their business. So let

Steve: me ask you that because we do have some people that is a is a paper lead model. Right? Like, we have service providers, and they sell us leads that were supposedly SEO. And when we talk to those people, it doesn't seem like they are the most excited. There seems to be a lot of tire kickers.

So let me ask you if I'm number one for, like, sell my house, Phoenix. Just crazy idea. Right? But if that was my if I was

Brandon: Mhmm.

Steve: Ranking number one, Google for that. Can you share with me, like, based off your experience, the quality of that lead on SEO?

Brandon: 10 or 15 leads to a deal.

Steve: 10 or 15. So it's still not like this is gonna be, like, a a home run. You still gotta

Brandon: You still gotta work them. Yeah. But if you look at all marketing channels Mhmm. I don't know of a marketing channel that has a few a smaller number of leads to a deal. Maybe in isolated areas and Yeah.

Just like that, we have clients that take four leads to a deal. Right?

Steve: So what are you finding, leads to a deal for, Google PPC?

Brandon: 10 or 15. It's a similar lead to SEO. Yeah. It's just you pay to be on top instead of earning your right time.

Steve: So you don't have more credibility necessarily for SEO. It's just in the long run cheaper per lead.

Brandon: It is cheaper. Yeah. And the the reason I'm specifically excited about this Mhmm. Is if you look at trends, so so we have, of course our gigantic database of what people actually search in Google and how that's changing over time. The interesting thing is, looking at that since 2018, the our top keywords are getting close to three times the amount of searches now, versus what they were getting in 2018.

Mhmm. If we look from 2004, as early as Google will give us data, you can see that there's an exponential trend in the growth of those terms. And the reason that's really exciting is it shows that SEO isn't just a cash flow asset. It's not like you just go there and you're gonna get a certain number of leads and that's good, but it's actually an appreciation asset. Yeah.

Because if next year twice as many people are searching that term, then you're going to get twice as many leads Right. But you're not gonna pay anymore.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: And if you're like in my mind SEO is the ultimate long term play.

Steve: And what do you recommend for someone to spend for SEO?

Brandon: So let's just say we break down that 20. Mhmm. SEO, I mean, you want to see where your site's at, what your timeline looks like. And by the way, if anybody wants to look at these things, you're free to talk to our director of SEO, Noah, and and he can kinda look at your website and where you're at, because that's the huge piece of context that's important for all of this. But I can tell you we we really commonly have clients spending anywhere from $12.50 a month up to $5 Mhmm.

On SEO. And that's kind of the the range that a lot of them come in. The more you spend, the more you accomplish and the faster it happens. Right. But slow and steady is pretty efficient.

Gotcha. So I don't think there's a wrong budget, but if I'm looking at a $20 budget, I'm thinking maybe I'm putting 3,500 towards SEO, in that long term bucket. Now the context of the business is important. If that's gonna put me out of business and I'm not even gonna be there to reap the reward by the time I rank in Google Yeah. Don't do it.

Right? SEO is not necessarily the best investment. Like you can tell me, you have this amazing investment right now for me and it's gonna cost $10,000,000. And you know, if I don't have $10,000,000 it doesn't matter.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: Right? You have to have the money to see SEO through. But it's if you can afford to do that. I I would put money in SEO before buying a rental hands down. So I'd put something like that there.

You're going to have some type of management cost. And then with that kind of budget, you know, it depends on the size of the market Mhmm. But you're most likely going to put, a smaller portion towards Facebook ads of the remaining and a larger portion towards PPC.

Steve: Got it. And then, Leo on Facebook wants to know, what do you recommend on ad spend per month on Facebook? So, Leo, I think he's in Houston. So what would you

Brandon: Yeah. Houston's, Houston's big enough that you you have, you have capability to spend more, but it it is a myth that you need to spend more because it's a bigger market. Mhmm. I don't have any problem with a small budget in a big market. You just have to have small budget expectations.

Right. But it can be really efficient because you don't have much of a diminishing return. In terms of ad spend, anywhere from, I'd say, like our starting ad spend would be around $17.50. Mhmm. I think that's fine.

I'd say in a market like Houston, it seems like people will wanna spend somewhere between 2 and 6,000 generally with that kind of size market. It we're we're just guessing here. Right? So There are ways to actually measure this and learn how this works for you, kinda like what we did for you, But we did nine months of Facebook ads before we could really do that kind of analysis.

Steve: Right. So let me ask you this. Kinda put you in the spot here. Right? You can be in somebody's crosshairs after this conversation.

Alright. So you get the service, you said, 80 different markets.

Brandon: Mhmm.

