Joe: Welcome. This is the Real Estate Investing Mastery Podcast.

Joe: What's up guys, Joe McCall, the Real Estate Investing Mastery Podcast. Glad you're here. On this podcast episode, we're going to be talking with Brandon Bateman, and we're going to be talk about what's working today in terms of marketing, getting leads, PPC, things like that. And so Brandon Bateman is a guy I met in our mastermind a couple, three years ago. And he's very active in the industry and he works with a lot of people that are doing a lot of deals. And, so he has a really good broad overview of what's working and what's not. Where's the market heading? What direction are we going into? Do we need to freak out? Is everything going to be okay? What marketing is working? What is that the cost per lead doing? Is it going up or is it going down? What are you kind of seeing? And so I want to bring Brandon on right now. It's going to a great episode. Glad you're here guys. If you're watching this on YouTube, please hit that like button and comment down below some of your questions. What other kind of topics or people do you want me to interview on the show? And we'll do that. So Brandon, how are you?

Brandon: Hey, fantastic. Thank you, Joe. Excited to be here.

Joe: Yeah, I'm glad you're here. So listen, tell people who you are, what you do, what is Bateman Collective all about?

Brandon: So I am first, as kind of all of us are, I'm an entrepreneur, right? Started this business about eight years ago. I was talking to someone on my team and they were telling me the other day, there's kind of two different types of entrepreneurs. There's the ones that are like, I want to go build a business. And then they go to build a building business. And then there's the other type that are the ones that are like, I'm going to do this to make money. And they start making money and at some point go like, oh shoot, I have a business and I'm definitely the second one. I started this company when I was a sophomore in school. I never had like a real job, like real like corporate experience. Anything I got before that, I just kind of dove head first into this. And it's been awesome. A years later, we're working with a couple hundred real estate investors nationwide doing PPC for motivated seller leads across houses, across land. Those are kind of the two niches that we target as a company. And it has been a fun ride.

Joe: What is PPC? Explain that to people who don't know.

Brandon: Great question. So PPC stands for pay-per-click marketing. When people say PPC, usually what they mean is Google pay- per-click. It's the most common platform for this. So if you ever searched on Google and you see that there's a list of companies that are going to show up there on your search. Like for example, you could search for how to sell my land on Google right now. You'll find there's probably going to be a few ads at the top. Sometimes they're called sponsored results. Sometimes are called ads. Usually there's about four of those. And then After that, you're going to see a bunch of organic results. And the two things we do as a company are PPC and SEO. And it's basically PPC is how do you show up at the top there with those sponsored results. And when somebody clicks on your ad, that's when you get charged money. Versus SEO is the flip side of that. That's organic. It stands for search engine optimization. It's how do I show up there without actually having to pay per click. And they each kind of have their own pros, their cons. But at the end of the day, the thing that they both have in common is it's intent-based marketing, which is really a different game than what you're doing most of the time, because let's just say you're doing direct to mail, you've got a bunch of lists. Like you're kind of doing property-based marketing based on people who you think might want to sell their land or their house, versus with paid search marketing or organic search marketing, PPC or SEO. The the way that it works is you you actually what you know about the person is that they have an intent to do this thing which tends to make it a different type of lead it's the only marketing channel where you can kind of guarantee that your leads had some type of motivation that they're trying to take some type of action.

Joe: That's interesting because somebody, you're absolutely right. Somebody who's typing into Google, how do I sell my land fast or how do I sell, my house, they're obviously have something they want to sell. They want to get rid of their property. So these leads are different than direct mail leads or cold calling leads because they're more intent on finding a solution quicker sooner rather than later, right?

Brandon: Yeah, absolutely. And it goes kind of multiple ways. So if I could kind of describe the range of how that's good and also how that is bad, then I think it'll paint a pretty clear picture. Let's just say you're doing direct mail and you have a really targeted list of properties. And you've targeted that list of property based on exactly the areas you love, exactly the number of acres you like to buy, places where you know you have buyers, whatever. You have all those specific criteria. You mail those people. You don't know that they want to sell you their land, but you do know that if they want to sell it to you, it's probably land that you actually want to buy. The only question is, can you give it at the right price? Can it be a deal? Right. If you look at PPC or SEO, it kind of takes a different turn. When somebody is searching, we actually don't know that much about their property. Their land could be 20 acres. It could be a quarter of acre. It could the land locked. It could it be as swamp. Like there's all kinds of things that we just simply cannot know. Because when somebody types into Google that they want to sell their land fast or something like that, what we do know is they own land and they have an intent to sell it. And what we don't know is anything about the land. So the kind of lead is different. The way that our clients have described it to us is with some of these channels. You know you want the property. You don't know if you can convince the seller. With PPC, it's a little bit more that you know the seller is actually motivated and they're actually taking action right now. It means it's more likely to be the right time. It means that the amount of time between when the lead comes in when you closes, could be shorter. And sometimes it gives you a mixed bag of properties. And that's especially true for land investors. If we're talking about houses, it still happens, like because some people are even targeting houses, they're looking for like probates or foreclosures or those kinds of niches. And with PPC, you kind of get like all those, all that stuff, but it's not like people, you know, going to foreclosure search for like how to sell my house and forecloser. Usually they search like how to sell my house fast or like that's important. Yeah, there's different things that they search, but the vast majority of them don't tell you they're in foreclosure. But then you get the lead and you realize they're foreclosures, right? So PPC in some ways is like way more targeted. It's super targeted towards a person who wants to do business with you. And it's less targeted towards this particular situation, towards the exact property, that kind of thing.

Joe: Okay, so there's different kinds of marketing, different kinds of leads, but there's also different kinds of PPC, right? So are you doing Facebook ads? Cause Facebook ads, that's just shows up to people that aren't searching, but it's still kind of an ad. What's the difference between Facebook ads and Google PPC ads?

