#398 – Mail-Right Show: The Best Google Ad Strategies For Real Estate Agents in 2023

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What Are The Best Google Ad Strategies For Real Estate Agents in 2023

Ready to take your real estate business to new heights with Google Ads? Our latest podcast/video outlines the top strategies for success in 2023. Discover how to create compelling ad copy that converts leads into clients, leverage AI-powered tools for efficient campaign management, and stay ahead of industry trends. Don’t let your competitors surpass you – watch this video now and revolutionize your advertising game!

With Special Guest Jarod Spiewak of Cometfuel

Jarod Spiewak is an international speaker and founder helping service and SaaS businesses scale by turning Clicks To CashTM.

At just 14 years old, Jarod took his first steps in the business world, earning money needed to attend college. After graduating, Jarod spent a year working in corporate America and two with a digital marketing agency before launching the first iteration of Comet Fuel at age 20.

Annoyed by traditional agencies promising the moon but only delivering stardust, Jarod saw a clear need for a digital agency that provided transparency and a results-oriented approach. For that reason, Comet Fuel offers every client a 200% money-back guarantee – how’s that for results-oriented?

Comet Fuel has helped their clients turn $40M+ in revenue into $250M+, so things are going alright.

When he’s not busy making his clients wildly successful, Jarod can be found cooking, watching too much YouTube (allegedly), and working on creative efforts that will never see the light of day.

Episode Full Transcript

[00:00:10.800] – Robert Newman

Back, ladies and gentlemen, to The Mail-Right Show. This is episode number 398. And we are extremely excited to have Jared, and I’m going to say this the way it seems like it’s spelled phonetically,” Spiewak” Is that correct?

[00:00:27.930] – Jarod Spiewak

Yeah, that’s correct.

[00:00:29.430] – Robert Newman

Okay, Jarod Spiewak is our guest on the show today. Jared is a rock star of paid advertising. He’s got a number of different websites and a LinkedIn profile, all of which will get dropped during the show. And we’re extremely excited to have this guest. John, in his typical splendiferous fashion, has found us yet another paid advertising guy who really, really looks like he knows his stuff. So we’re going to be talking about what would you do as a real estate agent or broker in 2023 if you were going to use paid advertising? Jared’s going to help us out with that subject. But before I go any further, Jared, why don’t you give your own intro to the audience along with any details about yourself that you think would be relevant?

[00:01:17.250] – Jarod Spiewak

Yeah, of course. First off, thanks for having me, of course. My name is Jared Spuak. I’m the founder and lead strategist at Common Fuel. We help service-based and SaaS companies grow to $5-10 million a year without all the typical agency BS. I’m hoping to really leverage the experience that we have in real estate to hopefully bring some value to you guys’ audience. The first and only corporate job I ever had was residential real estate marketing. That transitioned into a law firm marketing role in which we also worked with real estate lawyers. Once I started my own agency, we’ve worked with real estate agents, investors, mortgage lenders and brokers, insurance, ISAs, SaaS companies, so on and so forth. I’m also a real estate investor myself. So like I said, I’m hoping to use some of that knowledge to bring some value to you guys.

[00:02:04.210] – Robert Newman

Beautiful. Well, this is going to be super, super, super exciting. But before we go any further, we cannot forget my co-host of many hundreds of shows at this point, but I know him. But I know him, but you don’t necessarily know him, the people that listen to the show. John, why don’t you go ahead and introduce anybody that may not know who you are?

[00:02:27.420] – Jonathan Denwood

Thanks for that, Rob. I’m the joint founder of melhyfordright. Com. We build great WordPress websites. Also, we’ve got a great platform with CRM and the lead generating side of the business. Basically, we compete with Real Geaks and Sarah, Interactive. If that’s interesting, go over and book a demo with me and then chat. Back over to you, Rob.

[00:02:57.570] – Robert Newman

Beautiful. I’m going to help John out here. He’s also a multiple times tech founder. He is the founder of three different podcasts. His list of accreditations, rolls heavy. He has got one of the largest shows that’s out there about WordPress. I can go on and on. John has a lot of accolades to be sung in his praise. I am a real estate SEO guy that probably is the most experienced real estate online marketing consultant that’s currently working in the United States. I also have my own tech company, Inbound, rem. Plus, I sit on a couple of boards for a couple of prop tech companies at this point. Mostly as my role as a guy that really understands real estate SEO. Without any further ado, let’s talk about the other side of Google, which is not the organic side. Organic versus paid is one you figure out how to get placed by Google without necessarily paying them directly. Of course, if you hire me, you do end up paying, but it’s not a direct payment for placement. Whereas what Jared does is he’s going to get you found by paying to have your ads placed in various places.