Steve: So if you were to just identify, like, the top three or five markets that are, like, most competitive, what would you where would you put it at? Because there's always this, like, chest, pounding and so on in in in our industry.

Brandon: Oh, like, my market's the most competitive.

Steve: Yeah. Like, you know, people say, oh, you understand. Like, my market's really tough. Like, all markets are tough. So Yeah.

So what were you looking at, you know, top three or top five, like, most competitive markets?

Brandon: The interesting thing about this is more competitive markets, by my standpoint would be markets that we're tending to see higher cost leads in. Mhmm. Because we have a lot more data about that than we do about deals. Right. We measure the data to deals, but also there's all kinds of factors that are introduced there that we aren't really aware of.

Like Yeah. Is one market more competitive just because our client there is worse at sales? Not really. Well, you

Steve: should be able to average it out.

Brandon: Yeah. And we can average it out, but the the point is it's like we would do that based on lead cost Mhmm. Primarily, as, like, probably the the thing that we have the most data about to be able to say that. Yeah. Hardest markets are probably, Utah, Tampa, LA.

I'm trying to think if there's any other ones that have been, like, especially crazy Yeah. In my experience. Miami is a pretty crazy one too.

Steve: Interesting. So these are worse as far as the Google PPC cost per lead, than Phoenix and Houston.

Brandon: Phoenix has been not super expensive on a cost per lead basis for

Steve: us. Okay.

Brandon: But the weird thing about Phoenix is on average our clients have lower lead conversion. Yeah. And, you know, you look and you say it's the same keyword. Several clients have lower lead conversion, so I don't and and I think that they're good at sales, you know, so it's, like, I don't necessarily think that all of our clients in Phoenix are just worse at sales. I mean I mean, maybe your team.

I I don't know if you guys know anything about closing deals with sellers or anything like that.

Steve: No thing or two. I'm surprised you're Tampa on that list.

Brandon: Tampa's Tampa's expensive. And and by the way, I've heard similar things from other companies, like Yeah. Like, for example, a direct mail provider that we partner with that's just, like, has a short list of markets that they've really had trouble in. Yeah. Tampa's at the top of that list.

Now, we've done okay from a digital perspective. Mhmm. But it's one of those things, like, in Utah where we probably pay a higher cost per lead than anywhere else. But still, COVID had 5.5 x on PPC last year. But it's because it closes a lot of them and their deals are really big.

Steve: Yeah. Well, I understand Utah because you got you guys, Andy McFarland, and there's a Mhmm. And then there's another guy who is in. Because I I talked to Jason on a regular basis, and he's like, all the best PPC providers start in Salt

Brandon: Lake. Yeah. It's true. I guess you learn where the where the going's tough, and then you if you do it in Salt Lake, you could do it anywhere. Right?

Like, that's where I learned. Yeah. And I just thought thought it was normal till I went to other markets. I'm like, wow, I cannot believe that these markets are so much easier to do PPC in. But it's it's expensive.

It's tough. The the thing about PPC is like we sometimes see that like some of our hardest markets are like just this random like small market or something. Mhmm. Because it's it's highly dependent on competition.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: So, if you have a competitor like that is willing to value PPC leads very highly, then that could be an extremely competitive market even though it's very small. Yeah. So it really is a factor and they go up and down too. Right? Like, markets get expensive, and then what happens?

There's an invisible hand behind PPC. Mhmm. People realize my ROI is not good. They jump out. It gets cheaper.

Yeah. And it's just a constant flow.

Steve: And Tampa is, I mean, supposedly, Tampa was the guru capital until we took it over in Phoenix.

Brandon: So Yeah. Maybe it's just where the gurus are. Yeah. Maybe that's the Could

Steve: be an element.

Brandon: The methodology. But anyways, like they they manifest themselves in different ways. Right? Like like Phoenix, like I said, it's not the highest lead cost market, but it is probably the single market with lowest lead conversion based on what I've seen.

Steve: And then on YouTube, AI entrepreneur, is there a correlation between the type of leads that respond to digital marketing? Like, do they typically come from are they pre foreclosure, divorce, tax delinquent, or what are you seeing as typical avatar?

Brandon: Yeah. This is a really good question because people ask me all the time, can we target this type of property, this type of list? The thing with digital marketing is it that's not its strength. Right. There are some ways if you really want to that you can kind of do those things.

But in my experience, you don't produce the kind of result you're looking for. Yeah. And you artificially inflate your cost per deal for some type of arbitrary goal. Mhmm. So digital marketing gets you a bunch of random leads.

Alright. You'll get all kinds of

Steve: There's no avatar. They're just Mhmm. It could be anything.

