Welcome to this week in marketing! My name is Jason Pantana your host and I'm so glad you're tuned in, listening, watching, and whatever service you're consuming this content. I'm glad you're here and if you're new to the Channel please make sure to tap that big red subscribe button and there's a bell right next to it that if you click it, it turns on notifications. So whenever new episodes get released, you get a notification. so you're the first to know about it and therefore the first to implement and get the results coming in your direction your business.

So I'm glad you're here without further. Ado Let's dive into the topic with my super special guest. Jesse Stein Talking about the modern landscape of digital marketing and what are some opportunities in the physical marketing space if you're running a local business, If you're a Realtor and doing any kind of a business where it's you in a specific target market area, your ability to reach customers is becoming more and more difficult, more and more strenuous, and it's going to require more Ingenuity than it has in the past years. Because guess what? digital marketing is changing.

There is a friend toward more privacy, which is a great thing. It's a great opportunity, but if you're a marketer and you don't know what's going on when it comes to Data Tracking analytics and privacy, you're potentially holding back the impact of your marketing. And so today's conversation is with an expert in the space of all things digital marketing. not just in the real estate space, but in a wide variety of Arenas and he's going to lend his expertise specifically on a couple of matters that are of critical importance to you.

As a local business owner, that is your ability to Market through some old school channels that have had kind of a Renaissance and there's a massive opportunity right now in the old school channels. but also how do you get the data of for instance, homeowners inside of your Geographic farm so you can ensure that your marketing is targeting the right audiences to grow and scale your brand to attract more business? And so I will be joined today by an Absolute Wizard of Marketing named Jesse Stein who is the founder and the CEO of Audience.com which is an amazing company. I'm sure we'll get into some of the details about what they do in the interview, but he is. It's a long history of other startups, most of which worked, some of which did not, but has a lot of experience in terms of digital marketing and what is the convergence of digital marketing in a physical world? And how do those come together? And how do you build a brand and Trust at a local level? So Jesse thank you so much for joining us! I Am so glad to have you here today.

Thanks for having me! Jason Okay, now we're going to talk about a bunch of nerdy stuff so I kind of foreshadowed it a little bit. I Want to have a conversation about what's happening in the world of data privacy? and I wonder if you could share with the audience what you're saying? And I'm thinking about the app tracking transparency framework I'm thinking about sort of the Embargo on third-party data and third-party cookies and that might go over a lot of people's heads because they're just trying to run their businesses. But how would you explain what's happening in that context? Yeah, so you have to be extraordinarily careful when in doubt. Uh, never reach out to a cold homeowner.

So the name of the game is, you need to warm up that homeowner. So that piece of outbound marketing whether it's a phone call and remember, you have to be in alignment with state laws. Whether it's an email, whether you're door knocking, whether any form of outbound must be to an audience that you've warmed up first and it's a more difficult environment for sure. since iOS 14 came out a couple of years ago on iPhone What that was was it made Facebook and Instagram ad Impressions way less targeted because it made it, some of the apps on iPhone couldn't share data across app and it just made Facebook and Instagram Impressions less targeted.

So a lot of Realtors and other small businesses were using Facebook and Instagram and some still do, but those are less targeted and so now folks are moving toward other forms of marketing. But the name of the game is restraint. And if you don't have something to give of real value to that homeowner, then don't reach out that. hey, if all this talk about the quality of your marketing, the quality of your videos, the value in your emails has you questioning if your marketing is truly up to Snuff And you recognize there could be a strategic opportunity for you to level up and improve your marketing message and thereby the results of your marketing.

Then make sure to check out our course series Marketing Pro It's three online courses packed together. one that talks about social media and video, one that talks about email marketing at the best level, and one that talks about how to dial in your Google business profile to get found by more customers online. All those elements brought together in one series called marketing Pro To take your marketing to the next level, if you're interested, click the link in the description. I Dig that.

One of my favorite all-time marketing quotes is from Jay Baer He said make your marketing so useful. People would pay you for it and you're describing the origins of Seth Godin's permission-based marketing Market When you have the permission, it's warming up an audience. I Fundamentally agree and you talked about the app tracking, transparency framework and the impact that's put on or the strain that's put on platforms like Facebook and Instagram in terms of their ability to let you track hey, who's on your website so you can retarget them on Facebook and Instagram and that data has become a lot less reliable. Compounding that, you also have special ad categories that have a lot of a lot of the restrictions from special ads in the real estate space.

