I am certain that marketing is important to your real estate business. In fact in my 20 years of business I’ve come to learn that marketing “is” your business. If you are not marketing you are dead (or will be soon).

It does not matter what business you are in, whether you are selling sandwiches, cars, magazines, services, mortgages or real estate they all require marketing if you are going to stay in business very long.

In fact, as I stated above, if you are really going to CRUSH it in your real estate business your focus needs to be on marketing almost exclusively to everything else. This is what I mean by marketing “is” your business.

Whatever business you are in, it is just a byproduct of the marketing that you do to generate leads. Leads that become prospects and prospects that become customers.

Why do so few business owners and real estate investors spend such little time on marketing? If marketing should be your number one focus (that and sales), why spend such little time focused on marketing and testing different marketing messages?

I believe the answer to this is two-fold. Most investors and business owners believe that they do not have enough money to spend on marketing. Or, worse, they believe that they ARE marketing by handing out business cards, attending networking meetings and talking about their business on Facebook, twitter, instagram etc.

I’m not saying that there is anything wrong with going to your local REIA meeting or posting things about your business on social media. In fact I encourage these things to all of my clients. However, as far as marketing goes these things are the SLOW train to the future that you want.

If you want to move your business forward and begin to make money, and I mean real money, you must start spending time becoming a marketing ninja! And what does a ninja do to prepare himself…he trains grasshopper…he trains.

So, what does this look like in your real estate business?

Well, I don’t care if your focus is on rentals, fix and flip or wholesaling…each of these disciplines requires marketing if you ever want to make any money. To give you an idea of how important marketing is you should know that I have two long time colleagues of mine, both of who are full time real estate investors, that spend $100k per MONTH in marketing! And, no that is not a typo…$100k per month!

They would not be doing this if it was not making them obscene amounts of money. And, I can assure you that it makes them a grip of cash.

Now, I can hear some of you saying to yourself, I don’t have $100k per month to spend on marketing Andy. Heck, I don’t have very much money at all to spend on marketing, what am I supposed to do?

The answer is that you need to start…today. These guys didn’t start off spending $100k/mo. They started off very small just like I am recommending you to do. I want you to test out your marketing with small amounts of money and tweak until you get the right formula. Once you have the right formula you can ramp it up because you have the revenue coming in the door to support spending on more marketing.

If you want to stay in business for long, you must be marketing. I cannot stress this enough. In your real estate investing business I would recommend to start with direct mail. It has a cost associated with it but it works like gang-busters in bringing you deals.

If you are a fix and flipper, wholesaler or rental investor we all need deals. Our businesses go nowhere with out more deals in the pipeline. Sending out direct mail to a targeted list of “off-market” sellers on a consistent basis is one of the best ways to attract deals.

Right now I am sending 4 different postcards to the same person, regarding the same house every week for 4 weeks and it is working like a charm. You could start doing this in your business as well with as little as $500 – $1k.

Pick an area that you are interested in and get a list of the foreclosure properties in that area, or vacant houses, or absentee owners with equity. The point is to get started. Test your marketing message. Track everything.

The other place where marketing is so important is in selling (or renting) your property. If you are a wholesaler you need to be marketing to investor buyers who pay cash. If you are a flipper you need to be marketing to the retail buyer through the MLS, Zillow, Trulia, Redfin etc.

When I used to have a large wholesaling business I was continually marketing to investor buyers. This was something that I spent money on every single month and wanted to grow that list FOREVER. The more investors I had in my database the more money I could command for my wholesale deals through internal investor competition.

I hope you have heard me loud and clear today and take my advise. Marketing on a consistent and regular basis is the #1 way for you to build your business into a cash flowing machine.

In the real estate investing business marketing is paramount to your success. Begin spending time on a daily and weekly basis crafting your marketing message to your audience of both buyers and sellers. Take action today. I know you will be glad you did.