$3.4M in Revenue. $1.4M from PPC alone. Cody Hofhine and Brandon Bateman talk about how to add digital marketing to your business.

Steve Trang: Everybody. Thank you for joining us for today's episode of Real Estate Disrupters. Today, we have coming back Cody Holfine and Brandon Bateman. Cody's gonna talk about how we to get motivated sellers to call you. You did 3 and a half million last year, which I don't know how you survived on that.

And Brandon actively manages 50,000,000 a year in digital marketing, which is another crazy thing. If this is your first time tuning in, I'm Steve Trang, founder of the OfferFast Homes app, the only MLS for off market wholesale properties. And I'm gonna mention you create 100 millionaires. One question I get all the time is how do I become one of the 100 millionaires? The information on this podcast alone is enough for you to get there in the next five to seven years.

All you need to do is take consistent action, and you will become one. When you hear a nugget, please type in the comment section. And after the show, identify your single biggest takeaway and focus on just that for the next seven days. If you get value today out of the show, please tag a friend, share this episode. That way, we can all grow together.

And this is a live show, so please ask your questions for Cody and Brandon to answer. You guys ready?

Cody Hofhine: Let's roll. Ready.

Steve: Alright. So we were talking before about what got you into real estate, but how are you staying so excited in real estate and continuing to grow?

Cody: What excites me well, let me tell you what wouldn't excite me. Maybe this will be the answer. What wouldn't excite me is if I was wearing all the hats and if I had to do everything. So to be completely honest, what excites me is I went through that learning curve. I went through that that hard learning curve of scaling.

Just surround yourself with the right team. And we tried it. We failed multiple times. This is not an easy journey. This is things that it's like It's not.

You hire someone and you're like, man this resume said he did this this this and on day three I'm like this guy isn't even close to what this resume is like not even close.

Steve: Wait people lie on their resumes? It was so bad

Cody: and so one of our methods on that is now it's all referral based or we actually

Brandon Bateman: know them and some of them are even family.

Cody: Because you just know them. You know the ins and outs. You don't get this beefed up resume and then they come day three and you're like,

Steve: I already have to fire this guy. I don't

Cody: even want him on the team. So we've gone through the bad, believe me. But we've learned along the way, learned everything but we didn't give up. I think that's the secret right is we're all gonna make mistake. We're always gonna find ways that, you're you're gonna either win or learn you'd but you can't give up.

You can't let that set you back but most people when they get to that scale mode they try it once, like, oh, I'm not meant to scale. I'm not meant to get there. Well, guys, here's the question I had to ask myself, and to be honest. If if I keep wearing all the hats, what does that look like three years from now? What does that look like five years from now?

And that picture was a lot scarier to me than trying to figure out how to hire a good team.

Steve: Well, there's two things that I think are interesting here. Right? Because we always see social media, you know, you always see the 5%

Brandon: Yeah.

Steve: Right, of the best. So you see social media and you see these guys, they're crushing it, and they're cashing checks and this and that. And so some of the people that are listening are thinking, like, well, this should be easy, and they're frustrated because they're running into challenges. So what advice do you give someone that's, like, going after, going hard, doing everything they're hearing, they're watching a YouTube, listening to podcast, they're doing it, and they're not getting traction. Like, what do you tell that guy?

Cody: So some not even getting to scale. Just someone that's just taking action, but they're not getting deals.

Brandon: Yeah.

Cody: So they're just just in the grind and they don't know if they can ever scale because they still haven't consistently done deals. I always look at people's process more times than none. It's not that they're not afraid to take action. I know plenty of go getters. I was one.

I did insurance. I went out there and I pounded doors. That's just the dumbest way to spend your time. I was willing to take action. I took harder action than anyone out there.

I would out act everyone. I told myself no one will outwork me. That doesn't equal success and I think that's the secret is I thought, man, all you gotta do is just outwork them. Well, if you take the wrong action, it doesn't matter, right? So I always look at their process, break it down and say, what is it that they're doing?

If they're spending nine hours a day, that's fantastic. I love that you have nine hours a day to do it, but now let's see what you're doing with those nine hours. And you may just find out it's just the process they're doing. Maybe they're sending out postcards to the wrong list or maybe they're cold calling the wrong list or maybe when they talk to people on the phone, they're like saying things that you're, like, yeah. Don't say that.

You sound weird, man. That's why they're hanging up on you twenty four seven.

Steve: Using free skip tracing. That's right. That's right. So then what about because you you mentioned this other thing too about, you know, I wasn't meant to grow. And this is I think this is something that's, was perilous.

Right? It's a little dangerous

Brandon: Yeah.

Steve: Where, like, you grow and you said, oh, having all these people work for me, this is just more stress. This sucks. And you go back to one. And then at some point, they'll get brave again. They'll do it again.

And the same thing happens, like, this sucks. And I go back to one. What advice do you have for those people?

Cody: I that's where I question. It sucked for me. Like, I'm not I'm not gonna sugarcoat this. I want your whole audience to realize there's a suck to this. If you wanna get to a point where you can be able to just work on your business three to five hours a week, you have to go through the suck.

Like there was plenty of suck. I'm not gonna sugarcoat anything about entrepreneurship. I think so many times we paint the picture that it was just unicorns and rainbows and maybe that's where I think social media and this influencer space has a huge problem is because they never share the details. They never share all the bad that does come along. But it's just like, oh my gosh, guys.

You can do this you can do this in thirty days or less like this is amazing.

Steve: Well you can't share the suckiness. Like it's hard right? Like oh this person quit on me. This person stabbed me in the back. Like you don't really share those stories.

Cody: Right. It's tough. It's tough but I do. That's the thing is it is it is tough. I had bad hires and a lot of the time to point back though I have to also take accountability and realize I had a hire this one guy was an a player.

Like, this would be the greatest closer. He'd be the perfect acquisition manager we found him we got him we sniped him from another business like perfect the issue was I wasn't a great leader and so he didn't last long A players are looking for A leaders yeah they're not looking to just work for someone because it's a paycheck they want someone that has a vision someone that sees longevity, something that's gonna go for a long term, go a long time, and that they can see themselves growing in this place and not have a cap. I'm I'm that guy that they probably looked at and like, man, you you sold a great game here. Like, I'm talking about how bad it was for the resume people. I was probably that person.

Oh, yeah. This business is fantastic. It's gonna be like unicorns and rainbows. And then he came. He was like, dude, you're awful as a leader.

Yeah.

Steve: I'm not going to the promised land with you.

Cody: And they don't stick. You only the people that stick are just a mere reflection of who you are. So if you want a players, become an a leader and you will attract those a players. So how

Steve: the heck does someone become an a leader?

Cody: You don't have to be good, but you do have to be consistent. Are you willing to do little things consistently? Darren Hardy. Right? Classic compound effect.

Be willing to do the little things over and over again that no one else is willing to do, but just continue to do them consistently. An easy one, I read 10 pages a day from personal development. It's not a hard task. I'm not reading a book a day. I'm not listening to a book a day, but I do make sure I get my 10 pages in every single day that's outside of real estate.

Maybe it's on personal development and it could be negotiation. It could be stuff that's used in real estate but what about meditation or self reflection or I look at journaling most people are like journaling Cody come on you're a loser I'm like I guess I'm a loser this journaling has like helped me like reflect on so many things that I'm like I did this wrong and here's how I can do it better next time

Brandon: where

Cody: if I wouldn't journaled I wouldn't get better so there's just little tactics that I do every single day that I just have to do consistently Kobe Bryant I want to say you sent me the video there was a video I watched and I want to say I watched it from maybe some share that you had Kobe Bryant he would go to the gym four or five times a day where most NBA players would go two times a day and it'd get to the point says after two years, three years, no one could now go to the gym eight times and catch up because I had consistently gone to the gym four times a day for so long that you now can't catch up

Steve: to the gym. It's mathematically impossible to catch.

Cody: That's right.

Steve: Yeah. Absolutely. That's right.

Cody: But it's not big things. It's just little things consistently done.

Steve: Yeah. And I think that's such a great point that, you know, it's easy to say, like, what's wrong? Why these people leaving? You know, I've I can't keep good people, but I think you're right. The self reflection because people will look at you as a vehicle for the success and they're looking at you as like, I'm better than that guy.

Cody: Why am I not running this business?

Steve: Yeah. Like, if this idiot can run it, like, I'm out of here. I'll go do this. I'll go crush it.

Cody: So true. So true. And we actually did produce great competition.

Steve: They did. They left like, man, we're actually gonna make

Cody: this one better. I'm I'm grateful for you, Kevin.

Steve: Yeah. So I wanna, touch on Brandon real quick. So, Brandon and I were in, CG Select together. And, we both had to do our presentations. And I listened to Brandon, and it was very refreshing the way he presented, because he just talked about digital marketing.

And it wasn't there to sell. It wasn't a pitch. He was like, here's what I do. Here's what most people get it wrong. And for me, I'm not trying to say I'm this great marketer, but I did my own pay per click, management.

And my biggest frustration, and I shared this with Brandon, my biggest frustration is someone was like, hey. You should sign up for my services. Okay. And I ask I'll start asking them questions and it's silent on the other side. I was like, okay.

I can't I can't in good faith give you my money because I can't be better at pay per click marketing than you. Yeah. But Brandon was going into terms things that were eye opening and I wasn't familiar with. So I thought that was really impressive. So you wanna talk about digital marketing and what how you started and what got you here?

Brandon: Yeah. I mean, it's a great question. Actually, it might be hard to believe, but Cody was my first client in real estate.

Cody: Let's go. And

Brandon: so wanna go. I mean, he kinda he he came the news for everybody.

Steve: So That's how I was.

Cody: I was the guinea pig, bro.

Steve: We're learning on his dime. This is it. This is a 100% true. You guys can thank me.

Brandon: Yep. It it's 100% true. So it's about three years ago, I think. I was running a marketing agency and we're just kinda working with with, different kinds of companies not specific to an industry. And I got a call from Mark, you know, Cody's business partner.

He basically says, like, we've worked with a bunch of companies in this industry and we just can't crack the code. I think you did last time.

Cody: This is what yours coming to. Yeah. We've tried everyone like this. This is awful.

Steve: No. Why can't and if they were any good or competent, then they don't answer the phone.

Brandon: Yep. That's, that that that can be true too. So Yeah. But anyways, so so Mark was was basically saying, I think you guys did, like, what was it, like, $200 in revenue in 2017 off your website. So, like, they were doing deals, but but they spent, like, $100 getting them.

