This is the part seven of a seven-part series on crowdfunding. (You can find Part One here, Part Two here, Part Three here, Part Four here, Part Five here and Part Six here.)
As we wrap up this special seven-part series on how to crowdfund your projects, let’s reflect on what we’ve covered so far.
We’ve taken a close look at three core pillars of real estate syndication in the age of digital marketing:
- Developing a framework for building your investor list by automating the entire process.
- Incorporating key themes onto your website, including lead generating calls to action and an education page so you can welcome prospects when they visit your site, and entice them to stay longer and learn more from you.
- How to use content factoring to create masses of content with relative ease so you can generate a bait plume on social media to amplify your reach and attract even more prospects.
And to help summarize even further, here are seven key steps that, based on this series, you can implement right now.
- Install an easy to identify ‘Call to Action’ button directly on your website’s homepage inviting prospects to give you their name and email address.
- Add an education section to your website that makes it easy for investors to learn more and have their questions pre-emptively answered.
- Create your first article and get it up on your website.
- Include a call to action form in this article so you can generate leads.
- Post headlines, Notable Quotables or short video clips from the article on social media.
- Include a call to action on these social media post that directs prospects back to your website.
- Repeat steps one through six to build a lead generating machine.
Many of these practices may be new for you, but they don’t need to be complicated. Generating large amounts of useful content, distributing this content across multiple social media channels, and incorporating a call to action in every piece of content you create will pay dividends for years to come and what I like the most about this whole process is...
You only have to do it once.
Once your infrastructure is in place, it becomes a self-reinforcing asset for your company, constantly driving prospects to you and your deals. It’s like duplicating yourself so you can add more productive hours to your day.
And once you’ve implemented all the steps we’ve gone through in this special series, a few things are going to happen, and this is where the magic begins.
First, as soon as you begin posting your content online, you start to show up whenever your prospects are online. You go from being invisible to being visible. This is extremely important because as time goes on and as you post more and more, you go from being just visible to dominating the dialogue.
This is exactly where you want to be, because once your prospects see you more and more frequently, they start to position you as an industry leader and as someone they can trust. You’ve established credibility and, as time goes on, your prospects and your existing investors will become even more likely to want to listen to what you have to say.
Prospects will begin to want to connect with you, to learn from you, and to quote you. You may even begin to feel like a bit of a celebrity when total strangers tell you that they feel like they already know you.
Best of all, prospects will begin coming to you so you don’t have to go out and find them, and the days of tedious, time consuming old-school in-person networking will be behind you.
Where to begin
Now, don't be put off if you have nothing already in place. The wonderful thing about this process is that once you start building content in the way I’ve shown you, it stays there and repeats until you stop it—or until someone switches the Internet off. Each time you add something else, your corpus of content just keeps on getting bigger, adding to your reach and influence.
And don’t worry about overdoing it.
It's almost impossible to post your messaging too often. As soon as you post something online, your prospects will see that pop up until something else enters their feed and then you get pushed down. In theory, you could actually post the same thing ten times a day and a prospect might see it only once.
What you want is consistency. Consistent branding, consistent messaging, and consistently demonstrating your value proposition by actually delivering value to your prospects.
Moving forward, your overall objective is to start drawing prospects into your orbit and the first people who are going to gravitate towards you are actually going to be those who have already invested with you and who otherwise are already in your network. These are your best prospects to start with. By showing up online, you are reinforcing their trust in you.
Plus, you will attract new prospects at the same time by establishing yourself as ‘someone that is worth investing with’ before you even pitch them. This makes the process of closing on an investment with a prospect significantly easier.
Keep in mind too, that the best salespeople are often the ones you can barely even tell are selling you something. This is something that has proven to be true in seemingly every other industry and is no less so in real estate finance.
As soon as you get your message out online by providing information to your prospects about you that they can consume both in bite sized and full-length pieces you start to increasingly be seen as a thought leader. Without ever signing their name on a dotted line, you are giving prospects something they can directly benefit from for free—and without selling them anything, you’ve sold them on you.
Your prospects need information and, one way or another, they are determined to get it. Who is out there answering these questions? Who do they trust to answer future questions? Where is their need for information being satisfied?
By implementing what you’ve learned in this series, you will be creating a perpetual content machine. It will make you stand out from the crowd and put a bright sign on your company that you are open for business and a viable option for investible capital.
By shifting your website from being nothing more than a passive business card to becoming a lead generating machine, you will have entered the world of digital marketing. You will build a base of repeat active investors who recommend you to their friends and family and will, in time, create a network that will finance your portfolio no matter how big you want to grow.
Adam Gower Ph.D., who is an authority in real estate crowdfunding and is known as the creator of the Investor Acquisition System, combines a lifetime of experience in real estate investment and finance with best-of-class digital marketing tactics, techniques, and strategies to help crowdfund real estate syndications. Find out more in this new book, SYNDICATE or at GowerCrowd.com