Jeffrey Brogger is the founder and CEO of JJB Multifamily, a brokerage focused on sourcing off-market commercial real estate deals. He is also the founder and senior digital marketing strategist for STEEZY.Digital, a marketing agency that helps real estate brokers and mortgage loan officers with lead generation and follow-up through branding, advertising, and copywriting.
In this episode, Jeffrey shares what most people do wrong on social media when it comes to marketing themselves and their businesses, how to improve your lead generation technique, and the importance of developing and executing the right marketing strategy.
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TRANSCRIPT
Ash Patel: Hello, Best Ever listeners. Welcome to the Best real estate investing advice ever show. I'm Ash Patel and I'm with today's guest, Jeffrey Brogger. Jeffrey is joining us from Huntington Beach, California. He is the founder and CEO of JJB Multifamily, a brokerage focusing on sourcing off-market commercial real estate deals. Jeffrey is also the founder and senior digital marketing strategist for Steezy Digital, a marketing agency that helps real estate brokers and loan officers with lead generation and follow-up. Jeffrey, thank you for joining us in how are you today?
Jeffrey Brogger: Absolutely. Thank you for having me on, Ash. I am fantastic, best day in my life. How are you doing?
Ash Patel: Awesome. Before we get started, can you give the Best Ever listeners a little bit more about your background and what you're focused on now?
Jeffrey Brogger: Sure. So my background in real estate really started with my family home. Long story short, unfortunately, my father passed away when I was 16. And it's not a sob story, it's just my story... And that was a very formative experience for me. But part of the things that he left behind were a family home. So he left a single family home to myself and my three sisters, and that was my just crash course into real estate investment. We decided, even as I was a 16-year-old teenager, I was voting to keep it, rather than sell it. I know a lot of families do sell in that troubling time. And we ended up keeping it, so through my 20's, mainly my sisters managed it, but I started to read Rich Dad Poor Dad, I started to do direct sales at Cutco and see the possibility of making money, but then getting money to work for you, and investing in income-producing assets.
So throughout my 20s I ended up buying out my sisters, and I held on to that up until actually last year when real estate market was at pretty much its peak, and ended up selling it, making a killing and doing great. So that was kind of my first introduction into it, as I was learning sales and business and marketing. And when I started my real estate marketing agency five years ago, in 2017, I paid for consulting that prompted me to niche down. If you're selling to everyone, you're selling to no one. So I believed in that, and I chose real estate. It was already something that was there for me, I almost got my license at 18; I chose to go the Cutco route instead, for various reasons, and I saw this real estate asset that was appreciating and cash flowing, and I was like, "This is amazing." So I chose real estate.
I focused specifically on the residential side first, and my niche were top 1% real estate brokers. I helped them with their lead generation and follow up. I knew that there were all these brokers out there 55+ that needed help with a lot of their digital stuff, so for the last five years, that's what I've been obsessing over. And I can't tell you all the doors that's unlocked. Today I do commercial, as well as residential real estate, broker lead generation, and then mortgage loan officer lead generation as well.
Ash Patel: Alright, my head's spinning. Hold on, hold on. Let's back up. How did you get into this?
Jeffrey Brogger: How did I get into what?
Ash Patel: Into lead generation, but also how did you become the founder and CEO of a brokerage?
Jeffrey Brogger: Well, okay, so a couple things. Number one, I started my first venture after purchasing the Tai Lopez Social Media Marketing Agency course in 2017. And he just gave me the courage to go on LegalZoom and get an LLC. That was pretty much the extent... There was some decent content in there, but I chose real estate and then that's when the doors started to unlock. That's when I focused on value.
I knew intimately from all the personal development I had done, since being a sales rep at 18, and then taking [unintelligible 00:05:36.11] conferences and going to Tony Robbins and all the stuff, I knew that you don't get something for nothing. So if you're going to build a successful business, you have to bring value to the marketplace. And based on that principle that I believed in, I understood, "Okay, it's 2017, I've founded a company." At first before I did consulting, it wasn't really going anywhere. Now I know my niche, I know exactly who I want to solve a problem for. What problems are they experiencing?