You know? So it was, their ROI was kinda low. They wanted a lot more scale and that kind of stuff. So anyways, I Mark basically

Cody: said add to this. We always ask the company. Here's another kicker. We always ask the company, we have more money sitting here. How can we spend more money?

Like, we wanna spend more money, and they never spend it. I'm like, we have more money. Like, I want you to I wanna get more than a $200 in this year. I want a million dollars in. Here's money sitting aside.

I need you to spend it. And we go back and we're like, how much did you spend?

Steve: Well, we spent this. I'm like, that's the same as last month. I just said that. Yep. Listening is an important skill.

I wrote a book about it actually.

Brandon: Well, when I listened because basically, Mark came to me and he was he was like, you know, we tried all the agencies in this industry and we really can't make this stuff work. We know that there's deals to be had here. Mhmm. I mean, the fact of the matter is people are gonna gonna find the companies that they sell their house to. They're gonna find them on social media.

They're gonna find them on Google. That's just how the world works now and it's becoming even more that way. So like they knew that there had to be deals there. But they wanted to bring someone in from the outside that that perhaps had a little bit more competence on exactly how this stuff works, you know. Right.

So so anyways, that was kind of the beginning. We saw that first year. We we I can't remember the numbers exactly. We over doubled revenue with keeping the ad spend exactly the same.

Steve: Wow.

Brandon: So that was that was huge for us. And then the next year, we're able to scale more. So I think 2020, we did 1,400,000.0 in assignments from just about 277,000 in spend. And when I say that much in spend, I mean, like, that's what what Cody's paying for his carat website. Mhmm.

That's what Cody is paying me to manage that stuff and my team. That's the spend that goes to Facebook, to Google, to CallRail in order to to to track our calls. And, Like like, that's, like, the spend that must happen in order for everything to to happen.

Steve: So let's take a step back, though.

Brandon: Mhmm.

Steve: What got you into digital marketing?

Brandon: Oh, man. What got me into digital marketing? It's it's an interesting, interesting story. So I

Steve: I don't know if I actually know

Cody: this one, to be honest. I don't know if

Brandon: I've asked

Steve: you this.

Brandon: No. I don't think you do. So so a long time ago, when I was 15 years old, my first job ever was at a marketing agency. I was doing just kind of whatever they didn't wanna do. So so I remember, like, one of my tasks was, like, you know, here's a 100 species of mushrooms.

I need you to find stock photos of each of these species of mushrooms so that,

Steve: you know, we can use it for to actually help. Miserable.

Brandon: It it wasn't because I was 15 working during my high school class.

Cody: It wasn't. He's like, it wasn't, though. I loved it. No.

Brandon: Here's the thing. I was a 15 year old working with my on my phone while in my high school English class making $20 an hour.

Steve: Okay.

Brandon: You know? So I was stoked. I think that Yeah.

Steve: That's legit. That's legit. That's legit.

Cody: Money money rules the task. That's for sure. I mean I mean Yeah.

Brandon: My my my other job was at Publix. You know? If if you know the Southeast, you know that grocery store where making $8.20 an hour.

Steve: Yeah. Okay.

Brandon: And I had to show up, and I and I had to deal with customers. And it was just a different completely different experience.

Steve: Alright.

Brandon: So anyways yeah. Looking back, nothing nothing crazy, but but I enjoyed it. I after that, I I've kind of always been interested in marketing. Did a bunch of different stuff. I spent two years of my life living in Romania and Moldova, and that was when I got, like, even more into this because I was I was, like, on a on a service mission.

And we used to teach English classes because people there, like, that's where their opportunities are, is knowing English. Right. So I decided one day, let me try to, let me try to run some Facebook ads and just see, like, what could happen. Could we get people to our English class? Turns out with $250 in Moldova, you can reach almost the entire population in Moldova with a Facebook ad.

It's incredibly inexpensive. And this is 2,014. Like, if you know Facebook ads, they only existed in, like, 2013. At that point, it was, like, you know, maybe what TikTok ads are now. Like, it just was super premature, and nobody really knew how it worked.

So this is like super early stage Eastern Europe Facebook ads. We had 500 people come to our English course. That's a 50¢ per person that shows up Wow. In person. And it was just it was absolutely nuts.

And and we serve so many people. And it was, so anyways, that's kind of when I got addicted to the high of driving results with digital marketing, so to speak. I started the company when I was a sophomore in college. Wow. And just decided to go all at it.

Yeah. That's, we we started working with, ironically, some some interesting kinds of companies. We we started going more the enterprise route, which is where we got, of course, a lot more competent in in knowing how to do it really well. Selling enterprise clients as a sophomore in college is kind of an interesting, interesting gig when it comes to digital marketing. Yeah.

But but, anyways, we learned a lot of stuff there and

Steve: kinda Did you have to sell them or was it was it all marketing and they just kinda like signed up on the website? Like, did you actually have to sell them?

Brandon: Like, do you have

Cody: to pitch them to get them as a client? Like, do

Steve: they register on a website and then you have to close them on the phone or they were just

Brandon: like Like, this is all custom marketing. Right? So I was just kind of networking my way into, into, like, you know, doing audits, saying you should be doing this instead of this. I mean, when I started out, I literally just said, like, I don't even care if you pay me or what you pay me or what you want me to do. I wanna do marketing.

So good. And and that was it.

Steve: Right? So so I I literally I decided I was gonna start this company. Done. Yeah. I decided I

Brandon: was gonna start this company, and within thirty minutes, I'd already sent a 100 emails to a 100 companies, and just saying, like, let me just do something. And then we got some bites, and and then we we, of course, started charging money at some point. And I realized that the whole let me do your marketing for free business model

Cody: So how do we get back to that beginning model with my company?

Brandon: Yeah. So anyways, that's the story. That's awesome. It's, I guess the secret for me in getting into entrepreneurship was low opportunity cost. Yeah.

I decided to start a company instead of taking an unpaid internship. Yeah. And that, you know, changed everything for me because I'm such a risk averse person. I don't know if I didn't make if I didn't make the jump then, I don't know that I ever would have become an entrepreneur. Yeah.

At that point, I still viewed it as risky. Like, I don't want that life. Like, I am the guy that's happy with the corporate job. Mhmm. And my perspective has changed so much.

I mean, after after owning the company for a little bit and, like, I guess now I believe that I'm safer working for myself than I ever could be working for some

Steve: slow training.

Brandon: And that wasn't, that never registered for me as something that could potentially be true.

Steve: Is that how we were programmed growing up? Exactly. So along the way because direct what you're doing right now is direct response marketing.

Brandon: Mhmm. Right?

Steve: And so, like, when I went through I've shared before, like, I was managing my own pay per click back into 2011, 2012. And I still miss those days where it was $2 per click and $12 a lead for buy my house. Right? Like, I missed those days, so I left a lot of money on the table. Along the way, you know, I had to learn direct response marketing, Perry Marshall, Dan Kennedy, all of this stuff.

What did you do to learn and become excellent at direct response marketing and pay per click marketing?

Brandon: Well, that it's it's a really good question. I think it plays on my my strengths, you know, as a person. I'm great with data. Like, I just think in numbers. And and that pays huge dividends when it comes to to digital marketing.

A lot of people are saying, like, you're not getting your KPIs right. You're not tracking the right data in your business. You know? And that kind of that matters. But for every business I see that's not getting their KPIs together, I see two businesses that have their data, but they don't know how to use it to make business decisions.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: And I think that that realistically misinterpreted data is one of the biggest threats to to most businesses. And that's exactly what happens in digital marketing. People say, well, we've we're kinda seeing this trend, and and this is the data. And I say, okay. Well, that that sounds good.

And then they say, well and and that means this. And I'm like, okay. Yep. About right. And and then they say, so we're gonna do this in our business.

And it just everything deteriorates.

Steve: So the the conclusions did not make sense?

Brandon: No. Hardly ever. So, I mean, that's where I got I got so deep into understanding. How do we collect data? Mhmm.

Right? How do we build a system that collects as much data as possible? And then once we collect that data, how do we utilize it in a way that speaks the language of the platform that we're using? So that's where we've I mean, I've gotten so deep in this. We've built our own software around PPC.

We've we've tested thousands of Facebook ads for for wholesalers. At this point, I believe, like, in terms of understanding what actually drives deals, not just leads, we have the largest database that exists Yeah. In digital marketing for wholesaling across

Steve: these channels.

Brandon: I I believe so because nobody else is tracking what generates deals.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: They're only tracking what generates leads.

Steve: And by the way, this is how you close me. Right?

Cody: No. Take my money.

Steve: Yeah. I mean, so I'm I'm listening to Brandon talk about this. Like, yeah. We know that these phrases gets leads, but we know these phrases close deals. That's right.

Oh. Makes a huge difference. Okay. So we're we're bidding trying to get our cost per click low. Really, what we should be doing is trying to get our cost per deal low.

And that was the thing that he was talking. I was like, oh, crap.

Cody: That makes sense.

Brandon: Perfect example of data misinterpreted. Yeah. Being a problem for a business.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: Right? Because marketers want to tell clients we generated to do this many leads. Mhmm. And we don't care. When we work with clients, we don't care if we say that we generated to do that many leads.

Yeah. We don't care how many deals did you get.

Steve: Right. And that's the important thing to track, the closings.

Cody: I look at just digital marketing in general. I think that has the biggest space for growth. Mhmm. I look at that was what we're most excited about. Direct mail, I mean, everyone knows me for direct mail.

That's what I've always preached is direct mail. It's not dead. It's still not dead. Mhmm. But something happened even last year that I was like, man, there's there's something special here.

And so we just Brandon just kept learning. I wish I could say I I kept learning. I didn't. Well, and and We just kept responding to the awesome learning he was doing. Well, and he's

Brandon: being humble too because a lot of that growth that we've had is is from training his team on how web leads are different from the other leads that they manage.

Cody: That's right. So, I mean, in just a different process. Integration.

Brandon: Yeah.

Cody: Makes sense. Process on how you manage those leads. Although direct or digital marketing can produce a lead, we treat those leads completely different than any other leads. So it's no different than our marketing dollars. We have, certain lists and then we have a stack list.

It's like, okay. This individual is on four different lists. Who's gonna get majority of your marketing dollars? That or the high absentee or the high, high equity owner occupied. Right.

It's like most companies though they're spending the same money on all these lists. It's like guys we gotta concentrate. Mhmm. So the same thing with with our how we respond when these leads come in. These leads are seeking you out.

