[00:00:01] Brian, what's up?
[00:00:02] Hey, how's it going? Good, how are you doing? Doing great. Mike, how are you doing?
[00:00:07] Good, man. Doing good. Excited to be a part of this.
[00:00:11] Yeah. I'm excited to have you and Travis on today. I didn't know I got both of you, but I'm excited that I do.
[00:00:16] So thanks for joining us. Yeah. What's up, man? It's going great. Travis, how are you? Life is good, man. I'm blessed.
[00:00:27] I love it. So.
[00:00:32] How we're approaching brokerage growth and expanding into new markets is our topic today or I'm sorry, how to dominate your market with Google PPC is what we're talking about.
[00:00:41] So let me put that up here for us.
[00:00:45] You guys are the masters of this like.
[00:00:50] I didn't even realize I don't even know who you guys were until close to a year ago, and as I got to know, you guys like you have hundreds. I think it was like four hundred and fifty teams or something working with you to master, how to do PPC, how to get the most out of your business, how to get the most out of your leads. And so I really wanted to have you guys on today to really share with everybody. This is something that everybody wants to know. So I'm going to let you guys run. And, jeez, congratulations on all of your success and for all the success you've created for your customers.
[00:01:28] Yeah, we're excited and being able to help the clients. That's really where our heart and where like the core mission of our businesses. We love seeing the success that we're able to help those achieve. We just recently got off Travis was on a call earlier with a client of ours. Put a was it a four or five million dollar PPC lead under contract over the weekend?
[00:01:53] Yeah, it was like four or five million or so. And the you know, it's a team. And the the buyer's agent put one of the rainmaker's listing on our contract. So they ended up selling their listing that had been sitting for a while, plus getting that under contract. But yeah, after you kind of do enter Mike, I'm going to break this down. Yeah. Is going to be all about numbers and results. And really what's always the most important thing to us is talking about expectation, expectations for a return on investment. And I think that will go along well with what Sisu does so well. Right. Is helping people understand the most important metrics of their business, like the vitals of their business. So so, yeah.
[00:02:37] So what I love about you guys and you guys are just about helping people build their business. That's what makes it that's what you thrive on. That's what makes you feel good. And to put one hundred thousand dollar plus commission check in somebody's pocket, that makes you guys feel good. There's no it's abundance mentality. It's like, yes, we can do that, which is awesome.
[00:02:59] So thankfully, we love to see the clients when I mean, that's really what it's all about. Obviously, a lot of this isn't possible without some commitment from them. Right. So they need to be all in they need to really play their position, allow us to be able to support them and help them through that. For those of you who are not familiar with who we are and what we do, we have a company called GMES Coaching, and it really has two major subsets, one of them being GMs media. So that's pay per click, that's Facebook advertisement and the other one being Gemas messaging, which is more of our follow up system that we have that we work right now currently inside of Sierra Interactive, which really helps you get the most out of the leads throughout the lead cycle today. Really, what we're going to cover is a lot of the stuff that we're doing on the media side, because that's something that everyone can benefit from. And we're doing some really cool things. We're building out some awesome technology to be able to, like, really dig deep into people's markets, understand their markets, because that's one of the biggest challenges.
[00:04:08] When you hire a pay per click manager, there's some things that they really need to understand a little bit of that is like basic real estate economics. Right. And being able to put the client in the best position to win. Right. Not just taking on a client because they want to sign up or not just letting them, you know, spend whatever they want to spend, like really working with them to talk through what makes sense for where they're at in their business and really the goal that they're trying to achieve. So a lot of the things that we do with the clients on the media side is start with the end in mind. You know, where is your business at? Where are you trying to take your business? Now let's take a look at the landscape and figure out what does that look like and how much should you be spending a month in order to achieve that goal instead of just throwing cash at it blind?
[00:05:04] Yep, yeah, 100 percent and then taking a economies of scale by aggregating that data together and looking for trends and yeah, I really think, Mike, you you reiterated what we do on the media side really well. But what I want to do today is bring value to people who have outside managers or maybe managers are watching this week, you know as well as anyone in the industry, because I like competition, like I like a free and open market. And that was one of the founding things that Mike and I talked about when we were offering generation services were that that such a big issue where data is not shared with agents and a lot of cases where they're they're paying to generate a lot of that data. Right. And we all know how the whole Zillow and Realtor thing went right in the initial set from going from a paper MLS like well before my time to those companies sharing the data with the portals.