[00:04:13.290] – Robert Newman

What do you think a couple of key things are that agents and brokers need to understand about using Google ads maybe for the first time, maybe just in general?

[00:04:25.000] – Jarod Spiewak

Yeah. One of the biggest things that I recommend, especially if you’re on the smaller side, is take a DIY approach. I’m a really big proponent of DIY. The reason being is when you hire somebody, whether it’s a freelancer, an agency, someone in-house, you use a referral from your broker, what have you, it’s really hard for you to tell they’re doing a good job if you have nothing to compare it to. The amount of times that I’ve talked to people that have hired someone to run their ads and then they did it themselves and they got better results is staggering. That’s how we got into it. I founded an SEO company. Our clients wanted us to do ads. I said, No, we’re not ad people. They said, Pretty please, we don’t like who’s running our ads right now. I said, sure, we’ll give it a shot. Watched one YouTube video and started improving their ads better than these agencies that they started hiring, and it was really, really shocking. I recommend people simply go to YouTube, type in How to run ads, try it yourself, understand the basics, see what you can do, and then compare what you’re able to do yourself before you’re hiring someone else to do it for you.

[00:05:38.130] – Robert Newman

Okay, I couldn’t possibly disagree with that. I love that. I’m desperately fighting back the desire to ask you questions about your SEO company, but that’s not what this show is about. I will get schooled if I tangent off too hard by John. Just on the DIY approach, when you log in to Google, and for those listening, you may or may not know, but Google has gotten pretty good, in my opinion, about making proactive recommendations just for anybody that opens up an account. You go into an account and says, Hey, you can improve these five or six things or whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah. How do you feel about… How good of a job do you feel that Google does if all you did, all you did was follow along with and recommendations that they’re making at AdWords?

[00:06:32.500] – Jarod Spiewak

Sure. I think if you go online and you google a Google AdWords and see how people discuss what the recommendations the automatic recommendations, the recommendations that people from Google, contractors of Google, send you, out look not so good. Now, that being said, not everything that they send your way isn’t bad, but everything has to be taken with consideration. I wouldn’t just say apply all, hope for the best, because that’s really what you’re doing. Some of those recommendations will be pay us more money. You’ll get dinged on your recommendation score if they say, Hey, you should actually be paying us another $50 per day. If you say, No, your recommendation score doesn’t really change anything, has a lower percentage. They might say, Hey, remove these keywords. I’ve seen recommendations for a real estate lawyer, for example, where the term real estate lawyer was removed from the account because that’s what the recommendation said. So there are definitely good recommendations in there. There are sometimes settings that you accidentally said that you didn’t mean to that it’ll catch and it’ll remind you. But I would never just let it do whatever it wants. I would always look at the recommendations and say, if it’s a good recommendation, yeah, go ahead and apply it.

[00:07:46.380] – Jarod Spiewak

But if it’s not, it’s not always going to be a good recommendation. It’s not always going to be a good recommendation for you in your scenario. Just put a little bit of consideration before you just hit apply all.

[00:07:57.310] – Robert Newman

Right. For those of you that may not be aware, and I feel like some people are, Jared, and some people aren’t, but I’m going to say this. Oftentimes, you’re real estate marketers in general, SEO guys, paid advertising guys. It’s like buying insurance. You may or may not know, let’s say, 80 % of the subject. But what Jared just described is like a knowledge-heavy response where you got to look at what they recommend and know enough to understand if the recommendation doesn’t actually make sense for you. I have blindly followed along with a lot of different things, not understanding what the difference was because I didn’t have the knowledge, expertise. In the absence of knowing the answer for sure, I personally, who consider myself to be a fairly clever guy, would opt to follow the recommendation because I just didn’t know if I should or shouldn’t, which is a great example of maybe why such an obvious keyword was taken off of a client’s account because maybe in the absence of knowing for sure, somebody said, Well, maybe Google knows what they’re talking about. Maybe there’s a good reason for me to take real estate lawyer or whatever it was off the account.

[00:09:13.580] – Robert Newman

And this right here is why probably Jared, Jonathan, and I all have a living or business. It’s because at some point when you’re spending enough and the decisions cost you enough, it is better to have insurance. Though in Jared’s example, I’m definitely going to say if you’re at the place where you’re just starting your first-year agent, there’s no way in the world I think you should be hiring a guy like me or a guy like Jared or a guy like Jonathan unless you already have previous entrepreneurship experience and you already know what you’re doing, in which case, by all means. What are some of the fundamental mistakes you see?

[00:09:55.520] – Jonathan Denwood

Can I ask that question, actually? Get me. Yeah. Go. Yeah. What are some of the fundamental mistakes, one or two, that you regularly see your clients making when they’re in the DIY or clients come to you, Gerard? I’d imagine there’s a pattern that you observe. What is one or two that you see?

