Scott discusses some of the marketing stats that he shared along with some highlights from the California Distressed Mortgage Expo.

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Marketing Stats and DME Recap

We’re out here in the lovely Southern California from attending the Distressed Mortgage Expo. A big shout-out to Marc Gold and Mahir Allan for putting on a heck of an event. Roughly, I’d say about 250 people were there. It’s hard sometimes to tell exact head counts. You get people coming and going, a lot of people in the room and then you also have a lot of people in vendors, hanging out in the hallways networking, for coffee, at the watering hole, getting some libations as they’re networking. Really good event. I have to give them that a lot of people comment along the way, “It was great”, catch up with a lot of people, not a pitch-fest, which is huge. Some pretty good panels.

My biggest takeaway from attending an event like the Distressed Mortgage Expo is just the networking aspect of it. What’s unique about the DME, this event I would probably say three-fourth of the audience are either listening or their past students. For those that came up and greeted us and say how much they love the podcast, thank you so much for those that said that. I think that’s the biggest thing, is just catching up with people, our extended note family, or some people like I say the Carsonites. It’s always great just to hang out with everybody and see what everybody’s up to. What I really love besides just hanging with everybody, and first of all, not running the event, it’s nice to just sit back, relax and participate, get thrown into the mix as needed. Just seeing the growth of everybody. Seeing Wayne Snell in panels and how far he’s gone in a couple of years, talking with Kimberly Banks Fawcett and catching up with her and seeing Chase Thompson and visiting with him and the Adams family. It’s just really great to be surrounded by good people. It makes life a lot easier. Really great also to catch some new faces of people that we’ve connected with here online, one or two other things and get to meet them in person and visit with them and have a drink with them or cup of coffee or just hang and shoot the breeze a little bit, is always a really good thing.

If you weren’t here in bright Orange County for the Distressed Mortgage Expo, they are coming to the East Coast. I think sometime in January is when Marc and Matt were telling me that their next one is in the works, so probably in New York and New Jersey, so look forward to that upcoming here in the next few months to see that. The next big event I think you guys will want to attend, if you haven’t already gotten your tickets, is our upcoming Note Camp Convention, which is 100% live and online and gives you the opportunity to network with everybody. We’ve got an amazing line up of speakers. That’s set here on October 12th to the 15th online. You can get your tickets at NoteCamp.live, use the discount code PODCAST. You’ll get a nice little discount on that.

Besides the Distressed Mortgage Expo, one of the great things is listening to some of the speakers and meeting with the vendors. We got a great chance to hang out with Shante Duffy and Kevin Cordell from Madison Management who are our servicers. It’s always great to hang out with Joel Markovitz and his wife Donna and catching up with Cindy Gold, Marc Gold; just all our vendors that we use on a regular basis for the most part were there. It’s nice just to be normal people listening with them. Marc got me go on a couple of panels. I was on the Shark Tank, which is fun, along with being on the first panel and talking about the business. I gave an hour-long presentation on marketing in today’s real estate business. I’ll go through some of the statistics that I shared with those that are there. I won’t give you the full presentation, but I will go through some of the slides I thought were the most important, that really gave a lot of feedback, that we heard a lot of great stuff from. Before I go to that, why am I still here in LA? I’m just hanging out in the after party are still quite going here? No. I’m actually here for very specific reason.

For those who don’t know, obviously we do a lot of marketing and some of our best stuff that we take from what we learn comes from DigitalMarketer. DigitalMarketer is one of the largest agencies out there that provides content and training on how to be better at your social media, your content and creation and things like that. DigitalMarketer puts on two extremely large events each year. One in February and March each year is the Traffic & Conversion Summit that they have in San Diego that we’ve been attending for the last five years. They put a big event, Traffic & Conversion Summit by DigitalMarketer in San Diego each year and it keeps growing and growing. They have over 5,000 entrepreneurs there in social media, internet entrepreneurs there which is always phenomenal, 100 plus vendors. We always take one or two or three nuggets from that event and really implement them. It’s helped us take our business to different levels each year after we go there. Of course, I walk out of those events better then I always want to blow my business stuff and rebuild it because there are just so many things I can see that’s happening. It’s the proverbial marketing onion. We add layer and layer and layer on top of some stuff. It works out pretty well for us.