[00:06:03] And then now we're seeing those giant portals enter the brokers market, which is OK, too, for a lot of people who still thrive with Zillow leads and realtor leads. We'll see how it plays out when that competition moves continues to increase in the future as they enter more markets with brokerages. But to all of us, to all of that on the paper side, what you'll see coming from us in the future and a big point I want to put out today is what to expect, like the number one question I get. How many deals do you think I should close from these paper leads? Like what should I expect in my market? How much money can I make? And I think that's a valid question. If you're going to invest twelve thousand dollars or one hundred and twenty thousand dollars on a generation medium, you should have some type of expectations that are rooted in data. And a lot of the information that is out there. When I was first getting into real estate and looking out there, it's not based on actual data. It's based on hunches or hearsay that you get in social media groups when people will say, like, what's the average conversion rate for a paper quickly? And they'll say one percent. And then we talk to clients like we did today, where they're in a market where the rainmaker's average price point is three point two million and the team members average price points, one point two million. You know what's interesting enough? There are costs for a paper quickly. There's literally five dollars on average compared to some markets where the price point is not anywhere close to that. And the cost per lead is fifteen dollars or twelve dollars because the competition is different in those markets. Right.
[00:07:41] And that's what I want people to understand when they're thinking about dominating their market with paper click, there's going to be variables in every single market and you just have to have an advantage or work with somebody and look and see what the results are.
[00:07:59] Have systems and processes in place to follow up with those leads because the overall conversion rate is going to be low and see if it works in your market and give it time. And you can't do that. You can't track those results easily, especially when you're running a big team without a company like Sisu that's helping you break down your return on investment per lead source. So if you're generating twelve thousand paper click leads per year, how many deals should you expect out of that?
[00:08:28] Ok, so let's talk about that. Twelve thousand leads per year, hypothetically, like you're going really big and your average cost per lead is.
[00:08:38] Five dollars, how much am I spending and let's how much are we spending to get that?
[00:08:44] Yes. Well, if you're getting twelve thousand leads and you spend five dollars per lead, then we're spending 60 grand, right?
[00:08:53] Yep. So five grand a month.
[00:08:59] So if we spend five grand a month and we go by what the industry would say on a search based campaign, which is where it's Homes Rousselle, Brian, where do you live?
[00:09:10] I live in a lake. What is it, Salt Lake City?
[00:09:14] Salt Lake City, OK. Yeah, we run some ads over there. So homes for sale in Salt Lake City. Someone goes into Google. They have a thought in their head. They might type it in. They might do voice to text. It's the same search campaign. It's just the keyword that you're targeting. They might say, hey, Google, I want to see homes for sale in Salt Lake City. They go there. And then when you go to Google, you can see the ads that are there. You can see what other people are running. They're pretty straight forward for the landing pages that people have. What's really interesting with so many people out there, like they'll be with some with certain companies and there's bare minimum basics that aren't being done, like where if you do, homes are still in Salt Lake City. The landing page will have the most expensive listings first by default, like the highest price listings, like a consumer's going into Google who's looking to purchase a home, and they want to see the most expensive listings. That doesn't make any sense from the process of what a buyer is doing. They want to see the newest listings. They're not. They're having trouble finding homes. The newest listings are going to be the ones that are priced the best in a lot of cases on average versus the highest price point. Listings are going to be sitting there for a while. People have probably already seen them. So that's one big mistake. You can just go check on your own if you find your ads in your own market to see if that could be adjusted and you could talk to your ad manager about that. Or if you're running your own campaigns like obviously always do, you fall to the newest, newest listings. But so back to the point. We're spending sixty thousand dollars a year, OK? And we generated twelve thousand leads. So that one percent conversion for twelve thousand leads. How many units do we have?
[00:10:56] Well, one hundred and twenty units, right, so one hundred and twenty cells, OK. How much is the average price point in Salt Lake City, right?
[00:11:06] It's around 350 to 400. I mean, Salt Lake City itself is more like four hundred.