This isn't you trying to seek them with a postcard or a cold call or any other way that's outbound. Mhmm. These are people coming to you saying, hey, I need to sell my home. And too many times I caught my team writing this story that was just fake. And so this is over years of of learning this.

So yes, great digital marketing but then this process where I'm looking at my team and I'm like, well I just already called them and I called them four times in the last twenty minutes and they're not responding. This must be a fake lead. This must be one of our competitors just baiting us over here. And we write this story and we start to almost find justification and and rightfully so. Most people fall into this and I see this all the time nationwide where they're like, oh, man.

I called them five times. I mean, they're probably not as motivated they wrote in this web form. Well, real story that took place, we have three acquisition managers in Utah. We had a web form come in that was just like you wish you could get this on a phone call in five seconds. I mean, everything that you needed to know was like a number 10 on my on my hot list.

Brandon: Like,

Cody: get out there now. And they call them. One extra vision, call, voicemail, text. Next extra vision, call, voicemail, text. Call, voicemail, text.

Three people in ten minutes. From the time the web form came in, ten minutes. Now we could all write this story and say, oh, man. They're not motivated. It wasn't there.

You always have or how many times do you say, man, your phone's on your hip. Look how fast I pulled my phone up. It's like, the phone's on their hip. You don't just leave your phone sitting around. Like she knows we're calling her.

She knows we're texting her. Well, the reality was my youngest acquisition manager, the newest one, says,

Steve: I think I'm just gonna go

Cody: out there. So I'm like, what a brilliant idea. Let's do it. So he goes out there and she is already loading boxes into a U Haul. And, yes, her phone is upstairs.

Goes in, talks to her. Two hours later, comes out with a contract. Still to this day, our largest assignment, a $124,000, where most people would write that off saying, well, we've tried three phone calls, three voice mails, three texts in the last ten minutes. It must not be motivated. We treat these leads with a higher urgency and more respect than that.

We just go unannounced and we get contracts all the time unannounced.

Steve: It reminds me of Homer Simpson. Right? Like, I'm just one man. I did everything I could do.

Cody: That's the story you hear. I mean

Brandon: Yeah.

Cody: You if if you're not I I can still hear it in my team. My team knows this process, and there's still times where we have to catch each other saying, is that real, or did you just write that story? And they're like, you're right. I wrote that story. We have to always remind ourselves, always be aware of we write these stories all the time, but it's to justify that, I don't need to follow-up with this one.

They're not that motivated. Yeah. And we write this story out.

Steve: And we've updated our process. Yeah, baby. Right now, PPC, we can't get a hold of them. Get you right over there.

Cody: That's a 100%. That's one of the that's probably the best gold nugget, guys, that I can tell you. If it comes from pay per click, these are hot leads seeking you out. Get your butt out there and go unannounced and you'll find out that you'll still do deals. So 3 and

Steve: a half million last year. Yep. What was your number one lead source?

Cody: Number one lead source, we did was it +1 412? What was it in digital marketing? Yeah.

Brandon: One four off digital.

Cody: So that was our well, then we have direct mail that still did over 1,000,000. Cold calling did it still does great too. Those are our three highest. Mhmm. People call driving for dollars.

Driving for dollars is not a marketing channel. It's just a channel to get a list. It's no different than list stores. And so I don't call driving for dollars a marketing channel as much as a way to get a list that then we can market to either through texting, cold calling, or or direct mail, or PPC.

Steve: Right.

Cody: Or, I guess, all. Facebook and SEO. But, yeah, I'd say our most, when it comes to our highest return for at least amount of money out, digital marketing.

Brandon: Alright.

Cody: And that's the three

Steve: piece. So let's talk about digital marketing because we've been talking just about just about pay per click. Yep. But Brandon's gonna open my eyes a little bit and he tells me that I'm being what was it? Wasn't willfully ignorant, but it was like, you're completely disregarding Facebook and you're making a mistake doing this.

Mhmm. So can you you got your platform here.

Cody: That's the other thing that he's good at. He's kind. He didn't tell you what he really wanted to tell you.

Steve: Yeah. He's like, yeah. I I don't think you're looking at this completely. Looking at this right.

Cody: You really should add it.

Brandon: Yeah. Yeah.

Steve: So let's talk about that.

Brandon: Yeah. Let's talk about it because I don't think everybody, you know, listening is probably even familiar with PPC. So are you cool with if we if we just kind of go over the three of them and Yeah.

Steve: Yeah. That's great.

Brandon: And how they work? So so p p p c is the one that we talked about the most. That is people who are actively searching on Google, and the magic of that is you can just pay to be at the top of Google, and you're guaranteed that you're just gonna be there.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: Right? It's you're not guaranteed it'll be a certain price. You know, you can bid according to what you want to pay. But but anyways, you get you get those clicks out of Google. And those ones, like, our our best clients are closing one in closing one in 10 to 15 PPC leads.

So those are pretty much like the best leads that you can get in your business. I don't know of any channel that produces at that kind of close rate. Yeah. The downside of PPC is it's expensive.

Steve: And no no barrier to entry.

Brandon: Yep. No barrier to entry. You're going to, you're going to probably be one of several companies in touch with the seller. Yeah. You could, of course, be the only one.

But, basically, if someone searches for a wholesaler on Google, they will have no problem finding a 100 pages of wholesalers on Google. Yeah. Right? So your competition is also in touch with them, and that's where p p Cody's team kills it with PPC. It's because they're they treat those leads with real urgency.

Mhmm. They understand that when they get a PPC lead, it's going to be a deal. The question is, are they gonna be the one who gets the deal or someone else gonna get to the seller before they do it? So anyways, PPC is an excellent channel. There's a lot of scalability in it.

If you wanna spend a lot of money on PPC, you can. And that's why a lot of Cody's results come from PPC is because we're running that scale. Right? We spent $275,000 last year. You can't spend that on Facebook, but you can on PPC.

So it's, like, a lot of our bigger clients really love PPC because it produces volume. And and, like, correct me if I'm wrong here, Cody, but, like, if I was scaling a business you talked about all these problems with hiring people on these channels. I mean, scaling direct mail, scaling cold calling, texting, and all that stuff that requires tons of lead management and charging for dollars. That is a whole different game than scaling your PPC, scaling a business on hot leads is so much Which brings up a

Cody: good point though. How many times, I mean, you're a business owner. I'm a business owner. I always used to think this. I'm like, ah, we'll just figure it out ourselves.

We'll go hire a cold call. Cold calling is probably our least profitable, but it's also our least scalable. It's the one that, like, puts a pit in my stomach when I'm like, oh, man. That person was pretty good and they're walking? Like, because it's not it's a big turnover and it's still a good channel.

So I'm not here to poo poo on the party of of cold calling. It's a great channel. It's still profitable, but it's the one that gives me the most heartburn too because it has the most turning parts.

Steve: Well, it's labor intensive. You guys manage like

Cody: It is.

Steve: You can yell at Google, but when you yell at Google, it's because you did something wrong. Alright? Right? But you got people and we're, you know how do I put this? We're inconsistent.

Yeah. Perfect world, you know, we're automatons at work. Right? Perfect world. But we're not.

I mean, you could have an argument with your wife before we got here. Right? Yep. Got cut off in traffic. Whatever.

Your mood is just not right. And it affects the entire business. It does. Right? And if you had one person in a bad mood, in a room with three other people, does a person in a bad mood dominate or do other three people get them out of bad mood?

Cody: Negativity always wins. So Always.

Steve: That's some other challenges of managing people. Yeah.

Cody: And this is such a scalable channel, but I never as an entrepreneur, I guess sometimes I get nervous. I'm like, man, but there's there's this ad spend and then there's management fee. But now you look at it as like, oh, wait a second. This really is actually less than hiring someone to be in my office doing this marketing channel and I don't have to manage it. All I gotta do is just respond to it.

That's it.

Steve: Well, the other thing too is I can sleep perfectly fine at night knowing that Google doesn't need my money. Right? Like, if things are really going bad

Brandon: Yeah.

Steve: Right? Or, like, COVID strikes.

Brandon: Yeah.

Steve: Right? Yeah. He's like, okay. Let's just pause Google for a month.

Cody: That's right.

Steve: You you sleep totally fine.

Cody: That's right.

Steve: Google, Sergei, whoever else other people over there, they're gonna be fine. You can't just pause payroll.

Brandon: You can't.

Steve: That's gonna cause problems.

Brandon: Yeah. Yeah.

Cody: And I don't want to say that I don't want people to have because, again, it's the mix of all of this. If I had to rest my laurels all on on digital marketing, yeah, I wouldn't have done 3,500,000.0 last year. It just wouldn't have happened. That's a fraction of it. Yeah.

It's it's the joint efforts of all of them. And so I I I'm not here to say don't hire team. Yes. A good team. I mean, John Maxwell, he says, don't show me your dreams.

Show me your team. Mhmm. Like, that's how we accomplish our dream is we gotta have that dream team.

Brandon: We gotta have

Cody: that team in place. But, man, it's so nice when you have just leads coming in that you can just respond to. It's really nice.

Brandon: Yep. Absolutely. I mean, so that's where like, a lot of my bigger clients love PPC because of that scalability. It's easier to scale a company on that kind of stuff. But, however, Facebook, which this is kind of what I told you.

In 2020 was our highest ROI channel across all of our clients. Right? Facebook is, Facebook is an awesome channel. And and the reason it's great is it's still inbound. Mhmm.

People are reaching out to you, but your ad doesn't show next to other people's ads. You're reaching them kind of individually. So while there's a little bit less motivation than PPC, you're much more likely to be the only person in touch. So the average assignment on Facebook across clients has been higher in 2020 than it has on PPC. And that

Steve: was, that was a statistic that surprised me a lot. Mhmm.

Brandon: Yeah. Which is, which is interesting cause like PPC has those, those different forces, right? They're really motivated, but also competition drives down assignments. Right? Right?

So so that's where Facebook is a great channel. A lot of my smaller clients love Facebook because it gets you a cheaper cost per lead. It gives you that stronger lead flow, and it gives you a better ROI typically than PPC does. The disadvantage is you cannot spend nearly as much money on Facebook. So Facebook is if you're looking for low hanging fruit, I think Facebook

Cody: has a cap? The mister Zuckerberg has a cap on it.

Brandon: He's not gonna spend with this guy? Well well, let me let me clarify that. I'm talking about diminishing marginal returns.

Steve: Alright. Yeah.