[00:10:19.490] – Jarod Spiewak

When I get on the call with somebody who is already running ads, I ask the same two questions. I say, How much did you spend last month? And everybody can answer that. They look at their account, they go, 2,500, three grand, whatever that number is. Then I say, How much revenue did that generate? All of a sudden, that question becomes a lot harder to answer because you’re notmost people aren’t tracking the entire sales cycle through their ads. What happens is you might have one month, you get 10 inquiries, and you can look at your overall revenue and go, Hey, that was pretty good. Another month you have 10 inquiries and no new revenue came in. It’s like, hey, what happened here? What we found is that it’s very easy and possible to have one keyword, one ad group, one campaign that may have driven 20 different inquiries, form fills, phone calls, what have you. But maybe that only drove two or three real opportunities for you. Whereas another one may have driven only eight inquiries, but five opportunities. But if you’re only tracking the inquiries, you’re going to spend a lot more money on the former and a lot less money on the latter, yet the latter was a lot more profitable.

[00:11:30.150] – Jarod Spiewak

What I always tell everyone, and one of the things that we try and really help people understand, is closing that gap between somebody filling out a form, someone actually being qualified to be worth your time to interface with, and then do they actually turn into a customer for you? Because if not, it’s just a waste of money. Really focusing on optimizing that full sales cycle and not just people taking that first step and reaching out, because not everybody who reaches out is going to be a good fit for you. That’s the number one mistake. I’ve been in about 1,000 ad accounts, less than 1% have this set up. The next big issue I tend to find is not having a real sense of who your customers are, which might sound silly, but what’s your goal? Make money. Great. Let’s start selling ice cream. Let’s do this. Anything can make money, but are you trying to go after residential, commercial, high-end residential, low-end residential? Are you trying to sell apartments, condos? Are you trying to sell to first-time homeowners? Are you trying to sell to investors? Depending on who your customer is, is going to completely change how you try to talk to that person.

[00:12:40.620] – Jarod Spiewak

If you’re trying to attract first-time homeowners and your copy, your website, your landing page is very vague on information about you, very vague about the buying process, I, as a first-time home buyer, am not going to feel confident to reach out because I don’t know if you’re a good fit. There are 9,000 other real estate agents around me who are all trying to bid for my business. Really honing in on who exactly are you trying to attract so that when they click on your ad, they can very quickly identify, is this somebody that I want to have a conversation with or not? Is this somebody who knows the area that I’m trying to buy, who knows the type of property that I’m trying to buy at the price range that I’m trying to buy it? Because if I’m trying to buy residential, if I’m trying to buy $125,000 apartment, I don’t want to work with someone who specializes in selling $800,000 single-family homes. They might not know as well as they could the buying process compared to someone who is more specialized in that area or who does more work in that area.

[00:13:37.350] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s fantastic, Jared. Back over to you, Rob.

[00:13:40.720] – Robert Newman

That was a really good point. Well, John, you had to throw a question in here that dealt with AI, didn’t you? How do you see AI affecting Google adverts, if at all, over the next 18 months?

[00:13:59.700] – Jarod Spiewak

I think that there’s a couple of things that it can do, and it’s already doing. First is how do we define AI? If we’re saying AI/machine learning, whatever you want to call it, it’s been within Google Ads for years and years and years, way before ChatGPT became as popular as it is today. Google has been involving AI and machine learning in a lot more aspects of ads with performance max campaigns, with dynamic search ads with… Nowadays, when you create a text ad, Google will even suggest ad copy by crawling a landing page. It’s not really using AI, but you can call it AI if you want—and the effect of this is on one hand, it’s making it a lot easier to get up and going. You don’t have to know as much about ad copy if Google is able to just find your website and suggest you add copy, that may or may not work. But it’s also a bit dangerous if you overly rely on it and you think, Oh, this automated system that may not know my goals, may not know my business, may not know much of anything. I’m just going to click on all the things that it’s suggesting and hoping for the best.

[00:15:02.120] – Jarod Spiewak

Kind of like that first question, going back to the recommendations, maybe they’re good, maybe they’re not. It’s something that we always have to take with a grain of salt. I think on the other side, depends on what AI. If you’re running display or video ads, you might be using some AI that’s producing video or images for you. Right now, that’s a bit of a copyright issue where most people aren’t going to be putting ads on that. There’s a lot of lawsuits happening right now. Even Chatgpt right now, there’s a lawsuit. But I think if they lose that suit, they’re going to have to basically start over. Their entire database is going to have to be deleted because of copyright claims. Text, we have to worry less about. In and of itself, I think it’s great. I think you can use it, but I think you still have to apply knowledge and experience to it. You can’t just say, Oh, because this AI is suggesting content for me and ad copy for me, that it’s inherently good. But it’s a really good starting place to go, Yeah, that’s a good idea. Now let me expand upon this idea with something that’s a little bit more specific to my particular needs.