They’ve also, in the last two years, started a new conference called Content and Commerce. It’s a little bit small event with only 1,600 entrepreneurs at the JW, but I’m really looking forward to the three days of great content speakers, plus there’s a ton of vendors. Anytime that we can plug in to other people that are a lot more successful than us, to have their niche down in whatever they do as far as marketing, blogging, providing content, or helping us collect to be more effective on our marketing sales and things like that or a training, so it delivers easier to our students and clients out there, the better off we are. These events are put on and coordinated by DeAnna Rogers. DigitalMarketer’s owned by three guys, Perry Belcher, Ryan Deiss who’s from Austin, Texas and another amazing gentleman by the name of Roland Frasier who is a marketing genius. I’ve known Roland for quite a few years. I’ve learned a lot of my initial marketing, blogging, and a lot of stuff that we started off with years ago that helped us stay ahead of the curve from Roland. I’m always excited to see what he’s got to say, hear him speak. They do a tremendous job of providing some great content that we can take and implement.

We are always excited to hearing stuff, as you would be as well. We’ll attend some of the same ones and then we’ll also divide and conquer, she’ll go her way on some things and I’ll go my way on some things. It’s always great to have such a great event. They had the opening cocktail party, which was great. Hanging out with DeAnna Rogers is just, DeAnna is an amazing person. We come to these things and it’s not a cheap ticket. We come but we always get value out of it. It’s always good to network. We’ve met with some new people that aren’t in the note business. They’re not in the real estate investing community, but I can learn a nugget from just about everybody that’s out there.

I want to go into a couple of things this morning. Marc asked me to speak on marketing at the Distressed Expo and I’m like, “Okay, great,” and I’m thinking, “What the hell am I going to talk about?” I put together a presentation. What I want to do is hit up some of the points that a lot of people really love. One of the things I always offer when I speak is if you like a copy of my slides, you’re more than welcome to get copies of my slides. I pulled some statistics to help people understand where they need to spend their focus. WCN is a 10,000 megawatt out there of all the stuff that we did marketing-wise, whether it’s this podcast, through Facebook Lives, emails, videos or GIFs or whatever we put together. Not everybody is going to do that. I understand that and you just embrace it. I didn’t do all this initially. I started with one thing and one step at a time in doing it.

That’s one of the things that I share with the people. It wasn’t about what we are doing at WCN and any other podcast. I focused on a lot of our students and other people that are doing phenomenal things in social media and pick specific things that people focus on. I’ll give you an example. I talked about how BiggerPockets is a very effective way to network and raise capital and talk about what Wayne Snell is doing on there and Adam Adams, Bob Malecki and Gail Greenberg and what they’re doing in connecting with other investors and using the keyword options to find funding partners, to find note buyers, to find people that they’re raising capital from. We share with people about videos. Some people are doing amazing things on videos, like Chase Thompson and Adam and Wayne again as well. We talked about people who are using webinar and other things that also get the word out.

We focused on really some of the most effective things out there and the people having the biggest bang for the buck and they aren’t about them, it wasn’t about us. I can sit here and talk about this all day long but most people only hear that and they’re like, “I can’t do that. I can’t be Scott Carson. I can’t be somebody else.” I get that. It’s intimidating sometimes, the shadow that we throw. What’s important to keep in mind is we all have to start somewhere. If you’re going to be in business in real estate or marketing or whatever you’re going to be doing for the long run, if you just stop, if you don’t do what you’re doing what you need to be doing now and you put off two more years, you’re just a step further behind the curveball. If you can start doing something and we’ll go from there.

What I’d like to go through now is just some stats I provided to help you guys keep rock and rolling. You can always go Vimeo.com/WeCloseNotes or our YouTube channel and you’ll be able to catch the replay with the slides that we go through. One of the things I always like to ask people is why they’re here. I think a lot of people love is The Ugly Truth. What I mean by the ugly truth, a lot of people don’t know the stats about contacting people and how important it is to follow up with everybody. It’s so important to follow up more than just one email or more than just one post because most people aren’t going to respond the first time around. Most people are only going to respond after you hear them again and again and again. If you take that you need to connect with 100 people, you need to communicate with people out there, you got 100% of your stat, your database as well. The first time you send an email out like a contact request or go meet with somebody at a meet-up group or things like that, you’re only going to have really 2% of that crowd respond the first time you contact somebody. I know that’s not the most exciting thing but two is better than none.

