Wholesale Marketing Strategy! Advice Wanted; My First Big Post!
Hello Bigger Pockets Community! After following this forum for some time I decided its time for me to finally make my first post and more importantly share my marketing plan with you guys! Any insight that you have please share, I'm completely new to this and look forward to all the insight you guys can provide! Before i get started here I figured i would give you guys a little background!
My name is Jonathan and Im a "wholesaler" here in southern California, specifically the LA area. My background comes from sales, as the past 2 years I have been fully involved in the door to door background, managing a team of about 20 guys for ADT homesecurity. I recently just made the transition into REI with my sister who actually has been an agent for the past 3 years. We decided to come together and join forces and really build something up from the ground up. I have been all in for the past month, trying to soak up any education that i can, becoming fully invested in the community and getting to as many REI groups as possible!
Now that I have shed a little insight about myself, lets get into the marketing plan!
I have developed 3 active forms of marketing in order to be able to generate motivated seller leads. Here are the three methods broken down and the success i have had with in within the past few weeks.
1. Direct Mail Campaign
Thanks to the help with @michael quarrel and his team over at yellowletters.com i was able to put together my list for my direct marketing campaign. The program that i used to pull my lists where REBOGATEWAY.com. Within this group there are three different lists or categories you can say that i am mailing to. if you have any questions about this service feel free to DM me and i will let you know my experience with it. The first being absentee owners with equity, non occupied out of state owners with equity, and finally Affidavit Of Death (which to my understanding skips the probate process). From the three lists, i have composed a total list of about 1200 people, 900 of them being a combination of absentee and non occupied and the rest being affidavit of death. Thanks to yellow letters & Michael, i put together a 6 month campaign starting with yellow post cards (besides affidavit of death), and officially they have been sent out today!!! Im hoping the phones will be ringing within the next few days based of the 900 list mailer. I plan to continue to mail each list consecutively for the next 6 months (1 month), alternating between yellow letters and yellow postcards. For the Affidavit of death, i decided to inhouse these with my sister just to save ourselves a little on the upfront cost (obviously after landing that first deal we will outsource because it takes way to much time). For this list we have been doing professionally typed business letters with our company name, put inside a invitation style envelope (off yellow color) and hand wrote the address with red ink, we also added an urgent stamp as well! These also went out today!
2. Driving For Dollars Campaign
This has been an amazing campaign in my eyes, because its low-cost, and allows us to actually see if the properties are vacant or not. My sister and I have been following @Chris Feltus program on driving for dollars. Every time we get out and drive our farm we will pull about 25 leads that are not on our original lists. we do this 2-3 times a week so usually we will be adding on average 50-75 names to our driving for dollars list. We will knock the neighborhood as well surrounding the vacant properties and see if we can get some homeowner information or possibly just another lead. When we mail these, in house them and actually take pictures of the property and attach them to our mailer. If you have any questions on this please see Chris's post on driving for dollars. The cool part about this marketing campaign is it allows us to fill in the time (god i hate waiting around), grab great leads that weren't on our list previously, and also allows us to get to know the neighborhood and even talk to some of the neighbors. (i grabbed a lead the other day knocking the neighbor of the vacant home). So far we have sent out over 50 mailers from our driving to dollars campaign and we actually received our FIRST CALL today from this campaign. Hey 50 mailers to 1 call isn't so bad (maybe its the picture?)!
3. Cold Calling Campaign
This is where i can use some of my bigger pockets PEEPS insight on this! This is the current marketing strategy that im working on developing. I want to be able to go AFTER the lead, especially when driving for dollars is not a option in that current moment. More importantly i feel like if i can get this strategy down with cold calling, i can develop a system for a team to automate the process and have a team of callers. So my question to you guys is this? Who would you recommend I cold call? Would you recommend just "skiptracing" the lists that i have right now for the numbers. If so do any of you have any recommendations on which service to use on "skiptracing". If i don't use my own lists, what do you feel would be the right crowd to cold-call. Keep in mind i don't plan on doing this with affidavit of death just because of the situation itself. If anyone has cold calling scripts i would greatly appreciate that as well!
So ladies and gentleman this is what I have so far. We have been in full motion now for about a month, and officially have launched the marketing campaign within the past few days so with all hope and god willing we get these phones ringing! If not, no problem, ill do what i know how to do best... KNOCK DOORS!
Please feel free to share any insight, or where you feel i can improve, or any comment whatsover, i have been planning on making this post for awhile, but i figured to do it once everything is actually up and running so i can come to the table with more than just an idea, but me taking ACTION!
thank you guys & girls!
- Jonathan & Mallie Messri
PS. I also want to give a special shout out to @sharon vornholt, @michael quarrel, and many others for helping amongst this journey! also a shoutout to the bigger pockets team Josh & Scott for making this all so much more simpler for myself and others. Why reinvent the wheel when it has already been created!