EP 196 – Marketing Madness

NCS 196 | Marketing

NCS 196 | Marketing

On this episode the Note Closers Show, Scott discusses some of the marketing mistakes that people make.

Listen to the podcast here


Marketing Madness

Today’s episode is about something that happens pretty often that I call marketing mishaps. Sometimes you’re just going to screw some shit up. That’s the best way I could say that. When we market on a regular basis, we have really good things, we have bad things that happened, we have some things that just completely just crash and burn and bomb. Some things we do really well where we get a lot of applause from people that are excited about it. We also got haters that want to put a gun out and try to shoot us.

NCS 196 | Marketing

The hashtag that we’ve got to keep in mind is the whole #embracethesuck because you’re not going to do well at first.

What I want to go through today is talk about some of the basic marketing mistakes that I see new entrepreneurs, new real estate investors, new note investors make. I’m going to tell you right now, you’re going to screw up. The hashtag that we’ve got to keep in mind is the whole #embracethesuck because you’re not going to do well at first. You’re going to do some goofy things. By messing them up at first, it may be you don’t use a good infographic, you use a grainy image when you take a selfie of yourself and doesn’t come out looking good, but at least you’re posting it. That’s the only way you’re going to get better at marketing is by doing it more and more and more and more often, doing it again and again and again. You’re going to goof up on things. You’re going to make things that look ugly and some things that you’re just going to get better at honing and using different websites whether you’re using Paint on your laptop to edit a picture. Nicole almost choked on her coffee when I talked about using Paint versus using Canva or Photoshop or other things like that out there. There are a lot of great tools you can use to edit photos and do really good in making things happen. 

One of the biggest mistakes I see starts off really initially, the very first thing that we, as entrepreneurs, often do when we’re starting off somewhere new. It’s creating entity. Come up with a name for your company. You can have the greatest idea, “I’m going to come up with Limited Investments,” or something like that. They go out and get the LLC set up or things like that, but they don’t see if any of the social media sites are available for that, or they don’t see what happens when they do their keyword search to see if Limited Investments is available. Maybe somebody else owns that website. There’s a website that you need to also use called NameChk.com. NameChk.com is a really great tool that we use very often especially when we’re doing one of our Fast Track trainings or having our Mastermind or a class.

What NameChk allows you to do is it allows you to log in, it’s a free service, you type in your website, say, Limited Investments and they will tell you if that domain is available. It also will tell you if the Facebook, the Instagram, the blogger, all those social media platforms if that is taken; if Limited Investments is available or taken. It lights it up with a different color. Green it’s available, yellow it’s reserved and other things like that. I’ve got people who had the greatest LLC names but none of the social media is available, which really shoots you in the foot when you can’t use Instagram or Facebook or have any of those smart social media platforms to really help you market. That’s one thing that I see people really struggle with. 

Another thing is they don’t change up or tweak up their name a little bit to show things. This is an example of a fail on my part. We originally called this podcast The Note Show. I forget that notes are not just pieces of paper or mortgages. Notes are actually just flat out notes, people are writing notes. There is a Note Show that some guy has had it for a little while and he’s got the Instagram. That’s why we had to re-adjust it and Nicole had to redo the infographic into The Note Closers Show. It’s a little bit longer but it actually fits a little bit better with what we do versus The Note Show. 

Another thing that I see a lot of people do is they have too long a name. You need to try to make it simple and keep it down. Anytime you could consolidate three letters too like WCN for We Close Notes, that’s helpful versus having such a long weird individual name that doesn’t sound very easy. I’ve got a buddy who has a company called Adamantine Investments. Adamantine is the metal that Wolverine is made out of. That’s the problem there. I love it. I think he is a big Marvel fan but you can’t spell it right half of the time. When people try to send him emails or they’re trying to track you down and stuff like that, it makes it difficult. You want to try to keep things simple, complete, as short as possible, but you also want to make sure it’s available. 

