252 Mail-Right Show: When Should You Consider Paid Online Advertisement?

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When Should You Consider Paid Online Advertisement?

Johnathan: Welcome back folks to the Mail-Right Show. This is episode 252 it’s going to be an internal discussion with me and my great cohost Robert Newman. We’re going to be talking about when is the time to use paid online advertising to increase the amount of leads, quality leads that you’re going to get. There’s always a time when you’re starting your career, where you look at guerrilla marketing, and we’ve covered a lot of that during our internal discussions and with our guests, but then there’s a time where you want to paraffin on the, on the fire to get quicker results. So that’s the time to look for paid advertising. So, would you like to introduce yourself Robert to the new listeners and viewers?

Robert: I would love to. My name is Robert Newman. I’m the founder of Inbound Real Estate Marketing. I have an amazing website, inboundrem.com, which has answers to all of your real estate marketing questions, everything from how to name your company up to what niches you should follow. So, if there’s anything you want to learn, go there.

Johnathan: And if you’re looking to listen to all the great interviews that we’ve done over the past two years, you can go to the Mail-Right website, and there’s a full library covering literally anything that you need to know about online marketing or real estate marketing in general. So, Robert, how are we going to start this conversation Robert?

Robert: So today to all of our…I’m going to do John for a second and say to our beloved listeners and viewers, the way we’re going to start off today is we’re going to talk about when and how to use paid advertising. I’m an SEO guy and often times that gets a little bit confusing with like people go well, do you use paid advertising? And the answer is actually quite frequently. I advise people to use paid advertising on almost every single call that I get on. So, John was talking to me at the beginning of the show and he was talking about doing YouTube, paid advertising as a potential replacement from brokers and teams in different marketplaces. And so, I said, why don’t we have a conversation about when and how you use paid advertising and for what reasons? So, to kick us off, John, let’s talk about YouTube. So, you’re like [cross-talk 02:47] like understood it. Go ahead.

Johnathan: It’s a bit high level. We’re not going to try and keep it quick because I can waffle, can I? But it’s well known that in the sixties, seventies, some extent the eighties, if you had to kind of semi mediocre brand, if you were one of the bigger companies and you had a spread of different brand in food, clothing, it doesn’t… let’s say you had a mediocre brand of food product and you want… what was the, what was the quickest way to increase sales? What was the cheapest guaranteed way of turning that mediocre brand into something more special? And the way to do it was TV. When you looked, how much you had to spend by how much profit you would make from the expenditure, that there was nothing that could compare to local or national television or regional local, regional or national television, nothing. If you could afford to play in the playgrounds at that price level, there was no better return.

And that’s why a lot of companies would spend a lot of money with television because it was a guaranteed way. Literally you could spend like $1 and you’d get a four, five, $6 return. It was a non brainer. Well, in the modern age, and they’re not being offensive here, but apart from a lot of very old people, classify myself as old there, but I don’t do it yourself, apart from a lot of old people who watches traditional television? Most people I know and I might be unusual for my age, I don’t have a television. I have Netflix and I watch stuff on YouTube. I don’t watch…I’m not prepared to exp… or I get some films and other materials of iTunes, Apple. Right.

Robert: Right.

Johnathan: But I can’t stand watching television because I can’t stand watching 10 minutes of traditional television and then being exposed to six minutes of advertising. Right.

Robert: Right.

Johnathan: Which is mostly drug company, Korean cars, cheap Korean cars, drug companies and the sector, and I think apart from that older audience, a lot of millennials, Y generation, X generation they feel the same. So, increasing on traditional television, your marketing to other very poor people who can’t afford Netflix or, your marketing to very old people. Well I don’t think that’s a very good idea. So, I see when you look at the costs of advertising on YouTube to build a brand I think if you’re a broker or power team, you should actually look at YouTube and a mixture of gorilla free videos on your YouTube and also paid advertising. Compared to Facebook and some other online paid traffic sources, the prices are still quite reasonable, actually Robert.

Robert: I hear you. So, a couple of comments to what you just said. Cable advertising still in my mind has very much has a space, there’s a big audience, they are not just poor people there is affluent people out there that I think that still watch TV. And I think…

Johnathan: I was getting a little bit controversial there.

