Are you wondering how to market your wholesale real estate business? Marketing your wholesale real estate business online can earn you a big return on your investment. Most people who are looking to sell their home for cash start by browsing the internet, so it’s crucial that you have a digital marketing strategy that can promote your business in the places where your target audience will be, which is Google and Facebook.
If you’re just getting started on marketing your business, we’ve put together a helpful guide that will get you on the right track. Feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions.
1. Make Sure Your Website Is Compelling
One of the first touchpoints people encounter when they’re looking to sell their home for cash is a website. If your website isn’t designed for the modern age, then your prospects will most likely make note of that — and it could potentially affect their opinion of your business. First impressions matter.
A compelling website is one that is well-designed, fast, mobile-friendly, and easy to navigate. These are all crucial components of a website that not only functions well but can also compete well with other wholesale real estate businesses within your local market.
If you do a Google search for “sell my home for cash,” you’ll probably see some national businesses and a few local ones in the search results.
Click on a few of the local businesses. There’s most likely 1 or 2 that don’t have a great website. This isn’t something you need someone else to tell you — this is something you can identify within a few seconds.
If your website can outcompete most of the other local wholesale real estate businesses in your area, you have a very high chance
of converting prospects into new clients. That’s why having a modern website that works and converts is the first essential step to marketing your business.
2. Have A Solid SEO Strategy In Place
Once you’ve built a great wholesale real estate website, you need to make sure it can be discovered on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. If your business doesn’t rank on the first page of search results, then your chances of someone discovering your website are low.
Most people don’t click past the first search results page unless nothing on the first page is relevant to their search query, which is usually rare. In order to start earning top positions, you should have a detailed SEO strategy put in place. If you’re not already experienced with SEO, you should consult with a digital marketing agency that specializes in these types of services.
A successful strategy usually entails a specific plan for tackling technical, local, on-page and off-page SEO. If your wholesale real estate business only services areas around a certain city, then having a strong local SEO strategy will be even more important. You’ll want to make sure that your business appears on the first page of search results within your target geographic area.
There’s a lot that goes into SEO — but if you invest in this crucial strategy, you’re sure to gain a competitive edge over other businesses in your market.
OppGen can help you get that competitive edge with our SEO program. Contact us to learn more.
3. Run Search Ads On Google and Bing
How Do You Get More Motivated Leads While Spending as Little on Marketing as Possible?
Most wholesalers tend to start out with the tried-and-true method of spending their weekends putting up bandit signs or sending out direct mailers. For many starting out, these are cheap and relatively effective ways of getting leads; however, this “shotgun marketing” approach is not typically the best way of capturing those elusive low funnel leads that are hyper-motivated to sell their house now.
That’s where PPC advertising comes into play. Unlike bandit signs and direct mailers, where you are actively searching for home sellers, it’s the exact opposite when running a PPC campaign because home sellers are browsing the web and actively searching for YOU.
What PPC Advertising Channels are Available?
At OppGen, when building our custom PPC campaigns for other wholesalers around the country we have found a lot of success with running search ads on both Google and Bing. This is due to the robust interest- and audience-based targeting options that they offer for our clients.
For example, you want to target a certain zip code that you know would be great to wholesale in. Both Google and Bing search ads would not only let you target and show your ads to homeowners in that area, but you also could target them by income and age.
Contact OppGen now to learn more about our custom PPC campaigns.
How Do You Get Started Building a PPC Campaign?
When OppGen first started building out what is now our proprietary wholesale real estate PPC program, the first thing we did was build out a solid keyword list. When building out this keyword list, start out by trying to put yourself in the motivated sellers’ shoes and ask yourself, “If I needed to sell my house now, what search terms would I put into a search engine that would trigger similar keywords within my Google or Bing campaign?”
Once you feel like you have a good group of keywords, proceed to group those keywords into campaigns and segment them out into ad groups.
For instance, you wouldn’t lump together keywords targeting both people going through a divorce who want to sell their house and people who have back taxes on their home looking to sell. If you do this, you will have to make your ads for both these ad groups more generic in your language instead of being focused on one, which could potentially lower your clickthrough rate and result in a lower number of leads.
4. Retarget Your Website Visitors
If you’re going to invest in a website and PPC for your wholesale real estate business, it would be wise to consider investing some time in understanding remarketing for people who visit your landing page or main website.
What is Remarketing?
At its most basic level in digital marketing, it’s the ability to be able to retarget a certain audience that has visited your site.