Anybody who's had advertising in real estate should already know there's a lot of rules and regulations depending upon where you're watching from. like, for example, fair housing you should not and cannot Market in a way that's discriminating. Uh, and so Facebook A few years ago, they got sued about enabling this to happen and it was happening and it wasn't okay. And when they made the corrections, they called it.

special ads category and housing is under this umbrella of special ads categories and it effectively puts up if you're playing a game of bowling. It's like gutter guards like you just can't go there. They effectively block your ability to Target certain interests or intent signals or ways that you might Target somebody you believe is actually an ideal candidate to buy or sell a house on a specific market, for instance. But they've also added a lot of geographic limitations and so, uh, we're I'm.

sure most people listening and watching know that you can't Target zip codes anymore, and this is carried over into Google and to YouTube and all other platforms because they want to insulate against the possibility of some kind of a press auditory, discriminating form of marketing. And it's and it's great. but this keeps getting a little bit more so. for example, Facebook or Meta that is recently remove the ability to Target people who live in a specific area it used to be.

You could create an ad where hey, I can do a 15 mile radius still of people who live in were recently in or are actively traveling to an area, but now you can't do that. It's all blurred and so what I'm getting at is is becoming more difficult to reach the audience that's in your backyard that may be looking to buy or sell a house for instance. And so I want to have that conversation today about what do you do to work around that I Wonder if you have any other thoughts? I could just give some light to this this world of privacy and transparency and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, so you just want to be really careful when you buy homeowner data for instance.

Okay, so you don't want to buy random lists of uh, you want to go through real channels. And so for example, we with our handwritten note service, we sell homeowner data and we only go through the best providers. And so you want to look at folks like Property Radar like Property Shark for New York City Specifically and Street Street, there's services like that that can be really good and then you want to enhance or enrich the data with services like Hunter.io where you can take the data and enrich with email addresses for example. But again, the overarching like the the bumper sticker is add value and so you'll learn wrong.

If that's your true North and your mission truly and your guileless, right, you're not working angles with the homeowner. You are truly obsessed with serving more, protecting, more, educating, more, helping, more, assisting, more, guiding, more, creating more intelligent market reports. Really, really helping them without any expectation of anything in return. right? Give, give give give, and at the end of that rainbow, you will absolutely get.

And so that should be your Guiding Light And that is a Common Thread that runs through. Super Hyper Successful. Realtors Who have made a career of being a phenomenal guide? Totally so. I Imagine there's a lot of folks listening watching right now.

Who would absolutely say this guy's right. That's right. You have to create valuable content You have to create. You have to go give to get.

That is the nature of it. And I do think you know. Phil Jones Talks about, um, from a sales standpoint, using his scripts and dialogues or his language patterns in his book. It's not what you do to somebody.

it's what you do for them. And in the same sense, marketing isn't what you do to somebody, it's what you do for them. So I I Think we all agree your marketing has to be useful if your marketing isn't useful, if this isn't valuable, if it's just the same ad over and over and over again. we can break down all the walls today in terms of we can still show you how to reach your Target customer.

but if you don't reach them with the right message in a way that adds value to their lives, they're still not going to want to work with you. notwithstanding. I Think there are a lot of folks who are watching and listening and would agree and they would say yeah I Want access to my consumer again because I believe the message I'm sharing with them is valuable to their lives in the real estate application, it's you know. Hey, we want to help you stay informed about what's happening in your backyard your local Marketplace But it is becoming more difficult to do that online because of a lot of restrictions that are imposed against in particular the Housing Industry.

So you made a comment about being able to use tools like property radar where I'll just fill in some gaps or backstories. So what you're getting at it sounds like is hey, most of these advertising portals like meta like Tick Tock like Google they enable advertisers ieu, the people who are watching and listening to create a customer list of data that is of potentially the homeowners and your Geographic farm for instance is the first name is their last name, is their email address, their mobile phone number, whatever data you have and you can create that list and upload it into one of these platforms and theoretically direct your ads. that is your content that is valuable in and of itself at that audience so they can get exposure and warm them up. Is that where you're going with this? Yeah, for sure.