The second time you make a contact or follow-up with another email, you’re only going to have 3% of the people respond to you. What is sad is most people never get to that. Third email in a week or third contact in a meet-up group and things like that, you start connecting with five people. 5% of people will respond and want to do something with you. You do the fourth contact, fourth email, you got ten people. The thing to keep in mind is that 80% of the people that you’re going to connect with or going to do something with you are going to come after your fifth contact. Most people never make it past the first one. This is why your follow-up, your email responses, sending another email every week, the consistency of doing stuff on a regular basis is extremely important and most people fall asleep at the wheel on that. 48% of the people out there, once they send an email they get people to respond, almost half of the people wouldn’t even follow-up. I see this happen a lot of times especially in real estate where a lot of people will give postcards and mailers. They’ll send stuff out and they’ll get phone calls back from interested borrowers or interested homeowners and they just won’t even follow-up with those people. It’s just sad. You put all this work initially to get things rock and rolling and you just drop the ball.

Only 25% of people out there will actually send out a second round of contacts, whether it’s a post, an email. One in four people will actually take it a second time. 12% of you out there will send a third contact or email post. Only 10% of people out there will send out three or more emails or post. You’ve heard of the whole Pareto Principle or the 80/20 rule; 20% of the people make 80% of the profits. In the note industry specifically when it comes to this, I think it’s 10% make 90% of the profits. Unfortunately, one of the things that we did see at the Distressed Mortgage Expo, we see a lot of repeat faces; people asking the same questions over and over again, “I’m looking for sources. I’m looking for capital.” They are just not doing a damn thing about it. They keep showing up and asking the same stupid questions. They’re sitting there banging their head when they need to be doing things differently. That means reaching out to asset managers. That means connecting with IRA investors. You have to do and think different things about your business versus just sitting there and expecting people to show up to do business with you.

That’s one of the most disturbance with this because I think people are like, “Oh crap, yeah.” Where do you fall in? If you’re in that 50% of people that only respond, you’ve got to change what you’re doing. I think a lot of people fall into that obviously. You’ve got a 50/50 shot of doing something or not doing something and that determines your success a ton of the time. Anytime we’ve done a workshop, we’ve always tried to provide the contact list to everybody, list of those attendances so that we can encourage you to network with others. Literally less than 5% of people most of the time will send us even an intro email, “Hi, it was great meeting you at the Note Buying Workshop or Note Camp.” Less than 5% of people actually do something. That’s scary because what that means is a lot of people are wasting time, resources and energy showing up to something but they’re not really serious about doing something.

We go through a lot of things about working. Kimberly, Wayne, Cody Cox, Jay Tenenbaum are doing great about networking and connecting with people in their markets. Recycling content is a very easy thing to do. Just taking articles and blogs and sharing them to your database, your post. Adam Adams I think has become the king of that, twice a day. Karen and Stacey Wall from Bike Homes do a tremendous job of that as well. Chase Thompson does this on LinkedIn on a daily basis for his marketing stuff. Video, you all know how much I love video. Some people are doing amazing things out there. Obviously, Cody Cox is doing a Friday Stroll video every day. Adam is doing some stuff from his road show as well. Dan Zitofsky is doing a great job. Our big, buddy big Dan is doing some great videos and sharing what he’s doing. He just needs to do it when there’s a little bit more light and not when he’s driving. Wayne Snell is famous for doing some videos during their road show. Chase does a lot of video as well. We talked previously about BiggerPockets and how people are doing great jobs connecting with people there. We also talked about webinars a little bit there. Matt Allan, Mahir, Cynthia Faulkner from SDIRA TV is doing a great job, Kimberly Banks, Wayne Snell. Email obviously as we talked about is important because it gives you a really cheap alternative to doing a lot of direct mail. For every dollar spent on email contact, you’re going to get a 4,400% ROI. For every dollar you get, you should be getting $44 back of what you’re paying.

What I want to dive into though is the statistics that we shared with everybody at the event. How does it breakdown? Is it women or men? If you look in the different social media channels on there, a percentage of user online adults with personal accounts would all fall in social media services. This tells you who is where and what they’re doing. This is as of a couple of years ago. You see 50% of men are on Facebook, 56% of women are on Facebook. Google Plus was the big surprise, only about a quarter in the population has Google Plus profiles because it is not quite as interactive as Facebook or LinkedIn or things like that. The important thing to keep in mind, and I forget about this a lot too, we fall down on the job on this, your Google Plus is owned by Google. Anything you post on there, it’s categorized by Google and it can show up in your search engine. It’s really great to help you be SEO optimized. It really hits some stuff.