Brandon: So the core difference that I would say is it's demand generation versus demand harvesting. They're kind of two different forms of marketing. You'll notice all forms of marketing kind of fall in one of these or the other. Demand harvesting is there's already this demand for what we do out there and we're just kind of routing that traffic towards us, but it already sort of exists. That's what happens in Google. These people are already actively searching and we were just saying, why don't you just find us instead of whatever else you're going to find. Uh, social ads, that's more of a demand generation play. It means that this person wasn't going on to Facebook, for example, to find a solution to sell their house today. Facebook's not the platform that people go to to find a way to sell the house. Usually. But could they be on Facebook and then see an ad from you and then decide, actually, I do want to sell my house. This hit me at a really good time. I do have this situation, whatever the case is, right? You kind of created that demand that wasn't actively searching. So they're both good channels. What you'll find about Facebook in general is the leads are cheaper. And what you'll find about Google in general is that the leads tend to be more motivated, higher quality. And what I can tell you, as we're talking about like houses versus land, for land investors, we have not had as much success with Facebook. For whatever reason, haven't quite cracked the code. For house investors, we've been able to make it work. I'd say PPCs are number one channel because it's more scalable. But on Facebook, we're spending probably three, 400 grand a month right now across Facebook ads for our clients and getting houses. Like we do a significant amount of it and actually it returns at a slightly higher ROI than we're getting from PPC. It just does it through a larger number of leads that are slightly less motivated. So it kind of depends on what you're going after. I would not personally recommend Facebook for land specifically, but for houses, it works.

Joe: Okay, cool. Let's talk about what you're seeing working today. You know, let me rewind a little bit actually too. This isn't a strategy for beginners necessarily, is it? This requires more of an upfront investment, right? These leads cost more than a direct mail lead is, but it's also these leads are more qualified. So you may not, you know, with direct mail, you may need 30 leads to do one deal. With PPC, you might need five or 10 leads to one deal. So you're going to pay more to leave, but this isn't necessarily for beginners, or is it?

Brandon: So I'll explain some of the pitfalls that beginners fall into there's always exceptions, right? So if you're listening to this and you're like, I'm a beginner, but I don't really feel like I'm gonna have those particular problems for XYZ reason Okay, maybe it's fine for you I can tell you some of problems that people run into at the beginning of the real estate investing journey is Usually a beginner just doesn't have a lot of capital for marketing and this is a more expensive marketing channel and there's of course accessions to that and And what you'll find is direct mail. You can go send 300 postcards if you want to. Post office will take you. Now, will you get a deal or not? Who knows? But the fact that you sent that little isn't gonna like be a problem for you. Versus PBC, it's different. It's not like I'm just saying, these are the people I'm targeting, this is how much I'm spending to get to them. PBC is actually an algorithmic game. As you spend that money, you're kind of feeding the algorithm and it's learning what's working to get you leads. It's learning, what's work to get you the quality of leads that you want. And then that feedback kind of gets put back into the ad strategy so that it can get better and more dialed in. What that means is that there's a learning period for new campaigns. And that period is basically where you're spending money and the algorithm's kind of trying to figure out where it could target to be really successful. I know you at least know this from the standpoint of like you ran a fair bit of social ads. It's kind the same deal with Facebook ads. It's the same ad deal with like a lot of modeling advertising platforms. So the problem you run into is because of that, number one, there's ramp up period where at the beginning it just doesn't work as well as it starts to work like two, three months, four or five six months down the road. And then the other component is if you have a really, really small budget, there's just not enough data running through that algorithm to make it really effective. So for land investors, we actually, the good thing about land investing is altogether, it's cheaper than house investing. For house investing, usually we're requiring at least a $4,000 to $5,000 monthly budget. And our average client starts somewhere between there and maybe $15,000 a month. Land investing is a little bit different. Usually we're management fees, and then our typical investor somewhere maybe between $2,000 and $8,000 per month. So it's a lower barrier to entry than it is for houses. And it still is to think, you don't want to think about it in terms of just monthly budget though. When you're starting with a channel like PPC, you really want to give it a six-month runway. And what that means is you're looking at two grand, but then is it really two grand though? Because you have to pay for management fees too, right? So maybe by the time you're all in, you're $3,250, $3500, whatever it is, and then you spread that out over six months. It's not an insignificant amount of capital to like run full campaigns.

Joe: It is an investment. I do like land way better than houses, because you're not spending as much per lead on all of the marketing channels. You're not spinning as much as per lead, but you need to know what you're doing. Mike, you need know how to make an offer, how to close on the deals, how sell them, because this is a lot of money that you're spending on marketing. So I always recommend, hey, start small, start with direct mail, start calling realtors, cold calling if you want. But as soon as you've done three, four or five deals, start seriously looking at PPC, because in a certain sense, it's very reliable, and you don't have to work as hard because you get fewer leads. Can you talk a little bit about- That's the value. Yeah, totally. Because like, again, think about it. If you're doing cold calling, you're going to have to make 10,000 dials to do a deal. If they're doing direct mail, you might have to send 3,000 postcards to do it. Well, not that many, for land specifically. You might have send 1,000 to 2,000, postcards, to do the deal. That's going to give you, you know, 30 to 70 phone calls, and, you have to a lot of offers. But with PPC, again, you might just need 10 leads. And out of those 10, you might find a good deal. So it is less number of sellers you have to talk to. But I think one thing that's really important, I know you know this, Brandon, the quality of these leads are so good. You can't let that lead sit idle and then just call them back when you have some time in a couple of days. These leads are hot. Do you have the numbers? Do you track like how long, if you wait to call them, back or if you don't answer the calls, like how much of that lead that you have, you do lose. Does that make sense what I'm asking there?

Brandon: Yeah, I do know exactly what you're asking and I wish I had the data for like every lead we have exactly how long before it was called so I could see how it correlates with conversion. We haven't done that study, but there are many companies that have just across industries and the general trend is like the longer you take to call a lead, it drops off really, really significantly. I can tell you we do have one other piece of data. We track from our clients who's closing what on a per lead basis. So we understand which clients are closing really well, which clients are closing more poorly. And we did do a study. We took our top 10% of clients. And we looked at basically everything that they're doing, interviewed them, interviewed members of their team, looked at their SOPs, processes, and their CRM, what's happening with the leads, all that kind of stuff. And then the other thing we did, because I think this is really important, because the next people just look at what the successful people are doing. They're like, oh, I need to do that. But what you really need to know as a differentiator, you need to what are successful people doing that the people that are unsuccessful aren't doing. So we also took some of our worst clients and we interviewed them, interviewed their team. By the way, not a great phone call to get like, hey, just so you know, you're one of our worse performing clients.