Brandon: You just get a subset of what's in the market. If 1% of the houses in your market are meth houses, probably 1% of your PPC leads. Right? Now of the distressed houses that are motivated. Right?

If if 1% of your houses in your market are meth houses, you have a meth problem. You know,

Steve: you're either in Salt Lake or Phoenix. I

Brandon: don't know. Yeah. I guess

Steve: so Kai wants to know on YouTube, when would be the best time to start PPC?

Brandon: Best time? This time of year is really good. I could tell you there is a little bit of seasonality in digital marketing Mhmm. Just like a lot of channels. PPC is actually more consistent through the entire year than Facebook is or than SEO is.

Yeah. And the reason being less people search in November and December, but you could still pay the same price per click. It depends on how your competition responds to that. Oftentimes, they kind of ease back a little bit. Yeah.

What happens is the pie gets smaller, but you also pay a smaller amount for your smaller piece of the pie. SEO, less people search, you're just gonna get less leads.

Steve: Alright.

Brandon: And then Facebook, you get hit probably worse with seasonality than other channels. And the reason being your response rate goes down, like the number of people you need to reach to get someone who's interested because the, you know, the seasonality that people just aren't as interested that time of year. And that happens with most channels, but also the ad costs go up because the single biggest segment that advertises on Facebook is e commerce companies. And they tend to spend a lot of their budget q four. So picture it like direct mail where your response rate gets cut in half.

Mhmm. But then the post office says people love mail right now. We're gonna make it 60¢ a card instead of 40 or whatever you're paying. Yeah. So you kinda get hit twice with Facebook versus PPC, you only get hit once.

SEO, you only get hit once.

Steve: So going back to Steven Kotler's question earlier. So just percentage wise. Right? 20,000. How much would you spend on SEO, p p Google and Facebook?

Brandon: SEO, 3,500. Mhmm. Something like that. If you look at the the rest of the budget, percentage wise, I would be more like two thirds in PPC, one third in Facebook.

Steve: Got it.

Brandon: And then, you know, reevaluate. Of course, once you start to get some data, you can actually make data driven decisions. Mhmm. At this point, it's kind of a guess. However, I believe that my guess is probably okay.

Steve: Mhmm. But It's educated.

Brandon: It's educated because I see our clients that are spending that much and have dialed it in. Mhmm. How much are they spending on those different platforms? Something like that. But your situation will be different.

Steve: So Rodrigo on YouTube, what are the keywords that you've seen have great ROI?

Brandon: Well, this is a fun one. I guess I'll I'll say something a little bit controversial. Mhmm. I don't believe that any keyword has a better ROI than another keyword. I don't believe that there's any such thing as a good keyword or a bad keyword.

Mhmm. And the reason being, all of that ignores any context of cost. The important thing is value. Picture this like you're wholesaling. You come into a market, and you want to wholesale houses.

What do you do? Do you look for cheap houses? Do you look for expensive houses? Well, the expensive ones will sell for more.

Steve: Mhmm.

Brandon: The cheap ones, you're getting for a lower price. None of that makes any sense. What you do is you look for undervalued houses.

Steve: Yeah.

Brandon: So, in PPC, certain keywords are gonna be undervalued in your market compared to other keywords. That's gonna depend heavily on what your competitors are doing in that market. And that's where data is really important. We have a whole list of keywords and we know exactly that that keyword is worth two and a half times what that keyword is, assuming we're going to get the click. Or if we get the lead, it's worth 1.3 x or whatever the case is.

And that's really important. So then what you'll find is you set your bids based on that kind of stuff. Because we don't use by the way any strategies that are like maximize conversions or maximize clicks because that implies that all leads are created equal. Mhmm. We would set for different kinds of conversions or different kinds of keywords, we would set different target cost per leads because we want to we want to make it true to the value.

Yeah. So the point being in your market, if you set what those things are actually worth according to quality data, what's gonna happen is some of that stuff, your competition is gonna be spending way more on it than it's actually worth. And you're just not going to show up. Yeah. Because they're over bidding, and it's just not something you want a part of.

Other things, they're all going to be missing the boat. It's a really good keyword. They're just not bidding enough. And you're going to be number one because you're way more aggressive than them. And then there's everything in between.

But Right. That purely depends on what price your competition puts on those keywords Yeah. Which is gonna be different in every single market.

Steve: So let me ask you. You know, you're you're saying, like, you know, it depends on what the the keyword is worth and you wanna bid accordingly. So if you can get it for 70% of market value like we do wholesale

Brandon: Exactly.

Steve: That's kinda where you wanna be. But Yeah. Do you think there are some specific keywords that are gonna have larger margins. Right? Because something that, you know, again, Robert wants to leave on the show, he's somewhere returning ad spend.