Another marketing mishap is you get all excited but then you don’t do anything. You don’t send out emails. Emails are the easiest thing that you guys can send out. I’m talking about using a CRM tool like Infusionsoft. We had Adam Adams a week ago on the Monday night Note Night in America webinar and did a great job. We had him on Note CAMP. A lot of people use MailChimp. We started off using MailChimp until our database got big. The thing I see people doing on a regular, they’re asking questions, they’re making offers, but I don’t see a single email from them on what’s going on, or I see one email from them and they don’t follow up with things. That’s a big marketing mishap, not setting up a marketing calendar. 

Nicole, I asked you the other day, and this is just straight on the spot here, what’s something I asked you the other day? I know you’re like, “What are you talking about?” because I asked you a lot of things throughout the day. Remember we talked about a marketing calendar? 

Right.

We talked about planning out this next year already, right?

Correct.

I’m just saying that it’s already a priority two months out from 2018 to pre-setup things for our pre-planning marketing. The important thing for that that I’m trying to get at is that there are things that can happen. Every month we have a holiday, we have something going on whether it’s a class I’m teaching or someplace I’m speaking at. It’s a matter of simply putting those promotions in place in pre-planning out 2018. Many people can do that now. You can pre-write your emails that would go out around Valentine’s Day or New Year’s Day.

The 60-day marketing calendar.

That’s the thing, you can start planning now. I know I goofed up also on some other things I forget about. I’ll give an example. I was at the movie and I went and saw Bad Moms. It is so hilarious. There were only twelve people in the whole big thing. A Bad Moms Christmas, hilarious. Literally, I tried to pull my phone out and take a picture of the screen because in the pop-up, they had the whole five days until Christmas thing which made me think about our Twelve Days Until Christmas, which we need to create. We’re about a month out from having to roll that out.

Last Christmas, we had the actual Twelve Days of Christmas song that we put together. Instead of doing the song, what I thought we would do is, and this is a marketing thing that we’re just rolling out here, we’re going to do Twelve Days of Christmas but let’s do Twelve Days of Infographics. We have our different infographics like Twelve Days of Christmas we’ll just do from twelve down instead of doing the reverse way. Then we’ll throw it all in Animoto so it’s a nice little easier thing at the end. I saw something on the screen and I said, “I’ll use that.” Of course I’ve also seen Thor a couple of times, twice as it came out opening weekend. It’s quite hilarious. Great movie, but they had the whole Immigrant Song from Led Zeppelin. It’s one of the most popular Led Zeppelin songs. I use that as the intro music for my Monday Note on Monday night. 

NCS 196 | Marketing

You have to be careful about what you throw out there.

The idea is to give inspiration from wherever you’re at. One of the big things that you can have happen to you is you have to be sometimes careful about what you throw out there. The number one email that I’ve ever written that still gets played is when, I guess it was three years ago, four years ago now when the first Fifty Shades of Grey movie came out. I did the Fifty Shades of Notes. I sent an email out to my database. Took the infographic, took the book but changed it into S.A. Carson, left a message in there, “Do you feel like your borrowers are naughty? Do you feel ball-gagged when talking to your borrowers? Do you feel like you need to be spanked?” That kind of just fun, playful stuff in there. Huge open rate people, then also I got some haters. The funny thing is if you’re a hater on me, make sure you don’t send an ugly email to me, call me blasphemous and un-Christian and an asshole, because I might just send you a little surprise. I had three people sent out hate emails to me. We’ve had their address, so I sent them all three copies of Fifty Shades of Grey book to their house anonymously off Amazon. Yes, it’s funny. Now, they know. I doubt they listen to me. I’ve offended a few people here. That was a great marketing piece because I don’t mind when people unsubscribe because it allows me to clean up my list.