Brandon: Right. So Zuck's gonna take as much money as you're willing to give him. Yeah. Yeah. But the fact of the matter is Facebook's so cheap, you'll just reach everybody that exists in your market.

And after you do that, you'll do it again. And after you do that, you know, maybe the third time it doesn't do as much as it did the first time. Right? And you just run into this diminishing return where people kind of get fatigued from your ads and it doesn't do as much. Whereas PPC, it's limited by the number of people searching, but there tends to be more money that you could spend there than on Facebook.

So it's a Facebook is an excellent channel. Oftentimes, if people are looking to just get started, and have a lower budget, Facebook is is the best channel out of the digital ones. Whereas PPC, they look at it like, I only got like four leads this month. You know, it's kinda slow. It could be really good and those leads close at an amazing rate, but it doesn't feel like as much as happening as it does on Facebook.

So anyways, great both great channels. They kinda have their own their own things. I think the interactions between them are probably the best thing. When you're, for example, marketing through through Google pay per click and then you're retargeting with Facebook. So when someone visits your website, you're continually showing continually showing them seller testimonial videos and and different things like that that help not only for you to get the lead, but also once you get it for when you call them, them to be excited to talk to you.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: Not skeptical of this company that they submitted their information to online. Their information to online. So there's definitely some, some intricacies there. And we also find that a lot of people are afraid of clicking on Facebook ads. So instead they'll search your website on Google and you gotta be found there too.

So there's, there's we, we find that we have a lot of leads that kind of have interactions on both of those platforms. Interesting.

Cody: Here's the perfect story. We asked a client of ours that it came from Facebook.

Steve: On our

Cody: side, it shows it comes from Facebook. But when you track it down, they were at work and they were typing it in on their phone. So I wouldn't be this, but be this. They'd be typing in their phone, they click on our ad, our pay per click ad, and then the boss come this is the true story. My boss came by so I closed down and so I shut it down.

And then I was at home talking to my spouse. I was like, man, there is this company is like sell Utah or something like that. Well, meanwhile, retargeting on Facebook. Also, they're in Facebook like, hey. That's the company right there.

And they click on it. Facebook got the credit, but that's the beauty of them working together where would they have found us again? Maybe. Maybe not. Or would they said, was it this company I sent it to or is it this company I sent

Steve: it to that form? And they can never remember.

Cody: That's right.

Brandon: This is

Cody: a 100% because I mean you got a few seconds and most of them are busy at work and

Steve: they're trying to do it

Cody: as quick as they can, but then boss comes by and they shut down and go back to work. Right?

Steve: Yeah.

Cody: That's why that retargeting, why the two of them I didn't know what I didn't know either. I was like, nah, just pay per click.

Brandon: Yeah.

Cody: And then you realize, no, it's the power both because how many people are scrolling through Facebook and that retargeting is now pennies on the dollar.

Steve: I mean, am I saying that right? Yeah. I mean, retargeting

Brandon: is such low winning fruit. Like it's we spend less than a dollar a day for the majority of our clients on retargeting. And we still reach everybody who goes to their website.

Steve: Wow.

Brandon: So it's just incredibly inexpensive. Of course, you I don't know if you can hire an agency to spend $30 a month for you on Facebook ads. Like, you gotta do something else too, but it's like a no brainer to spend that money on retargeting.

Steve: Wow. So one thing I always heard, correct me if I'm wrong. Right? If someone's finding on Facebook, generally, isn't it a longer cycle time from when they register to closes?

Brandon: Yeah. Absolutely. That's where we see that PPC tends to be the quickest time in between a lead and a contract. Mhmm. Facebook, it's a little bit longer.

Steve: So, like, you got an immediate dopamine hit with with pay per click. A 100%. Facebook is a slow

Brandon: Yeah. It's slower. It's not like cold calling

Steve: or texting.

Brandon: Like, it's gonna be shorter than those windows. We still find that everything blended together on on digital tends to be a quicker, payoff than than any other channel. But, yeah, Facebook's gonna be those longer ones, and and PPC is definitely gonna be those quicker ones. Because on PPC, like, if you get to the point where you're distressed enough that you're searching on Google for someone to buy your house, you're ready to move pretty quick. Mhmm.

Whereas on Facebook, you're reaching people early. Like, maybe it's not time right now, but they're thinking, oh, you know, with that thing that's happening next week, I might actually have to start trying to look at options to sell my house. So with Facebook, follow-up is huge. And and we find that you get a lot of deals there. What did you say?

Like, something like 75% of your deals are coming on follow-up. Yeah.

Cody: And it varies. 75% of all of our deals come from follow-up. So I always like that metric. If we find out that 50% or 60% came on on the spot closes, we missed out on a huge, like, portion of the market. It really should be skewed where 75% of your deals has come from.

And that's an easy metric just to anyone watching. See where your deals are coming from. Track that. Mhmm. And if you're like, like, oh, 80% of my deals come from on the spot closes, I hate to tell you, you're missing out on 75% more of the market

Steve: out there. Like, you're missing out

Cody: on a ton of deals.

Steve: Yeah. Exactly. And then there's a third way.

Brandon: Mhmm. Exactly. It's called SEO. It stands for search engine optimization.

Cody: My favorite.

Steve: Is it?

Cody: Cody When it comes to ROI, this is my favorite. Yep. But it is a later game, not a now game. Yeah. And he'll explain that.

Brandon: Yeah. So so if PPC the here's probably the best comparison. If PPC is renting a house, SEO is owning a house.

Steve: Mhmm.

Brandon: SEO is basically the game of using Google for what it's actually used for. When someone searches something, yeah, Google's gonna show paid ads, but also it's gonna show organic listings that are the most relevant thing for that. Now how do you, when you're one of a 100 wholesalers with websites in your market, prove to Google that you're more relevant to what the person's searching than one of these other companies? It's by by doing search engine optimization. Things like posting content on your website, getting backlinks, optimizing pages on your website for particular keywords and different things like that are kind of how you prove to Google that you belong there.

The thing about SEO is it does take a lot of time. If you start SEO today, you will not get I mean, most of our clients, it's nine to twelve months until their first deal from SEO. Wow. It's one of those things where it's relatively inexpensive each month. Like you won't pay as much for SEO as you do for other stuff because there's no spend.

There's management only. And you'll find that you're getting the same quality of leads that you get from PPC, but you're not paying for those clicks anymore.

Steve: Is it the same quality?

Brandon: Yeah. I mean, technically, it's a little bit lower quality because we have like, if we get some, for example, some terms that people are searching on Google that aren't exactly what we want, but we're ranking for them organically so we don't have to pay anything extra to show up there. Like, yeah. We'll take those. Right?

So sometimes the leads aren't as high quality, but they're they're really, really close, and it includes also those core things. There's different SEO strategies you could do to do the core stuff or

Steve: Yeah. Well, I'm just curious because, like, for me, it always made sense that they'd be more motivated. Right? Like, that's what made sense to me logically. But we bought some SEO leads.

Right? But, you know, other people ranked on SEO and then they sell those leads. Yeah. And we use those leads. And we we're like

Cody: That's actually a brilliant model.

Steve: Yeah. I was looking. I was like, these leads are not very good. So I was just curious. Like, maybe something else was going on.

Brandon: Yeah. I mean, that's a matter of what is the SEO. I mean, any company that's selling leads, you generally can't count on the quality of the leads being the same as if you were to generate them because they're making money on each of their products.

Cody: How many leads they can get in.

Brandon: Yeah. So it's a I think incentives are kinda misaligned and

Steve: Slightly skewed?

Brandon: Yeah. It's it's not that they couldn't do it right, but, like, if you're looking at what's gonna make them most profitable Mhmm. It's rarely gonna be having expensive leads and telling people, but trust me, they're really good. It's just gonna be providing more leads. That's generally what's best

Steve: for them. So And I'll ask you the question here that I asked you, when we talked before was I've got a couple of guys in my market. They're pretty big. You might heard of them. Opendoor, Offerpad, Zillow.

How do I compete against these guys? Because they have a little bit more money than they do.

Brandon: Yeah. And a lot of people think of SEO, like, I wanna be number one. And then I ask them, like, well, what what do you mean number one? They're like, I wanna rank number one. And I say, well, well, for what?

Because we identified about 5,000 things that people could be searching to find a wholesaler. And you know what? If someone searches right here where we are or they search five miles away, they're gonna get different results on Google.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: Google's a a crazy machine. Mhmm. So so anyways, there's a there's a lot of granularity to it. If you can't compete with the big guys in being right at the core of Phoenix on buy my house, I mean, there's there's more long tail stuff. Right?

There's there's things that are less less common that you can be more optimized for. And then, of course, there's different locations and everything. So really for SEO, there's there's always something to to be had there. There's so much opportunity. But it is worth saying that it can't scale quite as much as PPC with one website because Google only considers one website relevant for so many

Cody: things.

Brandon: Whereas PPC, I mean, you could bid on like like, we've had a client that has 10,000,000 keywords on PPC. This is outside of wholesaling.

Steve: I was gonna say, I've I've done my campaigns. It's not 10,000,000 words.

Brandon: Yeah. But they they literally have 10,000,000 keywords. Like, you if you're willing to pay for it, Google's willing to let you pay

Steve: for it. Of course.

Brandon: They're really good at that. Yeah. They're, they're

Steve: really

Brandon: good at it. Cha ching. So anyways, that's where like PPC, you can scale

Steve: it to.

Brandon: Yeah. As long as there's people searching, you can have it there. But basically the advantage of SEO is once you start ranking, it tends to be the highest ROI channel over time. Like Cody spent about $12,000 maintaining his SEO last year and did about $300,000 in revenue from that.

Cody: A little over 300,000. Mhmm. So That, my friends, who wouldn't wanna spend $12 at a slot machine, put in $12, pull it down, it spits out 320?

Brandon: Uh-huh.

Cody: That works.

Steve: That works.

Cody: It was.

Brandon: But it really is a long game.

Cody: It is. That's scary as an entrepreneur before you go on to this. That's scary as an entrepreneur because someone's like, you're gonna just be paying me, but it's like planting a tree. It's like, I want shade right now. It's like, great.

You should have planted a tree fifteen years ago. Yeah. This is the same play. It's you want leads from SEO? That's fantastic.

Well, you should have started twelve months ago, and that's the reality. And so many people are like, Well, then I'll just keep investing more money over here, and then they never start this. The problem is you have to start this. Get that twelve months going because that ROI is so crazy. That's why I love it.

