Budget Marketing: How to Best Use $5/Day to Bring in Leads

I have the pleasure of talking to tons of real estate investors all across this great country of ours. Many of them are seasoned investors who are just getting their feet wet. Besides questions about investing and learning more about the business, I get asked a specific question all of the time:

How are you marketing your business on a budget?

Most newbie investors are just starting out, and the last thing that they want to do is spend tons of wasted dollars on direct mail due to not knowing exactly how to do it. Direct mail is powerful, but it’s something no one wants to jump into right off the bat and lose money up front.

Plus, they tell me stories about certain sites contacting them regarding advertising their website and listing their companies on directory-type sites for 2, 3 or even 5 hundreds dollars per month. People are getting pushed and pulled to spend money on and offline.

You see, I’m a big fan of spending money on advertising only when it’s done in a way that guarantees me leads. These services out here that offer you placements on their sites are not guaranteeing you anything. Honestly, all of them only want your money and they couldn’t care less about the conversion rate on your site.

What’s even worse is that most of them don’t even take a look at your site to determine if their advertising is going to convert into leads. They pull you in by saying something like, if you spend $XXX amount with us each month, then you can be placed in front of a potential of 1,000 or more leads per month.

But Wait…

As you probably know, I have talked about having an educational real estate website in the past on BiggerPockets. The reason why I keep stressing this so much is that if you don’t have a site that solves everyday issues for homeowners, renters and those who just want to learn more about buying and selling a property, then you will lose money.

If your website is all about sell, sell and sell some more, then your advertising dollars will dry up faster than a glass of water in an African desert. The key to spending money on advertising that will produce better results is to educate people on something, and then allow them to make a decision to opt-in.

This leads me to my simple, but very effective $5 a day marketing plan that I do all of the time for myself and those clients of mine who really want to see their budgets go far.

Spending $5 on Social Media

I talked a little about social media a time or two in the past, but today I’m just going to explain how a simple process can equal a potential of 300 leads per month.

What we want to do is take advantage of Facebook’s local advertising platform. I’m not going to go too much into how to use it because it’s extremely simple when it comes to the setup. Just know that you need to have a real estate investment business page before you start setting up your advertising campaign.

All you do is start a campaign by selecting the following regarding targeted demographic and parameters for your ad:

City
Category (homeowners, renters, etc.)
Ages
Budget ($5 per day)
Etc.

Once this is completed, you want to see what type of reach you will have. If you’re in any type of city in this great country of ours, you should get numbers anywhere from 20k to 2M people who will be anything from homeowners to renters in your local market.

Your budget should give you about 10 clicks onto your advertisement, which should put you at about 300 potential leads coming over to your website each month. Now, if you set up your campaign right, then you should be able to convert a lot of those people into leads or opt-ins.

Our Plan

What we are trying to do is get renters onto our website to read all of the content that we have about becoming a homeowner. We want to educate them about lease options, buying on bad credit, and all of the other options that they have at their fingertips.

Plus, when it comes to the homeowners, our goal is to have educational real estate content about how to avoid foreclosure, sell FSBO and obviously how to work with local investors to sell faster.

For a measly $5 per day, you can easily see an average of about 10 percent of those visitors converting into leads. Now, you may say that only 30 leads per month is not a lot, so how can I grow my business with this?

Well, to be honest, even just one of those leads transformed into you buying a piece of property can bring you tons of potential profit. You see, it’s all about the numbers, but it’s not going to work if your website is strictly about sell, sell and selling some more.

You have to teach and become the local real estate teacher who has all of the answers for the students — the homeowners and renters in your market.

Have you used a low budget social media campaign before? What kind of success did you see?

Leave a comment below!

Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.