I mean all all Marketing in 2023 and Beyond is omnichannel and totally integrated And so and I always look for where is the underpriced attention right? And you refer to Jay Bear earlier who's like one of my favorites Him: uh, you know Andy Sternowitz These Word of Mouth marketing experts like it's like how to turn your customers into volunteer marketers, right? Jay Abraham talks about how it should. You should be so good as a trust as a trusted advisor for life that you. It's a moral imperative to ask for a referral. So I look at I look at like you you ask like okay, you get these lists from from places like Property Radar and others.

Let's say you upload them into your brokerage CRM or into a phenomenal CRM like a follow-up boss or other. What do you do with it? How do you start? Where do you begin Or what don't you do with it? Maybe we start there. The thing that you don't do with it is you do Not mass email people on solicited. Repeat that please, Never Ever mass email unsolicited If you if you want to very quickly, uh, get rejected and dejected and and uh, yeah, asked aside as a realtor in your Farms absolutely mass email mass text be annoying, please.

Uh, because it'll It'll backfire almost immediately, people. It will be cringy at best, and at worst you'll get a nastygram from uh from multiple law firms who troll for this sort of thing. and they have automated systems. Uh, and so just don't don't do it.

It's not only so, don't mass email the list no matter how good the or reputable the provider from whom you got the data is. don't mass email the list. But what can you do with the list? Yeah, so you can send handwritten notes for example, to the list. um, offering something of value.

Uh, and you would want to test a small portion. Yeah, see how it responds. So let's just say that you want a farm. 500 households? Um, and and remember, like always, keep in mind that the the real goal.

Don't put the cart before the horse, right? You want to make sure you nurture your your transactions here before and those are the folks. So those are the buyers and the sellers that you've dealt with in the past and we we all know that but we all uh, tend to forget it sometimes. So let's say you've got a list of 500 that you've bought um from us from property radar, property sharks Street Easy Um, somewhere out there and you want to go to a place like, um, like unbounce? Um, and then you want to um I'm sorry, Zero Zero Bounce and others and you want to make sure those emails are hygienic, that they're clean. So it's really important.

Even if you get emails from a place like Hunter.io for homeowners, those emails might be bad. they might not be open anymore. So what does talk about Like what a Spam trap and what these Bad Emails might be and what that could do as a consequence to a marketer? Absolutely. So there are law firms for example that will seed emails into lists.

Um, just to see if your mass emailing a group of people unsolicited with no unsubscribe link. So make make certain as well that if you ever email a group of people that you do it through a proper CRM and that you have a working unsubscribe link, you don't want to be one of those super annoying people that emails the unsubscribe link is not there. So you want to make sure you do that. Go go to a place like Zero Bounce first and it cost pennies And you can.

You can run a list of 500 emails through that and and come up with ones that, um, that are not good anymore. And then you can dip your toe in the water before doing a cannonball. So you want to make sure that you might reach out to ten percent of that list again with something of value. a market report.

Um, I'll I'll get your home valuation for you some something, uh, valuable. It could even be a neighborhood Report with some interesting uh, maybe you interviewed the head of admissions for the private school and you did this amazing interview right? and you want to share that with people? Maybe you interviewed the the Mayor of the town and and you want you want to talk about that again like how can I help? how can I add value So you want to just keep that as your Guiding Light And then when it comes to uh, phone and text like almost I Mean there's multiple states that ban it in the first time? Absolutely, you don't even want to go there. Uh, But then when you call, right? that should always be to an audience that's been warmed up either by a note or you met them at a you know, a networking event, or somehow that audience is warm. Otherwise, you're just going to be annoying and you may get yourself into legal trouble so you can call.

and you can text in states that allow it. but you want to do it very cautiously and only to warm audiences. Yeah, and also be aware of any other overarching federal laws like the Telephone Consumer Protection Act the Do Not Call List Etc et cetera. But let's go I Want to go back for a second and just talk about the general line of logic that we're seeing happen here.

