There are essentially 3 channels to engage with your investors in the digital space. These are:

1. Your Website

2. Your Social Media Presence

3. Your SMS/Email Campaigns

Each pillar reinforces the other and plays a critical role in helping you build trust and authority with current and prospective investors.

Website:

Your website should be clean, easy to navigate, and speak to your target audience. Additionally you want “brand congruence” across all marketing channels to help people remember what it is that you actually do. They should know within 5 seconds of visiting your website what your company does and who it serves and it should have a clear call to action visible upon page load such as signing up for a newsletter, downloading a free guide/lead magnet, or booking a call with you or your investment relations manager.

From a marketing standpoint you want to have some sort of USP (Unique Sales Proposition) and a specific affinity group. A USP is what your company does that most if not all of your competitors do not do (tenant appreciation/financial development, giving supporting specific charities, leverage of technology, sustainability etc…)

An affinity group is a group of people with similar interests or background as you. They believe what you believe and share similar life experience. For instance if you are an airline pilot, you could develop your brand for pilots. If you are a physician, you can build it around physicians. Veterans generally love working with and supporting other veterans. The more specific and targeted you can get, the better your results will be. For instance, targeting ER doctors or cardiologists will yield even better results than simply physicians. You can start with one and add additional target audiences over time as you validate them one by one.

Funnels/Landing Pages are a specific type of website in which there is only one thing for someone to do/click on. Either fill out a form or leave. No menu bars, no external links, nothing. Just a form and an offer with either a video or some images. These are critical additions to a website because they are used primarily for lead generation and bringing “fresh water” into your database. If you have a dozen things for people to click on, those will distract people from what you want them to do and people are very easily distracted.

In our experience, load time is more important than looking pretty. Conversion rates have been sky high with super simple forms and surveys. This is due to the simple fact that people are impatient and unwilling to wait for a slow page to load.

Your site should include a blog that has key words in it that people who might be looking to invest in real estate would google.

Social Media:

Social media advertising can be broken into two categories, Paid and Organic.

Paid advertising is exactly as it sounds. Also known as PPC (pay per click) you setup an ad account with one of the 800 pound gorillas of the social media world like Facebook, Linkedin, and/or Google and you design and run an ad campaign.

Paid ads follow a general structure as follows:

1. The Callout - who should be reading the ad (make over 200K?, dentists, etc…)

2. The Pain Point - Tired of paying sky high taxes, tired of stock market volatility?

3. The Solution or Offer - I help investors achieve above market returns secured by real property, etc….

4. The Call to Action - Click on the link below to get my free guide on (cashflow, depreciation, forced appreciation, etc…)

If you have case studies and existing authority in the space, you can inject that between 1 and 2 to help enhance the ad. Furthermore if your deal has limited space/time, you can inject a bit of scarcity by mentioning these limitations in number 4. Implementing this should keep your lead costs to under $12/lead. With proper consistent followup, out of 100 leads, 1-5 should become solid investors at some point within 3-6 months of first contact (s 1-5% conversion rate).

Organic advertising includes writing and posting content that your target audience would find useful and interesting to help build your authority. The two are synergistic and not mutually exclusive. You can run paid traffic to a popular organic post and you can organically make PPC style posts.

Regular posting is important and consider quality over quantity. Post a few times a week at a minimum and don’t just talk about business. People want to know who you are, what you stand for, and get personal updates about you and your family. Creating value through free education in the marketplace while asking nothing in return goes a long way with people.

Email/SMS:

Emails should be an extension of the organic posts you make on social media. They don’t need to mirror one-for-one but they should be consistent and can follow the same themes. Send newsletters/emails at least once a month, if not once a week.

When someone opts into your ecosystem, they should get a daily email for the first 1-2 weeks. It may seem like overkill and that they would opt out, however if they have a legitimate pain point, they want to see these emails. The first week is a critical “burn in” period in which you have an opportunity to reinforce in your investors mind what you do, that you know what you’re talking about, communicate frequently and have processes in place.

Again these don’t need to be (and really shouldn’t) be all business. People invest in people first and properties second.

Email Deliverability is key so warm up your email server before you send a lot of emails and scrub your list for bad emails before you send them out. Gmail has limitations on how many emails you can send out in a day so you want to use a third party email server to send mass emails. If spam filters detect that a bunch of your emails are bouncing, they will begin to mark your email as spam more frequently or you get a ton of unsubscribes/spam. Deliverability should be north of 98% and open rate should be between 40-70%. Delete any bounced emails from your database as they bounce.

Avoid spammy verbiage in your emails and titles. Having a checkbox confirming that people want to opt in to your email list and/or only emailing people you know will go a long way towards keeping you out of the spam box. Include a button at the bottom of each email with a call to action (read more in blog, book a call, etc…)

SMS is an absolute superpower when it comes to raising capital. Texts get read 97% of the time. We’ve helped syndicators raise millions of dollars starting with a simple text message. However it must be wielded with care. Avoid texting too much or texting people that you don’t know and the best practice to comply with TCPA requirements is to get permission to text people first via a checkbox and opt in. If more than 2% of your list replies with STOP within a 24 hour period you are likely to get your texting account suspended and will have to jump through a ton of hoops to get it back.

A2P registration is a relatively new requirement for A2P (Application to Person) texting. Because of all the spam going around, in 2023 carriers started requiring you to register your LLC and EIN with them to confirm you are a legitimate business and sender before letting you mass text on their platform. They also require you to send samples of what you will be texting as well as any opt in/opt out language you will be using. Just like email, avoid spammy/salesy language.

There you have it, the three pillars of online marketing. This is not a replacement for speaking engagements, webinars and other marketing activities but if you cover all your online bases and be consistent, you will have a steady flow of conversions and capital for your deals. Leverage AI and automation as much as practical to help make all this easier. Hope this helps someone.