Get More Deals By Marketing Yourself

Welcome back to another module of the Short Term Lets and Service Accommodation course. Today, we’re going to talk about marketing and how we can do that specifically to landlords, to attract them as our avatar to make sure that we can find as many rent-to-rent deals as we possibly can.

Marketing is the lifeblood of any business. As you scale, your marketing costs will go up. You’ll look into more paid advertising and it will become a real part of your business. My internal team now in terms of marketing is huge and they all play a vital role in ensuring that we deliver on the results. You are no different, and you are going to have to start it off yourself. So starting investing in your marketing education would be my first and top tip for any business that you’re wanting to create.

Using Marketing Techniques To Solve Problems

So, let’s look at how we can do it for landlords. Landlords typically have properties and within that properties, they normally have a problem. So those problems can be a whole host of things. They can have void periods. They can have tenant damage. You can also have accidental landlords who inherit properties and don’t necessarily want to be landlords, but they can’t sell them. They can actually turn into good lease option deals. What else we’ve got? We’ve got voids, we’ve got tenant damage. They just want to change, they quite like the idea of change. So they may want to flip from what they’ve been doing to what they are now. This could be borne through Section 24 Tax.

So again, there is a video on my channel which explains what Section 24 is, but in brief, any landlord that has property in their personal name cannot write off the mortgage interest anymore if they are renting to a tenant. However, if they put it as a short let in the right fashion, then they can actually write that cost off, and ultimately they can pay less tax. So obviously, that becomes quite attractive to them. In the main, they’re in the majority of the properties.

I guess one other would be low turn-around costs. What I mean by that is every time a tenant leaves, typically a landlord’s paying anywhere from probably 750 to a couple of grand to turn that property around and get a new tenant in, new carpets, new paints, things like that if they’re lucky. If they’ve had a bad tenant, then they could be looking into the thousands, or I have seen tens of thousands in some cases. So they’re typically the problems that landlords have.

Now what we want to do with our marketing is we want to talk about those problems. Whenever the landlords read about how your service can solve their problem, they’re going to naturally reach out. So the main thing we want to do is talk about the problem. In all of your content that you’re putting out there, you want to be figuring out who your ideal avatar is, and then what their problems are, and then you want to talk about how your service solves those problems. That is pretty much basic marketing.

So here we have the problem and here we have the ideal scenario of where they want to go and where they want to be, what life looks like when they have solved their problems. Here we have what’s called the gap. Now your service fills the gap. So you need to talk about how your service solves this problem and get them to that scenario.

Issues and Problems Of The Landlords

Let’s just look at the void issue for one. So the problem is the void. Their experience of voids, every couple of months, they’ve got a tenant leave. Let’s say every 14 months they have two or three months of voids while the tenant turns around and they also have the cost of the refurbishment in there as well. Now, by using your service, you can potentially because you’re going to run it as a business, as long as you’ve got the right area, which we’ll look at that in the up-and-coming videos around the deal analysis, we have got the right properties, then you’re going to make money out of it. So there’s no reason why you’re going to want to give that property back. You’re going to want to continue for many years, 3, 5, 10 years, possibly even more. So your service is going to help the landlords escape the void, and then ultimately over here, they’re going to make more profit because no void periods equals more profit. Fairly simple. So your service is going to fill the gap.

Your service also, in terms of the refurbishment cost here that they’re going to have to incur, is also going to reduce the costs which increase the profit and reduces the hassle. How do we do that? Well, on our service, we’re cleaning the properties once, if not twice per week. Every time a guest comes out, we have to fully deep-clean the properties. We’re cleaning the microwaves. We’re cleaning the ovens. We’re emptying the wardrobes. We’re emptying the drawers. They are full, deep-cleans. Tenants don’t do that. You’d be lucky if a tenant cleans the property once the whole time they’re there, never mind the microwaves and the ovens. So that reduces the increased maintenance cost at the end of the term, which increases profit and reduces hassles because then they’re not having to sort it out.

So there are many ways that our service, can market to landlords. All we got to do is put this in a nice message, whether it’s a long-form story post, whether it’s a short post, whether it’s in an image, whether it’s in a banner, whether it’s in a PDF format that we’re sending to people. There are so many different ways that you can market both online and offline, but storytelling is probably one of the best ways, and that’s how you can talk to a problem and then get them to reach out when they’re good and ready.

Understand The Pitch

Now, one thing that I see, which I really, really, really encourage you not to do is what I call “pitch posting”. All they do is pitch services. You see it all the time on LinkedIn in your inbox. If you’re on LinkedIn, you’ll understand exactly what I mean. I am the best company. We have the best service. We can do X, Y, Z. “Well, you don’t know anything about me. You don’t understand my problems. You’ve not once even talked about my problems.” So that’s how your posting just doesn’t work. It’s why it doesn’t get many responses. Also, you see it online, like “I’ve got this. I’ve got this. I’ve got this.” If you’re talking about you or we or me far too much, then that’s bad marketing. You want to be talking about them. So who is the avatar? What is the problem they’re facing? How can you solve that problem for them? What are the benefits to them? Don’t think about what you can get. It doesn’t matter how great your service is. No one really cares. What they want to know is how you can solve their problem.

If you solve problems, you will live in abundance. It is that simple. If you can solve problems for people and you can add value to people’s lives, you will live in abundance. You will have more money coming to you than you can possibly ever imagine if you can unlock how to talk to people’s problems. If you can do that in your marketing, it’s an absolute game-changer. That’s how you can do it, in brief, to try and attract the landlord.

There are so many different ways that you can look at this. There are so many different problems. Just come up with a problem, and figure out what it is. What’s the gap? What’s the ideal scenario? Talk about how you take them from that problem, your service helps, and they end up there. Then, in the end, you always want a call to action of “Ring this number if you’re interested, or if you are feeling like this is you, then send us a DM” or whatever the call to action is. It doesn’t matter, but always make sure there is a call to action because people like to be told what to do. It might surprise you, but they do, and if you don’t tell them what to do, nine times out of ten, they won’t.

So if you don’t tell them like me now, “Go and subscribe to this channel. Hit the notification bell so you get all the different videos in the series because you don’t want to miss out on them because there’s valuable content like this”, nine times out of ten, you’re now going to maybe subscribe to the channel. If I don’t tell you to do that, then you’re more than likely, it’s not on your mind, and therefore you just watch this video and switch it off, and then you miss all the next videos. So tell people what to do. Tell them what the call to action is.

That’s how we use marketing for rent-to-rent deals and that’s how I’ve used it all over the internet. Facebook, Instagram, Gumtree, all over, LinkedIn. There are so many free places. All you’re doing is exchanging time for money. So your time is all you’re giving out. This isn’t costing you anything. You just need to invest in yourselves. Get more educated. Try, test, post, and see what works. You might do a post like this. It might not get anything. You might do 10 posts like that and it might not get anything, but then your 12th post might be because you’re just tweaking the words slightly or you’re tweaking the benefits slightly, or you’re just coming at the problem from a different angle.

Summary

So it’s really important that you don’t give up. With marketing, it’s all about volume. Just get volume out there, especially at the beginning. As you get better, you will want to refine the volume into quality, but at the beginning, it’s quantity. Just get it out there. Find out what works. When you find a piece that does work, try and make it better. That’s called split testing and then you’re constantly improving over and over again.

As I mentioned before, it is now time to close the video off. Go to my Youtube channel, Hit that bell notification and subscribe.