The more you communicate with your database, the more you’re going to build your tribe and more narrow in on your tribe with your marketing. I’m the first one to make fun of myself too. I was running out of ideas a couple of months ago and threw together the whole strip-down marketing where I had my head on top of a Chippendales’ body and sent that out. I got a lot of hits by women on that. A lot of guys said to me, “Your trainer is awesome.” I wish that was the case. I would have to get those six-pack abs. I would be the Seth Rogen on Neighbors. What I’m trying to get at is if you’re going to market and you poke fun, make sure to poke fun at yourself first.

One of our best email blasts we did out recently prior to Note CAMP was on April. We did an April Fool’s one on a Saturday where we poked fun at a certain Note speaker with a moustache. We got a lot of good positives back, but that speaker initially was upset then he said he wasn’t. We sent out a reprieval email, which I was already planning on doing  anyway if in case he got upset and we got even more likes back on that. It’s a funny thing sometimes you’re marketing can work in a great way and not work in a bad way. In the news most recently, you have people who have done a marketing thing through their social media that’s backfired. If you recall the lady that was riding on her bike as the Trump motorcade was driving past her and she flipped out, flipped off Trump or flipped off the motorcade and somebody took a picture of it. What happened I guess later on too is the motorcade came to a stop sign and she pulled up next to it in her bike and she just kept on driving and flipped them off again. She didn’t post it on her social media, which is open marketing for anybody, and of course she got fire from it.

There are two sides to every story. One you have to look at is marketing fall into your First Amendment rights of freedom of speech? I think it does. You also have to look at are you responsible for what you put out there and if you’re going to be working for somebody to fall in some things? One of the things we talked about this is when you were all hired too, so be careful what you put on social media. There are two things that we don’t post on social media: politics and religion. That’s the bartender’s code of a happy bar. You always avoid politics, you always avoid religion. We are equal-opportunity comedians when it does come to politics so we did have the whole Trumpenstein and Hillary the Vampire. When we get a marketing piece regarding election, we made fun of both parties. Some people like both, some people didn’t like it, whatever. It is what it is.

I think it’s the big thing. If you’re going to do something and put it out there, don’t be afraid when you get something happen. We had a marketing piece that somebody got upset about. Actually, I had a conversation with a couple of our Mastermind students about hiring assistants. They were looking to hire an assistant or hiring somebody off of Fivver or Upwork or something like that. This conversation has come up repeatedly over the last couple of months, so I said, ” Let’s do a Monday Note webinar about it this Monday night about how to hire your assistants.” I walked in the office, and Nicole, what did I say to you? 

We need to find an image of a magician’s assistant.

I think it was actually I said, “Let’s talk about plate spinners.” Didn’t I talk about that first?”

Plate spinners and then we went on from there.

I said, “Let’s find something about plates spinners because a lot of people are trying to do too much. The email I closed at, “Quit trying to do everything yourself.” We tried to find an image of plate spinner and we didn’t find very good ones, they’re either old or grainy. It wasn’t good. I come back about an hour later and asked how you did it after I got back from lunch, and you pulled up the image of Scarlett Johansson from The Prestige. Not one where she’s lying in the bed with one of the two actors from it, I can’t think whether Christian Bale or Steph’s favorite Wolverine character, but one where she’s on stage in a black corset outfit, which has no thong and a whole lot racier. It’s just a movie grab of Scarlett Johansson holding something. I said, “I need assistants.” Somebody took offense to that about saying that I was looking at women could just be assistants. That never even crossed my mind. If you look at any of the marketing I’ve done, I’ve made fun of myself a lot more, especially the whole Chippendale thing. Probably the raciest thing we did besides The Fifty Shades of Notes image was the one we did right before the two blondes holding the signs, that was before Note CAMP. That was a little racy but I meant to push that a little bit; no nudity, those two blondes were covering themselves with two signs.