Right? Like, we know, like, if they are looking for this. Right? Like, sell my hoarder home, for example, just hypothetically. Right?

Brandon: It never gets searched.

Steve: We do really well with hoarder homes. Right?

Brandon: Yeah. Yeah.

Steve: So, like, would it make sense to say, okay. If someone's looking for hoarder homes, like, it doesn't matter what it costs. I want it. Right? I'll bet I'll bid a thousand dollars for it.

Brandon: What are

Steve: your thoughts on that?

Brandon: That just there's a cost at which that's not worth it. I think what you'd be arguing is that there's some keywords that are worth far more than other keywords.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: Their value is not infinite though.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: They still have a fixed value. So if that really were the case and a thousand dollars is what you realized it's worth Mhmm. Then yes. But what if everybody else thinks that? And then what if it's $10,000?

Then is it still worth it? And there's always going to be a price that's too high Right. For something, no matter how high quality that lead is. So that strategy would just assume that your competition doesn't think that thing is as valuable.

Steve: I guess my question is, so when you're weighting it, do you weight, like, a best expected value of assign assignment fee based off the keywords? Yes. Are you able to track that data?

Brandon: Yes. And we always wish we had more data. Mhmm. Because like I said, 80% of leads come from things that have one click ever. So imagine you have a list of 300,000 different terms Mhmm.

That people have searched on Google, and you have, like, a few 100 deals spread across it or something like that. Like, how do you make sense of that? That's where we built our own predictive analytics technology and stuff like that that aggregates that data and predicts that these people are gonna perform similarly to these other people based on these similarities and what they're searching.

Steve: So is there a way right? This is just getting super nerdy here. Is there a way, right, if someone googles this keyword, right, that lead goes into Salesforce Mhmm. With the keyword attached.

Brandon: Mhmm.

Steve: And then six months later, you you pull back from Salesforce. Here was the revenue from that keyword. And if you get back into your system to to you know? Again, we're we're feeding the beast to get us the best data.

Brandon: Mhmm. The answer would be yes, but there's a better way, and we choose to do it the better way.

Steve: Okay.

Brandon: So the everything about that I love Mhmm. Except for the fact that you're measuring based on a keyword. And if you look at Google today and how Google works, Google uses match types Right. That I said at the beginning are a little bit sketchy. Yeah.

And if you look according to Google's logic, like, we maybe advertise on average with, like, 60 keywords or something like that for our clients. We look at a search term and it could have technically matched to, like, 58 of those keywords. Right. Because it's close enough to all of them.

Steve: Yeah.

Brandon: The point there being, you're using buckets of data that have no walls, and that data is different every time you look at it. Mhmm. So now when you raise the bid on this keyword, Google's gonna attach the search term to that new keyword because that's where you're gonna pay more for it.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: Right? So the problem is every time you make an adjustment based on that kind of methodology, you lose data. So the way to do it is you capture what's called a GCL ID, stands for Google Click ID, when someone fills out a form. Mhmm. That Google Click ID is a unique ID that applies to that particular click in Google.

What you do from there is you will figure out what happens with that click ID and then report via the API to Google. This is the click ID, this is what ended up happening. Mhmm. And then by doing that, not only do you know the keyword, you know what ad they clicked, you know the exact search term, you know the keyword, you know the ad group, you know the audiences, the demographics, you know the time of day, you know everything Yeah. About that click.

And where this gets really really interesting By the way, we're kinda moving this direction, but this is very advanced, and it's not fully there. We can use some elements of this. Yeah. But the where it gets really advanced is when you take it from what's called an inferential perspective to a predictive perspective. Yeah.

And I I know this, you know, this is like like college, like, analytics stuff. Right? Like, I don't I don't think most real estate investors get this all. Let me explain really briefly. Inferential analytics are basically analytics where you can understand what the data generation process is.

Meaning, you understand because it was that keyword, it was this, therefore we can make this change. Mhmm. Predictive analytics are where you don't understand why, but you understand what. Mhmm. And predictive analytics is basically machine learning, AI.

And it's much more effective at predicting outcomes than inferential analytics, which would be for example, statistical analysis.

Steve: Yeah.

Brandon: And the real value of bringing that in is now if you do that all right, you can utilize machine learning algorithms to predict on the data versus being limited just to that inferential level. And that's where Like if we're looking at where PPC is headed in this industry, that's where it's headed. The only people who are gonna be able to do that are gonna be those that have the most data. Because even those with the most data will hardly have enough data Mhmm. To really make that work.