Joe: Yeah, that'd be a lovely phenomena to see.

Brandon: Yeah. So anyways, we looked at all the stuff that they're doing and we found what are the things that are different amongst the best compared to the worst? One big difference was that those who are the best, they measure how quickly they get to leads, not in minutes, but literally in seconds. We're talking like less than 60 seconds continually. And it's a hard thing to do and it doesn't matter as much for other marketing channels for PPC it does. And let me explain to you exactly why it's important. If somebody is searching on Google, you basically know that they came to your website from a that includes all of your competitors. Do you think they're only gonna find one real estate investor on Google? No, they're gonna find a big old list of a bunch of real estate investors that goes as deep as they want to make it, right? And what happens when you have a problem that you're actively trying to solve? You reach out to one company and then you probably reach out to another company and you probably reached out to another company, right. So the process that we build to explain how it works, they search on Google, they click on your ad, when they click on your add they're going to see a form. That form is going to have very minimal information. We're going to ask for literally the address. I know it's slightly different for land, it's not always exactly an address. And then their phone number. And that's it. We ask for very minimal information just because we want anything that we can call a lead from somebody who had searched on Google. And, then what we're going to do is we're taking this big old questionnaire where we ask a bunch of questions about them and about the property. And the purpose of that questionnaire, a lot of people think it's that they can get all that information about the leads. Well, If you're doing your job right, ideally nobody ever finishes that questionnaire because the whole point of that questionnaire is like once they're done with you, they're going to go to someone else. We need to like hold them on your website for a period of time. That's your window to call them. The problem is if you take too long, they finish that. Then they're gonna click back. They're gonna go to Google. They gotta click on another one. So what you'll find is like, will you still get a hold of leads if you're calling them too slow? Yes, but you'll get ahold of them and then you're one of three people sending an offer versus if you can get them a little bit quicker. You have time to have that conversation with them that makes them forget all about your competition. That yeah, makes them think like, I look, I don't want, maybe I don't want an offer right now from Joe, but like Joe's my guy. I have a lot of trust in this guy. So, so if I feel like, if you just get firm far enough in this call and have a conversation with me to where I just feel like really confident that you're going to be able to solve my problem, then I don't need to go anywhere else. And it means that you're going to get a greater percentage of those deals and you're also get them deeper than you would otherwise because there's going to less competition on those deals. So that's why PBC is such an important thing because let's just say you're cold calling someone you're sending mail like you don't know what their timing is like maybe they want to sell the property in three months or six months or nine months or 12 months if they're searching today on Google like people don't do that for no reason PBC's an episodic channel there must have been something that happened in their life that made them decide that like right now is when I'm solving this problem so if you want the greatest chance of closing them right now it's the time to talk to them and a significant number of our clients are actually closing the leads like on the first phone call.

Joe: Yeah. Oh, that's important. It's really important. I've done PPC before. I also done PPL. I want to ask you what the difference between PPC and PPL is, but you've got to call those leads right away because you know they're calling other people and you want to get them an offer as soon as possible. So, all right. So let's talk about targeting. The nice thing about houses is you can say, you know, you can do deals and you can target states. You can target counties, maybe zip codes. With land, it's a little different because the person that owns that land in North Carolina maybe lives in Florida or the other way around, right? So how do you target people who own land? Or do you just target the keywords when they're searching for something?

Brandon: It's a fantastic question. And you're absolutely right. I mean, in houses, there are some absentee owners, but it's very few. In land, it's almost like the standard. It's not the expression like it is with houses. So this is one of the biggest things that we find is different about land compared to houses. And there's also some different components of land that make it more possible. So our ability to target based on where the property is, just based on how Google works. It's very limited. Could we, for example, target Texas if we wanted land in Texas, and we just geographically targeted Texas? Is it likely that more of the leads are going to come from within Texas than not? Yes. Especially with a bigger state, it's reasonably likely, right? Because if this person is searching from Texas, they likely have land in Texas. Although it could be some more ups, right. It might be 50-50. So what we found is controlling exactly where the land is, is a really hard thing. Now the other thing is when you're talking about houses, to do it virtually is actually pretty hard. When you're talking about land to do the business virtually, not that hard. There's not a lot to figure out in terms of like condition of the property and all that kind of stuff. Like it's a piece of land. You could do that from literally anywhere. So what we find is there are some land investors where the way they have built their business is I buy land that's in this county or whatever the case is. And maybe it's because they need to be really targeted. They're going to end up like to entitling the land and during like really specific exits and all that kind of stuff. So they need very particular land and very particular areas. And if that's you, PBC is not a great channel because it's just not going to give you targeted as much that type of land. Our clients that have made this work, what they're generally doing is they're relatively flexible about where exactly the land is that they're going to get. And they usually have some criteria, right? We're maybe looking for a number of acres or something like that. And there's things that we can do to influence the campaign towards those things. But if you're really, really strict about all that stuff, you'll find a lot of your will just fall out of your buy box. Like we can get them more targeted towards it, but it's not going to go all the way there. And if you could be a little bit more flexible about what exactly you're willing to take, then you'll find that you can get a lot of leads that match that criteria and they want to work with you. So that's generally how it works. So you have to think what kind of land investor am I? Can I basically say like, these are the deals I want and I need to go find those? Or am I kind of saying, let the deals come to me and maybe it's exactly what I was looking for, maybe not, but if it's a deal, I'll make it work. And those investors tend to do a little bit better with this particular channel.

Joe: So you're talking about investors that are maybe targeting much nationwide. I mean, what percentage of your land investor clients specifically just target nationwide?

Brandon: I'd say probably 60, 70% target nation wide, and usually it's not pure nation wide. Sometimes it's a collection of states or something like that. We have some that are in the single market. Usually if that's the case, it's bigger market, not a smaller market. And the other component there is some of those people, like they really want to find leads in there, but they also are willing to monetize leads outside of there. And we do have some where they just kind of throw every lead that comes outside of the area they want in the trash can and they still find they have enough leads left over that it ends up working out. The numbers can pencil.