Uh, digital marketing is just a level of access to Consumers we've never had before, but now it's changing. Over the past two to three years, we've seen some pretty significant inroads in terms of uh, consumer privacy and putting the consumer first online. And that's all good. It's excellent.

However, some of the tools we've long relied on as marketers and advertisers to Target people in specific Geographic areas or people with different interests or intent signals that would make them seem like the right people to Target your content toward or your ads toward that's been lessened. in terms of its impact. We've seen changes like the app tracking transparency framework. we've seen uh, special ad categories, we've seen personalized advertising policies on Google and all these different uh elements coming together that make it more challenging and so what can you do? Well, I Think there's two things you can do.

First and foremost, you still have the ability as an Advertiser and this conversation between us is more about the advertising side of it. It's not just like we're not saying you shouldn't be doing your traditional content on social media and it's not that at all. But from an advertising standpoint, if you're for example, trying to dominate as a geographic Farm area in your backyard, it's getting harder. So what can you do? Well, most these ad portals Tick Tock Meta Google they enable advertisers to upload customer lists whereby you can Target directly at those people.

and what you're saying you can do is you can go to reputable services to get that list data. You mentioned property radar. there's there's tons of them out there. You said enriching it with Hunter.io to fill in or skip Trace other missing data points and then scrubbing your list looking for spam traps or faulty little numbers that are not actually in service through I think you said it was Zero Bounce? Yeah, and then what can you do? So that brings us to what can you do with that list.

Well, assuming everybody listening and watching is operating from the standpoint of I'm not trying to spam anybody I'm simply trying to add value and reach the right customers with the right information to help them make informed choices assuming your heart is in the right place. I Think you have a couple of really powerful options right now. One is creating those customer list custom audiences in your targeted campaigns on Meta and other platforms and what? I In in my simple mind, here's what: I think you already have their email address and I'm curious. Your thoughts on this.

You already have it. We're not going to email it. We're not going to email it because we don't really have permission to email it. There is this invisible line of demarcation between what I would call personal communication channels and in personal communication channels, sending somebody physical mail is somehow deemed an impersonal communication Channel Because it's not as restricted in the context of permission marketing, but texting or calling or emailing somebody is on the other side of that fence.

Targeting an audience with ads is on the fence side of impersonal comparatively. Would you agree with that so far? Oh boy. custom audiences are no-brainer and you'll spend just pennies doing it. With an audience of 500 or 750 or or a thousand, you'll spend a couple bucks a day and it's just yet another touch.

And I totally agree with you. I would do it with an offer designed to get them to give you their email address so that now you have the permission to actually email them I Have some clients doing it right now and they're spending about a dollar to two dollars a day generating email addresses and then they're now. they're long enough into it. We're like we're starting to see we got the email here for a buck on Facebook or whatever and now they're searching for homes and now they're out on the field with my agents on the team buying properties.

Wow, we just attract and and what was the offer that got the email address? They were just giving good information about the market. It was like like you were talking about a market update. So there's there's that side of the coin which is customer list custom audiences targeting them and getting them to give you the email address because you gave them an offer that warranted it. But then talk more about the other opportunities of physical mail.

And yeah, I want to hear your thoughts on this? Yeah, so again, all all marketing has to be integrated and so physical. Now the reason I Started Audience.co which has robots that hold pins and write just like humans and we do Awesome! Yeah, it's cool. It's really cool. We have 350 robots and we work with thousands of agents and um, it's It's phenomenal.

It gets six times the response of normal direct mail and then people if you do it right. uh, like I'm holding up a card right now if you do it right on a fixed stock card with a beautiful graphic with no branding on the front that is a local Landmark that resonates with their community. and then you make the note bifold like we do and you give them an opportunity to respond easily with a QR code label and maybe a cool little um, doodle inside that resonates with your brand somehow. Then what happens is, unlike other marketing, you kind of defy the time space continuum.

and I know that sounds esoteric, but this is what I mean by that. You cut through the noise, you cut through the noise, and you get people to keep and display it unlike email unlike normal Direct Mail unlike a Facebook ad impression and do all of those things, do everything you need to be integrated. Do the bus bench, you know what, whatever it takes. But the cool thing about the hand Unwritten note is it forms a deeper bond with people in your farm and sphere and then they keep and display it.

and so when they are interested, you're top of mind. and then the key with physical uh ad Impressions is you have to follow the user Journey now kind of. from their mailbox to their inbox you have to like they're living in the Digital World um most of the time and so you have to follow them there. And so once you've warmed up the audience with that cool note and remember what you're doing here is you want to add, you want to introduce yourself.