So that's, like, our long term play

Steve: Right.

Brandon: In this industry. But that's so much more powerful than knowing which keyword it came from.

Steve: So I think the key here is you guys need to roll that out. Right? Start with Cody. Right?

Brandon: That's a tough thing. You gotta start with everybody because you need so much data.

Steve: Start with Cody Yeah. And then me.

Brandon: Yeah.

Steve: And then lock out Phoenix by anyone else from getting that.

Brandon: Alright. Alright. I think that's

Steve: what we need to do.

Brandon: Fair enough. And and there are some elements of what I described that are present now. Mhmm. But to do it in a way that is excellently executed and just completely unbeatable is something that we're actively working towards.

Steve: Yeah.

Brandon: But it is a beast of a project.

Steve: Well, I support this. I support this endeavor.

Brandon: Alright. Thank you.

Steve: Alright. So Corey on, YouTube. Thoughts on using Karat as a landing page versus a custom landing page for PPC?

Brandon: Yeah. This is, this is a fun one because last time we talked

Steve: Mhmm.

Brandon: We used a lot of Karat landing pages.

Steve: Yep.

Brandon: And and I love Karat. I I think, I mean, I don't think carrot's the only way. I think carrot's the easier way to accomplish the same things you can accomplish other ways. Yeah. And it's idiot proof.

Mhmm. As long as you don't make heavy horrible modifications to your website, it will not be an f. Right. But it'll just be a b. Yeah.

So I love care. But we have seen a decline in conversion rates Mhmm. Over time, to the extent that one of the biggest factors influencing our results for clients last year was heavy split testing on our own landing pages, that are exceptionally fast, and where we've tested all elements of the design, form, flow, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. And we've gotten to the point where we've like, for example, our most recent version, we keep on having clients say, but you should test it against my heavily customized site or my carrier site or whatever the case is.

Like, a dozen times, we beat them by some type of really large value, and and the the landing pages have never been beat. So where I think you go wrong, generally when you use something like Karat for a landing page, is that you serve two purposes with the same website. Caret is very heavily designed for SEO. And there's a few things that happen on SEO that aren't good for PPC. Mhmm.

Specifically, you have a ton of links going to a ton of places because you're never gonna rank a one page website in Right. A search engine. Right. Just Google doesn't like that. Right?

So you have all those links and when it comes to conversion, those are distractions.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: And then the other thing is you have tons and tons of content. Have you ever read a Carrot homepage and realized that they just said the same thing 50 times in different ways?

Steve: It's SEO.

Brandon: That's SEO. Yeah. It's if that is it is, that's SEO. But that has a negative impact on conversion rate. So why would you subject your PPC landing page to the same negative factors that you need to do for SEO?

So my advice is, make your website really well designed for SEO. Use an independent landing page that's really well designed for PPC.

Steve: And that's what we have, where they're subdomains.

Brandon: That's exactly what we do for you. Yeah. We have the sub domain that's unique. And then by doing that, you can be good at both of them versus trying to, like, walk that line with one website.

Steve: Yeah. And then this is different question from Kai. It was, what do you do to get over mental hurdles?

Brandon: Oh, wow. This is a unexpected question. I I only talk about digital marketing. Did you did you tell him that? What do I do to overcome mental hurdles?

I'm trying to think of what I what I do. I think it's always like like one thing that I should have done earlier Mhmm. But I do now and has made a huge difference in my life is just to have visionary time because it's so easy to get overwhelmed with all the stuff you need to do. But it's, it's really great to wake up in the morning and know that I've got an hour to focus on what those hurdles are, how I'm going to overcome them, and really have that end place in mind. Because if you go into the day seeing that end that you're shooting towards, then it's like the stuff that you run into in the day doesn't matter anymore.

Right. But when you come in focused on those things, you lose that long term vision. So I don't know if that's the answer you're looking for, but if we're looking at things that have recently really made a big difference for me, it's just making sure I realign with that vision every single day. And it keeps me a lot less stressed about the stuff that happens during the day, and it opens my mind. I I I go for bigger goals, and I'm more excited about those things, and I'm better at getting other people on board.

All that stuff happens when I have that kind of clear mind.

Steve: And Nathan Brooks was here last week, and, you know, we were talking about, like, having that vision in place, the daily reset. It's your North Star. You got your North Star, and now you can make sure you're headed the right direction. But if you don't, you can kinda go off the beaten path and this and that. And it doesn't take long to drift off completely

Brandon: Mhmm.

Steve: In the wrong direction. Corey is asking what's been my experience PPC. So I wanna say and I can't speak here a 100% intelligently. You might even know better than I would. I might.