I like the Scarlett Johansson one because she’s one of the most well-known, most powerful women in Hollywood. Somebody took offense to it and said, “This is horrible.” I responded back, “No offense. I don’t answer to you. I appreciate it.” I looked at this lady’s profile and she had something on there that’s hypocrite. We sparred back and forth. She decided to take it to her Facebook page. She later took it down. She also edited her comments off of LinkedIn, which was funny. I just said whatever. It could have gotten a lot worse. Then she also said that I’d never have women on my podcast, I never had women on the workshops I do. I said, “You obviously don’t know me.” Anybody that knows me knows that I push for the whole women in notes thing. Everybody would agree to that. I have three very strong women in here at WCN between Jennifer, Nicole and Stephanie. Greg, we’re out-numbered two to three. Even my dogs are female dogs.

NCS 196 | Marketing

If you’re into the marketing piece, it’s okay sometimes to push the envelope.

What I’m trying to get at is if you’re into the marketing piece, it’s okay sometimes to push the envelope. It’s okay to get people talking about it. Me, I’m laughing about what’s going on and people are getting fired up. Just be careful with your messages because this woman also runs a company that if you do a hashtag, and that’s what I was doing. I was literally driving home, left the computer but I pulled my phone, I’m at the stop light. I said, “Let me do a hashtag whatever her name is.” When I pulled up people and hashtags in Instagram, literally five out of the six were porn sites. That’s not effective marketing. That’s a marketing mistake. She did not use NameChk when it comes down to it. That’s one thing you have to be careful if you’re going to use a hashtag. Make sure you’re using a proper hashtag. Make sure you’re using something that’s not going to align you with the free porn sites. That’s a no-no, unless of course you want to raise capital that way from whatever. You probably should not be using vivid or other things or other porn companies in your name.

You have to be careful on some of the things. The most important thing is don’t be afraid of those mistakes. It’s always often good to ask somebody, “What do you think about this?” I ask a lot sometimes. Sometimes I have to call you guys down on some of our marketing stuff. I’m like, “No, let’s not do that. That’s taking it a little bit too far.” I also pick up the phone and call some of my friends who are well-known in the business and I want to run some things and I say, “What do you think about this?” “It’s pretty good. That should be a pretty good laugh.” A lot of times, I just say confidence is my middle name. I don’t really give a shit sometimes if I piss some people off because it gets the word out there. You don’t have to respect me. You don’t have to like me. Trust me, I know that a lot of people don’t like me and I’m fine with that. That does not bother me. What cracks me up though is those that do like me are the ones doing things.

Some people don’t like being pulled out in their shit. If you’re not doing marketing, you’re just not in business these days. If you’re not posting on Instagram or Facebook or to LinkedIn, you’re not in business. If you’re not sending any email blast out to your database, if you’re not coming up with an infographic to drive foot traffic or traffic to your website, you’re not doing anything. Just having a website doesn’t do anything. I think I have known people I know are brainy in pretty much a couple of things. For one, it’s green, which is great. Second thing, we’re the best in the industry of what we do because we do it on a regular basis; consistency. It will be there anything after if you do it consistently and doing it on a regular basis. That’s with anything in life. You’re consistently making offers. Consistently networking. Consistently attending your local REA. Consistently sending an email. Consistently going on to LinkedIn and connecting with people every day, adding to your database, breeds success. That’s the only way that you get better at things.

I get ideas all the time. It’s why I love going to movies. I love listening to comic clubs or comedians and things like that. I got a couple of ideas from Eddie Griffin in Vegas, not that I can use but some stuff that I’m going to save in my pocket for some things later on. You have to realize that marketing is just maybe not all about you but it’s about what’s going on out there. Sometimes you will push the envelope and you will cross the line. The best thing is just to say, “My bad. It’s not what I intended it to be. I can see where you’re going.” I can honestly see a little bit of the person that got upset. What’s the first thing I told Nicole to do today when we came in? Put my Photoshopped head on top of Scarlett Johansson’s body. Last night at the movie theater, Steph and I have been talking about me going and getting dressed up in drag and doing a photo. I’m not going to do that, it’s a little ugly. It’d be funny though. I don’t think everyone wants to see me in drag. It’s been almost twenty years since I dressed in drag. Halloween 1998, I dressed as a woman; fishnet stockings, wig. I was actually waiting tables at the Gristmill. I made a lot of tips that night. I just sat and had fun with the crowd.