[00:16:03.940] – Robert Newman

I’m going to say, John, I know that you slipped this in here, but I’m going to take this time to say something that I’ve mostly been saying inside my closed Facebook group. Ai, which Jared, in my opinion, nailed it, there is no such thing as AI. The technology, in general, is mislabeled. Autonomous intelligence is not here yet. Behavioral learning is here and has been here. He called it Machine Learning, which is also another great name for it. But what it can do is it can learn from what already exists. It can go out there and say, We’ve seen 10,000 real estate ads and we can take bits and pieces of those ads and piece them together and perhaps maybe create something unique for you. That’s a big maybe. There is only a limited number of fields. I think Jared will know this better than I, but I think it’s like 159 characters or something for at least the standard text ads. I might maybe get any number wrong, Jared, but it is a limited number. I know that for sure. And so whatever that number is, you only have so many variations to those words, maybe millions or billions, but at that point, you’re only doing a very small change over each time that you accept an ad that is being generated to you by behavioral marketing.

[00:17:24.750] – Robert Newman

And I personally think that while I don’t disagree with the idea of maybe using it to give you some ideas, I do think that if you start to use it in its current phase, number one, you could run into some problems, which Jared is pointing out with copyright and things like that. Not so likely in the text ad space, but definitely in the image and video space.

[00:17:48.710] – Jonathan Denwood

But.

[00:17:51.180] – Robert Newman

Another thing that you might run into is becoming dependent upon a tool that is untested, something that I’ve seen countless times inside technology. Ai is definitely the wave of the future. As is behavioral marketing, machine learning, it’s actually been around for a long time and it’s only going to get better as time goes on. But to say, should you use it now? And what should you use it for are important questions that should be considered heavily before doing it, in my opinion. John?

[00:18:21.570] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I think it’s time for us to go for a break, Rob.

[00:18:24.400] – Robert Newman

Oh, okay. I thought you wanted to say something other than that. All right, we’re going to be right back, ladies and gentlemen. When we come back, we’re going to talk about scaling.

[00:18:33.950] – Jonathan Denwood

How can I do that? You’ve said.

[00:18:36.030] – Robert Newman

So much, Rob. Oh, my God. All right, we’re going to talk about scaling and we’re going to talk about some of Jared’s rock star heroes. We’re also going to talk about a couple of other cool questions that we’ve come up with to ask our guest, Jared, and we’ll be delivering all of that when we come back. Stay tuned. Do you want quality leads from homeowners and buyers right in your own neighborhood? Then you need mail right.

[00:19:06.810] – Jarod Spiewak

It is a powerful but.

[00:19:07.880] – Robert Newman

Easy to use online marketing system that uses Facebook to generate real estate leads at a fraction of the cost you’d pay from our competition. We stand behind our work with a no-question-asked 30-day money-back guarantee. So don’t delay. Get started today. Go to mail-right. Com. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen to episode number 300 and 98. We’re here with Jared Spiwak, who is a founder of his own ad company, cometful. Com. You can also look up Jared on LinkedIn. Com. Forge slash in Jared Spewax, S-P-I-E-W-A-K. If you’re interested in finding out more about our guests, he has an incredibly impressive track record. And what’s more? He has done something that most of us wish we had done, where he just bailed on the corporate world and decided to create his own company. Among many other things about the company, one of the things that caught my attention is he offers a 200 % money-back guarantee, which basically means he will pay you if you don’t get the results, whatever they are, the deliverables that he discussed. So very impressive mindset on the way that service is provided. So having said all that, actually, you know what, John?

[00:20:29.630] – Robert Newman

Why don’t you go ahead and do number four.

[00:20:31.140] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, sure. How do you scale Google Ads? The testing the walkers to really depending on your budget, really making a big difference into the six, seven figures to the top line. Can you give a broad description of maybe how you help a client from beginning to get into that massive end result?

[00:21:02.950] – Jarod Spiewak

Yeah, of course. For a little bit of context, the smallest campaigns that we’ve worked on have been as small as someone spending $500 a month on ads. The largest that we’ve worked on is someone spending over $700,000 a month on ads. There’s a big difference in someone who’s spending that little to someone who’s spending that much. But the one consistent thing is from looking and working with companies who are spending larger amounts on ads, even if they started off with really, really small budgets, is the ability for ads to be measurable. The better that you can measure performance, as I talked about earlier, the easier and faster it is to scale. If all you know is what’s driving leads, but what’s not driving sales, what’s not driving qualified leads, it’s really hard to be confident when to spend more money on what to spend more money on. But if you know you’ve spent a thousand dollars on X and it’s produced $4,000 in profit for you, you can test the waters and go, Okay, well, what happens if we spent $2,000 on that instead? Maybe it doesn’t go all the way up to $8,000, but maybe you get seven and a half grand, maybe you get six grand.