It's not like that was my biggest money in channel. It's just 12,000 out for a little over 300,000 in.

Brandon: I know.

Cody: It's just you look at that and you're like, holy cow. But one of the other things that I think is crucial that we're really, really good at is find every time you do a deal, we have a process set up to get a testimonial on Google, so a written testimonial on Google, and then in fact people can go look at it. Utah just type in Utah sell now, not the w w and definitely not the pay per click. But you'll see you'll see on the right side you'll see on the right side, you'll see, I think it's like a 105 or 106 Google reviews. And then more importantly, on our website, who owns YouTube?

Google. Mhmm. And so what are they gonna promote their company? So always get video testimonials. And at the bottom of the testimonial, always transcribe it.

And now you just did search engine optimization. So when people are clicking in keywords, and we're very, very specific on if I'm getting a review from you, Steve, I'm like, Steve, how was a cash offer for you? And I have you repeat it. Well, a cash offer was awesome because it allowed me to do this, this, this,

Steve: this, this. What you have to do.

Cody: My house. And so it's like every question has its purpose. Mhmm. How was selling your home fast in Provo, like, even say

Steve: in a city, so that if someone is

Cody: in the cities of Provo, Google's like, well, here's a company that's relevant because this guy just sold a home for fast and for cash in Provo, and this guy is right outside of Provo in Orem. So there's there's key things there that I think a lot of people aren't doing. If you go to our website, you'll see we have a lot of videos, but we also have a lot of Google reviews. And it's not like you can just pound them and say, hey. I want 20 of my friends to go and put reviews on there.

Google doesn't look that as relevant. They're like, that's great. You did 20 in a day. They wanna see longevity. They wanna see consistent post every single week consistently for years.

And then they're gonna be like, this guy's relevant. This guy's serving a lot of people, and people are willing to post about their review on it.

Steve: So I think we should hit on real quick the process. How do we get all those Google reviews? Like, what is the conversation? When are you asking a seller? And what's that conversation like?

So we used to have our our title company do it. So when they're in closing, like, hey, before

Cody: you go, we'd have like a mug and all this fun stuff that we'd give them as a gift. And, hey, before you go, how was your experience? Now what we do is our acquisition managers just do it. And what we do is instead of asking for a testimonial, that's like that's like a way that's like, like, let's get better than this. Like, it's almost sounding like you owe me.

Mhmm. They don't owe us anything. They just sold us their house at a discount. They don't owe me a testimonial. But when we ask for a testimonial, it's almost like, hey.

You owe me a testimonial. They don't owe us anything. So what we do is we involve them in our mission. Our mission is to serve people and help them. Like, we wanna make sure that we get them to plan b and serve them with high quality.

How do we enroll enroll those people into that mission? And so now what we do is

Brandon: we just ask them, hey.

Cody: Your story, it's not as unique as you think. But you may find out that your story could really help someone out there that doesn't think they have an option on selling their home, that they think stuck with this. And it might be your story that lets them know that there's hope that could inspire them and motivate them to let them know there's other options out there. Do you mind sharing your story so we can see that? And people, like, they wanna be everyone wants to help someone.

Brandon: Right.

Cody: If you ask someone, like, what's the biggest thing you'd wanna do? They're like, oh, if I could just serve people or help people. Everyone wants to help people. So enroll them on that. How do I get a story from you so you can inspire these people?

Do you mind sharing your story so we can help these individuals that might be out there thinking, I don't have a chance. I don't know if anyone will buy my home. You may find out your story just might give them hope to find out there's options. Like, heck, yes, I will. And then they do it.

Steve: I love it.

Cody: So that's what we do.

Steve: So we're not gonna mention any names here.

Cody: Okay.

Steve: We were speaking offline and there are individuals out there that promote locking contracts up at the seller's price and price dropping them. You feel that shortsighted. And it kinda I think that lines up what we're just talking about. Definitely not legal. That's another conversation.

But as far as, the shortsightedness, you you wanna talk about, like, well, I guess we just expand upon that, you know, the problem with that business model.

Cody: The problem now if you're gonna go back to digital marketing, what person is going to give you a review if your goal is, well, gosh, I'm in a market where I have Steve Trang and Pace and and Jamil and Brent, and I'm in this market that's just crazy competitive. So what I'm gonna do, I'm just gonna lock it up at full price, and then I'm gonna go back and renegotiate it because I'm gonna get an inspection and say because of this, I have to actually pay this. Like, come on. There is no intent of ever paying that price. And on top of that, majority of them are gonna cancel.

Mhmm. But how many people, when you go back and say, I'm gonna give you one eighty, and then you go back and say, I can only give you one twenty. How many people can you enroll to say, hey. Would you give me an amazing story that would inspire people? Like, no, dirtbag.

You cut me out $60. Like, I was hoping for $1.80 and you didn't do it. You did $1.20. I can't imagine that business growing. So now on the SEO side, at least for I mean, I don't know how it values.

That's a great question for you. I put a lot of stock and weight, and we use that as an authority play when we're talking to people. Hey, guys. We have more written reviews, more video testimonials than any other company in the whole state of Utah. In fact, on my way over there, I'll send you a couple that you can already start watching.

So we use these all the time, and we send them over. And we and that's our touch. Right?

Brandon: It's

Cody: five to 12 touches. So we're using that. Well, if you're short changing people, you have nothing to say in authority. But I'll guarantee you also those ones that contract that you canceled, I'll guarantee you those people be like, dirt bags

Brandon: Right.

Cody: Crooks. Never do business with these scumbags again. And guess what? Google's gonna sniff that out and be, like, nope. We're not referring you.

We're not putting you anywhere out here for people to see. Like, you your SEO, you're gonna be on the twentieth page.

Steve: Well, not just that. Like, that's something I I taught a while ago is that every lead is an Internet lead. You might not think it's not an Internet lead, but every lead is an Internet lead because even if you came by referral

Brandon: Yeah.

Steve: I'm still just like, who's this who's this Cody Holfheim guy? Yeah. Let me look him up. Oh, he does all these things. Hey, Cody.

Don't even bother coming over.

Brandon: Yeah.

Steve: Right? Like Yeah. It impacts you. Right?

Cody: That's right.

Steve: The ones that you price are gonna give you some nasty reviews. The ones that say f off are gonna give you nasty reviews. No one's loving you.

Cody: That's right.

Steve: Right? So it's really short sighted. And then the whole other thing where it's completely legal. That's a whole another story.

Cody: You wanna last in the game. If you don't wanna last in the game, do that model. Yeah.

Steve: So let's see. Guys, please ask your questions, here, for for Brandon and Cody to answer. Is there anything else you wanna add on the digital marketing side?

Brandon: Well, I just say with SEO, like, the way I would think about it is, like, if you're at a point in your business where you're taking home money beyond what you need just to pay for your, you know, for your family's livelihood. Like if you're buying rentals or you're investing in the stock market or something like that, SEO is gonna get you a better return than that. It's worth investing in. The problem is people put it next to the short term stuff, and they say, well, it's not gonna work. But then they go buy a rental.

I'm like, well, that's not returning your money day one either. You know? Like, that that's gonna be a long game to get your money back there. SEO returns dividends far.

Steve: So you're saying don't compare SEO to your pay per click results.

Brandon: That's right. Compare it

Steve: to, like, your stocks and your rental portfolio.

Brandon: Because it's a lot of investment. Investment. Yeah. Just like those things are. If you decide today, I wanna stop paying Google, I wanna stop paying Facebook, they're not gonna give you any more leads.

No. If you have worked on SEO and you built it up, that's a machine that generates leads, and now you'll get leads even if you decide to stop maintaining that machine today. And slowly tapers off, but the maintenance can be cheaper than getting it there also. So it's, so anyways, it's an asset. Mhmm.

And that's how you have to view it. It has actual tangible value. Whereas pay per click Facebook ads, you bring the leads in and then they're gone. And and it's, you know, very great ways to scale a business. But I find that most wholesalers are a little bit too short sighted Yeah.

Steve: To really invest in money. And actually, this goes back just in line with our conversation we just had now. Like, I'm investing a lot on my personal brand. And we were talking about, like, we're talking about doubling our size of our space and investing in our personal brand. That's SEO.

Right?

Cody: That's right.

Steve: Building our Instagram profile, our TikTok, our Facebook, that's just different SEO. It's just that we're just ranking on Instagram versus ranking on Google. Yeah. Alright. So search engine optimization, that's definitely the way to go.

So yeah. Not a lot of questions here. I mean, I think there's just a lot of people that have gone through it and weren't really in love with it. So what would you say to someone that's gone through Facebook and they have not had the results that they wanted?

Cody: I had those experiences. I think you've had those experiences.

Brandon: I have

Cody: definitely had those experiences.

Brandon: I I

Steve: did not care for those experiences.

Cody: No. I I I seriously, I had a a come I have a I had a huge coaching platform

Brandon: Mhmm.

Cody: That we were single handedly building this guy's business. Like, Like, built it big just off our our clientele, off our customers. And it ended up turning into a bad sour deal where he was telling us he was reviewing our accounts every week. And then we had someone look at it and it's like, this guy hasn't touched your account in six months. And we're like, hey.

You said you brewed every week. Oh, yeah. I do it every week. And it's, like, lying to me right there on the phone and then putting other clients in front of me to where it was it was I was always, like, one or two spot, and then I was never found on these searches. And then I'm like, man, how are these guys must be paying more.

Well, then I find out they're being managed by the same person, and I'm no longer ranking on PPC. And I'm like, wait. What? And the guy denied it. He's like, oh, no.

I don't manage their accounts.

Steve: I'm like, it says it right here.

Cody: Like, I know who's managing it. Yeah. So that's what I think when people are having experiences, I had ever been a ride to be like, I'm done with this business. Because I felt like that industry was one of those industries. I'm like, I don't know.

I mean, he's talking. It's you might as well speak German. Like, I don't know half of the stuff he's even talking about. I'm like, fantastic. I don't know.

But when you don't know, you also don't know what to monitor, what to judge, what to expect because you just don't know. Mhmm. And I'm grateful I found Brandon, but I I thought, oh, yeah. This is what it is and this is the return and that's what it's supposed to be doing. I mean, he told us it was a great lead.

And then when you find someone that actually knows what they're doing, you're like, this is what it's supposed to be like. So that's for those out there, don't stop. Don't let it make you lose or give up. Let it teach you to learn and just maybe ask better questions. And really, really,

Steve: the big thing I like

Cody: to see is hands on. How hands on are they with the account? If it's touching it once every six months

Steve: I can do that. Yeah. So Alexis wants to know Alexis Adams, is p p is PPC and SEO the only marketing that you guys are doing?