So I just became very curious and inquisitive, and I was able to get one client that gave me a shot. 100 million dollar broker in Las Vegas, and shout out to Aaron the real estate guy, great guy. And five years later now, still a client today. And I just focused on, "What do you have problems with? What are your biggest pain points? What are the biggest opportunities you see, but you can't implement on?" and I became his digital strategist from day one. I just started to solve some of his internal problems with technology and marketing. And it always came back to lead generation.
So I didn't go into it saying, "I'm going to generate leads." It was more so "Where's the value?" Real estate professionals have their sphere, but there's all this opportunity out there. And consumers are now finding homes and properties online first. They're going to Zillow and Redfin first; what if we could fish upstream, just like the iBuyers are? And then what if we could nurture them through the process, to then give the local real estate professional a chance, rather than going through one of the iBuyers? And by the way, the local real estate professional will probably serve them better anyway, because they're local experts.
So I went through that whole process... And you know how it is Ash - you get involved in an industry, you meet people. You start to get clients, you start to go to conferences, you start to meet people... And through that there are a lot of learnings. Not everything was a success, but there were a ton of learnings and relationships that were formed through that period. And then I ended up getting my license later on. Everyone that was my client capacity, "Why don't you have your license? Why don't you just get your license and sell homes, or take referral fees, or XYZ?" So I ended up doing that. And who else to join under other than Aaron Taylor, the real estate guy, my first client, that I have this awesome relationship with.
So I joined EXP Realty under him, and then I ended up going the commercial route, instead of the residential route, for a few reasons... But I've been talking for a while, so I'm gonna give it back to you.
Ash Patel: No, keep going. So when you say commercial - the true definition, non-residential, commercial?
Jeffrey Brogger: Yes, I focus on five-unit and up multifamily.
Ash Patel: Oh, so still multifamily commercial.
Jeffrey Brogger: Yes, I'm not so much into industrial, and retail, restaurant, things like that.
Ash Patel: Why not?
Jeffrey Brogger: Hey, tons of opportunity. I'm a niche guy.
Ash Patel: Less competition.
Jeffrey Brogger: I feel it. I am a believer that there's abundance everywhere. There's just so much opportunity, and all you have to do is shave off a sliver of a niche of the market, and you can be wealthy beyond your wildest dreams and help a ton of people. So I have no problem niching down and becoming a specialist, because I've just realized that when I do that with real estate, other opportunities come from it. It's not that I haven't had other clients outside of real estate in the last five years. In fact, my success in real estate marketing has attracted outside clients like coaching clients, that have an online course they want to market, they've never been able to build a funnel and be successful. They come to me and they see the success in real estate and they say, "Hey, will that work for me?" It's not "Who are you?" and "You have to sell me now" and this and that. They're actually attracted to me by the success over there. So I figured that the same will be with multifamily. Maybe I'm wrong. But I think that a specialist will be paid more, will serve the clients better... And I just don't have the capability at this time to go off all eight commercial specialties... So I'm doing the one.
Ash Patel: Jeff, what are most people doing wrong on social media when it comes to marketing themselves or their business?
Jeffrey Brogger: What are most people doing wrong? They're not posting nearly enough. And if they are posting, they are probably not posting the right things. And if they are outsourcing it, their vision is probably not getting communicated with the clarity and the sincerity that they would say it themselves. It's this conundrum. The best-performing posts are of people. And the person that knows the most about the business is the founder. The founder also has the least time to go post on social media. So it is quite a conundrum.