[00:22:15.150] – Jarod Spiewak

Maybe that’s still a good enough ratio for a return for you to then go, Okay, well, what happens if we go up to 3,500? What happens if we go up to five grand? That’s really the process, which is if I can look at what I’m doing right now and know that it’s working, let me just start to incrementally what I’m spending per day. Eventually, you’re going to get to a point where your results start to dip down below your profitability requirements, or you start to run out of, you’ve reached all the people that you can reach. In those instances, you might need to change up your targeting. You might need to expand your keywords, your audience. You might need to try free marketing if you have and trying to display ads. If you’ve reached out, you maximize what you can do on search. It’s just a matter of really going, Okay, great, I spent X, I made Y. Am I happy with the ratio between the two? If so, let’s increase the input. Let’s see how that increases the output. If I’m not happy with that output, then let’s take a step back and go, is that because we ran out of ways to get more input?

[00:23:13.810] – Jarod Spiewak

Or do we need to go back and say, how can we increase the output? That could be anything from improving the conversion rate of your ads, lowering the cost per click. It can even be on your sales front. The profitability of your ad campaign goes way beyond just your clicks and your leads. But how long does it take you to get in touch with the lead? Once somebody becomes a lead, how often do you follow up with that person? Can you create a new system or process where if you get 100 inquiries instead of 10 of them turning into some viable relationship for you, can you get that to 15, 20? If so, you just doubled the profitability roughly of what you were doing, and that might allow you to increase your input all of a sudden way more. Just mapping out every step of the sales cycle from start to finish, mapping out what was the input, was the output? Do I need, am I happy with the output? Let’s try more input. If I’m not happy with the output, let’s drill down on each step of that funnel and figure out what the path of least resistance is, optimize that so that I get an output that I’m happy with, and then go back.

[00:24:14.900] – Jarod Spiewak

More input. Let’s measure the output again.

[00:24:17.600] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s fantastic. Over to you, Rob.

[00:24:21.050] – Robert Newman

I’m going to say as a closer. Jared, over the years, I’m publicly acknowledged in so many goddamn places talking about organic marketing and SEO and getting traffic back to your site, firing your marketing company, continuing to see returns, talking about return on investment in comparison to paid advertising. The following statement may surprise a lot of people listening to the show, which is I do think that there’s a space and a time if you have a dedicated partner and you’re talking about this honing down of a pipeline where you keep looking for efficiencies. The best partner in the entire real estate industry currently is Wailopo, who’s doing something like this because it has G. J. Fung. And if you haven’t checked him out, Jared, I strongly recommend that you do. He is one of the very few people inside the entire real estate space that actually truly, truly deeply knows his stuff. And the reason I say all this is because if you don’t have that really deep time and energy to go through and/or you have a partner who’s really doing what Jared described, and scaling up and tracking profitability and looking at return on investment and finding out which segment of your lead generation is actually generating you a return, then this may be difficult.

[00:25:44.660] – Robert Newman

But if you did have that, then there is one thing that paid advertising delivers, in my opinion, that almost no other type of marketing does and not organic marketing, which is the ability to scale and scale fast. Which, unless I missed my guess and we’ll ask you this question later, it might be one of the reasons why you turn from an SEO company into a paid marketing company. But having said that, let’s go on to number five, which I’m going to take this one and, John, you’re going to take number six. Does that sound right? Okay. What have been some of the biggest influences? Or it’s funny, I mentioned, let’s talk about who some of your influencers are. Do you have any? Do you have any online mentors, digital people that you follow? Maybe they don’t know you follow them? Is there somebody that you really pay attention to in order to guide decisions? Or maybe do you just like to follow them because you think they say interesting things?

[00:26:41.280] – Jarod Spiewak

Yeah. There’s a couple of places that I like to go to. One in general is YouTube. I’m someone who grew up on YouTube. As a kid, it was watching funny, stupid videos on there. As I got older, I couldn’t afford to buy all these $5,000 courses all the time. Anytime I got stuck on something, I would go to YouTube. I’m not that great at reading. I struggle to really pay attention and just sit down and read a book. But I can go on to YouTube and I can watch a 20-minute video to exit and go, Oh, I didn’t know how to do that thing before. Here’s someone walking me through every problem that I’ve ever found in my life pretty much. That’s great and for free. Youtube ad nauseam is great. For specific people, a name that’s getting more and more popular nowadays, which is he’s done a really excellent job in his own personal branding, is a guy named Alex Hermozi. He’s become very, very large recently. He just released his second book, $100 Million Leads. His first book, $100 Million Offers. The offer that we have right now, the 200% money-back guarantee, is one that his book helped me basically form, and our lead gen massively took off after that.

