I had an extremely informative conversation with Michael Meier, who is a New York City based Real Estate broker, about different marketing techniques he uses to grow his business. I have a marketing background and I thought I had heard it all, until Michael explained how he leverages social media platforms, specifically Snapchat, to create a solid, expanding real estate brand that puts money in his pocket!
Michael’s best real estate investing advice, for both investors and brokers, is to make sure your marketing methods cast a wide enough net that reaches a large audience and that it is very personal. In the investing world, there are a multitude of marketing techniques, like yellow letters and postcards, which allow you to connect with people in personal ways. Regardless of what your business model is, the more personal you can be with people, the higher the likelihood is that you will receive a response or have an interaction with them.
For example, if you are looking to flip smalls homes in a certain area, by reaching out in a personal way, like a handwritten postcard or yellow letter, you are going to have a better chance of connecting with them, getting a conversation going, and ultimately finding out if there really is an opportunity. However, if you try a non-personal, commercialized approach that doesn’t speak to people, like a mass distributed printed white letter mailing campaign, you are not going to get the same amount of responses.
Michael believes that the best medium out there that allows you to cast the widest net and connect with the most amounts of people in a personal way is the social media platform Snapchat. Snapchat allows you to show people who the “real” you is. And if the “real” you is someone that can solve a problem for somebody, that is in a distressed situation, by purchasing their property, then that will shine through via Snapchat, and the person will be happier to give the deal to you than to someone they don’t know or don’t have a connection with.
If there is someone that has a larger multi-family building and you think that you can buy it, rehab it, and do an added-value purchase, and they see from your Snapchat that you are a strategic thinker that knows how to take properties and get the best value out of them, then in their mind, they may think that you are the type of person that will pay the most to purchase it. Regardless of whether or not you actually will pay the highest is irrelevant. The point is that when you get the person to trust you, you will have a better chance of getting them on the phone and talking so that you can evaluate the opportunity.
Michael specifically uses Snapchat to connect with real estate agents, brokers, and investors across the country. He does this by creating daily one-minute educational lessons in 6 snaps or less. He picks a topic and is forced to discuss the topic that might typically have taken him an hour and a half to explain in only one minute. As a result, he has a lot of interactions and people leaving comments the lessons he is posting. People are either agreeing with the information, relating a similar experience they have had, or saying “wow, you brought up a point that I had never thought about before, but what about XYZ?” And then he will use XYZ as the topic for the next day’s 1-minute lesson.
Not only does this allow Michael to hone his teaching and presentation skills, but he also learns from people communicating with him, and most importantly, he has met a lot of brokers and agents from across the country, which has resulted in referrals, and in turn, money is his pocket!
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this blog post are provided for informational purposes only, and should not be construed as an offer to buy or sell any securities or to make or consider any investment or course of action.