A great example is our friend Laurie Davidson out of Georgia. She had an assistant come in, write a blog or two couple of years ago, posted to Google Plus and really didn’t do anything after a week. By and by goes by a year and a half two years later, sure enough, I did a search on that blog post, popped about 1,800 hits. I forget about that sometimes but it’s important to do. Twitter still goes about 16%, 17%. LinkedIn is at 14%. These are all usually going to be your professionals and it goes down from there. It’s important to keep in mind on using these different platforms. Let’s talk about where they’re using this, whether it’s mobile versus desktop. Where are they actually accessing this content? For those of you that are listening or watching on Facebook, most of you are doing it via mobile device, 68% of you. Twitter, most of that is 86% online. Instagram is almost 100% watching completely online on their phones.

The big kicker is that LinkedIn though is about three-fourth that’s still in front of a desktop, computer. That’s something to keep in mind. Whether they’re accessing, they’re uploading things or they’re typing blogs, it’s easier to do that there versus on the mobile app. Obviously, Pinterest is 92% is mobile. Actually, I find that a little interesting. Tumblr is roughly almost 54% and 46%. This is why it’s important when you’re communicating, using a blog or doing an email blast, that your content is mobile optimized especially if you’re using a CRM tool like MailChimp or other things like that. Use it so that your stuff looks nice when people open it up on their mobile device because whether you like it or not, your phone is now the new TV of the 21st century. A lot of people like this slide. It’s given them options like, “Now I understand why people are spending a lot of time on their phone.”

Let’s go through two things here real fast for you. How often do people access these things? Three quarters of Facebook users and half of Instagram users are on those two websites daily. 76% of people use Facebook on a daily basis. If we combine it whether it’s weekly or less, 92% of people at least are on Facebook using something. Most people use it at least weekly. Instagram, 51% of them is on daily. If you only are going to use two things with photos for your business to share the deals that you’re doing just share where you’re at, just share the life of a note investor, things that you’re doing, be using Facebook and Instagram.  At LinkedIn, while it’s not as fast and not as socially, I guess you could say, gratifying, it is still an effective vehicle to be sharing your business stuff. The reason LinkedIn is a little bit less down here, it’s much more professional. People don’t want as much to see the stock what everybody else is doing. It’s more of a professional network, so keep it professional. Keep it classy.

This is what got a lot of laugh on other people because I’m sure many of you have thought so many people are wasting their lives away on their phones, on their social media and this is a great slide. The average individual is spending five years of their life online, especially in the social platform. Facebook’s a year and seven months. The thing you got to keep in mind here is when YouTube shows up here at a year and ten months. Almost two years in people’s lives, they’re spent watching video or watching other things out there. That should be a huge nugget in just alone in that stat. If you’re not doing video and posting stuff on YouTube, which is the second largest search engine out there, about your business or things like that, you’re really missing out. Twitter was only eighteen days. Instagram was eight months. They’re spending eight months looking at photos. Snapchat is really a surprise. People are spending a year and two months on there. It’s grown well-over the last couple of years. I think obviously it’s much more a younger demographic. I would say much more the 35 or less. That certainly isn’t the quite demographic that we look for with note investing or with raising capital. We’re looking for the 35 to 65 category. That’s why YouTube is so important. I think Facebook as you see is such a big, big turnout on that. A lot of people really love this slide here because they’re like, “I can see.” If anything at hand is exactly what you need to be doing is spending time there or where you need to be putting your ad dollars or if you’re going to be using stuff with these Facebook ads or even YouTube ads to share your content.