[00:27:54.500] – Jarod Spiewak

He’s someone that I really like the way that he explains the concepts that he has. I think there’s no real BS in there, at least from my perspective. I think it’s very digestible content, easy to consume. He’s someone that I’m quite a big fan of in the not online space, so you can find him online. Michael Mikeovitz, I brought you the last name, he wrote a book called Profit First. That’s a really great book on cash flow management that also helped us as we were scaling up. He also has other great books like The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur and The pumpkin plan is also a really great book of his.

[00:28:34.290] – Jonathan Denwood

I love the titles.

[00:28:39.970] – Jonathan Denwood

I think it’s full marks for that. Sorry about that. I just had to say that, Gerald. Let’s go. Obviously, I am not a native Nevada. I come from England.

[00:28:52.570] – Robert Newman

You don’t say.

[00:28:54.290] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, you don’t say. As a child, I was a great watcher of Doctor Who and The TARDIS, hopefully. If you had your own time machine and you could go back to the beginning of your agency in this journey, Gerhard, is there one thing that you wish you could tell yourself at the beginning of the journey that you know now?

[00:29:17.760] – Jarod Spiewak

Something I talk about all the time with others when I’m at events is don’t compare your business to other people’s businesses. It’s really hard to do. The reason being is, when I started getting involved in my own communities, the people in the industry, and going to events, conferences, what have you, I would have conversations with people and I would go, Wow, you’re growing so much faster than I am. You have so much more revenue than I have. Your team is so much bigger. I would start to look at, what are these guys doing that I’m not? How can I copy or emulate what they’re doing? Because that must be what they’re doing that I’m not must be the secret to success. Fast forward five years, no shame to them, but a lot of those guys are out of business. A lot of those guys no longer exist. Really, what I’ve done over the past two years as I’ve been a lot less involved in these groups, socials, I mean, COVID obviously had a pretty big impact on that. But as I just focused on just bettering myself, if you will, and not really looking at what other people are doing or how they’re growing their business, mine has actually grown much faster and easier.

[00:30:26.730] – Jarod Spiewak

I’ve also had a lot less stress as I haven’t really been concerned with, Oh, no, we’re not doing this other thing that this guy who just doubled the growth of his company in eight months did, maybe we should do that. But we didn’t do that. Then two years later, that guy went out of business. It’s not that I don’t care. It’s just that what’s good for them might not be good for me. I’m happy for whatever they’re doing with their business, but I’m not going to change anything in mind just because I see someone else growing better, faster, whatever, from my perception right now because who knows how that will affect them in two, three, five years from now.

[00:31:01.130] – Jonathan Denwood

Thanks for that, Jared. That was a fantastic insight, actually. Thanks for sharing that. Back over to you, Rob.

[00:31:08.340] – Robert Newman

Ladies and gentlemen, we’re down to what would technically be the end of the show. Jared, we’re also through the questions that we set up. If you’re willing, I’d love to just have a riff for maybe 5, 10 more minutes. Are you down for that?

[00:31:27.020] – Jarod Spiewak

Yeah, I have time. I’d love it.

[00:31:29.020] – Robert Newman

Okay, so I’m just curious and I am going to go way off script here, but you are… I don’t know how old you are, but you look young. You look very young and you’re sitting.

[00:31:42.740] – Jonathan Denwood

Here- He’s actually older than me, Rob.

[00:31:45.880] – Robert Newman

There isn’t anybody alive older than you, so that’s not possible, John.

[00:31:49.970] – Jonathan Denwood

I feel that way sometimes actually.

[00:31:55.740] – Robert Newman

I’m somewhat curious, what drives your… I wish that I got myself together. I’ve had seven businesses, but I really struggled when I was your age to keep the focus on a business. I am ADHD from here until the next century, and so I could never really dial my focus in to stay connected to a single thing that I was doing. I’m curious if you have mechanisms for doing that yourself.

[00:32:24.810] – Jarod Spiewak

Not really. I also have ADHD, so it’s something that I struggle with a lot. I really struggled. I can’t really read. If you see the bookcase right there, those are all the books I haven’t read. The ones right here are all the ones I have read. I really struggle to do that. I’ll spend a weekend. I’ll have an idea and I’ll be like, Oh, that’s a cool idea for a business. Let me work on this. I have time. Then Monday comes on like, I don’t have time to work on this. Sometimes it’s just through attrition. I just haven’t simply given up. I’ve pivoted a couple of times as I found a greater opportunity for growth, but I guess I’ve never been smart enough to quit.

