As everything has gone virtual to deal with the pandemic, it might have put a crimp in your plans to wine and dine every investor you come across. But this is actually an amazing time to shift raising capital and finding new investors to the online world. By using digital marketing, you can put your entire investment pitch on steroids and reach even more people in less time than you did before with in-person meetings.
There is no real difference between the old way and the new way to raise private capital. You still have to let people get to know you, establish your credibility and authority, and warm up your leads. Dr. Adam Gower has over 30 years of experience in real estate, banking, and finance, but a few years ago he realized that digital marketing and the Jobs Act of 2011 could revolutionize investing and the alternate lending space.
Dr. Gower uses every medium possible to build his brand and reach more people, including:
- Podcast
- Zoom meetings
- Email Marketing
- Skype calls
- Webinars
- Youtube videos
People want to learn at their leisure. They don’t always have time to sit down and listen to you pitch your latest deal to them. By pre-recording a pitch that they can listen to whenever they have time to listen to it, you increase the chance that they’ll listen to it in the first place.
USE YOUR PLATFORM TO EDUCATE YOUR AUDIENCE
Every industry has its own vocabulary, and after a while, real estate investors can forget that not everyone knows what the IRR means or what the BRRRR strategy encompasses. Dr. Gower suggests you take your pitch deck to your kids or someone who doesn’t know anything about real estate and have them tell you every word they don’t understand.
Then you can sit down and write a blog post, a website article, or record a video explaining that term to people who are brand new to the real estate world. As you put out content on the IRR, you’re also teaching people through the lens of your experience. They see how you think about that idea, and that will leave them predisposed to invest with you because at the end of the day, they will see that deal exactly the way you see the deal. You’ll have trained them to see the real estate world through the same lens you do.
As you educate your audience, you also have the chance to tell your story. What drives you? What makes you stand out in the online world? Your storytelling lets your potential investors get to know you, and it has the added benefit of letting them connect with you.
CONTENT DRIVES THE MARKETING
If you have a website but no content, then what you have is a big, beautiful car with no engine, says Dr. Gower. You don’t have any way to drive traffic back to your website and you have to rely on hoping someone pulls up your website on a search engine. When you start creating content, you’re going to explode the traffic leading back to your website.
From a single podcast, Dr. Gower creates at least 20 different pieces of marketing. Tweets, video shorts, Facebook posts, blog posts, and more can come from just one piece of content. Then those pieces of content can be distributed across social media channels with a link back to your website. As you educate people, you want them to find you everywhere.
For me, it starts with my podcast Accelerated Investor. We actually outsource a lot of the content creation to a third party and I just get to focus on the fun part of talking with people about their businesses. We turn that podcast into blog posts, videos, and emails. And we just closed a $20 million apartment deal after raising $3 million in private money because as one of our investors said, “Josh, you’re everywhere!”. And that’s exactly where you want to be.
CREATE A CUSTOMER AVATAR
Are your customers middle-aged women? Is your audience full of doctors, lawyers, or businessmen? If you don’t know who your ideal customer is, then your marketing won’t be targeted enough to reach them. Dr. Gower goes so far as to find a picture online of what his typical customer looks like and uses that for his avatar. Then he asks questions like:
- What do they read?
- How were they educated?
- What do they do for a living?
- How many kids do they have?
- What are their concerns?
He digs down deep to know exactly what drives the kind of customer he’s trying to attract, and then his marketing team is able to talk directly to the customer avatar.
CONCLUSION
YOUR story, your experience, and your expertise are all the ways that investors get to know you. Whether you choose the old one-on-one way to get to know people, or the new one-to-many digital marketing way, your potential investors will still want to know who you are and what your company is all about.
There are only so many hours in the day to have those one-on-one conversations that are so popular with the old way of marketing. And then it’s pretty normal to get off script, be off your game, or just forget everything you want to cover when you’re talking about the same topic for the tenth time that day. Digital marketing lets you land your delivery and then push out that message to the public. It’s you on your best day, nailing your message every single time and signing up new investors.
Be Daring,
Josh
WHAT ARE YOU THINKING?
Every business—no matter how small or how large—can benefit from professionally-created videos and digital marketing tools. Have you had success with videos? Or are you looking to learn more about the process? Let us know below.