Moving on here, this was a slide that a lot of people loved as well. We talked about where should I be putting my content? On content marketing for business to business, in what social media platform? Like we said before, LinkedIn is one of the bigger ones that does it. 94% of people in the business side are using LinkedIn. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube remain the four larger social media platforms that people are using. Google Plus has risen in the last couple of years because I think people are starting to realize the importance of using that and having Google catalog that. What was funny is Pinterest has decreased by 8%. SlideShare is owned by LinkedIn. We use SlideShare a lot of times just to catalog and upload our PowerPoint presentation so we could share those with people via email or social media stuff. This is where people are using and spending most amount of time in sharing their content and having the most effect. We talked about the content spider. We either have eight or nine different spots to post your stuff, but you don’t have to be that effective. Just doing and using things in the top three or four is going to get you a lot of traction and help you grow your database, grow your tribe, raise capital, find deals, find buyers for your assets. Just doing something on a continuous basis, that’s the most important thing that a lot of people forget about. They get overwhelmed, they’re not the most technologically savvy at things and they cop out, “I can’t do that.” You can’t, you’re correct. Just start doing something on a regular basis and make things happen.

There’s one thing that I think is really valuable for everybody to implement. I got good at this stuff because I made it a daily priority in my business to do things. I have the philosophy that if I could get one more person each day and one is greater than none. Many people are wondering, “What do I do? Where do I begin? How do I start getting things rock and rolling and make it a daily habit?” One of the episodes we did about a year or two years ago was something called The 30/30 Matrix. This is a tool that I got actually from Roland Frasier years ago on the real estate side. It’s a simple Excel spreadsheet. Down the left hand column you have the days of the month, 1 through 30 and what day it lands on. Across the top, you got 30 different activities you can do in your note business. You’re not going to do all this every day. Some of this you’ll only do once a month, like attending a meeting or going to a live event. Those are things you do once a day. The more checks that you have on this, you can send an email once a week and a follow-up email, that’s four more, that’s eight right there.

The biggest goal of this is at the end of the 30 days or your 31 days or 28 days if it’s February, is that you want your checks here, the box that you’re checking off, to add up to at least 70 or more, preferably 100 or more. That’s where you’re going to see the most amount of growth in your business, is just doing things on a daily basis. We literally gave a way this, just a simple one-page PDF that we gave away to everybody. What surprised me was only about 30% of the room actually came up and got it. It doesn’t surprise me for the most part because literally only 10% of people do something. This looks like it’s too much work. What is amazing are those people that are buying assets and making things happen, those are the people that came up and took advantage of this. It’s really a simple thing to set it up. If you look at the top, there are four posts three times a day, calling asset managers, posting on your Facebook group, doing a simple postcard out to your IRA investor if you want to, send an email to your asset managers, jumping on and posting an ActiveRain blog or posting a link to groups. These are all simple things you can do on a daily basis or weekly basis at least making things happen. If you want to get 100, you’ve got to do 25 things a week. That’s three and a half things a day. One in the morning, one in the afternoon, one in the evening. You can use Buffer or Hootsuite to automate this and set this up so it rocks and rolls for you.

That’s one of the things that we focused on. We really spent time going through this with everybody at the Distressed Mortgage Expo. I think a lot of people took it to heart. We did get a lot of compliments on our discussion and these are pretty much straight to the point. I’m not going to blow any smoke up anybody’s ass but rather just give you some good quality content and share with you some great nuggets to help you really take your business to the next level. It was good seeing Dawn and Greg Felt out there. We’ve seen a lot of people who are doing some things to make things happen.

We do have some new episodes on. Make sure you leave a review there on iTunes or Stitcher if you’re really enjoying our episode. That would be great. As always, feel free to drop us an email at Scott@WeCloseNotes.com with either your questions about what’s going on in your business or if you have a deal you want me to look through. We’re here to help. We’re here to help you take your business to the next level, close more deals, and make a whole lot more money. This is definitely a great time to be a note investor and make some things happen. Go make something happen. If you really enjoy the podcast, share it. I love to see anybody post online that they’re enjoying these things, they’re sharing the podcast. It helps us keep the word out. Not only does it help us take things to a new level, it always helps you. Hopefully you can learn by us and you’re taking the things that we share on here and apply them to your note business. Go out and make something happen. We’ll see you all at the top.

 

Important Links

• Distressed Mortgage Expo
• Note Camp Convention
• NoteCamp.live
• Madison Management
• DigitalMarketer
• Traffic & Conversion Summit
• BiggerPockets
• SDIRA TV
• MailChimp
• Buffer
• Hootsuite
• The 30/30 Matrix

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• The Note Closers Show Facebook
• The Note Closers Show Twitter
• Scott Carson LinkedIn
• The Note Closers Show YouTube
• The Note Closers Show Vimeo
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