[00:33:08.920] – Robert Newman

Well, it sounds like you’re lucky in that. Now I’m going to ask you a traditional entrepreneurial question. As you, through perseverance, stupidity, luck, or maybe drive and talent, I don’t know. But as you get more successful, I’ve noticed that more and more people ask you questions, which personally frustrate me because I’ve been doing the same thing for 15 years. But the numbers grow as time goes on, the recognition grows, but what I’ve been doing actually doesn’t change. I do the same thing. There’s just more people out there recognizing what I do is what I found. When it comes to you, what’s been one of your greatest setbacks and how did you address it?

[00:33:57.230] – Jarod Spiewak

That’s a good question. I think honestly, one of the greatest side effects was what I mentioned there at the end was going to events, talking with people, hearing what they were doing, and then making sometimes radical shifts in how we were doing things just because. At the same time, nowadays we have slowly building out. We have tons of business intelligence dashboard, tracking tons of different metrics on our own business performance. I would do things like, Oh, wow! I really like how they present their proposals. I’m going to do something similar. But I was never really measuring what impact that had. I just assumed they have a much larger, more successful business, so I’m just going to copy them. Then I was literally at an event last week. I’m not going to say any names, of course, but someone who I quite look up to, I believe that they were doing really well on a company that they were working on. They were talking about how well they were doing on the company that they were working on. I thought that I was like, Wow, I wish I came up with that approach like, Maybe I should find a way to take what we’re doing, find a way to incorporate that because that’s really cool.

[00:35:08.390] – Jarod Spiewak

It seems to be working so well for them. I was talking to someone that was just talking to this person and they’re like, Yeah, that didn’t work for them at all. They had all this marketing material that said it was working so well, but they actually just shifted their business entirely because that crashed and burned. But yet on their website, talks about, Oh, you shifted to this and money goes up. Then behind closed doors, it’s, Yep, that’s not working. The biggest pitfalls I ever really made was caring too much about what other people are doing and just assuming that everyone is going to be honest with you and say what they claim is working really well for them is actually working really well.

[00:35:40.510] – Jonathan Denwood

I totally agree because 2-3 people that have become friends of mine, like Rob Rowling, the founder of Drip, he does the Startups for the Rest of Us podcast. He’s got a track record, he’s done it. He’s done itHe’s built up a multi-million dollar business and sold it. And like Jason Coman, the founder of WP Engine, he’s a personal friend of mine. He’s just got a track record of building business and selling them. They’ve done it and they’re very public and sharing. But you do get a lot of people that do say they’ve done this, done that, done the other, and when you really look at it, they haven’t really done much have they, Gerald?

[00:36:32.750] – Jarod Spiewak

Yeah, sometimes a lot less than you think they have.

[00:36:36.580] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, exactly.

[00:36:38.220] – Robert Newman

I’m glad that we’re talking to you on the website paid advertising side and that you’re bringing this story up. One of the reasons that I started in Boundary, which actually started as a blog, not as this fully fleshed-out business idea, but I had already been in the industry for nine years and I’d noticed that what most marketing companies said that they delivered or said the result of this delivery would be was completely false. I knew it because I had talked to hundreds of thousands of agents direct one-to-one and had the input straight from them that whatever that they bought or that was told to them was absolutely inaccurate. And sometimes so wildly so that you might as well have lied about it, like a completely fictitious service or result where very few people, if any, were getting what was advertised. And that knowledge drove me to start reviewing real estate marketing companies because so often what I see published doesn’t actually have… It’s not possible that the measurable result is what they’re saying. It’s just not possible, except for maybe- Can.

[00:37:50.750] – Jonathan Denwood

I say something about that, Rob? Sure. I don’t know if Gerald agrees with this. I think we touched upon this next week. I’m sure there’s been some active misleading, but also I think there’s a lot of confusion between what is classified as a referral to what is a digital lead and the measurement and process that you discussed in the main part of the podcast, Gerhard. There’s a lot of people in the real estate that think a digital lead and they compare it to a personal recommendation, somebody in the communities recommended them to somebody else. I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding there, Rob.

[00:38:40.960] – Robert Newman

I think I’m going to write this down and do a YouTube video on this. Now that you say it, lead, designation.

[00:38:50.890] – Jonathan Denwood

What do you reckon about that, Rob, Gerard? Do you think that is part of the problem? They compare one lead generative process with another. They don’t understand they’re dealing with a totally different beast in some ways. Does that make sense to you, Gerard?