The way that I've been able to help clients combat that is to have extremely clear brand guidelines, and be able to have a brand book that's a professional 30-page, corporate-level brand book with your mission, vision, values, your manifesto, your core beliefs, your logo, your exact color points, your exact non-local use cases, everything. All in one document that you can share with every team member. Because then when you outsource social media, you can give that to them as inspiration, and you can also then identify the five buckets that they should be posting. And then hit minimum metrics. Like, for example, one post a day on Instagram used to do it for you; you'd grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. Now, there's so much content out there, the bar is more like two posts today on your normal feed, five stories, and at least one live long-form piece of content a week. So the bar is much higher now. So how do you keep up with that? By the way, reels are super-important. And Instagram is literally paying people to get views on reels, because they're competing with TikTok.
So there's a lot that goes into it... But being a GP with 1,000 units, you don't have to be this now social media expert; you can hire it out the way that you hired out quality assurance, is by going through an extensive branding process, and that's part of what my agency offers today, is to get what's in the founders head out onto paper, and into a brand story video... Because then you can actually scale your message, your vision, your mission.
Ash Patel: And in terms of lead generation, what are people doing incorrectly?
Jeffrey Brogger: Well, great question. They're treating top of funnel leads like referrals, or bottom funnel leads. Pretty much the biggest mistake is that a lot of businesses, if they're offering a good product and they're getting good results, they'd grow by referral. I love referrals. I think that you should have systems in place to generate as many referrals as possible. People that are referred typically buy more, buy more often, refer others, there's less barrier... It's amazing to get a referral that is ready to go, qualified bottom funnel, one call, they're on an exclusive, and they're good. The problem with that is referrals are difficult to scale. And if you have a completely organic strategy, you can create a ton of inbound, a ton of referrals, but if your goal is to really create a predictable dial, something you could turn up or down depending on the season, or your sales teams appetite, you need paid advertising. And if you have a successful paid advertising strategy in place, then you can drive leads to a funnel with pipeline stages, and actually have automation fire to get them to the next stage of the funnel until they're a marketing qualified lead. So once they're "marketing qualified lead", that's when I would hand it off to the sales team.
So the big mistake is you'll do all these cold calls, or you'll do all this Facebook advertising, and you'll say "All that stuff doesn't work." And the biggest mistake, Ash, that I see is treating top of funnel leads like they're bottom funnel leads. And just to make it really clear as I wrap this thought up, I had a client early on that we did a performance review. And I had generated 300 leads on the residential side on Facebook. Typically, we have a 1% to 3% conversion ratio; the law of big numbers, it just kind of works out. So they should have closed three homes per 100. That should be three to nine homes over that time period. Or maybe at least have showings and things where in the next six months those would close. And they said "These leads are garbage." I said "Okay, well, let's explore that. I'm open to it. Look, marketing is testing."
Ash Patel: Maybe you screwed up.
Jeffrey Brogger: Maybe I blew it. I'm willing to admit that. Let's dive in. So we dive in and we look at the CRM, and I start going through one by one, and I say, "Okay, this lead was generated on Tuesday at 10:47am. At what point was the first contact to this lead?" "Oh, I think my agent call them later that afternoon." Dead. The lead's dead. Okay, next lead. This lead was generated later that afternoon at 1pm. When was that -- two days later. You get the story, right? They weren't hyper sensitive to the speed to lead required to convert an online lead, first of all.
MIT did a study, you are 5,000% less likely to convert a lead that submits an online form after five minutes. This is a study from four years ago. So number one, you've got to convert them. Online leads are looking for instant feedback, instant communication. They're not looking for a call a week later. So that's number one. But number two, when you introduce an online lead top funnel to a closer, it's like the worst thing you can do. Because the closer's asking nail down questions today to close the deal, and the person's not even ready. They're exploring, or they're interested, or they saw something that just caught their eye. So you have to have a barrier in between, and this has come from hundreds of thousands of dollars -- actually, we've spent millions of dollars of ad spend, generated thousands and thousands of leads, and we've really why's this, that there needs to be an intermediary. Now, the intermediary needs to be either internal as an ISA, or my agency now actually has partners that can offer inside sales agent services to convert the lead, because once the lead is actually converted and qualified, then you hand it off to the closer or the founder of the company or XYZ, that can then go close the deal. So to wrap it up - don't treat top funnel leads like bottom funnel leads.