Robert: I think it has a place, however, isn’t the most effective place for a real estate agent to spend their dollars? Now that I would debate heavily now a broker. And if you’re listening to this brokers and I know there are a few of you out there that follow the show these days, listen, if you have a big enough budget and you’re still thinking the TV or newspapers are the way that you want to go every now and again, you have those clients that need that and you and the older clients are still the people that hold most of the wealth. So, you still go to those mediums.

Johnathan: Yeah

Robert: On the client side, John, because they expect that they’re going to be ads in the paper and things like that, regardless of their effectiveness. Now, having said that, how and when, from Robert Newman’s perspective, not John’s perspective, do you use paid advertising and would YouTube be effective? And the answer is if you’re spending money doing YouTube video in the first place, or you’re doing it yourself, and you’re personally producing it, the answer is absolutely positively lutely yes. Use YouTube advertising. It is the wave of the future, not the wave of the past and John is correct, in my opinion, on his estimate that you should be there. No doubt about it, hundred percent for sure. The other things that I would say though, is that the big thing in direct advertising these days is something called remarketing, why LOPA and all the big companies are using it. And I’m about ready to add it to my arsenal as well. And remarketing is where somebody has already visited your website, and then you an ad follow them around after they leave, because everybody has the attention span of a lemming on the internet and that’s true.

It is a fact, I mean, I’m over embellishing, but it is a fact attention spans get shorter and shorter. So, drawing them back to your site is a better, better, and better and better type of marketing and it’s very inexpensive. It’s not the same thing as getting a new visitor to the site, it doesn’t cost as much or anywhere close to it. So, remarketing becomes a wildly cost-effective way to use direct advertising for websites and such. Does remarketing work for Facebook? Yes. Is Facebook a good source of direct advertising? Yes. I think it’s been over talked about for real estate. Everybody’s using it, everybody’s got a different way of doing it. If you want to check out somebody brilliant, John and I have approached him to be on the show, but look at Travis Thom. That’s the only name I need to drop on the show. T R A V I S T H O M. He has little digital products that will break down different sides of Facebook marketing. Plus, John does Facebook marketing, but if you want to be taught how to do it before John gets his university up and online…

Johnathan: [Inaudible 10:16] lucky. I’ve been busy with my other business. So, but it’s just an excuse if it was big enough polarity, I would get it done so I’m not going to make any more excuses and just sort of going to try and get it done. About Facebook, yeah in some ways I understand what you mean there. I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t disagree, it’s just it’s no better, no worse than the other plat…the digital like Google, Twitter, it’s been kicked around like that, has been given a good kicking in the media and by the establishment. But as like I say, I don’t see it any worse than Google, Apple or Twitter in their attitudes and that, but when you when you look at the statistics, it’s still, obviously you combine it with Instagram, it’s still enormously powerful player. And I don’t see that changing in the near future or the medium future, really.

Robert: But having spent a second on those things, let me talk about something that you won’t hear anywhere else. You’re going to hear it here on the Mail- Right Show and this is why you listen. So, here’s some direct advertising options that very much work that are not being heavily tapped into. Twitter. Twitter advertising does work. If you have good content, if you’re producing a good video, if you’re producing a good something on your website, Twitter is…

Johnathan: Do you really [inaudible 12:08]? I’ve really totally discounted twitter when it comes to real estate.

Robert: I understand and for the most part, I don’t disagree with you. Where Twitter gets you in front of inside of real estate is people in the digital space. So, I don’t know, I was about ready to cap my statement with this. I think that Twitter is effective in major Metro markets where there’s a big digital audience. So, here’s some examples, New York, Houston, Miami, Los Angeles. These are places where digital influencers very much have money to spend on real estate and they’re very much on Twitter.

I have a Twitter account, most of the people I know in LA have a Twitter account, do all of us use it all the time? No. Do I occasionally click on an advertisement? Yes. Am I qualified real estate prospect in Los Angeles? Yes, I am. San Francisco, you have to be on Twitter if you’re listening to the show and you’re a real estate agent in San Francisco, and you’re not trying Twitter as an advertisement, I strongly recommend that you do. San Francisco having a Twitter account is almost a mandatory like badge of honor inside all of the tech spaces and there’s, there’s more tech jobs in San Francisco than there are normal jobs, so you would be ridiculous not to be on Twitter.