[00:11:11] Ok, so let's even just be conservative and say the average commission is, I guess, like two and a quarter. Let's just say it's ten thousand dollars. Is that is that fair? Sure. It.
[00:11:23] So if we're at ten thousand times one hundred twenty units.
[00:11:27] Whether we have.
[00:11:30] That's a pretty hefty amount of gross commission rate to one point two million, isn't it?
[00:11:36] I think it is, yeah.
[00:11:39] My math skills have weakened at one hundred of one for me, but one point two million engi with, say, five dollars per lead, your media spin would be sixty thousand dollars and a five dollar per lead, almost thirty five thousand dollars per lead, but at ten dollars per liter, media spend would jump up to one hundred and twenty thousand dollars.
[00:11:58] Ok, so then your total cost of media spend would be 10 percent. That's all great. That sounds great. The fact is, if you're converting one percent of the leads, you have ninety nine other leads that didn't convert. You still need to communicate with those. But it also took a lot of time to get that one percent conversion rate. So. So what I'm saying is that in a lot of instances when people have big teams or expect those things, people are closing actually much less than one percent because they have no plans to follow up with those ninety nine leads. And definitely that might be six, nine, 12 months out.
[00:12:30] The Facebook lead ads is a big thing. When people run Facebook lead ads, they're doing an impression based marketing. Right. They're using demographics which are limited now with Facebook to have a list of homes that's displayed in someone's news feed. So they go, you know, cute babies. I like that my friends got married. Obviously, I like that. Oh, there's a funny Gipp. Oh, there was a fly on the guy's head on my head last night during the debate, like they're scrolling and they say, oh, nice houses. I'm going to click on this. And if you ever click a lead ad, right, it repopulates all the information. So it's really easy. Sometimes someone might not even realize what they did. They click through there. So it's not surprising that when you talk to us say like a Facebook lead ad lead, and that's the only way that you got to them. You try to use their demographics that they're like, no, I'm not buying a house. I just wanted to see what it looked like. In some markets that can work, in some mediums that may work to get contact information.
[00:13:30] But the fact is people will look at a post on social media or whatever it is when they're doing their business planning. You need to get more references about studies at scale. Right?
[00:13:40] If someone actually spent that sixty thousand dollars per year, one hundred twenty thousand dollars, what did that look like? How much money did they spend to follow up with the lead? How much money did they spend in automation or or follow up? What was the total cost of following up with the leads and what was the time invested? Amiga agent with Keller Williams did a study about this with Love.
[00:14:01] Are you coaching Jeff Glover and brought up this conversation about a year ago, remember, on Facebook? And it's a conversation I want to continue to push, not just thinking about like, OK, my Cosper leads a dollar. How much time are you spending following up with the leads or money are you spending on following up with the leads? And then what does your conversion look like? And if you follow us on social media, we're going to be delivering a lot of this content as we continue to gather it, of what that looks like to give realistic expectations so that we can help our fellow entrepreneurs running real estate businesses who are helping people make the largest financial decisions of their life, keep food on the table. Right. And pay for their kids college, go on a vacation, hopefully, and have scalable, predictable businesses. And Brian, that's why I appreciate you and your team. You make it really easy for people to measure their results. And what you measure typically improves. If I've ever focused on my health. Right, I have. Right. I've gone through different cycles when I track how much I weigh every day and what I'm eating, my results are dramatically different as opposed to when I didn't do that because there was a plan of action and I could track what I was doing each week and that was motivating as I made progress. So, Mike, any other tips that you want to add on your talk about any anything?
[00:15:20] One of the really neat things that that Brian and I have talked about in the past over conversations is the what's unique about Sisu and what we love about Sisu is the fact that not only do they track so many things within the CRM, we can actually push this when we're pushing our leads through CRM so that that are attached to Sisu. We push a ton of tags in our Google and Facebook campaigns. So we're pushing straight to the CRM, the ad group, the ad set the name what the search terms were. We're really giving the CRM as much data as we can so that we can work together with teams like Sisu to show that data in a way to do what we're talking about, what Travis was just talking about, which is really follow and understand more about your business, because as we start getting into I mean, we're right now in the thick of planning what next year looks like. Right? We're in that business planning cycle right now. That's why a lot of your attending Sisu event today and yesterday is to figure out what does twenty, twenty one look like? What does my business look like over the next twelve? Eighteen and twenty four months, right? So in that what's really cool is once you start tracking, like Travis was saying, your results go up exponentially, right immediately because you're actually writing it down. It's the reason people keep food journals and my fitness pal and all these different accountability things I've got to watch on right now that tells me to breathe. Right. All of these things in our life that are helping us achieve better results. So when we get back to the dominating your market with PPC, what we see in the industry, typically, if you're using maybe an in-house paper click management company, a company with any of the big boxes.