Ash Patel: And ISA is inside sales agent.
Jeffrey Brogger: Yeah, inside sales assistant, inside sales agent - they're kinda interchangeable.
Break: [00:15:36.27] to [00:17:25.16]
Ash Patel: Interesting perspective. So these funnels are truly three-dimensional. It's not just a black hole that's one-dimensional, where as soon as somebody enters, it's like hit or miss; you've got to take them through the entire process.
Jeffrey Brogger: Well, yeah --
Ash Patel: And it seems like a lot of people fail at that.
Jeffrey Brogger: It's partially a failure of strategy. I'm honestly notorious for -- what is it, "Fire, Ready, Aim"? It's hard for me to slow down sometimes to do strategy. But one of my early mentors at Cutco said something that's always resonated with me. And every time I implement it, I've seen that it works. He said, "One minute of planning saves two minutes of execution." It's such a simple concept, but I've just found it to be true.
So what I mean by that is if you are going to invest tens of thousands of dollars into a paid strategy, you should probably invest a little time and probably a little money to have an expert design a strategy for you. And by the way, you might want to track it. The whole attraction to digital marketing is it's trackable. Well, I'll tell you what - if you don't have tracking in place, it's very messy and complicated.
So you've got to have a strategy, and then execute against that strategy... And then you change things - marketing is testing; you tweak things to try and hit those KPIs that you identified at the beginning. And that's why I really call myself a digital marketing strategist, because at this point, I have such a deep understanding of the different platforms, services, and things out there to get the messages across to different sectors of the market, that I can meet with a broker/owner, mortgage loan officer about their ideal client, and then actually help them develop the strategy and then execute the strategy to get in front of the right people with the right message at the right time.
Ash Patel: Jeff, your thoughts on inbound marketing versus outreach marketing?
Jeffrey Brogger: That's a good question, Ash. Wow, you're asking great questions.
Ash Patel: Well, my mind's being blown right now, so keep it up. [laughs]
Jeffrey Brogger: I'll be honest with you. Honesty moment here. It would sound good for me to say, "Oh, yeah, I'm a master of inbound, I'm a master of outbound." I'm honestly not. My experience has been almost exclusively paid advertising from day one, for everything, all the time. And honestly, I regret that. I wish five years ago I would have started paying someone 500 bucks a month to build SEO on my site. I wish. So now I'm focusing more on reputation management, online listings, Google My Business, getting more organic search ranking, to bolster and inform my paid advertising decisions, and have it be more of a cohesive strategy. Because I'll tell you what - as a copywriter and a media buyer and a senior digital marketing strategist, it was very easy for me, "Oh, we need more clients? Here's a new headline, here's a new ad, go run it. Go spend a couple thousand bucks."
Ash Patel: Ready, aim, fire.
Jeffrey Brogger: Exactly. We'd get some new leads, we'd close some more deals, revenue jumps back up, we're good. But it didn't create this long-lasting, steady consistency and this reputation in the market where you're always ranking for the relevant topics around what you are an expert on. I highly suggest in carving out a small portion of your budget, and it's all about consistency. Even if you can only afford $100 a month; every business can afford $1,200 a year. If you can afford 100 dollars a month, then that would equate to four hours of an SEO expert at 25 an hour, or it might equate to 10 hours to someone that's a beginner on Upwork; you can now have international workers work for your company. You could have someone 10 hours a month, optimizing your site on a site like Upwork, or Remote Work Philippines I think is the one... Anyway, there are these options to have SEO done for you, and have it be very consistent over a long period of time. But that is the key. Just like social media, the content - it's all about consistency. Tony Robbins says "You don't expect to get fit if you go to the gym one time, and then you don't go for a year." You have to go put in the reps every single day, consistently, over a long period of time, and then you'll be fit and healthy. It's the same for SEO, it's the same for organic for your business.