Joe: Because I always say, there's a pig for every barn. I learned that from some guy a long time ago. There's a big for every bar. And so you can still sell land in an area that you're not normally investing in. You might have to offer 100 bucks, but you could sell it for 3000 bucks to somebody. I know a guy that sells all of his properties with bandit signs, and he hires somebody local to put some signs in the area and can sell his deals. So it is interesting, but, you can always throw the lead away if you don't want it, is that right?

Brandon: Yeah. And the name of the game is just to make enough money from the leads to justify the cost of the leads and have a good return on investment. And everybody gets there sort of a different way. Some people will just really ignore the small deals that come through. And there's different things we can do. So I talked about this algorithm, how it works, where like the more you feed it about what's happening, the better it gets at targeting those things. So we will, in that questionnaire that's on the website, we will ask a whole bunch of questions that are basically your qualification criteria. And then based on how someone fills that out, we will dynamically report the value of that lead to Google so we can optimize for more of the highest quality leads. So what you'll find is like maybe all things equal, like say there's a lead you like, there's a lead that you don't like, maybe the leads you don't like would be 80%, the leads you like would 20%, and then you'll fine that you can optimize so it becomes more like 50-50, right? So how you make it work is kind of a combination of like the optimization process and also how do we monetize as much of the leads as possible while still keeping our focus, you know. So different people do it different ways.

Joe: One of the advantages for hiring somebody like you, right, who does this for other clients around the country is you already know what's working and what's not. So I don't have to waste, if I hired you today, I wouldn't have waste a bunch of time, would I, to try to optimize it and try to figure out what's work and what not. Would you already, would you set up somebody like me to be like, okay, these are your goals. You know, you're okay with this area or this area. You can get me there a lot faster. Is that right?

Brandon: Yeah, I mean, realistically, probably at least several times, several times faster that you can get there if you're working with somebody who's already been there. So it's, there's a lot of value with that. The thing we still have to keep in mind as a company is I used to play a game of like, Oh, I have a client doing well with this kind of campaign. I'm just going to do that for other people. It doesn't always work like you expect because different people have different skills, business models, all that kind of stuff. So that's kind of the game we play is we keep, we track all our data. I could tell you by down to the decimal exactly how many of our leads to be converted by different clients, different areas, all that kind of stuff. So we track the data really, really well. We recommend strategies that we know are working well, but we also take the time to understand what's unique about you and your business model so we can figure that out. Because if I've run anything, it's not that there's a single way to skin the cat. We have clients very successful in this business doing things a very different way. You just need a model that works really well, and there's multiple different ways you could do that. So that's where we kind of look at what's unique about you and your situation, your business. And then we find very successful clients that we have that kind of have that same criteria and try to build your campaigns similar to those.

Joe: Okay, so let's talk about PPL. A lot of people online are talking about that. PPL stands for Pay Per Lead, where you basically hire a company who's already doing the marketing to get access to their leads. So it's not like they're, when they're doing the ads, the customers aren't seeing your website, they're seeing the name, the company's website who does the PPL, you're paying for leads. Do you do PPL yourself? Do you like it or not? What's your, what do you think of it?

Brandon: So we don't do PPL. If you ask what marketing I like, I like marketing that works. So I can include a lot of different things, right? Sometimes PPL, sometimes not. It has some pitfalls. I can tell you the, the, what, what I, one thing I think is just a really fascinating observation about this industry as a whole is so often PPL and PPC get put together. And I want to talk about like why it is that people look at that. And we see it too, like people come to us and they're like, Oh, I'm going to either going to do PPL or PPC with you guys. The crazy thing is PPL and PPC are no more similar than PPL& TV or PPL in direct mail. I don't know why they get put together so much. I think here's my hypothesis. Everybody knows that the best lead quality in the industry is PPC. So all the PPL companies, they like being associated with PPC, right? So they market themselves as if they're selling PPC leads. And are they selling PBC leads? Yes, some of their leads are PPC and it's kind of mixed and diluted with a bunch up like other marketing channels usually. So, but they're not going to correct anybody if, because the assumption that most people have is, oh, they just generate PPC weights and then they sell them. And it's actually pretty, pretty game far from the truth like most of the time. And so, so generally, if you look at it, we, we recently did a, did an industry survey. We surveyed about a hundred investors nationwide about what return on investment, what lead quality they were getting from every marketing channel. So we have all those numbers and what we found between PPC and PPL is that PPC in the survey, as reported by investors, was generated about double the lead quality compared to PPL. So there is a pretty significant gap there. Now, when is PPL really good? The cool thing about PPL is you don't have to figure out the system, build the system all that kind of stuff. It's like the epitome of capitalism. Like someone else did that and they just sell you the leads like on auction basis per lead. So that's what's really cool, right? If you're looking for what gets me the most leads like this week, the answer is gonna be PPL, it's a fantastic short-term strategy and that's where we find, in my opinion, And the best way that I see PPL used by operators is generally is that stopgap. Like all my other marketing channels are a little lighter right now and I need to keep creating my team. I'm going to double down on some PPL at the end of this month to make sure we hit our numbers. I think it's fantastic like that. Now the problem with PPL is it's kind of like, there's a lot of things that match this criteria. Like I kind of think of it like the payday loan of real estate marketing because can it work? Can it get you through the pinch? Yes. But if you start to build your whole business based on that, it's kind of a risky business model, right? Because what makes your business valuable is the fact that you know how to generate leads and that you collect the data around those things. And if you're just a PPL, it's really like someone else owns that core part of your business. And tomorrow they can all have a discussion internally and say, you know what, we're going to turn off the PPC leads. We're going to turn on the crappy cold call leads because that's what we decided to do right now.

Joe: So they might share those leads with other people. Yeah, they could do that too. Like they doesn't really. You're not the only one doing. Yeah, yeah. A lot of them do that and they don't tell you that they do it, but you're not the only getting those leads.

