This will not be one of those "How I went from 200 views to millions of views" posts. It's quite the opposite because I have a content problem, and I don't know how to solve it.
In my business, the big question I must answer is: "What would it take for someone who found me online to invest $50,000 into a real estate deal with me?" The high-level answer is that I need to create enough trust that I'll do what I say I'll do.
What I'm Doing
My current strategy for building enough trust for that type of investment is a content funnel:
- I create podcast episodes and videos to earn trust and attract potential investors.
- From those, they visit my website and either download a free due diligence guide or join my mailing list.
- That puts them on my email, where I educate them on passive investing & nurture the relationship.
- And ideally, they eventually invest with me once I build know, like, and trust.
On a typical week, I produce one podcast, three shorts/reels (from the podcast), and a summary carousel (of the podcast). This is sustainable for me (and Jessi).
My Results
Here are my typical stats:
- Podcast audio listens: 10
- Podcast video views: 532
- YouTube views per short: 1,991
- Instagram views per reel / carousel: 215 / 65
- LinkedIn views per podcast post / short / carousel: 23 / 7 / 41
- Weekly website visits: 62
- Email subscribers: 1-ish every 3 weeks
- Active investors who found me online: 0
At first glance, those numbers feel... underwhelming. I recognize that subscribers and views are vanity metrics and not my ultimate goal, but they're part of my funnel and feel low.
How Do I Improve?
I have an existing set of investors, which is fantastic, but I'd like to 10X that so we can do more/bigger deals. And for now, my biggest issue in reaching that goal is not having enough people at the top of the funnel. So, I'd like to 10X (or 100X?) each of those results above.
But I'm genuinely at a loss for what I need to improve. Here's an overwhelming list of questions I regularly ask myself:
- I've created my ideal customer profile based on current investors. Maybe I need to be more niche?
- I've taken classes to improve my video editing skills, but perhaps I need to increase the production quality significantly?
- I've gotten help with my YouTube SEO, but the impact isn't meaningful.
- I think the topics we discuss are relevant to investors... but maybe not?
- Maybe I should do epic real estate things (i.e., hard to replicate at home) and share them?
- Should I start or join an engagement pod where 4-10 of us like/comment on each other's posts to kickstart the ol' algorithms to promote them more? (probably not)
- Or, should I leave my $1.80 by commenting on 90 posts a day?
- I'm posting 1 video and 3 shorts a week. Should I increase to 1-2 a day? Is that sustainable?
- I like my titles and thumbnails, but perhaps they're not effective?
- Do I need to invest more time in understanding my retention analytics and optimizing what I have?
- Should I hire a social media guru? Probably not... But maybe there are folks who could coach me?
- Is this answer "yes" to all of them?!
So many questions! And yet, I simultaneously feel like I'm overthinking this!
What Would You Do?
The standard advice is to keep going and improve something 1% each time. I feel like that's what I'm doing, but... I don't know... It's discouraging. I'd like to try putting in 10X the effort, but a) I'm not sure where to put it, and b) I don't have that much time (or money to pay someone else to put in that much time) since this isn't directly related to my revenue.
In reality, if I attracted one qualified investor a month, that would be amazing! So, I don't need a huge following, but having more would be helpful.
So that's where I'm at. I'm open to feedback or ideas. :)
A few ideas, in no particular order… some of these might be technically off topic, but I think will help you accomplish your end goals:
ReplyDelete-Work out a system for referrals and ask your current investors if they know anyone that might be interested in investing with you.
-Paid social media PPC advertising.
-Engage in online communities: comment on others’ posts, and maybe create some posts of your own, establishing your expertise and the nature of your business. I’m thinking Reddit, forums like Bigger Pockets, etc. Isn’t there an offshoot of BP that’s for passive investing?
-More content would probably help, but to be honest, I don’t spend a lot of time looking at Instagram or reels or anything like that. Maybe that’s not really where your typical investor is spending their time. How about some in-person events?
-this is probably an interesting question to throw at AI. Try a prompt like: “act as an elite social media strategy firm and develop a plan to grow my audience and goal of identifying in building a relationship with high net worth passive real estate investors.” You’ll want to provide some detail about what your current activities are as well.
I’ll be interested to hear what you end up doing with all of this. Good luck! I personally love the podcast, I listen to the audio version. Looking at your statistics. I guess that makes me unusual, haha!
Thanks for the ideas. Those are all good ideas. An in-person event is a very interesting idea.
DeleteInteresting thought from Derek regarding where the investor spends his/her time. Would someone with a lot of extra cash they’re looking to invest spend their time on a podcast, reels, posts, etc. Maybe? Or would they gain trust through some other means? I appreciate your posts and advice and it’s fun to hear you and Jessi chatting away!
ReplyDeleteYeah. Good questions. Perhaps I need to go back and look at some of my base assumptions.
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