Cody: No. So we do we do, all web marketing. So we do, PPC, Facebook, SEO, and then we do direct mail. We do cold calling. And then our texting isn't like batch like texting.

We don't we don't send out, like, blast a bunch of texting. It's just simultaneous with the people that we're cold calling. They're simultaneously through just a sideline app that we're just sending a text. If if it goes to voice mail, we're like, hey. We just left you a message, blah blah blah.

And it's literally a copy and copy paste and then click.

Steve: Yeah.

Cody: But that's really all we're doing for our marketing. So it's the it's squeezing the juice with multiple.

Steve: So, let me ask you, with your direct mail, is there anyone you're targeting specifically for direct mail?

Cody: Direct mail, yes. Are are, like, go tos every day. And this is direct mail and cold calling at the same time is penned. So think of p e n d. It's probate, eviction, notice of default, divorce.

We love that list because it's a daily list where most lists you're buying, like, tax delinquent. You're not gonna pull that more than once a year. Yeah. And so you're gonna keep that list, but so is 50, a hundred, two hundred, whatever market you're in. Other people are hitting that list nonstop.

Where that penned list, probate, eviction, notice of v notice of default, and divorce, those are daily list. And I can promise you no one's getting them quicker than us. And so we're on those all the time but those are fantastic list. Anything that you can pull daily, fantastic list to target and cold call at the same time.

Steve: How's your conversation on those divorce lists?

Cody: Divorce list? We don't bring up the spade and be like, hey, it looks like like you're in a salty relationship. I'm like, no. We don't do any of that as much as direct mail's gonna do its thing. They're gonna respond if they're gonna respond.

But if it's cold call, it's just simple. It's just the simple script that I think everyone knows out there. Brent's been in here a bunch of times sharing it and it and it works. It's just a easy thing where it's, hey, I know this is random and out of the blue, but do you own the home? Are you the owner of the home at 123 Main Street?

Steve: Hey, it's not out of cash shop. I was just at the divorce court and I noticed.

Cody: Yeah. I noticed you're in the Fritz. Listen, I'm here to help you.

Steve: So property grabs. Do you think doing a video ad with a real human will convert better on Facebook than just a generic ad?

Cody: Oh, that's your question.

Brandon: Yeah. It's a good question. So so I'll, I'll say what I think it's asking. A generic ad would be maybe a picture of a home or something like that. And then and then a ad with a real human would be like a seller testimonial or perhaps a video of you talking about what you do and and stuff like that.

We use both. We find that the, I don't know if I call them generic ads, but like for example, an ad featuring a picture of a home or something like that. Like that can work really well, because it helps to qualify a bit. Because that particular, it's it's not interesting to anyone who's not selling their home. Right?

It's the most boring ad ever, and that's what makes it great because someone has to be motivated in order to actually reach out from that ad.

Steve: Right? Yeah.

Brandon: We're not a pay per lead provider. We're not trying to just, like, bring in, like, the most flashy stuff.

Cody: Think through that. I'm like, you're right. That is boring.

Steve: Yeah. I'm not clicking on that ad. No.

Brandon: Yep. And, and Facebook's algorithm works in a very interesting way where it sees who responds well to your ad and will show your ad to more and more people like that.

Cody: So

Brandon: if you have an ad that instantly qualifies, then you can find more and more of just those right kind of people in your market. So that's one where like we, we almost want ads to have a really low low CTR. That's a click through rate.

Steve: Interesting. And

Brandon: we want a high conversion rate. Because

Steve: I think a low CTR with higher cost per click, but I guess it doesn't matter cause that's just part of the game.

Brandon: That's just part of the game because you can increase conversion rates because you can qualify better. So, so

Steve: there's that, right? So that,

Brandon: that stuff works. There's also the video ad side where, you know, maybe having that person in their face can help have some better connection. We found that those tend to work really well as well. We also get feedback from our clients consistently that when they talk to the person and they show up at their house, for example, the person is much more warm to them. They have kind of that celebrity effect.

If I saw you on Facebook in an advertisement, like you must be a big shot. So I, you know, this time that you're giving me is really valuable. So we want to have that stuff, especially retargeting because it keeps your face in front of them over time, even if they're not ready to sell right now.

Steve: Are you are you is your face on the ad?

Cody: No. So that's the key thing is my team is on the ad. So it'd be my acquisition manager, the ones that will actually be going out. So I'm glad you brought that up because I'm like, this is this is perfect. Because if it's me and I don't go out, they're like, who's this schmuck?

Like, who's this guy?

Steve: Well, because I'm I'm I'm just laughing because of Max. Right? He goes out to the appointments. He'll call him, and it's his the testimonies are are his testimony or my testimonies. Right?

Like, me interviewing sellers and him interviewing sellers. And he had a lead, and she's like, hey. This is Max. Like like, the Max? The Max in the hat?

Cody: The the the Max? Sign here. I want your autograph before I sign there.

Steve: So yeah. Let me ask you.

Cody: I think personality types, though. Think about this. I had a guy that I sent I didn't know this until I'm at a title company. This guy walks in. He's like $78,000 check.

It's a guy that went through a coaching program. And I'm like and I'm looking at him like, oh, that's awesome. Really what I was doing is, like, getting the name. I'm like, what's the name and address? And I jot it down.

Right? And I go back to the office and I'm like, we have to figure this out. Like, he just did a $78,000 deal. We gotta figure this out. And I'm like, we mailed this guy, like, like, six or seven times.

He cold called him once and the guy's like, I keep getting postcards. And I'm like, no one's gonna buy my house. This is the awful it's the worst house out there. He's like, well, tell me about it. But it's because he called him, he gets a lead.

So there's these personality types Mhmm. That respond to different things that that still image versus like a video image. I think there's also that personality type that says, I'm gonna go with the still image or I'm gonna go with the video image.

Steve: So there's that personality part.

Brandon: And this gets actually, I don't think you you quite understand the, the implications of what you said too, because Facebook uses that exact system, but in a much deeper level. Right? Facebook knows who's likely to respond to a video, who's likely to respond to an image, etcetera. So what we're doing, it's scary. This is like, like imagine you have different postcards and you're mailing to people and you're dynamically delivering the postcard to each person based on things you know about them and what they're most likely to respond positively to.

And that's exactly how Facebook ads work. So with every client we really stress having as as many options in terms of breadth of creative as possible. Having that video and maybe also having that image of a house or something like that because it allows us to dynamically deliver whichever one is going to be most effective to each person.

Steve: Have you experimented with Instagram?

Brandon: Yeah. We we when I say Facebook, I mean Instagram too. They're kind of one in the Do

Steve: you get conversions from Instagram?

Brandon: We do. What we care about as people Mhmm. We don't care about where they are. So we target the right people. And if that person's on Instagram, we're there.

If that person's on Facebook, we're also there. They tend to be on Facebook more often than they're on Instagram. Right. But we're kind of agnostic to where they are. We just reach the person.

So at the end of the day, we probably spend less than 10% of our budgets on Instagram, but we still spend money there when it works. You know?

Steve: That's interesting. Jacob Wriggen wants to know, how does he go about getting the pen list?

Cody: The pen list. So, I'd I'd be curious where he's at if it's a disclosure state or non disclosure state. I would be talking to either title companies or talking to like a probate attorney or a divorce attorney because ultimately some states allow you to just log in and get it. Especially right now with it being closed down, some are already switching over. Now some of these, slower cities, they're not.

They're like, well, the courthouse isn't open so you can't get it. And they have no they have no ambition to change that. They're like, when it opens again after COVID, you can come get it. Some cities are sophisticated enough where they're like, let's switch this to online so people don't come in. So it's readily accessible just through online searches through your government, through your county, your township, your your courthouses.

You can get them online. Or you talk to title companies or probate attorneys or divorce attorneys and ask them, say, how do you they know how to get leads. Believe me. They're not just they're not just like, well, let's put it out on PPC. Mhmm.

They're like, how do I get leads? They have lists that they get. And title companies have access to lists, so ask them. Hey. I'm looking for probate, eviction, notice of default, and divorce.

Is there any list I can get from you? If you're doing deals with the with the title company and they have access to that list, they're gonna be like, yes. I'm gonna give you that list all day long so you can keep bringing deals to me. Probate attorney, they're a little bit

Brandon: a little

Cody: bit yeah. They're a little like like hold to it, like I can't share this much or it maybe it might be against fiduciary responsibility. Mhmm. But ultimately, what we did find out, there is a software out there that you can enroll in that gets you those lists that get them the same list. So it's it's either gonna be software based, city based, county based, courthouse based, or unfortunately, you're gonna have to literally drive there and get them.

But you can get them daily.

Steve: So Reginald David has a question. I think because you're you you saw this problem with Facebook and, like, not everyone can just plop a large chunk to start marketing. So he wants to know, if you have a small budget, how do you get started with digital marketing?

Brandon: Yeah. It's actually something that I'm pretty excited about right now, because we I mean, traditionally, we've worked with, you know, larger wholesalers. We never really started working with people who were doing less than, say, 50 deals a month or something like that. But we

Cody: have 50 deals a year. I'd say a month. I don't even do that, man. Who are you working with? Cody's our I wanna

Brandon: meet this guy. No. Yeah. Yeah. A year.

But, anyway, that's that's kind of arbitrary number. It depends on the market and everything like that. But, like, yeah, traditionally, we were dealing with, like, more, you know, bigger budgets and, and, more full service type, type things. We did just launch a product literally last week. So this is brand new, for Facebook ads where it's basically an entry level Facebook ad advertising you go to a website, which I mean, I think you're going to have a link in the, in the show notes here.

Steve: I just posted it.

Brandon: Perfect. So, so that link, you can, you can go there and then sign up for a strategy call so we can figure out if it's actually a good fit for someone. But it's a $50 a day minimum program. So that means it's like I mean, that works out to what? Like, $1,500 a month, as a base for Facebook ads.

And instead of trying to figure out what exact audiences are we gonna target and how are we gonna pull that data and what's our creative and and how are we gonna optimize this and and how do we know, like, which form of capturing the leads is best and getting our website up and our hosting, like, all these this host of things. You literally just go in and say, this is how much I wanna spend each day. These are the counties I wanna spend that money in and you get the leads.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: And it's, it's as simple as that. We set up the website on our end. We set up the ads and the audiences. We have our own advertising that we've tested, across a bunch of clients already that we're using for that. So it's kind of more of an entry level thing.