Brandon: Oh, absolutely. So, it's kind of a risky game in the sense that they can change something that can really horribly affect you. And it's actually happened this year. So what happened is the real estate market got a little bit tougher this year, and along with that, PPL companies, the bid price that investors were willing to pay in their auctions went down. And picture it like this. The average PPL company makes about a 6% margin at the end of the day. So what happens if their bid prices go down by 20%? They are like not just unprofitable, but like really, really unprofitability. Like it's a big problem. They're losing money. So what do they do? Yeah, like what naturally happens, they end up generating a whole bunch of bad leads in the system because they've got to be able to sell the leads at a cheaper cost, right? So it's not like a super aligned thing. So we've seen PPL kind of drop off, especially throughout this year, just because they haven't been able to afford to generate the leads that they need to be able to generate. So it is just a tricky game, like I wouldn't build my business on it. Now would I recommend PPL to a newer investor? Quite possibly, right, because as a newer investor, you're not really as focused on longevity. You're more focused on, I got to get some deals in. And PPL could be great for that. And it's a really quick ramp up. So if I were to take like the path that a lot of people could take, PPL would be one of those channels that I might consider at the beginning when I have a smaller budget and I just need to be able to buy a few weeks here and there. And I would say there's probably a time and a place where you have to kind of grow out of it or else it becomes an unnecessarily large risk in your business. Right. But there's there's a time and a place for it for sure and i even see some of the biggest operators in the nation often will do a lot of ppl the key thing is it's just like like anything in your business like if it's a risky thing it just can't be like 100% of your business unless you're just doing like your first deals or something like that but eventually it's kind of got a curb down.

Joe: Yeah. Okay, that makes sense. Now, let's talk about to somebody that is listening to this. They're new. They maybe can't afford to pay a company to do it for them, so they want to learn to do themselves. Where do they start?

Brandon: Okay, I'll answer your two questions two ways because my honest recommendation for the vast majority of people is that they don't do it themselves and I'll explain why now I do have some places you can start if you're like really dead set on doing it yourself So I'll get I'll give some resources because I want to help you I want the like below where the likelihood of it failing but here's what I can tell you if you look at the total cost to run a PPC campaign usually what you're gonna see is there's an amount that goes to ad spend, and then there's going to be an amount that goes through your management fee. People think if they do it themselves, they're going to save a ton of money. Usually they might save like maybe 20 or 30% low budgets or high budgets, more like 10% and in saving that 20 or 20% or 10%, they still have to pay for the massive amount of ad spend. And if you, if you look at what happens, so I've done some calculators for our average client, if we can just get them 4% better results with their ad spend they break even on our entire management fee, Really? So I want you to think about that. Four percent. What does that mean? Yeah, it means taking your cost per click from like a hundred bucks to ninety-six bucks. Or it means changing your landing page conversion rate from ten percent to ten point four percent. Wow. It doesn't have to be a big move to cover the management fees, right? Because the reality is companies don't go broke because they pay too much money in management fees. They go broke, because the ad spend doesn't work. That's the real thing you want to avoid. You can make almost any mistake as long as it's not your ad spend not working That's the one that really kills you because that's the vast vast majority of your expense. It's highly leveraged So that's why I generally don't recommend people do it themselves because an agency that does this all the time They probably can do four percent better than you They in fact probably could do 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 or 100 percent better. Yeah, that's interesting That said some people really want to do it and some people are more built for it There's a case for, I'm a strong believer, look Joe, I am an expert in these marketing channels and in my company for my own PPC. Guess what I do? So I hire this guy named Derek. Derek runs our sales and marketing, he's an expert on PPC, he spent hundreds of millions of dollars in Google Ads in his experience and guess what he does? He hires an agency that specializes in working with companies like mine to run our PPC for us as a company. Despite the fact that I've got 30 really qualified PPC markers within my company, we still outsource our own PPC for generating these for us, right? Not for our clients, because all those people are doing this for our clients.

Joe: Well, why is that though? Is it because it's a different type of marketing to get?

Brandon: It's because it's really different and there's other people who have more experience doing that very particular thing for, which is very similar to mine. And then the other component to that is like, if you were to bring Derek right here and ask him right now, why do you do that? That's because I don't have very much time and I could do this with my time, but I've got this big old list of things I could with my, and I actually find we'll get better results if I focus on some of these things that are higher leverage. And then I outsource that piece that I know that I can outsource to someone else who I trust. So do it quickly. Yeah. That's what it comes down to. So, and then that's, that's business, right? Like a quality entrepreneur is not looking for more things to add to their play though, they're always looking for things to take off their play, right. Because if you, let's just say you, you are really good at this and you can figure out the PPC, like what a crappy business model that like, you have to be the person to run your PPC. Like I like a business model where, where it can scale. So anyways.

Joe: Usually, yeah, that makes an interesting point because isn't your time better spent if you're an investor, if you are an operator, isn't you time better spend on talking to sellers and making offers and following up? Yeah. You don't want to be building the website and figuring out how to run Google ads. But that's fascinating. You need to be, if, you just say a 4% improvement, let me get this right. If you see a 4 percent improvement, that will more than cover the expense for the person or the company running your PPC ads.

Brandon: Yeah. And if somebody wants to see the numbers, I can come to us like we have a whole calculator where we basically see like what performance, hypothetical performance could you get on your own and then how much better would it need to be to justify spending this extra management fee where a lot of people don't realize those like your ad spend, big number, your managing fee, small number, and then also your revenue, really big number. So it's crazy. People are always focused on like, could I get a little discount on this agency and stuff? We have people trying to negotiate with us to save like a certain amount of percent of the management fees. And when you look at it as a total thing, it's like, this is literally like 2% of your marketing budget that you're trying to negotiate away here. Meanwhile, the real game here is like, let's make the 98% do better. Like even just a little, little, little bit better. It's actually one of the things that we've done really well as an agency, is we charge more for management fees than other companies do, and it's allowed us to hire really quality talent. And it's almost always a better game if we charge all our clients 500 bucks more, but then we can get them better talent, which allows them to get 15% better results, it's always a win for the client and for us. So that's generally my recommendation, but I will answer your question because I know somebody's still gonna go try to do it themselves. Yeah, yeah, and the answer to that is we do have a number of resources. If you go to my podcast, it's called the Collective Clicks Podcast.