So those are some examples. Now here’s the big one though, Linkedin. LinkedIn is becoming a more and more of a space that people are referencing for moving. So, will it get you in front of traditional real estate searches? No. If you are relocation specialist or some percentage of your business is based on relocation, Linkedin becomes an amazing option because especially if you produce content that is surrounding relocation. So basically, think of it this way. You produce an ad that has to do with relocating to your city, everybody that’s listening to this show that is in a city that contains a very large amount of incoming traffic, this is a great advertising idea because very few people focus on relocation and yet big cities like Los Angeles, Phoenix almost every major city in Florida, they all have massive audiences coming in and out.

And the place that those people who have jobs are oftentimes starting that process is LinkedIn because 90% of the time when you’re getting a job that is asking you to relocate, it does have something to do with a job that you found or advertised on LinkedIn. Linkedin is becoming the place that people get hired, employed, put their resumes on. So, it is more and more like it’s a destination platform. People are on that site often times looking for groups and things related to cities that they’ve now secured a job, applied for a job in X city, all those things there, there’s a growing amount of search on LinkedIn that relates to location and moving. Take it away John.

Johnathan: Oh, we’ve got time, we’ve actually reached a time for our break actually. So, we’re going to go for a break and then we’re coming back and we’ll be… I’ll be responding to Robert’s insights about LinkedIn. We’ll be back in a few moments’ folks…

We’re coming back. We’ve had a good old discussion about paid advertisement. Online paid advertisement when you have to get your wallet out to get yourself on these platforms. And we’ve finished the discussion talking about LinkedIn. Yeah, funnily enough, I was having a discussion about LinkedIn early on this morning and when you hit LinkedIn, it’s becoming more and more similar in each stream to other online platforms in a way. They’re trying to get away from it only being seen, you only go on it if you’re looking for a job into a more professional competitor to the other social media platforms. And you can now…I learned from somebody that they’re do it in beta, they actually link in it somehow to newsletters. You can ask somebody to join your newsletter through LinkedIn now.

They seem… I was told this morning that they are doing a beta on that concept.

Robert: Okay.

Johnathan: And that sounds powerful. I don’t know how they’re going to do it, but if it’s done right, that could be really very interesting. You can now put videos on there can’t you? It is becoming… because I think there could be also overlap, not only for people looking to move from one region to the other, but there can now be some overlap with it because it’s… I don’t totally see it now as a totally business to business platform, it mostly is, but when it comes to high end, especially on the high-end property, everybody’s interested in property, aren’t they?

Robert (18:11): Yes.

Johnathan (18:11): So, I’m using video and talking about your latest perch, some of your latest client on that. I think you could legitimately put that on LinkedIn and you’d probably get interest, wouldn’t you?

Robert: I do think that you would. Yes.

Johnathan: But when it comes… I think the other thing we need to talk about, which you got… which I haven’t got any experiences that you deal with a bit with paid Google, don’t you? Google search, don’t you?

Robert: I do because here’s the thing. More and more frequently right now, so Google is doing more and more of their ranking based on user behavior, which I’ve said on top of shows. But you know what the funny thing is, how do you measure user behavior? You have to have users come into the site. So, a way to kickstart SEO, like if you built an amazing website and amazing experience, and you’re going to send some good, strong SEO signals, start building domain authority, guess what the other thing that you need to really get fast results? You need traffic so you have to fucking bite the bullet and send paid traffic into a site. If you really want to rocket your results super-fast and start getting leads right away,

Johnathan: You putting some gasoline on the bonfire.

Robert: Exactly. Because now Google has all those users to measure success with and they will absolutely rank your site much, much faster if you’re sending in paid traffic, that’s it. They will tell you over and over again. Oh no, we don’t do this, we don’t this bullshit. I have done countless tech case studies at this point and Google ranks sites faster that have paid traffic coming to them full stop. Mostly probably because it kicks in their usual behavior algorithms so if they said, Hey, we don’t have a special part of the algorithm, I would say, okay, that’s true butt if you’re going to tell me that they didn’t design it on purpose, so that most likely you have to leverage paid advertising if you wanted any kind of results, anytime in like the first year that you built the site, yeah, I think they did that.