[00:17:24] Right. Any of the the typical names in real estate, the all in ones, the challenge that you have is a lot of times they don't spend enough time with the client to really understand the client's needs.
[00:17:37] And they don't have a very good plan of action for really digging deep into that user's area and being able to target large amounts of keywords. So we have what was the campaign we were putting together the other day, Travis?
[00:17:54] How many keywords did just the one campaign. What wouldn't like just was just one area we were looking at. And it was like nine thousand keywords, wasn't it? Wasn't it like eighty six hundred, something like that.
[00:18:07] Yeah. It just it all depends on the geo modifiers that you have in a geo modifier when you refer to that is if someone says homes or sell in X, that's what the geo modifier is.
[00:18:19] It's Salt Lake City. Salt Lake City is a really big place. I don't know much about Salt Lake City, but when you go further down into Salt Lake cities, I'm sure there's different little towns or areas within Salt Lake City. There's different zip codes. There might be school districts that people search for. There's different ways that people search for things in that area that show intent, that they're looking to purchase a home there or looking for a real estate agent.
[00:18:41] And that's why we love the subdivision neighborhood level. We do the typical city level zip code level standard targeting that you're going to see with a lot of whether it's an outside paperclip company or once again, like an in-house company that maybe offers it through the platform. But where we take it to that next level is really when we sit with you and really understand what are not only the zip codes that we're looking to target. Well, what are all of those neighborhoods and subdivisions in pockets that are within there that typically are only searched the other low volume search terms typically, but we're putting so many of them into these different campaigns that that results in higher search volume overall at the subdivision neighborhood level. But what's really neat about that is when we sit and do that with you, those search terms are for people that are being very specific about where they want to go and where they want to live. It's not a very vague search term. That's someone who has already pinpoint it in their mind, potentially the neighborhood, the school district, those sort of things. Like they really know I love this community, I love this development, and I want to be there. Right. So we're trying to hop in, still get you the city and the zip code leads, but really get into where places where the Zulu's and the Redfin's and and other pay per click people. There's way less competition. And it just really allows you to do what we're talking about, which is dominate your market with with PPC.
[00:20:15] I think I think what you guys are saying is there's so much truth to it. There are so many different types of leads out there. And the one thing we know about PPC is and I'm seeing it more and more in today's market, you can target exactly what you're looking for. And people people are looking for a home like they've searched, as Travis was saying, maybe a certain school district, maybe a certain county.
[00:20:41] And these are these are leads that I'm seeing from a lot of teams that we're working with that are converting at a very high level right now.
[00:20:51] And in Utah, I mean, there are so many people moving from California into the Salt Lake area.
[00:20:57] That and Travis, you're right, it's not necessarily Salt Lake. We're just in the outskirts.
[00:21:03] But there are so many people moving in that if you want the opportunity to take those leads and get those people that coming from out of town, this is a great way to do that.
[00:21:15] Rather than trying to rely on somebody like a Zillow.
[00:21:19] Yeah, that's what Zillow and Realtor do to an extent. That's how they drive traffic to their website. And honestly, if I was Zillow or realtor their reps right now, I'd take a big look at Google local service ads. Like if you go into a lot of your search engines, if you're watching this right now, you're watching the replay later and you do best. Real estate agent near me, right?