You want to add value. Don't make stuff up about fake buyers that you have. if you don't really have those buyers that are really looking for their home, don't mention it. If you do, by all means, that's adding value to them that they just missed out on buying a home.

Just be honest, but introduce yourself and be Earnest and then add value and maybe the QR code takes them to a market report. Uh, maybe it just enter and maybe you're just leaving them with a Keepsake and that's all the purpose was. You left them with this beautiful note that they display on their kitchen counter, on their fridge, on their home office desk, on their mantle. Whatever.

And it's cool and they'll remember you as a result. Then you can follow you, create custom audiences inside of meta and so forth. But my favorite thing now it's a couple things now. Number one: LinkedIn message ads are the red-headed stepchild of the digital marketing.

World Um, not a lot of people really do those because they're perceived as annoying when you're on LinkedIn and those of you that are listening, you're watching if you're on LinkedIn that's your kind of the LinkedIn messages that come in, uh, into your inbox and most of them are it's called in mail. Most of them are pretty annoying. It's like yeah, I have an I.T company and I really wanted. They're not targeted, but if you sent them a note, those LinkedIn message ads are somewhere between 30 cents and a dollar depending and you can send them with a very targeted message.

Hey, I Just wanted to follow up on the handwritten note I sent and make sure you got the market report that I prepared specifically for you for example. So LinkedIn message ads number One I I Love I Love that I think it's it's underpriced as an ad impression, the rest of LinkedIn is is pretty overpriced actually in my in my opinion. And then the second thing I'm super excited about the these days is vertical video. Short vertical video between 30 seconds and a minute and you know I just was super lucky and had one of my vertical videos go viral.

It's got like 10.8 million views and I love to do that. To me, it's more just like Luck algorithm and a really cool hack that I got to teach. But the cool thing? This is the first time since the beginning of social media that there's a single ad format that is native to all the major platforms. So vertical video that is holding your phone up like a phone and not landscape, right? that's holding up.

Uh, selfie mode that format is native to Instagram of course Tick Tock which we can talk about in a minute. which is not just for selling hoodies to 14 year olds anymore. There are multiple multiple Realtors and other and many others quietly crushing it on tick tock. Facebook Twitter Even Uh has a native vertical video SnapChat But the point is is that you can create a really cool piece of content and boy in another session I'd Love to talk about um Ai and how to use AI in ways that are um, not expected but really really useful to then create awesome content for vertical video that you can then publish using uh, Social Media management platform like a HootSuite or another tool.

So you create like a 45 second piece of content vertical and you can push it out to all the Platforms in one film. So I'm really, really excited about that. So if I could double down on that, not only can you do that, but I would argue that the content you're theoretically pushing out through vertical video is presumably the content that's most useful to your consumer and therefore could very well be the content that you put money behind when you create ads to ensure that it's what they see Because we know that you know your video that went viral with 10 million views, which is amazing. Those views were scattered all over the world.

But if you're doing business in a local area, well, social media isn't overly local. and so if you're running a local business, you have to be very strategic in terms of how will I ensure that my content reaches the right local audience. There's a couple of ways to do that. One is make hyper local content that only locals would truly care about and share about, but the other is pay to play.

But pay to play is so much more restricted now unless you leverage the custom audience targeting options whereby yes, posted organic yes, add value, but yes, Also, hedge and double down that they're going to see your content by putting money behind that content so that they're seeing you everywhere. You talked about, uh, the magic of multi-channel marketing. You talked about bus, you talked about, the handwritten notes you talked about LinkedIn messages. and the the interesting thing about marketing, especially when you talk about geographic farming I think a lot of Agents Look at farming and they think, oh, it's postcards.