I think they did that and probably did it on purpose. So now you’ve got to send paid traffic in, but the good news is, is that oftentimes once the results kick in Google does legitimately keep you ranked you don’t have to keep spending money on paid advertising, which is the only part of that, about this that doesn’t make it evil is that they literally are just saying, all right, well, now that we know what people are going to do, when they come to the site, we’ll ranking organically

Johnathan: When it comes to my… I’m guessing I’m getting these figures not from personal experience, but I’ve got a friend that does a lot of political campaigns.

Robert: Okay.

Johnathan: Regionally and nationally. A lot of regional campaigns for politicians is a dirty business, but somebody has got to do it. And he’s done very well aware of it and he uses YouTube use YouTube advertising. And he was saying to me that he’s managed to get some results where he’s moved the needle enough to get a victory by spending about 500 to $1,000 a month period. So I haven’t got the experience to say , but I would imagine if you could spend that money and dominate your local market so when your buddy came on YouTube, they would see one of your adverts a lot of times… so, I think you could do that around $500. Now, when it comes to Google paid search what kind of money are, we generally talking about that will make a difference?

Robert: Okay. So, with the client, like most of my clients, the searches are ranging between 30 and 70 cents a visitor right now which is down. It used to be I would absolutely say, oh, it’s about a buck, a search because that’s a good estimate in a lot of rural markets come in a lot less than that bidding system, John. So, you’re bidding against other people and whatever people bid the keyword term up is what you end up paying. With real estate, there’s a lot of terms that you can get into that aren’t directly valuable they could cost as little as 5 cents a click like 5 cents a visitor but the value of that visitor based on the search that they’re doing is probably going to be a lot less. I’m going to stick with an average of between 30 and 70 cents a search. So, if you want a thousand people to the site, you’d spend $700.

Johnathan: What we found with Facebook is that unless it’s a major metropolitan area and some of the competitors they break up the matchup words and areas is by zip code and you but a zip code area, but what we found in the non-metropolitan area where you might have an overall population audience of, let’s say 200 to half a million is that the campaigns exhaust very quickly that you get an initial really nice response, but after 10 to 12 days, they tear off quite dramatically, the campaigns. And the way we we’ve had to build more campaigns, but we actually swap the actual images out of the adverts and we find that regenerates the campaign to some extent last for couple weeks, two- and a-bit weeks. But we’ve found that if you want to supply a month’s worth of leads, we actually got a run two separate campaigns and change the Facebook advertising images of those campaigns. Because of the way the algorithm works in Facebook, it doesn’t work that well with small catchments. And they would classify a quarter of a million to half a million people as a small catchment.

Robert: Right.

Johnathan: So that’s one thing we’ve found where I don’t think you have that problem with Google paid advertisement, do you?

Robert: No. And, and ladies and gentlemen who are listening to the show, this is why John and I make good partners. He focuses his agency on using paid search for Facebook and I focus on Google and it’s not to say that either one of us haven’t done the other, because we both have, but to say that we focus on it. Like the intricacies of doing this marketing in the digital space is why you’re listening to the show. There’s a lot of… like every single person, that’s bets, whatever market you’re in and you’re listening, whether your place that you’re in is going to work slightly differently. Like whether that’s Florida or Orlando versus Miami or Tampa versus Orlando, every single market is different. Like the cost of the advertising is going to be different, the ad that we might run, it could be similar in topic, but it might need to be… it’s going to have to be focused on your particular area, relocating Tampa is not the same thing as relocating to Orlando.

And that’s what…so that’s why I love our dialogues on the show because he covers one side of it and I cover the other, we sometimes get lost in the sauce. I hope that some of you listen because you’re already doing advertising and you’re hoping that we’ll cover a detail that you haven’t thought of yourself. I want to circle back around briefly because John kind of moved on to something else before I got a chance to finish my thought. With Travis Thom, he’s got two separate sites, Walled Garden HQ, which will be automated in an automated way, do listing advertisement, takes some of the pain that John is talking about away from it. And Ad Crate which I like ad crave a lot because ad crate is just a little app that he developed that has a whole bunch of pre tried and true advertising for Facebook, like just ads that he’s run successfully. So, you can just subscribe to ad crate and keep getting good at ideas. It’s a small…

Johnathan: We’re on, we’ve built out now, 15 campaigns bow we’re on our 15th bill out campaign that we’ve been testing and that’s enough now for us to move on and really try and get some more clientele. But we have found that they do get exhausted much quicker than you think they will, by changing the images that kind of boosts them up a bit longer so it’s a realistic time in the metropolitan area, you’ve got such a bigger target that players like bold leads and there’s a couple other… other couple… well there’s probably more play. Well, there’s a lot of players that kind of consult with brokerages, don’t they? They run, they run campaign Facebook campaigns for brokerages where I would say now, they probably are more players than I think, but my main competitor is bold leads where we offer a solution to the actual agent, therefore rather than the broker level at price.