[00:21:43] We can't pull up any screenshots of it for this, but if you do that, a lot of you will see like a traditional ad and you're going to see home light agent pronto. Dave Ramsey is on there and all of them are looking for their 30 to 50 percent referral fee, depending on what it is like. There's fifty five places, dotcom. There's all these different little niches where there's these national aggregators who are trying to figure out who's looking to purchase or sell real estate next and get you that lead, OK, and take 30, 35, 40 percent of your gross revenue. That's a lot, especially when the average business and real estate right now does not operate at a thirty five forty percent plus margin, especially when there's a midsize or even small team because the margins have been compressed. So when I got started in real estate, I was really lucky to join a great company and have a great mentor. And he showed me what's referred to as an economic model. So that showed me, like Travis, you have two young little girls, right? You're in a new industry. How much money do you want to make this year? What do you need to make to pay your bills to go on vacation and achieve your goals and to save some money? And I, I think I wanted to do like three hundred and fifty thousand GCI or something like that. So we broke it down. Let's be conservative with these estimates and your price went. So we did seven thousand dollars average expected commission. So it was going to take 50 units and we worked it all the way backwards to how many contacts it would take me prospecting to get X amount of appointments, how many appointments it would take me to sign X amount of listings, and then estimating that for each listing I took with my marketing, I could generate one buyer.
[00:23:24] Ok, so that sounds really simple and that's honestly as simple as it is. But then you have to figure out how to use the CRM bit to figure out how to do marketing. You have to find the best photographers. You have to vet all of these companies trying to sell you things and see what actually makes sense. It makes you money. And then on top of all of that, I needed to talk to my mentor on a biweekly basis and bring in all my numbers and track how many people I was talking to while trying to call expires. We're only like seven out of one hundred would answer. And I had to hand dial them because someone told me I couldn't use a power dialer because I would get fined. So this whole business that seems so simple that laid out in the economic plan came really complicated quickly. So I went through like three or four spreadsheets and different variations of that, where I spent countless hours trying to figure out how I could measure my results so I could see Rose up. And then I finally ended up with a with a separate company. This is like four years ago. And that company saved me so much time. But I would have loved to have Setsu because with that company, it was still manual entry.
[00:24:29] Right. It wasn't a push notification on my phone, just as a simple reminder, like, hey, how many people did you talk today?
[00:24:35] And when we're talking about getting granular with our tracking on lead source on Google, like if you want to target people relocating from California to Salt Lake City because a lot of them are moving, or if you want to target buyers who are relocating from the northeast in New York because everyone in New York is moving down to Florida. Right. And if you want to see that campaign compares to your local campaign, because in your localized campaign is someone searching for homes for sale in Tampa, they might have a home to sell and you could get two units. But those people moving from the northeast might not know any agent. So you have a better chance of working with them. That's a lot of data to track. And doing it manually is not practical, especially at scale. So when you have systems that talk together with your CRM and then your pipeline management and your transaction management system as well as your activity tracker, that's a beautiful thing because we can start to see those trends. And what I'm most excited about is we can share them with the industry, just like with our ad accounts. They're open so anyone can come and see our account structure. Right. Someone else just has to execute it at a better level than us at a lower price. And then that's where we would have to innovate our product even more. And that's why I love it. And that's why it's so important to have the systems to talk together, because you can't look at those trends. You can't decide that like, hey, I'm going to spend all of my money targeting those people, relocating because we just didn't close many deals from our local campaigns are relocating, relocating campaigns, crushed it.
[00:26:08] How do you know that if you don't have a tag that's coming in because first has to go for your Google account, then it has to go to your CRM, then it has to go from your CRM to what a spreadsheet are you going to put in the name? Address. Email, name or not, name the tags of the location, are you going to push all this data in, plus all the other things that you have to segment your database? It's just not practical, but when you execute it with the automation, we can see great things. And doing that, structuring your campaigns in that way is how you can dominate with paper. Click. But I always want to put that caveat there. Paper click leads should not be your primary source for business, right?
[00:26:53] Maybe if you're first starting out and you're trying to enter a market rate, but you need to have other levers. You can't put all your baskets in there if you could. If you have a lot of money to spend when you're initially starting, you're trying to spend six grand up front. But my analogy that I've been talking about with anyone is asking for expectations. Recently with paper click is put it back to farming, which is like, you know, like an old school, you know, source of business, which, by the way, still works really well. It depends on the market, depends how many other people are trying to farm that neighborhood.
[00:27:23] But if you send out, say, five hundred dollars to a five hundred home neighborhood, sometimes you get lucky, you get three listings, you know, wow, I got three listings.