It's not I don't think it's right for every company because it's not custom to their brand. Right? So they're not gonna have, like, their face in those ads, for example, and then stuff like that. They're not going to integrate that with their PPC marketing and all that stuff. Like, that's all stuff that I think comes But

Cody: do they tap into your knowledge? Like, I guess that'd be the question I'd wanna know. Do they tap into, you're now working with, let's say, x amount of wholesalers. Mhmm. I think that's what makes in my mind, I'm like, man, that knowledge is getting wiser and wiser on your end saying, hey, amongst all of our clients, do they get a tap into that knowledge base that's saying, hey, we now have a big massive lookalike audience that you're just tapping into already or no?

Does that not work like that?

Brandon: No, no. It works exactly like that. So, so we're basically taking our knowledge of what's worked across clients and this is just kind of taking the core of that and, and making it more, like by making it not custom for every client and, and not, you know, making a website for everything and customized and all that stuff. It basically just makes it more efficient on our end so we can make that really simple.

Steve: And you're, you're leveraging magnitudes of scale and using your, what you know already.

Brandon: So I would say like if you're looking to potentially get into digital marketing, but you have a smaller budget, that's probably the best way to start. As soon as you do have the budget to afford it, I think a custom service could make a lot of sense where you're going to be building something for your company specifically. And taking into account those nuances of your market and all the different channels and the interactions and having your brand there and everything like that's definitely valuable. But this could be a good stepping stone. We intend for to be a place where we can kind of start getting clients some deals, and build up that trust in digital so that we can get them on the, you know, the full solution.

That's better I think in the long term. But I do think it's a step up from say a paper lead type program because it is built for quality of leads. It is built for, as much efficiency as possible. So it's, it's kinda like in between a custom service and a paper lead

Steve: type program. A step. A stepping stone.

Brandon: Yeah. Exactly.

Steve: So you said you were spending how much, a year or per month on pay per click?

Cody: Pay per click. You know that number probably better than I do.

Brandon: Not pay per click.

Cody: I'd say

Brandon: is it 17 Is it 15?

Cody: Is it 15? But that's between both markets. So that's Utah and Dallas. I'm like, it's not 15 in each state. Utah and Dallas, Texas, 15 between the two.

Steve: That gets you enough. I'm kinda surprised. I thought you can go bigger in Dallas.

Brandon: I mean, everything's bigger in Texas.

Cody: You can, but we have to scale that team and make sure the process is in place. So Gotcha. That's a one year old business where we're going on year what are we? Since May '15. So we're going on year six, almost six years.

Brandon: Mhmm.

Cody: And this one's just in its infancy. So we're now building that out. So we just brought on our second acquisition manager. We're now building that out so that it can handle when we turn that up because, yes, there's that's why I love Dallas. It's like, what a nice city where I'm like, oh, man.

I love this city because it produces deals. You can, like, chuck a rock and you'll hit one of those cities in Dallas. It's like they're they're everywhere. It doesn't matter where you throw a rock. You're like, there's a deal.

There's a deal.

Steve: It's a massive, massive area.

Cody: It's true.

Brandon: And he could spend probably $50 a month on PPC Yeah. If he wanted to.

Steve: So that was gonna lead to my question. Right? I I mean, everyone in Phoenix just completely disregard this episode.

Cody: Not for hire.

Steve: So how big can we get as far as spend goes in Phoenix for our operation?

Brandon: I mean, this is the I mean, this is one of the key advantages of working with a company that really knows what they're doing. Mhmm. Right? Because when we work with you, we can figure out these kinds of things. To know that before you enter into a market and because, like, we're starting with you, Steve Mhmm.

Today Yeah. On your advertising. Right? So it's like we don't have all this data to know. Like, we're

Steve: Ryan doesn't know. You're meeting with him right after this meeting.

Brandon: Yeah. So we, so so anyways, that's where, like, we need some of this information. But to give you an example of, like, what we're doing with Cody, oftentimes we're saying we have some more money. Where should we put that money? We're saying, here's the data that we need on your side.

And then we'll look at things at PPC, like, how often are you showing up and on what keywords are you showing up and how high are you showing up on those things? And we could do some simulations. If we were to spend more money, how would that affect your cost per lead? You can always spend more money. Almost always.

The question is how much is that going to increase the cost per lead and how far into diminishing returns are you going to get? If I had to guess in a market like Phoenix, over $30 a month, you could probably spend on PPC with, with a reasonable level of efficiency. But it is always that trade off between do we want to kind of be a small player and just pick off the lowest hanging fruit and have that advantage or do we want to play at volume and we're going to spend a lot more per lead, but we're going to get so many more leads and we're gonna do a lot more deals. And could we be more profitable doing that? It's always about finding that balance between those two.

Steve: And actually that's a great point because this is a question I always was wondering about. Do I wanna be I always bid enough. So my average was 1.5. Right? Sometimes I was

Brandon: number one, number two, but I was never number

Steve: three. Yeah. And so I just always adjusted my bids. I didn't adjust. I had it set so Google automatically adjust my bids so that my average is 1.5.

Brandon: That ages you, Steve.

Cody: That ages you.

Steve: It's like it's

Cody: not done that far.

Brandon: But average position doesn't even exist as a metric, much less positional bidding. But, yeah. Anyways,

Steve: that's just funny because that's before my time even. But Oh, jeez.

Cody: So even he's

Steve: So like I said, $2 a click. Yeah. $12 a lead. Yeah. Anyway Crazy.

What so then there is no, like, magic now where you say, like, you know, you wanna be number one or number three. Like, it's just like, is there a a goal here then as far as bidding?

Brandon: Yeah. ROI. Okay. Right. So so what that comes down to is sometimes there's gonna be searches where you're like, oh, those aren't amazing.

Mhmm. Someone's searching sell my house. Mhmm. Right? It doesn't say if they're motivated, but also they're searching on Google.

So maybe like that shows some type of motivation. Yeah. But it's not like, we buy ugly houses search. It's not a sell my house fast for cash or get a cash offer in my house Yeah.

Cody: Search. It could be traditional real estate.

Brandon: Yeah. It could be it could be more more retail focused. Everything has a value. That's the key point. Like, in an extreme example, you you could be a wholesaler in Dallas, and then someone could be searching for a divorce lawyer in Memphis, Tennessee.

And one in a million of those people searching for a divorce lawyer in Memphis, Tennessee also has a house in Dallas that they're wanting to sell. So that click has value to you. It could be like a millionth of a penny, but it has value. Right? So so that I think that's that's a key thing that we wanna change in in terms of our mindset about PPC is it's not that there's good things and there's bad things.

It's that there's things that are overvalued and undervalued. When you go into a market as a wholesaler, you're not looking for I mean, you're wanting to you're wanting to sell houses at top dollar for as much as possible. Right? But you don't go into the market and say, I'm now gonna look for the most expensive houses because that's how I find the ones that are gonna sell for the most. Because that's not how you make the most money.

Right? That would be really silly. What you're looking for is houses that are undervalued. So you might find one where the house is only worth $20, but you can lock it up for $5. Well, that's a deal.

Right. Right? The same thing with PPC. We have some stuff that's better, some stuff that's worse. The the thing that's most valuable is understanding what those things are worth and bidding appropriately to it.

So if you have a click that's worth a $100, you don't pay a $120 for it.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: Right? So that's that's the main thing is basically we look at

Cody: This is that German talk I was talking about.

Steve: Well, this is the reason why I signed up

Brandon: for them.

Steve: We were talking.

Cody: This is why I

Brandon: was there.

Cody: I'm like, this is why I had to bring them. I sit here. I'm like, Steve's gonna ask me a question. I'm like, I don't know. I have no idea.

I better bring Brandon.

Steve: But this is exactly why I signed up for this guy. So, Alexis is asking you guys are pulling your list, you said, daily?

Cody: Yes. On on those four, yes. Tax delinquent, it's not worth pulling daily.

Steve: And how often are you following up with a lead? So let's say someone hit the pen list yesterday.

Cody: Yep. You

Steve: pulled it today. Yep. What's the follow-up like after that?

Cody: Yep. That's gonna depend on what it sounds like when it comes in. Right? Like, not every lead's gonna get the same follow-up. Someone's because we're reaching out to them on directly, it's called cold calling.

Everything's cold. You're just reaching out to them. Some people are interested. Great. They're gonna get follow-up, but we have a process.

So our acquisition managers are the thirty days and less. Like, someone that's gonna move in thirty days less, that's the only leads they touch. They don't touch our medium and they don't touch our cold. The medium's done by a like a a lead manager and then our cold is done by our cold callers. And so if it's like, oh, yeah.

I might sell next year. That stays in the biggest pool that has the most leads and just gets followed up by our cold callers until they're ready and then it changes the pools or changes buckets. But we only have 25 leads per acquisition manager at any given time that they're following. That's it. We want 90% of their effort on those 25 leads, not dinking around with these other leads that, yes, are important, but not important for them to follow-up on.

So that's a hard question to answer because it's not all the same. It just depends on where they're at. Thirty days or less, they're getting a phone call. It could be daily. It could be two, three, four times a week.

Someone's gonna move in the next six months, maybe a medium lead, it could be once a

Steve: month. Right.

Cody: It and then it gets closer and it switches over here and it's like now it's twice a week. Then it's once a once a day. Just depending on time frame.

Steve: Tyler's asking, do you pull from the county daily or is there a software? And I think that just really depends on the market.

Cody: Depends on the market. So that's gonna be completely reliant upon where you live and that's gonna be unique. But if you find out that you have a probate attorney that says, hey, here's this or here's that, you're gonna find out that you're probably one of the only people in your market that had the courage to go find that list daily. And if you get it It's

Steve: a gold mine.

Cody: Thank me later. It's awesome. It's awesome list.

Steve: Prince wants to know, Brandon, if you want to learn SEO, where should he start?

Brandon: Oh, learning SEO. That's, that's an interesting one. I don't get asked that very much because most business owners, they're like, I don't wanna spend my time doing that. Like, if you learn enough about SEO, you realize it's not worth your time

Steve: because it's

Cody: a twelve month payoff. I'm not going to go work on something that doesn't pay me for twelve months.