Ash Patel: Funny story. Tim Ferriss on one of his podcasts was mentoring somebody, and they were selling - I'm just gonna say clothing. I forgot what it was they were selling. And they went to Tim for advice. And he said "Give away all of your paid advertising keywords." And she was blown away. "Why would I do that?" Well, because you are already organically getting ranked, your competition will pay a ton of money with your paid searches, and your cost of doing business will be much lower. So to your point, the organic marketing is priceless when it comes to competing.
Jeffrey Brogger: Yes. And by the way, the organic lead is more close to a referral than a paid lead. Typically, an organic lead is more middle to bottom funnel. They've already done research, they've already found you on their own. There's this interesting philosophy that an SEO lead feels like they discovered you. They feel like they can go report to their friends "Look at this company I've found." It's not like you were interrupting them in the middle of their Starbucks session as they're scrolling on social media. I love paid advertising, sell it all day, do it all day, get results all day... But there is value in SEO, and I overlooked it. So I don't want the listeners out there to just think that I'm out here promoting only paid, and that's the only way. This is what my agency specializes in, and admittedly, inbound and outbound are both very important.
Ash Patel: Alright, two points. One, you sound really expensive. So we'll get into that in a minute. But if somebody were to outsource SEO, and they don't have the knowledge to ask the right questions, how do they find the right person and not get scammed?
Jeffrey Brogger: Oh, man, great question. So I learned this one great outsourcing technique from Chris Record. I don't know if you're aware of Chris Record; digital marketing guy, he ended up successfully exiting his agency four years ago or so for like 100 million dollars, and now he's just living the good life... But one of the things he taught me - and a course that I purchased - was how to vet VA's. Super-valuable. And he specifically used Upwork, which is my VA contractor portal of choice.
So what you do is you go follow their prompt, you type the description, you set yourself up as a business owner so that you're contracting VA's, and then when you go through, you put it on Countries All, but then you set super-high criteria for more than $10,000 billed on Upwork. Active in the last two weeks. Native English only. You put the strictest filters on, and it filters out -- if it ends up being no one in the world that can fit that, okay, maybe loosen them up a little bit. But most times I find hundreds of applicants that you then have to go through the process. It's not that it's super-easy and non-time-consuming. You then still have to go invite people to your job description, vet them, look at their reviews, start working with them, fire them if it doesn't work out... So there's still the whole hiring and firing situation. And that's why, even though you can do this yourself, if you're in a position to hire someone like me to help you create the strategy and then execute it - yeah, we're gonna charge you a little more do it, but you're not gonna have to worry about it and it's gonna get done. And if the work is not done right, that's on my agency. It's not something that you have to go fix.
Ash Patel: So Jeff, let's take an individual, whether it's a broker, loan officer or an investor. What would they end up having to pay you to increase their business?
Jeffrey Brogger: Great question. Well, we honestly have packages that range from starter packages, onto more of our core products. So I'll let you know about the core products, because in sales if you start high, you end high... So a platinum package is 12k a month. That includes ad spend. So in that package, we would do your full strategy, we would start to finish funnel strategy, back end, front end, traffic, channels, everything. And you can anticipate approximately 50% of the 12k a month going towards advertising. So we spend half of it directly to partners like Google, Facebook, Hulu, whatever makes the most sense. But we just make it really clean and simple. That's what it costs. And then we implement all of the tracking. Then at the end of the six month or 12-month campaign, we can say, "Oh, you got a 5x ROI. Do you want to do it again?" That's one of the most important things, is tracking.
So that's really our premium package, the platinum package. And then it goes down from there. 12, 9, 6, 3. Those are our core packages, and that's 1000 a month. Honestly, most people start at three. It's more rare that we get the top shelf type buyer, but people want to try it out, and that's okay. We will give you the same service that we offer to our platinum package clients. Full digital strategy.