Yeah. But my experience, I believe we're between a two and three on, x on Google. Do you happen to know with our business where we're at?

Brandon: It's close to there. I don't know the exact numbers. Yeah. Part of it is we have deals that we don't know if they're gonna fall through or go through. I know that, for example, we were looking at one really big one that did fall through.

Yeah. So there's a where I think we are, to summarize the PPC, is we're early. Mhmm. Like if you look at the total spend, it's not super significant compared to the size of deals that you're working with here. But it appears that we're headed somewhere to that two to three x kind of range.

Yeah. And there's a few factors in that. And they are specifically that we need to get a little bit more data about what our actual lead conversion is gonna be. Mhmm. Because our lead conversion has been much lower than we expect.

But like I said, we're seeing that with other clients in Phoenix right now. Yeah. And maybe it's just Phoenix. Maybe Phoenix just has worse quality leads in other places.

Steve: Well, I know. I mean, one of the biggest challenges in Phoenix, and I'm not trying to make excuses here. Alright? But one of the biggest challenges we have here is we've got iBuyers. Right?

And we have a lot of operators. Like, there's just and, again, I'm not trying to make excuses. Just the reality is every time there's a new venture, it starts in Phoenix. Right? Like, Opendoor about the place.

Opendoor, Offerpad Yeah. Zillow. Right? And they're off and on. Like, I guess they're buying again.

You know, even even the title company. Right? Like, they're all starting in Phoenix. So, it's just an interesting model. And I think that's one of the reasons why.

Well, that's not I don't I don't think I know one of the things when I first connected with you is, like, hey. When you manage my PPC, do me a favor and turn off the East Side. Right?

Brandon: Yeah. We did that. Yeah. I remember.

Steve: Turn off the East Valley because East Valley, right, it was 1998 and newer. I can't compete against dive buyers, so let's just turn that off.

Brandon: Yeah.

Steve: And we only target on the West Side. So

Brandon: Yeah. There's something to that. But yeah, it's those it's those little blanks that you can kind of fill in over time. Also, Phoenix has some unique keywords that other markets don't have. And we've invested a good deal into experimenting with those keywords, but we still need a lot of data to understand what the lead conversion is like in those keywords.

One that we had discussed earlier is like 72 sold Mhmm. For example. I mean, they started here. Right? Who knows if they're going to other markets, but

Steve: they started here. Yes.

Brandon: They they did more search volume than any other keyword here in Phoenix. Yeah.

Steve: Well, it's But

Brandon: what's the lead conversion on that? It's a little tough to say. Right? We know we can get cheaper leads.

Steve: Yeah. So as soon as you sold. Right? I mean, these are people that, typically are being pitched, over market. Right?

They're saying I mean, it's it's it's astounding to kinda see see what their ads are, that, you know, what the message is on on on when they're marketing and then, you know, what the actual service is. There's a a little bit of a cognitive dissonance. Right? And I'll leave it at that.

Brandon: Yeah. I know you're not a huge fan. But

Steve: so there's a little bit of a cognitive dissonance. So but, again, just someone else that's here. And they're spending a million dollars a month here, right, in marketing. So, that's that's who we get to play against. So let's see what else we talked about here.

We were talking about what's changed. Right? So we kinda touched on a few different things here. Anything else that's changed since you've been on a year since the year, it's been eleven months?

Brandon: I think we've touched on most of it. If we're looking at, like, how our company has changed, we've grown a lot over this year. And because of that, we just have a lot more information about a lot of things. Yeah. And that's done really well for our clients.

Steve: So you feel you can do more for your clients today than last year because you have more data

Brandon: than Absolutely. Yeah. We're I mean, here here's the thing. I I tell my employees this and everything. We're not we're not a digital marketing agency.

I don't believe that. I believe that we're a data company Yeah. First and foremost. And the reason we chose to specialize in this industry I mean, I'm not a real estate investor. Mhmm.

Now I am. I'm investing in some multifamily stuff. You guys have shown me the light. But Yeah. Outside of that, why we chose to invest in this industry is because we saw no other industry that had as sparse of a data set as this industry.

Meaning a data aggregator would be no more valuable than any other industry. And that's that's our been our game from Yeah. From the beginning.

Steve: So there there's a potential exit is kinda what I'm hearing.

Brandon: I mean, I there could be. Right? I I think, for for me, I'm not that's not necessarily my plan. Mhmm. But, you know, one thing that that inspired me once is, you know Jason Lewis, I'm sure.

Steve: Of course.

Brandon: I asked him what his plan was with some of his companies. I hope he's okay with me sharing this. I'm I'm sure he would be. But he what he basically said, I asked him if he wants an exit or one, and he basically said, I my real dream is to have this company that I could exit for this amount of money, but that I never would because I love it so much. Yeah.