An example of remarketing would be if you went to a website looking to buy a particular size of bandit signs, and you decide right before checkout that you don’t really need the signs for your marketing efforts right this second.
Then, a couple of days later, you’re browsing another website, and you see an ad featuring the exact brand and size of bandit signs that you almost bought a couple days back.
How Do You Apply Remarketing to Your Website or PPC Landing Page?
The two platforms that we find most effective for our wholesale real estate clients are Facebook and Google Ads.
Both Facebook and Google Ads make it fairly easy to take users that have visited your website or landing page and re-market to them. The best part about remarketing on these platforms though is that it’s cheap and effective.
5. Expand Your Reach On Social Media
It seems like just about everyone is trying to use social media to establish their company’s brand, and they are right to do so. Platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube give companies the digital tools and the opportunity to effectively market to their target consumer.
How Do You Get Started?
Start by researching what social platforms some of your local competitors are using first. Find out how they are marketing themselves on their business pages on sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook.
See what language they are using, too. If a majority of them are using the same marketing language across all of their pages, you may want to consider using something similar on your business pages while also putting a unique twist or offering on yours to help you stand out.
How Do You Make Your Wholesale Business Stand Out?
In order to stand out on these platforms, you need to be creative and consistently put out high-quality content to keep your followers engaged.
Instead of bragging on your company page that you landed a $20k deal, go into the process of how you did so, what kind of marketing did you use, what was your value proposition, why did you want to target this particular seller’s demographic and audience in the first place?
By doing this regularly, people will begin to see you as an industry leader and will eventually try to connect with you on these platforms. After all, your net worth is only as big as your network.
How Should You Leverage Certain Features to Engage Your Target Audience?
Once you’ve established your company on these platforms, the next step is to get a little more technical and dive into all of the fun features that they offer.
One of our favorite Facebook advertising features that helps target hyper-motivated sellers for our wholesale clients is the lookalike audience. It’s a great feature to use when targeting new motivated sellers that are similar to your past ones.
We do this by taking old direct mailing lists from our clients that targeted a certain home seller and directly uploading them to Facebook. There are some other really great features out there, so be sure to explore them.
Some features may be difficult to figure out at first, but when they are utilized properly, they can be very effective weapons in your digital marketing arsenal and can help your company stand out on social media.
6. Generate Testimonials and Reviews
In the real estate industry, talk is cheap, and the ability to produce results is everything, whether you’re convincing a motivated seller that they should sign a purchase agreement with you or persuading a potential buyer that the property you have under contract is one they will see a fast return on their investment.
Being able to effectively sell yourself and your company at every chance you get is key to long term success in this industry, so why not have people in your corner to help you do so?
You should be trying to generate as many testimonials and reviews from your satisfied customers at every chance you have.
Consider how often you look at the reviews before purchasing a product online. Surely some of the reviews have changed your mind about a purchasing product because people who’ve purchased it have said it isn’t as good as advertised. Reviews and testimonials can make or break your company and its offerings.
If you have a website, a Google My Business listing, or are running PPC ads to a landing page, you need to utilize testimonials and generate online reviews whenever you can. Building up a positive reputation for your company and brand can help you immediately, but if you keep working on building that reputation over time, your service will sell itself with word of mouth marketing. Let’s be honest: who doesn’t love effective marketing they don’t have to pay for?
7. Post Q&A Videos On YouTube
If someone in your local market is looking to sell their home for cash, they most likely have a lot of questions. This is especially true if most of your prospects haven’t done this before.
Publishing videos on YouTube is a great way to get in front of your audience to answer questions. Sometimes it’s not enough to simply write an FAQ page on your website. In our current day and age, people are on their mobile devices and social media platforms multiple times a day.
If you create video content that’s useful to home sellers and you distribute that content on YouTube, you’ll be able to build credibility in a shorter amount of time compared to static website content. It’s not that you shouldn’t focus on written content (you absolutely should), but making sure your business stands out on a visual medium like YouTube will differentiate you that much more from your competitors.
The best part about this strategy is that you don’t need a fancy camera or recording equipment. If you have a smartphone, just record some 45- to 60-second videos that will be useful for home sellers to see. Once you have a decent amount of videos published on YouTube, you can utilize them everywhere on the internet.
Get a Professional Opinion About Your Wholesale Real Estate Marketing Efforts
If you’re currently running a digital marketing strategy, or you’re just getting started down this road and need some guidance, we offer free digital assessments.
We’ve made the process super simple — just click through to fill out the form, and we’ll complete a site audit and schedule a time to discuss your wholesale marketing needs.