What happens is, as you reduce the spend, it starts to limit the channels that we can spend money on; we just dropped our advertising budget effectively from 1500 a month, and then also the amount of resources that my agency can use from 6k to 1,500 a month. So it just limits some of the things where -- I always recommend a strategy session with myself or one of my sales professionals. And what that offers is we can actually find out what your goals are, first, what your revenue is, what's your risk aversion is for investment, because marketing is an investment... So if you're not risk averse, you want to spend 30% of your revenue on marketing to explode and dominate your market... Well, we can do that math, and then see where you fit into our Platinum packages.
Ash Patel: Alright, a standalone realtor, a standalone wholesaler, the guy or girl starting out in multifamily that doesn't have a website, doesn't have a logo, doesn't really have a company name... You sound pretty intimidating. Can you help that individual as well?
Jeffrey Brogger: Hey, great question. So if you're out there, and you're just looking for help, we do have some startup packages available. And it might not make sense, honestly; I'll tell you, we're not for everyone. We really did start out with top 1% real estate brokers only in mind. So that was the core product. And then I found all these other agents and all these other investors and all these other people that needed the help, but didn't want to go start out spending 3k a month. And I get that.
So we do have started packages available. If you are a beginner, and you've never done a deal, I would say you probably should not then invest in paid advertising. Just from my professional opinion, you should probably go dial for dollars, follow the free coaching online, go get a contract signed and a deal done. And once you get that commission check, then reinvest it. You're just going to learn so much in that process that I can't teach you. I could actually send you great leads and you could blow them. And whose fault is that? It's my fault for not telling you that you weren't ready.
Ash Patel: It's your fault, because we're paying you to get the job done.
Jeffrey Brogger: Exactly. It ends up being my fault. Anyways.
Ash Patel: Awesome. Jeff, what is your best real estate investing advice ever?
Jeffrey Brogger: Money is made on the buy.
Ash Patel: Jeff, are you ready for the Best Ever lightning round?
Jeffrey Brogger: Sure.
Ash Patel: Alright. What's the Best Ever book you recently read?
Jeffrey Brogger: Slight Edge.
Ash Patel: What was your big takeaway from that?
Jeffrey Brogger: Slight Edge takeaway was consistency over a long period of time creates massive results. Same thing as many personal development books out there, but the way that Jeff Olson depicted it in the Slight Edge really resonated with me.
Ash Patel: Jeff, what's the best way you like to give back?
Jeffrey Brogger: The best way to give back is through money and time. So I chunk off 10% of my income, and as my income grows, I put that into a brokerage account, which is invested into the S&P, and every year I give it away.
Ash Patel: Jeff, how can the Best Ever listeners reach out to you?
Jeffrey Brogger: Well, let's see. It's a good question. LinkedIn is probably honestly the best. I was gonna say email, but emails change. So I would say look me up on LinkedIn, Jeffrey Brogger. I should come right up. If not, type in Jeffrey Brogger JJB Multifamily, or Jeffrey Brogger Steezy Digital, and I'm sure that I would then come up there. And I would love to connect with you on LinkedIn or elsewhere.
Jeffrey Brogger: Awesome. Jeffrey, I've gotta thank you for your time today. You've given us a lot of knowledge. We're looking at funnels a little bit differently, looking at SEO, outsourcing VA's... Thank you for all the knowledge. I'd love to have you back and let's deep-dive into one particular avenue and see what kind of damage we could do.
Jeffrey Brogger: I would love to. These are deep topics, and we went rapid-fire today, but I'd love to be back. Thanks.
Ash Patel: Alright, Jeff, again, thank you. Best Ever listeners, thank you for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a five star review, share the podcast with someone you think can benefit from it. Also, follow, subscribe and have a Best Ever day!
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