Joe: Collective clicks. Collective clicks podcast. Okay.

Brandon: Yeah, maybe you could throw a link in the show notes or something. We had Joe on there just earlier this year. There's a number of different episodes there. Some of them are stuff like I'm interviewing Joe McCall. And you'll also find some of them pretty solid information about how to actually manage PPC, particularly one that people really love. It's called the PPC Essentials series. It's an eight-part series. It's about eight hours worth of content where we dive into all the different aspects of PPC and how it works. We also have one for SEO that I believe is five parts and we have one for Facebook ads that's like three or four parts. Between all those, you've got probably 20 hours worth of content that goes deep into everything that we do, exactly how we do it. So should you want to learn about this? Go through that. In fact, even if you don't, I encourage you to go through that because while I very much believe in outsourcing things as a business, I think it's really good to understand how those things work because it helps you actually participate in the strategy, understand what's happening, understand what makes your business work well, what doesn't. So I highly recommend those to everybody. That's why we put them out there. But especially if you want to do it yourself, uh, that'll we've, we've always been very open about our strategies. We publish tons of contents about exactly how we do stuff. What we generally find though, is that people, once they, once, they know what actually goes into it, they don't have any dreams of doing it themselves. In fact, their dream is to never have to do it. So unless you're just like a very unusual person.

Joe: I get hives thinking about having to learn all of that.

Brandon: Oh, it's the best and it's a technical skill and look yeah I know all of that yeah I still hire someone else who hires someone else to do that for my own business so yeah you know well there's leverage.

Joe: I got about 10 minutes here. I want to ask you some questions about how important is the website that you're sending the people to?

Brandon: Yeah, it's very important, important in more ways than you would think. So number one way is the conversion rate on the website is so, so important. And the conversion is basically if you send a hundred people there, how many of those are going to actually fill out the form, take the action that you want them to take? And what's interesting is if you could just get a little bit more there, again, it can completely cover your management fees, all that kind of stuff. And it's one of the biggest things that we find because people are used out of channels, maybe like pay-per-lead with a pay- per-lead. This is pay-for-click marketing, right, which means for every, usually what you'll find is four out of every five clicks doesn't turn into a lead. All right, that's truly your biggest expense is these people that aren't converting in the funnel. So yes, having a high landing page conversion rate, you double your landing page conversion, right? You double your number of leads, which is really significant. There's also other aspects of your page that people don't even realize are true. Like one aspect is your page speed is really really important. If your page loads faster it actually hits you two times a lot of people think it just hits you one time so there's tons of studies showing that each little bit that your page load slower affects your conversion rate negatively really significantly because some people you'll pay for the click and then the page won't load right away and those click back which is a huge problem. The other thing is Google notices that that's happening and they'll actually penalize you on a cost per click basis if you're not providing a good experience. It's a they call quality score. So people, like let's just say you have a slower loading landing page. Maybe that brings your conversion rate from 15% to 12%. You just lost three out of 15 leads. But then also it increases your cost per click by a little bit. So now you're getting 20% less traffic. You could end up with like just your page loads a little slower and now you have half as many leads. You have half the return investment. And then you layer that on with like profitability of the company because you know profitability just happens on the margin. Because you could have been getting a three extra turn now it's a one and a half extra turn now like by the time you pay for your operational expenses you're making no money versus making good money like i'm on the other side so it's it's wild how like little little changes like that make a really big difference.

Joe: So do you have any website providers that you recommend or when somebody goes to you do you just build them a website for them?

Brandon: Yeah, we will just build it for them. And there's a couple reasons for that. One, we just like to have it in our control because if one day I was sick of telling clients, well, we would get your results, but your website is bad. So we can't, we should just take care of everything that we can. We don't even, it's not even like a, you come work with us and we're like, you should spend an extra couple of thousand dollars on this website. It's like literally not an option for you to not get the website because we know that it just won't work if we don't do it. The other component is your website. And in this case, I'm talking about PPC specifically, it's landing pages that are relevant. Your landing page is an integral part of your PPC strategy. A lot of people view it as like PPC generates all the clicks and then like the website converts it. But just like anything else, like if you, if you're sending a postcard to someone in probate or someone in bankruptcy, they're really different situations, you'll find that different things will convert better in different circumstances. So what we do is for each specific thing that somebody can search on Google, we create a hyper specific ad to that particular intent. And with each ad that we create, we create a specific landing page for that ad. And not just that, we created multiple that we're split testing against each other to try to figure out what one's going to actually convert best for that. And we find that that actually works really, really well. And when you do it like that, every ad that we have in the Google Ads account also needs an associated landing page. It's really hard to like collaborate across different vendors and stuff like that to make that kind of an integrated strategy happen. So we just cover it all for you so that we can make it all really, really integrated.

Joe: Are you using the WordPress platform for the websites or are you using something else?

Brandon: For main websites, we do WordPress and to be clear, main websites will do it if you're doing SEO. You could buy it if we're doing PPC, but it's not included as part of it. But then PPC we do landing pages for every single client. And that's just like a sub page on it. That we use Unbounce right now. I don't know if you know Unbounce, it's a platform that builds landing pages. It's good. We're actually going to move that towards WordPress pretty soon. Every other day, there's a million different ways to it. And the key thing that matters is you get a really fast loading page that you can do split testing on that converts really, really well. So that's, yeah, that's how you're in offer clients. So you, they can come to us with a website builds on whatever, and we can actually keep that alive and then also build a separate landing page. The key thing, if we're doing PPC that we really care about is that all of our traffic goes to a page that we control and we can set those up even if you already have a website versus with SEO. That's where the main website itself is the most critical piece. So often there we'll we'll look at what you have and and if we need to sometimes we'll fix it up sometimes it's a situation where new construction is actually cheaper than doing a rehab so we'll just build you a new one.

Joe:  You know, I see some guys that do ads and they have a phone number on the website, on the landing page. Do you recommend that?

Brandon: We do put phone numbers on our landing pages. Usually we have two called actions. Number one is the form submission. Number two is the phone number. What we find with the phone numbers is it doesn't get clicked near as much as the form gets submitted. And we even tried phone number only pages. They haven't worked quite as well as having the form there as well because people just don't want to call right now. So I recommend having both. Of course you've got to be really great at answering the phone. If you have a phone number there and you can't answer your phone, that's kind of a rough situation.