No postcards is a channel that is leveraged as part of a marketing plan for a Geo Farm But it's not the end-all be-all If you look at any one channel alone, it's typically less useful than if you combine it with other channels you keep using the word Integrated Integrated Marketing is a foundation staple of all things marketing. And so if you're going to crush your dominant or dominate your local market area, it's all the above. It's that convergence of physical and digital coming together. It's the direct mail and or the handwritten notes.

It's the get in their mailbox. It's the get in their feeds. It's to let them see you everywhere. And when they see you because your content is so useful, because you're not just a shark, they're going to love you for it.

Now, if you take what we're talking about here today to pump out a message that is tone deaf Falls flat annoys, then you amplify that. you get whatever you attract. So you're either going to attract annoyance or opportunity based upon the quality of your marketing 100 and um, and it you might get short-term gain from standing on a mountain and holding a big megaphone and yelling really loud for a little bit. Yeah, for a very short period of time, the half-life on that is very short.

And if you're dabbling in you know, in real estate and you're you're a toe Dipper then you know, go for it. Uh, but it's it's not going to create a career. A great example is a guy that we've been working with for three years. Um, he did a half a billion dollars in uh in sales last last year.

He's one of the top Douglas Element agents worldwide. His name is David Siddens I'll shout him out. Um, he actually sold my wife in my home a couple months ago. He's a great example of um: You do everything.

You do everything and then when someone lands on your website, have that chat feature enabled where they and they can and then have a form enabled where they can easily submit a lead and this is exactly to your point. Jace Which is you know, don't email them unless they've raised their hand. Classic Seth Godin right? It's permission marketing and Seth actually was my inspiration for going the internet when I watched him speak in 1999 and Tavern on the Green in New York City I was inspired by Seth too 100. He's awesome.

But yeah, only when they raise their hand or only after you have worn them up and evoked the most valuable thing of all which is reciprocity. And so when you evoke reciprocity without expectation of anything in return, it'll blow you away. And David is a great example. Sentence is a great example of someone who has embraced every form of marketing.

Then what happens is I've watched him, he'll hold his phone and here's a here's a guy who doesn't need to hustle this hard. But he does. He holds his phone and then the moment someone fills out a form he resp on his website, he responds immediately with a phone call, an email and says thank you so much. Uh, another example of uh, the way that someone like him is is integrated in his marketing approaches.

He'll send her handwritten notes and then we'll go door-to-door with brownies and then he'll door knock and offer something of value. Doesn't ask for anything, he doesn't He doesn't say I've got buyers, he just says Hey I was the guy I've sent you a couple of handwritten notes I Just wanted to stop by with brownies and the ribbon is branded with his name and then he'll create custom audiences. He'll hit them there. Yes, he interviews all the admissions directors for all the private schools.

Yes, he knows when all the pre-construction projects are happening. He puts on a hard hat, He makes friends with the developers and he stands there. He takes a video and he says everything he knows about that pre-construction project. He'll transcribe it.

I recommend you use a service like Temi Temi.com to transcribe whatever you do and then you can transcribe and you can turn that into other content. So it's all about integrated marketing. Dude, we could talk for flipping hours and we probably need to do round two of this because I think we could go to the AI route I Think we could go talk more about. Okay, how do you take a seed of content and turn it into an entire Forest of content? There's so much more we could get out on.

uh, today though. I think we I think we cover some important issues. We cover the importance of: if you're running a local business of any type: Realtors You're running a local business. how are you going to become the dominant agent and create I call it a put a dome over your town of just saturation in a way that doesn't create.

you know, don't don't amplify noise, amplify value. How do you do that? Well, You do that through a combination I would argue of getting the right owner data and the right marketing channels and the right message and put it everywhere. and Time and Time and Time which was implied in what you said So Yeah, Absolutely. And time and a lot of patience.

especially in this market. Yep, Uh, Jesse Where can they follow you? Uh, they can follow me on Instagram at Jesse.stein with an extra in at the end. It's a long long story. My kids created that username.

Uh, or just go to Audience.com You can check out our handwriting robots which are pretty cool. Love it! Awesome dude! Thank you so much for joining and for those watching I Want to know what your takeaways were? What are your challenges or questions? Drop them in the comments and we want to keep making shows that offer value to help you level up your marketing. Until next week. This is this week in Marketing Foreign.