And that's kind of my dream too. That makes sense. Like I don't want to, I'm not one of those guys just building a business to exit it. But I I mean, the same kind of things that you do to make a valuable business for exit are the kind of things that you do to make a valuable business to keep.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: Except maybe you're a little bit more careful Yeah. If you're gonna keep it. But that's don't

Steve: want it to dangle you a billion dollars, though.

Brandon: A billion dollars, I mean, might have to negotiate a bit from there. But Yeah.

Steve: I mean, that's just that's just the opening bid.

Brandon: Just the opening bid. You know, I'm sure they just wanted to be embarrassed by their first offer.

Steve: Just Yeah.

Brandon: Come in with an anchor and

Steve: And coming real low. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, guys. We've been asking all the questions here.

If you guys need help with your business, you know, send me a message on Instagram. What we're intentionally doing right now is kinda, like, helping you kinda navigate the right way. So send me a message on Instagram, and we'll help point you in the right direction. So what is your biggest struggle at this exact moment?

Brandon: Our biggest struggle is probably recruiting.

Steve: Yeah.

Brandon: It's Yeah. We're gonna have

Steve: a group therapy session for this.

Brandon: Seriously, we just need to to put all our feelings on the table because it is it is so hard. Yeah. And and to be fair, we've had some really good hires recently. Mhmm. And I there has never been another point where I've looked at the team in my company and been more confident that we have an incredible team.

I'm I'm really, really grateful for that. But it's so hard to build it. Mhmm. And we've we've experienced a lot of growth, and there's some positions that are just really hard. Not to make excuses, but Utah has, like, 2% unemployment right now, which is Does it?

The lowest in the entire history of Utah. Wow. And also digital marketing since COVID has grown a ton. And therefore, the entire industry is understaffed because there's more work than there are people to do it. So between those things, like, we're just we're kind of stuck in a tough place.

But it's taught us to be to be efficient and work really well with what we have. And we have been getting more traction in recruiting. But there's some positions, like, I've hired three head hunting agencies to find me, like, one person in particular. Nobody can find one. Yeah.

Yeah. I have an in house recruiter. I have three separate companies, like, willing to get a big commission to find me one of those people. And all of them, when they start out, they're like, yeah. Totally.

And then after a few months, like, I guess there's just nobody that we can find. I'm so sorry. So it's that's probably the single biggest challenge.

Steve: Rodrigo is asking, what do you think could be the result for PPC marketing if the new legislations get approved? I'm not sure what legislation he's talking about. He's probably referring to maybe some of the, legislation trying to prohibit wholesaling or make, wholesaling more difficult. That's probably what my guess is with with his question.

Brandon: Yeah. If that's the legislation he's talking about, it would be positive for digital marketing as well as for many marketing channels. Anything that you do to cut out competition is going to make it cheaper. Yeah. The really sweet thing about digital marketing like, let's just take PPC for example.

That's an auction. Mhmm. What do you do if you cut out half the people going to the auction?

Steve: It's probably gonna cut by more than a third. It might

Brandon: Yeah. The price is gonna be lower.

Steve: Right?

Brandon: So it's, like, realistically, that could be really positive. Mhmm. Of course, if you're one of those people that gets cut out because It's

Steve: really unfortunate.

Brandon: Because you're not licensed or, you know, who who knows what the what the case is, that's unfortunate. Yeah. But Yeah. There's anything that cuts back on competition is, think, good for those that aren't cut out through the process.

Steve: Yeah. Alright. So, if someone wanted to get a hold of you, right, or find out more, like, what what would they do?

Brandon: So the the absolute best thing to do maybe I can just explain how the process works. You would go to batemancollective.com/disruptors. Mhmm. And on there, you'll find a form that you can fill out with your information. This is your specific if you're specifically interested in working with us, what's gonna happen is someone on my team, his name is Noah, is going to have a scheduled call with you.

And they will basically talk with you about the exact situation of your company and what kind of strategy we'd recommend. Noah has been digital marketing literally since I was in my mother's womb. He maybe ages him a little bit. His first e commerce website was in 1996.

Steve: Oh, okay.

Brandon: So that was the year I was born. The reason I bring that up is the guy knows a lot. Then he can take really, really good care of anybody that wants to learn Yeah. About this. So so that would be the the best recommendation.

If anybody has campaigns that they want us to look at and kinda compare against best practices, because we touched like such a small portion of what we can today Mhmm. And a lot of generalized things. Because we're talking to a wide audience. Mhmm. You can make a huge impact looking at someone's specific data and deciding what they need.