Joe: I wonder, like, sometimes on direct mail, I'll put on their call a 24-hour recorded voicemail. And that works really good in getting more calls because they know nobody's going to answer and they're going to listen to a voicemale. And so I'm wondering if you could put that on a website, something to test.

Brandon: We haven't done that. That's, that's really fascinating. We do, um, we generally recommend our clients not to, cause it used to be really common in the industry that just voicemail was the main thing. And then they're just, people look through their voicemails and see which ones are good leads and call them. Um, although it's gotten, I think far too competitive for that recently, but maybe in my end, it's, it' way, it's way different. And we never, I never thought of it as like a call to action that actually gets a better response rates because people are expecting that particular thing. So yeah, that's, it's an interesting idea. It's not something we've done. Although if we're going to do that, I think we could just throw like whatever the voicemail would say just right on the landing page. It was like a VSL.

Joe: The thing is when they call that number now you've captured a phone number so you have a number.

Brandon: Oh and you wouldn't have it if they were just, yeah…

Joe: Right, so you know if they hang up you call them back right away you text them you follow up. Okay, so I want to ask you about YouTube ads. Do you guys run YouTube ads as well if you found that works or not?

Brandon: So yes, we run some YouTube. YouTube has been for us, not as good as Google search, but it has worked well in some circumstances, it's kind of something where I guess I would describe it as we're still figuring it out. I still haven't seen in the industry as a whole, like even outside of anything we've done, I haven't see anybody truly killing it with YouTube on the level that we've been able to see them truly kill it with PPC or with SEO, but I feel like there's gotta be a way to crack that code better because there's obviously great traffic potential to come for you too. But we haven't been able to replicate like people actively searching on Google. Like it's just really hard to replace like content-based marketing with something else that's more of an interruption style marketing where they weren't actively looking for you.

Joe:  Okay, cool, cool. Another question I had real quick is let's talk about SEO. How important is it to have an SEO strategy along with your PPC strategy? It doesn't matter. So everybody, and by the way, let me explain what SEO is. I'm sorry, SEO stands for search engine optimization. That just means give a website with a lot of good keywords and blog posts so that when somebody types in something, you show up in the general results, right? But go ahead.

Brandon: Yeah, I would say everybody needs an SEO strategy. How aggressive you are with it is really the thing that can be debated. Because let me just give you some basic elements of an SEO Strategy that I think if you're listening to this today, maybe even if you haven't done your first deal, might actually be really relevant to you. And if you do SEO with us, you might be paying $2,000 to $5,000 a month for SEO services. Do I recommend that for everybody? No. But there's some basic stuff. Like, for example, one core element of SEO is a Google Business Profile. You can go search on Google, add a created Google Business profile. You can create it for your business. They send you a postcard in the mail, you verify it's your address, and then you can start showing up. Let's just say you search on google right now for Bateman Collective. That's the name of my company. You're going to find our Google Business Profile on there. You'll find a bunch of reviews, people who've worked with us. And it's like a credibility piece for us as a phone number. So you can call us all that kind of stuff. You get a lot of leads actually in this space. So in Google business profiles and setting it up is not super hard. You don't need to hire an agency to do it or anything. Of course, if you work with us, we'll do it for you just to make it easier. But it's not like this is advanced stuff that you, you couldn't figure out on your own to like just get something set up, but here's the key. One of the factors that, that changes how well that profile ranks is, well, there's two factors factor. Number one is how long has it been around? Factor number two, and okay, there's not only two factors that affect that how it ranks, but you're like two easy ones that you can control all the other stuff is stuff that you might want to hire an agency for. Factor. Number two is how many reviews you have in there, how consistently could they come in and how good they are. And those are two things where like, let's just say you were going to end up focusing on your SEO strategy in two years, there is no way to replicate having had a Google business profile for the past two years and consistently gotten reviews on it. So that's one thing I recommend you do as soon as possible because it's like planting a tree. And the earlier you plant it, the, you know, you might, when you want that fruit in years in the future, you'll, it'll actually be available to get. And there's simply like, you can invest a bunch of money into a bunch stuff then, and there is no way to make it as if you had done this years ago. So that's thing number one. But as far as SEO strategy, when we actually talk about spending a significant amount of money on SEO, it's, there's a time and a place because here's, here's what I'll give you a quick example. I was in Puerto Rico giving a presentation to Jerry Norton's, and they were mostly beginners. This is in the house flipping, wholesaling world. And I was explaining PPC and SEO, and somebody said, well, how much does it cost for PPC each month? And I'm like, oh, maybe five grand. Well, how does it costs for SEO? On the low end, like two grand. So like, well I have less budget. Should I start with SEO instead of starting with PPC? And they also asked, well, what kind of returns do you get on it? And SEO, it's like, I don't know, close to like 5 to 10X is normal. In our survey we did, 10X was the average, believe it or not. PPC, a lot lower than that. And so they're like, okay, so it's cheaper and it produces a better return on investment. Should I just do SEO if I don t have that much money and I want to make as much as possible? And it was like, that's kind of tricky. Picture like this. SEO takes a really long time. PBC is significantly faster. So let's just say you're spending money on PPC and your cash conversion cycle ends up being three months I SEO your cash conversion cycle might be more like 12 months so if I'm spending that $5,000 a month on PPC I'm 15 grand into that channel when I get my first deal if you're spending that two thousand dollars a month over 12 months though you're actually 24 grand into that channel by the time you get your first deal so cash conversion cycles actually a really important it's really important metric it's kind of like picture I'm a hard money lender you know if I sent 500 grand out on a property and then I get it back three months later and then they put 500 grand into another property and I get back three minutes later. I do that four times in a year. Did I invest a million dollars that year or did I invest 500,000 four times? I kind of invested 500,004 times, but if we were talking about marketing, we would say that you invested $2 million over that year. That's usually how we say it. When the reality is it comes out and it comes back. And yeah, quickly it comes it back is a really important piece of the business. So the reality SEO is like completely objectively a better channel than PPC is in every single way, except for the fact that it just takes a really long time to work. Yeah. And that makes it hard at the beginning. And so, so you kind of need, you kind of need like, is it going to be better for me to invest in my 401k right now, or to pay for groceries long-term? It's gonna be better to invest my 401K, but can everybody do it? No. But like, as you make more, you should invest more and more into there and builds more and those long-terms strategies. And one day you'll actually have assets that are really significant. And that's how you make sure you're not like on the hamster wheel for marketing all the time.