We have a question, “Do you send the haters glitter bombs?”

No, I don’t do glitter bombs. We’ve talked about some other things to send out here. There is a company that does send animal excrements.

I was thinking about the gummies.

The most thing I’ve done was sending the books on Fifty Shades of Grey. I’m not going to spend any more money on that people just to make myself feel good.

The lady that hated on my piece last night literally went out and shared the thing to her database and said, “This guy posted to an all-male audience.” I’m like, “First off, my audience is not all male. It’s literally right at 55% women, 45% men.”

She didn’t know that we definitely praised one of our Women in Notes earlier that day.

We were begging to have kids and women in notes. We’ve had a lot of people on. Katie Moton was on the podcast a while back. Great job. People we’ve had on the workshops from Sue Nelson to Cathy Jetts to Donna Bauer to Kimberly Banks-Fawcett to Liz Bremer-Smith to Cynthia Faulkner to Stephanie Goodman being the emcee of the second room, to Belinda Savage to the Questies, Ingrid, Anne Marie, Beatrice, Rebecca, and all of them over there. I could go on and on about all the people that we have helped promote in women. Karen Peterson on the podcast a while back. We have Gail Greenberg as a member there. Everybody knows that we are very equal opportunity. We actually push women a big advocate because actually women have an easier job, easier time with buying notes because it is such a male-driven society. I’ve seen many times I’ve talked to asset managers and when I called they wouldn’t give me a time and day. When Stephanie called, they would talk to her more. Somebody else that I had another female call, they would talk to them. To just say that I’m misogynistic, that’s a false thing to say. You obviously don’t know me, which is quite all right. 

Jason Bible knows that I’m talking about. He’s part of the Rehab Romper Crew. It’s okay to get hated on. Only 33% of people are going to love you, 33% are going to hate you. It doesn’t stop us from having some fun with things. There are two tools that you can use. Learn to use either Hootsuite or Buffer. Both are free. We use Buffer here. Nicole, do you want to talk a little bit about some of the things that we do with Buffer here real fast?

I just schedule a lot of the posts that go out and make a marketing calendar, decide what contents I’m going to put and I will put it on to Buffer. It’s really nice because they give you times that they’ll look at the algorithm on your Facebook and they decide how much do you get the most traffic. They put those times on there and you can put your content in that time and you’ll get more likes, you get more hits, you get more investors.

NCS 196 | Marketing

You can also pre-schedule it so it automatically happens while you’re not even there.

You can also pre-schedule it so it automatically happens while you’re not even there. A post comes in at 9:00 in the morning and also one at night too and then we have one throughout the day. When I get a message on my phone on my Instagram then I have to go ahead and post it for Instagram. I’m not going to post to Facebook, I’m not going to post in LinkedIn. There’s a whole variety of different things they can post on there, whether it’s your Pinterest account too or other things. Those are two services that you’re silly not to use. I actually know that some very large marketing firms, like our friend Kristie Whites, with Serving Social who was a guest on the podcast and also another female guest on Note CAMP, uses that extensively with her clients. She sets up different Buffer programs or Buffer accounts for each of her clients and then pre-schedule the things that go out as one heavy duty brain dumpling session where they come up and brainstorm and figure out the maps, set it up, schedule it, and forget it. You can still go in and edit things individually as things pop up. If a tragedy pops up, you don’t want something to pop up.

We use Homey the Clown. One of our edgy things is when there was this clown killings going on, people dressed up in clowns. We waited a couple of weeks and then we posted the Homey the Clown thing, and there are no clowns that go in on there. People find it pretty hilarious. If we would have done it the day of it, it would be a little insensitive. Sure enough, it was quite okay. What’s sad is a lot of people don’t know who Homey the Clown was. 