So I'd highly encourage you to go to batemancollective.com/disruptors. And I think you could put that link in the show notes.

Steve: Oh, yeah.

Brandon: And that's where you can schedule a call with us and we can just see if it's a good fit.

Steve: Got it. Guys, just couple of real quick announcements. If you guys got value today, you know, if this is gonna help you guys with your business, please like the show. Right? Subscribe, share.

Leave us a five star review in iTunes. You know? Our goal is we just hit a million downloads. Our goal is to eventually catch Joe Rogan. I know that sounds crazy, but this is the reason why we do all the crazy stuff.

So please, right, help us reach more people. And we do have the workshop coming up in three weeks. If you guys are interested, send me a message on Instagram. DM me workshop, and we'll see if it makes sense for you. And then tune in next week, we got my good buddy Carlos Reyes coming in.

So you'll be able to, check out what's the latest in his journey. So what are some last thoughts you want to leave everyone with?

Brandon: Last thoughts. That's a that's a tough one. I well, first, thank you so much for inviting me out here again. This was fun.

Steve: Yeah. It's my pleasure.

Brandon: Never been so excited to hop on two planes in one day. Outside of that Yeah. I I think, I I really encourage people to to consider digital marketing as a viable option for the business. I mean, I know I know that you did Yeah. And it it has worked out pretty well and still do.

Yeah. You didn't quit it.

Steve: Well, and and remember, this is how I started. Right? Like

Brandon: Yeah.

Steve: Back when I started buying houses, it was me and Sean Terry, $2 a click and $12 a lead. I would literally murder somebody to get those days back.

Brandon: You might not wanna say that so many times on recorded podcasts. No. I You might be suspected of it. I stand

Steve: by it. I stand I fully stand by it.

Brandon: Alright. Alright. But and that's actually one of the things I appreciate about working with you is I I feel like, I just like that you kinda get the game anyways Yeah. And you still trust us with it. Yeah.

And it's, it just makes me happy. You know, it's one of those moments in your business where you look back and you think, like, well, Steve likes us. I think we're doing alright. Yeah. That that makes me happy.

But

Steve: Especially because it's really hard. Because I've prior to meeting you because I shared this with you before. Right? Like, prior to meeting you, someone's like, hey. See, let me do your PPC.

Okay. Let's sit down. Let's have a conversation. And I'll vet them. It's like, no.

There is no way I'm trusting you with my PPC business. Right? So it it takes a good amount for me to trust somebody.

Brandon: Yeah. And I think, I don't know exactly how it was managed or anything before he worked with you, but I think the exact words you used were dumpster fire last time we talked to describe the situation Yeah. When you actually did pull the trigger some way. So I'm glad that we turned that around Yes. And everything.

So I I really think, like like, if I'm looking at the kind of value that we provide in these consultations, it's it's extremely HEPAFLO value. Yeah. You know, enough to get Steve convinced. Right. Right?

That that that means something. Right? So so I highly encourage anyone to to at least explore the options, see if it makes sense for your business. I don't know of any place that you can go where you'll get more transparent information about what you can really expect from people that are actually in a position to say that. Yeah.

So I think there's value there.

Steve: Awesome. And again, someone wants to get a hold of you?

Brandon: So if they wanna get a hold of me specifically, then you can always reach out on Facebook. Brandon Bateman is my name. We probably have, like, 50 mutual friends. Yeah. And then, specifically if they're interested in working with us, then Noah is their guy.

It's batemancollective.com/disruptors. And of course, if you got anything, like, super complicated, I'll you know, Noah can bring me in. But I'll see you on the onboarding call, of course, if it's, you know, if it's a good fit. But that's probably the best place to go there, simply because, you know, last time I was on here, people were booking out my calendar, like, a month from when the podcast was because they I only got so many hours in the day. Yeah.

So I'm really grateful that we have someone that is staffed literally to to talk to whoever reaches out from this.

Steve: So Robert, since he's been in the show, impossible to get a hold of because he's

Brandon: because he slammed. He slammed. I I believe it. It's a we we got probably no less than 200 people reach out Wow. After the last time I was on the show.

Yeah. Which was, you know, amazing. I'm super grateful for the for the whole opportunity and experience and everything. But but so anyways, if you wanna talk to us sooner than later, then I recommend reaching out sooner than later as well because the calendar books up. But but, anyways, that's that's the best way to to become a part of the family, so to speak.

Steve: Alright. Awesome. Thank you very much. Yeah.

Brandon: Thank you, Steve.

Steve: Appreciate it. Thank you guys for watching. See you guys next week.