[00:39:09.510] – Jarod Spiewak

Yeah. Every lead source is different and lead attribution is very difficult. The more marketing channels you have, the more difficult it is to attribute leads and to understand why people came for you, where they’re coming from. When it comes to referrals, for example, something that we just worked out with a client of ours is we were running an ad campaign and they were like, Wow, this has actually generated a ton of sales for us. But then they looked down, they were like, Actually, we can attribute quite a few of these sales to referrals that we got from other people being like, Oh, Google this keyword and this company will show up and I recommend you click on that company. They clicked on our ad. The attribution got attributed to ads. But then we just worked directly to go, Okay, great, we actually turned off that campaign when even though we were driving a ton of sales, all the sales ended up being people that were already looking for you, already looking for referrals. We cut that off and moved that budget elsewhere. Understanding, if you’re generating a small number of leads, it is nice to be a little bit extra critical of them.

[00:40:18.790] – Jarod Spiewak

If you’re generating tens of thousands of leads, it’s hard to look by each line item and go, Okay, where did this come from exactly? I haven’t talked to this person before. That game is a numbers game. But I know if if you’re working with a small data set, it’s like, okay, Bob came to me through a Facebook ad, but I met Bob four weeks ago. Maybe that ad didn’t really count as a lead. Ithink that’s okay and I think that’s okay, and I think that’s a great conversation to have. Sometimes that’s a little bit disappointing on our end when we think we’re doing a lot better than we actually were and someone comes to us, Actually, this wasn’t as good as you thought. Lead attribution, I think it’s important to look at. I think it’s important to know where leads are coming from. If you can, I think it’s important to understand that a lead could be tagged from SEO, it could be tagged from Google ads, it could be tagged from Facebook ads. Some of that was branded. Some of those people already knew you exist, and it’s going to be the SEO, the advertiser, the social media marketer.

[00:41:14.980] – Jarod Spiewak

Everybody wants to attribute to the efforts that they’ve done, their own marketing, that may not be completely true. But at the same time, not everyone’s going to be explicitly trying to lie to you about that either.

[00:41:27.710] – Robert Newman

My experience, and I think this is probably a good place to wind down, but my experience has been that with the ever-increasing importance of considering omnichannel approaches, it’s really hard to say, even with SEO, which is obviously what I do, I would love to be able to say that that lead quality has been rising and rising and rising. But that would only be true if you took into account all of the media that supports lead generation in the first place, personal one-to-one videos online, social proofs, so on and so forth. The strategies have so changed that when I drive paid traffic into pages that we’ve already done a lot of work on that has all this stuff present, all of a sudden paid traffic gets a much bigger and better bang for the buck. So saying, Oh, is SEO inherently better from a lead quality perspective? I don’t know that I agree with that anymore. It really just depends on the support of the marketing efforts where you drive that traffic to. And then that creates the relevance of your spend and things like that. There’s a smaller and smaller distinction between where the lead was initiated.

[00:42:41.500] – Robert Newman

Was it search marketing? Was it organic marketing? Was it email marketing? Was it whatever else it might have been direct mail, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, that’s been my experience. I’m not declaring it to be universal. I’m just saying this is what I’ve noticed. Guys, we have done this for 42 minutes. Jared, you’ve been an amazing guest. I’m going to preempt John and cross my fingers and hope that maybe at some point in the future you’d be willing to come on the show and be a guest again. I personally have enjoyed you a lot. I’ve really appreciated your insights. You’re honest and your honesty. If somebody wanted to reach out to you and find out more about you, how would you like them to go about doing that?

[00:43:25.250] – Jarod Spiewak

First of all, thanks so much for having me. Would love to come back. If you want to know more about our company, you can go to cometfuel. Com. If you want to know more about me, you can just search for Jared Spiegel on YouTube. I’m also elementary to reach. I’m happy to answer anybody’s casual questions through email. Just jared@cometfuel. Com. Would love to know if you have any questions, I can help you solve.

[00:43:46.710] – Robert Newman

Awesome. John, if you would like somebody to reach out to you, how would you like them to go about doing that?

[00:43:51.200] – Jonathan Denwood

I’ll just go to the mail-right. Com website, look at what we’ve got to offer, and maybe book a chat with me or add my co-founder. Back over to you, Robert.

[00:44:02.800] – Robert Newman

If you’d like to know any more about me or what I do or have done over the years, you can go to inboundrem. Com. You will find a massive resource on organic marketing, social marketing, humor, and movies, all related to real estate. We’ve been spending years building up this site. At this point, I solidly say it’s one of the best real estate marketing sites that exists in the country. So you can go and check it out. Thank you, everybody, for tuning in. We really appreciate it. Thank you, Jared, for being the guest on the show. Thank you, John, for, as always, doing all the work that supports the show. I really appreciate it personally, and I know the audience does as well.

The Hosts of The Mail-Right Show

Jonathan Denwood

https://www.facebook.com/mailrightusa

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Robert Newman

InboundREM

https://inboundrem.com

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