And that has to be demonstrated. There’s only so much that the average agent can afford so that’s how we keep our pricing at that level. But it is interesting because all these… I am intrigued about YouTube because my friend who’s in the political area, the kind of budgets, the kind of money he’s thrown at it is really not that expensive. And he showed me his analytical data over the weekend linked to some of his campaigns and I was quite impressed, really Robert with how much the clicks he was getting for the cost. So, I do think… And the beauty of YouTube compared to some of the other is I think if you mark…if you spend a bit of time marking up your organic videos and you cover the area; you can use them on your website. You can use them on your Google local page. You can use them on your YouTube channel. So, they’re multipurpose and they can be used to attract people and then you could look at the paid side, can’t you?

Robert: Yeah, no, absolutely. And I… like, we’ve talked about this incessantly and we’re going to keep talking about it until people get sick of tuning into the show. And that is because video is the secret weapon of everything coming into 2020. We are going to talk about…

Johnathan: If I was one of those agent, I just be knocking out those videos every week are just be… if you’re not getting a lot of phone… you got a bit of spare time on your hands because of the virus just get your phone out and start making videos about your local area, about the parks, the facilities, the restaurants. If you’ve got a house, that’s your representing, do a walk through, but just start getting those videos out and just do it, just get off your backside and do it. Well, we reached out about 30 minutes.

Robert: Hold John, hold on. I know you’re about ready to close off the show for those of you who’ve held on this long, we have a bonus for you. it’s super exciting. So, we had a guest on the show a while back, his name was Malcolm Lawson, I think it is, but Malcolm is his first name for sure. Malcolm runs a Facebook group, which I have now been a part of since he came on the show, which was about two, three months ago. And I did get the right last name right. I have watched on his channel somewhere in the vicinity of 10 to $20 million in the real estate transactions that have definitely been done off YouTube lead generation.

He manages this group for free. There is no cost to this, so this is a free join it now today, stupid because this is… John and I will charge you money. Malcolm does not. Okay. So, here’s the group. It’s facebook.com forward slash groups forward slash YouTube lead gen; G E N. John will include that in the show notes for all of you. That is my secret to success. Malcolm himself has 10,000 subscribers and one of the most subscribed to youtuber’s in real estate in the country top 10. So that’s it. That’s the secret bonus. Alright John.

Johnathan: So, Robert, how can people find out more about you and what you’re up to

Robert: Please go to inboundrem.com and hey, if you want to book an appointment with me and talk about like a high end real estate SEO site and some long-term strategies, or, or even not so long term, just lead gen maybe, maybe questions about led gen in general, then go to inboundrem under services and then book an appointment with me.

Johnathan: Yeah, he does a good job, Robert and his crew, if you’re for that high-end site and using content marketing, Robert and his crew are the people to approach. If you’re looking for sort of something cheaper, different sets of the market, you’re in that second to third year and you’re looking to be more successful and you’re looking for something that works have a look at Mail-Right, really do. We’ve been doing a lot of work, me and my little team. I’ve got a team now and we’ve been building our campaigns and I think we’ve got something to offer you at a reasonable price.

So, go over to Mail-Right and book a demo with me or if you just want to chat, you can just book that through the website. And if, if you just want a general discussion about your online marketing. I’m there to help or if you want to have a look at Mail- Right I’m totally happy in doing a demo for you and walking through all the aspects of Mail- Right. We will be back next week. We’ve got a guest, got a returning guest, we’ve got Dr. Lee. She came on the show about six or seven months ago. She did a fabulous job.

Robert: Amazing.

Johnathon: Amazing job. She’s coming back on the show and it should be a great show folks.

Robert: She was super fun tune in.

Johnathan: She was, we’ll back next week folks, see you soon. Bye.

Robert: Bye.