Going back to marketing mistakes, the biggest mistake you can make is not to focus on it. Our good buddy Dan Zitofsky, who’s been a guest on here, as his business has grown, he’s been speaking more and more rehabs and stuff like that. Dan has struggled a little bit with getting marketing right a bit, because he’s speaking, he’s spending time in Memphis and out Birmingham looking at deals. He doesn’t have the time to post a lot of stuff individually, so he’s hired somebody finally, about time. He hired somebody to originally come up with some videos, but I guess it didn’t help with his marketing. I think Lisa Wilshon actually was doing some of his marketing. Lisa was picking our brains in February when we were in New Jersey about some of the things that we use. Honestly, on some of the marketing tools, we don’t spend that much time. We spend more time on Facebook ad promotions. When it comes to the programs we use, we have a paid account for Buffer. We have a paid account for Infusionsoft. That’s probably the biggest thing every month that we spend money on for that. We use a lot of dollar images off of Canva. The images you use for the podcast and things like that, what do you use? Where are you getting all those photos from with the whale?

I have a secret stash of stock images that aren’t really stock. They’re different from the regular stock photos that you see.

They’re good. I really love them. That’s the thing, there are a lot of stock photos. There are a lot of different things out there. Canva’s great. Then we use LEAP Pages, we use a whole variety of different things out there for this stuff. Honestly, do you think we spend $1,000 on the programs we use? 

Maybe a little less.

Over half of that is going to be for Infusionsoft and MailChimp. We have Ensomo and Mobit. We spend about $1,000 a month in marketing with just the tools we have. We are a much bigger worth of $10,000 megawatts blowtorch out there that’s marketing. You all out there can do things for less than $100 a month just doing it on a regular basis. Trust me, I had tools initially and it took me a while to get around it because I was like many people. I want to focus on the deals. Let me focus on the deals. Until I changed my mind that I have to focus on the marketing and the marketing built more deals and more capital. 

I’ll give you an example. Greg, what was one of the things I had you do in the office yesterday?  

Pull all the Ohio assets.

Did what with it? 

We mapped them on BatchGeo.

We used BatchGeo.com which is a free source to help map the outline. One of the things we also have, you also sent me the photos of the Ohio assets. Ohio can have Nicole take all those photos of Ohio assets and put it on a nice infographic. Let’s actually do that so they’d fit on a PowerPoint slide and I can throw that on my presentation. Here’s the map and here’s what these assets look like. Marketing is the key to every business and the only way you’re going to get better at it is by making mistakes.

Whatever you’re doing, like Jason says he’s using Meetup groups to really expand his database and many things. I know he’s doing a great job marketing. He’s getting 50 to 100 people at Meetup groups in his offices or his locations every month. That’s a great way to do it. You’ve got to start somewhere. 

A big shout out to Chad Razzio and Donald and Lucille on the Houston Meetup, you guys had thirteen or fourteen people last time. Brady Durr had about six or seven people in Fort Worth. Just get out and start talking to people. Get out and start marketing. You’ve got to share the images. You’ve got to share the post to draw attraction to you. If you don’t, you continue to hide and don’t post anything, nobody’s going to find you. In this crazy world, you’ve got to post things on a regular basis for people to pay attention. Otherwise, you all know their attention span is getting shorter and shorter by the moment, by the month, by the day, by the year. You’ve got to be exposed on a regular basis to really get people to take in on it.

Go to iTunes and Stitcher and leave a positive review. If you don’t like the show, why are you listening? Leave a review there too. Anything we can do better, please let us know. I would really love it if you guys will go out and leave a review on iTunes for us as well. If you feel like sharing this, please do so with five or ten of your closest real estate investing friends. Maybe we can help them make things better for them. 

Have a great day. We look forward to seeing you all at the top. We’ll see you later.

 

Important Links

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!
Join The Note Closers Show community today:

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.