Brandon: Well, and SEO is a labor game. It's really like, like as an agency providing SEO, our game is how cheaply can we write content. And if you, if you learn, like, if you learn like what you get for it in agency and you calculate in your mind like how long it would take you to do those things, you could like this. There's no way it's worth my time as a business owner to do SEO.

Steve: But, but if they wanted to,

Brandon: but if they wanted to, I think a good resource is backlinko.

Steve: It's a,

Brandon: it's a blog that works really well on Google kind of,

Steve: so I should start reading search engine journals. What you're saying?

Brandon: Yeah. Search engine journal backlinko. I mean you can

Cody: take away your time from talking to motivated sellers. Yeah.

Brandon: Yeah. Good heuristic is search on Google SEO and see who shows up first and then I'll tell you something. But yeah. Anyways, it's, there's definitely a lot that you can learn about it. I can touch on the very simple things real quick.

You want to produce content and you want to be posting that content targeted to particular keywords. So you need your keyword strategy, you need to produce content and then you need a back linking strategy, a strategy for getting links to your website. Beyond that, it's just about optimizing your website for particular things. But that's, that's most of what comes into an SEO service. So you can do that, right?

Like if you're just the guy who's gonna run a 100 miles an hour and in whatever direction, that is like start producing content and posting on your website. Start getting links from other websites of yours. Get your Google listing set up. Get Google reviews. If you do those things, like, you will rank.

It's just a matter of, like, you could be more aggressive with SEO and get it done faster or you could be slower.

Steve: So, Prince, one thing I'll ask, I used to do all my own SEO, is don't. Because the algorithms change.

Brandon: Yeah.

Steve: So even what worked last year

Cody: You thought we were still doing a 1.5?

Steve: Yeah. Right? Stuff that used to work no longer works. And And so for me, I did all my own SEO and it's like, that was not a good like, all those hours, poof, gone. Right?

And then Property Graphs is saying the pre foreclosure list, eviction list, with all these moratoriums, how are you guys adjusting? So are there moratoriums right now going on Salt Lake?

Cody: So there was that eviction moratorium where it's like There's

Steve: an eviction moratorium, but was there foreclosure moratorium?

Cody: Yes. But I don't I don't know if that's gonna be as big a problem as people think it is because at the end of the day, there's the the market hasn't dropped. So even if they're like, hey. We're not kicking our house. A lot of those people still have plenty of time to sell their home.

And as long as they have equity, majority are just gonna sell their home on a traditional market.

Steve: Right.

Cody: Where I think in o eight, it was a different there was a full on crash. A lot of downwind pressure. People are now negative. Right now, just because you're in foreclosure doesn't mean you're negative or upside down. So I everyone's hooting and hollering about this foreclosure thing.

And I'm like, I don't know what there's thing why people are hooting and hollering about it. There's so much equity in these homes that majority are never gonna come to us. No. I I know. That's my 2¢.

Steve: No. I I actually agree with you 100%. What is a great budget? I'm assuming here this is about digital marketing. If you wanna scale to a 100 deals a year.

Cody: We did about a 150. So all I can talk about is comparison. We did a 150 deals between Utah and Dallas, and our budget I hope you know those numbers. You spent

Brandon: $275 across those two, but that was for digital. Yeah.

Steve: I don't

Brandon: know what you're spending on your other stuff.

Cody: Yeah. But that was just digital, he's asking. Right? I'm presuming. So 275,000 did a 150 deals in two different markets.

Brandon: That's but the 150 deals was total. Right? Not just digital.

Cody: Oh, that's a good point. That's it.

Brandon: So, anyways, it it is

Steve: But 40%. It's 40% of your deals. Right?

Cody: That's right.

Steve: So 80. Yes. So the the

Brandon: thing about that is too, like, market's gonna be different. Like, we we provide some numbers like that. Someone in Indiana is gonna be like, oh, this is horrible idea. Right? And somebody in California, in San Francisco is gonna say, well, that's amazing.

You know? Because they they just have different assignments. And That's right. Naturally areas with lower assignments are also cheaper to get deals in. Right.

So so those things kind of adjust. I can tell you a lot of our clients starting out are spending around $8,500 a month for all three channels. If you're doing one channel, you can bump that to say $4 a month. Or there's like with facebook with the, you know, the base level program as low as $50 a month.

Cody: So that gives you $50

Brandon: a day? Or $50

Steve: a day. Yeah. Not a month. So say his follow-up was he was talking about all lead gen. So how much would you need

Brandon: to spend to do

Cody: a 100 deals a year? So a 100 deals a year, all lead gen. For our 150, I can just go off that. We're about, let's call it, 40 to we vary between 40 and 50 k a month.

Steve: In marketing.

Brandon: Yeah. But tell them your average assignment, though.

Cody: Yeah. Average assignment. Well, it depends on what channel. But overall, like, digital marketing, it's a $32,000 assignment. Guys, when I got into the game in 2015, my average is, like, $13.05, like, 14,000.

Really? So all we've done is just get better at our process and better at our process and got dialed in on getting good acquisitions, but getting really good at dispositions. And between that, now our average assignment's anywhere from 28,000 to 30,000 every deal. So you times it by a 150 deals and you start to get it going.

Steve: Yeah. It works. It works. Warner wants to know, what is your preferred PPC bidding strategy?

Brandon: We we, this, this will mean nothing to most people.

Cody: German.

Brandon: Enhanced CPC. Because we, we do want to do some dynamic, some dynamic changes to the bids based on different signals. But we also recognize that Google is never going to have quite enough data in one account for real estate investing to actually be able to bid automated. So our database is so much more powerful than, than any type of automated strategy. But we do allow Google to make slight adjustments to our bids based on different conversion signals.

Cody: Also, let me make sure I don't screw anyone up on this. I have to correct some things. Of those 150 deals, 20 about seven, twenty eight of them are fix and flips. Not a lot of people know I do fix and flips. I do them.

So that also helps that assignment. So I also wanna help people understand, like, I'm a truth teller, truth seeker. I'm not gonna be here and say, oh, these are straight assignments. They're not. And a lot of wholetail deals, guys.

I think 'tis the season, 'tis the market to be really considering buying that home and, putting it right back on the market, and you'll see that it's it's crazy. We got a deal for 250,000. ARV was $3.50. So instead of getting, like, a $15,000 assignment, we're like, let's just put on the MLS for $2.99. This home still needed about $20 work, but it was livable and it was lendable.

That's the key thing. We put on the market and it got bid up to $3.50. Then the guy's like, I'll pay the difference whatever it doesn't appraise for. I'll pay the difference because I want my daughter to live by. And we're like, this is absurd.

Brandon: So we

Cody: made a 100 well, we didn't make a $100, but there's a $100,000 spread Yeah. On a home that was probably $2.99.

Steve: Yeah. It's it's nuts right now. Yeah. So I want you guys to think about some last thoughts I'm gonna leave the listeners with. K.

Guys, if you got value today, please like this, subscribe, share, comment. Let people know. Right? Like, if we're all getting better together, it's I think it's better for the industry if we're all getting better together. And then next week, we got Brian Eric Fu.

He's gonna talk about how he did 6 figures a week, during COVID, which I think is pretty crazy, using creative finance. That's huge. So, I'll start with you. K. Last thoughts and how can someone get a hold of you?

Cody: Last thoughts. I think it goes back to because I think a lot of times our our listeners I mean, we have some seasoned people out there, but I think majority of people that watch content are like, they wanna get in the game. They really haven't done to something yet. You don't have to be good. You just have to be consistent.

I can't say that enough. That's probably one of my favorite sayings because too many people don't get in the game because they're waiting to be perfected. They're waiting for this perfect plan. But the individuals that just get out there and take massive imperfect, not perfect, massive imperfect action will always outperform the individuals that are sitting at home, building a perfect plan, taking no action at all.

Steve: Alright. And how can someone get a hold of you?

Cody: You can go to goref.com. That's a new website up to learn more about me, but also just my handle's just at, Facebook and Instagram. And that's just Cody Hoffine.

Steve: And it's ref with two f's.

Cody: Yeah. Ref. Go ref. Yeah. Stands for real estate freedom formula.

Steve: Brandon.

Brandon: Yeah. I mean, I would just say a lot of stuff is kind of tightening up and digital marketing is only getting bigger. Right? So, so I would encourage anybody who doesn't have this as a piece of their strategy to just recognize that, like, the Internet's not going to go away and people are going to find the companies they do business with on the Internet. So it's like, it almost sounds silly saying it, but there's so many wholesalers that are just so only mail, only cold calling.

And this is a big chunk of business that exists out there. So so, yeah, that's my that's my, my my recommendation. I have a link that I think you shared where you can book a strategy session with me where we'll basically talk about your specific market, what we know about it, get some idea of the data there. And if you've done advertising before and it hasn't worked for you, for whatever reason, whether it's pay per click, whether it's Facebook ads, whether it's SEO stuff, like, I will look at that and and try to figure out what went wrong. I've done that with you, Steve.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: Where we've just looked through your stuff and said, like, this is why it is the way it is. And also don't make the same mistakes over and over again because a lot of people will be like, oh, it didn't work. And then just try the same thing again because they don't understand why it didn't work. Right. So, so if, if I can provide that kind of clarity to anyone, I'm more than happy to do it because I know it's tough to, it's tough to have something that didn't work and not know if it's you, if it's your marketing, if it's your market that's not going to work.

And you never know anything for certain. But because we work with over 30 wholesalers all across The United States, we have a really great idea of what exactly it takes to scale your website to more than a million dollars a million dollars a year in terms of assignments. So yeah, I'd encourage anyone to go to that link. It's, I think it's www.batemancollective.com/disruptors. And there you can, yeah, schedule the strategy session and let's just dig into it.

Steve: Awesome. Awesome. And if someone wanted to reach out to you directly, is there another way?

Brandon: Yeah, there's a Brandon Bateman on, on Facebook.

Steve: There's gotta be more than one of those.

Brandon: Yeah. There, there probably are.

Cody: There's 72 of these guys. And honestly for somebody,

Brandon: for somebody who advertises a lot on Facebook, I hate it so much. I hardly ever use it. But there I am. There's also just by by email. My email is brandon@batemancollective.com, and that's b a t e m a n is bateman, how you spell it.

Steve: Awesome. Oh, and guys, don't forget. I do have the book, Active Listening two point o in Amazon. Check it out. Thank you.

Cody: Steve Trang, my man.

Brandon: Thank you

Steve: so much.

Cody: Dude, I appreciate you. This stuff's killer.

Steve: Yeah. That was fun. Fun. It was a great episode. See you guys later.