Joe: Can you help people with their SEO as well then?

Brandon: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We do it. We've done it for seven years. It's, it's a fantastic channel and we have, yeah. We have clients that have been doing it with us for that long that you see that it's like far out performs their, their PPC over time. And it's, it's just a, it's I love the channel. I truly love the channel and the worst thing you can do is spend money on it for three months and then run out of money because then you spent the money and you got nothing because it just takes so long versus PPC is a little more.

Joe: Let's wrap this up and let's give some advice to people that, you know, they've already had some experience. They've done some deals. They know how to close deals quickly. They understand the value of a lead. And so they're interested in doing some PPC. What's some advice would you give to them? And go ahead and give everybody your website, how to reach out to you? What's what's the best place for them to get started?

Brandon: Sure. So, I'll start with advice. My advice would be, and this is with all marketing, the number one mistake that investors make with marketing when they start is that they're inconsistent. And then they complain about having inconsistent businesses. If you want a consistent business, you've got to be consistent in the actions that you take. I think that's key for all marketing channels, keep you seeing credit, just like you don't send 300 mailers and say, oh, direct mail doesn't work. You've got be really consistent, do a lot of volume. How would you find us if you wanted to talk to us? It's Atemancollective.com, that's the website that you can go to. On there, directly, you can fill out the form. It lets you schedule a call with somebody on my team if you want to talk to us about this. You're more than welcome to. And we will help guide you. We just got a five-star guru review, like, two days ago. And I read the review, and it was like this guy saying, yeah, I talked to them, and they said that we weren't a fit. And then he said, well, why am I giving a review if they said we weren't a fit? Because that's right way to do business. And I, you know, I'm really passionate about that in the SaaS process. If you talk to an actual expert on my team and we'll help you figure out if this is actually the right move for you. If it is, you'll bet we'll be encouraging you to do it. But if it's not, then you know we'll make that clear too.

Joe: And then let's be honest with folks, you know, you, you need to have a budget of what, three to five grand a month minimum, if you want to cut into this and take it seriously. And I would add, you needed to be committed to this for at least six months. Is that about right?

Brandon: Yeah. Yeah. So then when you really, when you really break it down, and again, for land, it's like, if you listen to this in your wholesaling houses or something, you know, maybe double what I'm about to say. But if you're just, uh, if you're in land, it's thankfully a little more friendly, at least 20 grand over six months is, is what you're looking at. Right. And you kind of got to have that kind of thing set aside and you don't want to think of it like every time it comes out of your account, like you're spending it right then you kind of just got to like say, this is what I am spending on this marketing channel or this time. And I'm setting that aside and that's the bet that I'm making.

Joe: Here's the deal, 20 grand over six months. I'm not promising or guaranteeing anything, right? But you're only talking two or three deals to get all your money back, right.

Brandon: I mean, it depends on how big of deals you do, but that's the asymmetric bed of marketing that you're talking about. Like is there a downside? Yeah, absolutely.

Joe: Yeah, that is insane. That's so easy to do. You should, and it's that ad spend. I'm not, you know, I'm not making any guarantees or promises, but you know you should be doing one or two deals a month at that level. And it might take, you know, the whole cycle conversion cycle might take two to three months to do your first deal, but that consistency of the leads coming in and then the follow-up after that, yeah, it definitely pays for itself. My advice would be don't stop doing direct mail, but if you've got, you know, take some money out of your first few deals that you make, you should be always, I tell you this to everybody, you should always setting aside at least, you know, 10 to 15, maybe 20% of every deal and then reinvest that back into marketing. And when you do that, you may not be able to do PPC right now, but as you kind of build that up, now you've got a six month runway of 20 grand. Yeah, let's go. I see so many people that have no problem spending 20 grand on coaching or mentoring or courses and stuff like that. They get scared to death to spend 20 grand, they get scared the death to a thousand dollars on marketing, which is crazy, crazy.

Brandon: Yes, it is wild, but I mean, I've seen it. I'm sure you've seen a lot of the best, most successful operators in the space. They, they took that exact mindset that you just described of just always pushing more into that marketing budget. Cause you got to look at it. Like I had a conversation with a client. Um, this was probably about a year ago. It was after the prior year's results. And I was like, well, what were your results this year? He's like, uh, the same as last year, we had the same revenue. And I said, well what was your goal? He said, to double it. Well, what did you do to your marketing budget? Like I kept it the same. It's like, it sounds ridiculous and so many people do it and so many of the best operators they look at it as like, okay, I'm doubling my business this year, this is how much I'm going to spend on marketing each month in order to make that happen. They understand that that's kind of the metric that bleeds everything else. Cause you need to spend the marketing budget of the company that you want to have, not the company you have right now, because that's the only way that you kind of grow with that revenue. It always means you're kind of extending a bit beyond yourself right now in your lower margin now, but that's what business growth looks like. Like if you're not, you're, you, you you're not, you're not going to grow a business. If you're always looking at it, like I've got to keep every dollar that I make every single day. Like you got to reinvest.

Joe: You got a reinvest in marketing. Okay, cool. So we got to wrap this up again. Brand, sorry, BatemanCollective.com is a website. People can go there, fill out some information, schedule a call, talk to somebody. This has been very, very good call. I thank you, Brandon, so much. Appreciate you, man. Any final thoughts? Good job. Should we wrap it up? No, that's it. Thanks for the time. All right. We'll see you guys later. Hey, comment down below if you're watching this on YouTube. Let me know what you think. Type in something in the chat, your thoughts. What kind of questions should I have asked that I made it might have missed? Uh, and, and Batemancollective.com is Brandon's website. Go check that out. We'll see you guys all later. Thank you again. Thanks, Brandon.