[00:27:35] I spent five hundred dollars in and postage and getting my cards out there. I spent a few hours doing it. I went and took three listings. I figured it out. And then you go do that in ten other neighborhoods and you spend five thousand dollars and you get no you get no calls. Like, why is that? Because with that first one, it was a combination of probably good marketing and copy, but also timing and a little bit of luck. So that's the same thing that can happen with paper click. We have one client who just signed up in Ontario a little bit outside of Ontario. He's literally put four deals under contract in the first three weeks and they're contingent there. They don't have really inspections like their firm deals. They're firmed up. That's awesome. That guy spends a thousand dollars a month. He just put four under contract in the first few weeks. The fact is that's not a majority of the time. I wouldn't expect that. So have someone is going to be honest with you, because these are big decisions to make for your business. We're all planning here. And it's good that we're talking about it now because most closings that you have involve a good amount of follow up in time. So with that, I think I'm pretty much done on the paper klicks out of my side. Mike, you want to add any other notes for four things that people should expect if they're looking at using paper click marketing as a lead source?
[00:28:52] Hey, guys, I think you've drawn on some different numbers. Six thousand a month.
[00:28:56] A thousand like what is what do most teams start with? Where's a great place to start?
[00:29:04] It all depends on their ability to follow up with the leads, with the volume and how much they have in reserves and the agents they have. Yeah, how many agents they have, the infrastructure they have in place, you know, with most individual agents or small teams, you know, say like one agent, one admin or one agent, one showing assistant and an admin, I probably wouldn't spend much more than a thousand to fifteen hundred dollars a month because you're going to have a high volume of leads. And if you're going to scale it up, you can see if you can handle the follow up. But this leads to the beautiful thing about paper click marketing, just like farming like which is like offline, like traditional methods. It's like digital farming. You're going to have people continue to come to your website. You'll have people who are on your website for seven years. I've someone on my website like I'm not in production anymore. My wife just cherry picks referrals because we built a good database so she can do 30 units a year. But we have someone on our website who's looked at like fourteen hundred listings. She uses our website like Zillow and Realtor dot com now. Yes.
[00:30:05] So she she sees our pictures every time she's on there. So maybe she'll referrals business in the future or work with us. Have no idea. But she's using our website. So you're closing rate or your percentage of conversion goes up over time, just like it will with forming a neighborhood month after month after month, because people don't always move within a year or two years or three years. You had to think about the long game. If you're really going to think about competing with a company like Realtor, Dotcom or Zillow, you have to have localized info.
[00:30:35] For most users we're seeing right around a thousand dollars. Is that sweet spot? That entry spot. Obviously, we've got clients who are spending five, ten plus thousand a month. Right, that are running big operations, big teams, but definitely right around that thousand dollar mark is really that good entry level. And we pair that up with some really neat things that we do on Social to be able to get you in front of your sphere of influence, your database, your closed clients. We really keep you in front of not only new traffic. Right, but your existing database referrals. So close clients, those are really like the heart of where we can force multiply some of the groundwork that somebody has put in over the years and really help accelerate their business. So there's some really cool things we're doing over there.
[00:31:27] The last thing I want to ask, just because we're out of time, I know you guys have done a lot of work with Ciara, but everything we just talked about, it doesn't matter what CRM I have.
[00:31:35] Right. I can use any CRM and I can still take advantage of you guys to help me drive my PPC.
[00:31:42] Yeah, absolutely. Customized WordPress sites are going to have some variances that we're going to look at and share with you where there could be issues with conversion rate if it's a poor landing page. But for the most part, yeah, most major sites in some of the smaller ones out there we can certainly work with.
[00:32:00] Ok, all right. Awesome. Will you guys, it's great joining having you join us today. If we had more time, we could dig even deeper. But for anybody watching the website, GMES coaching, it's sitting there in the in the comments. Feel free to click on that. Go to their site, check them out.
[00:32:18] These guys are producing at a very high level for a lot of customers. So you guys you guys are OK. Thanks for joining us and thanks, man.
[00:32:26] Yeah. All right. Thanks for improving the industry, Brian. Appreciate you, man. Yeah, likewise. Thank you.
