Has anyone done this successfully?
I would like to buy TV time in the Atlanta market, but the cost is more than my one-man operation can handle. Actually, it’s not even so much the money, but really the quantity of leads that would come in.
I thought about pooling my dollars with four other investors and then together spending $12,500 per month to run a TV campaign for three to six months. We’d then split up the leads in an agreed-upon format.
Has anyone done something like this? Successfully?
Who would decide which leads went to who? Who’s phone number or website would be in the commericial or would you use a neutral site or number that catches all the responses to be divided up later?
I’d have to ask iof there’s an actual business plan around this idea. How many leads are you expecting?
12k per month is a lot when you can spend a couple hundred on bandit signs and see more direct profit. Returns from direct mail, classified ads, or television is somewhere between 0-2%. Television advertising is usually considered PR and not lead generation. People may know your brand name, but if you really want to make money, you should use the other lead generation activities investors use on this site.
Pooling one’s resources and combining forces from a marketing standpoint allows you “to cover more ground for less”.
In the corporate and retail worlds, this is called co-op or cooperative advertising/marketing.
Sounds great in theory, but as they say, the “devil is in the details”.
Regards,
Scott Miller
My business plan does not allow for bandit signs. I don’t like them.
$12,500 is a good monthly broadcast television budget in the Atlanta market. Based on thorough research, I have an idea as to how many calls, leads, and deals should come through. The numbers are right.
This is not a stand-alone effort. I would continue to do direct mail and some display advertising, as well as mobile marketing and some outdoor marketing, too.
While I agree that much of TV spending is about branding, it absolutely has the ability to serve as a direct-response channel. Any TV ad that you’ve seen with an 800 number is geared toward direct response, and I’ll bet you’ve seen plenty. Moreover, in the Atlanta market, the number of people past due is so high that even a carpet-bomb approach like television makes a lot of sense.
The question was not about whether TV is good or will work. The question is has anyone here ever done this shared advertising successfully.
As for how the leads are shared, that could be done on either a rotating basis or by county or whatever the investors agree on. And much like how the other real estate marketing companies work (1800PAYCASH, 1800NOAGENT), there would be a central Web site and central phone number.
Thank you, all, for your interest and feedback.
Yes, there is a business model out there for just this type of situation. As stated 1800PayCash, 1800CashForHouses, and even 1800BuyKwik all do this already.
Some have people pay for a county, so if the caller is from that county, you get the lead, other break it down by Zip Code or village.
I have been sharing marketing costs with other investors. We even have a “JUMP” web page set up. Think of it like when you go to WEATHER.COM and before you can get the forecast, you have to type in your city name or zipcode? Well, they do that for the property, then are routed to the existing website for each of us, depending on where the property is located.
Now, if you are just pushing out flyers, my suggestion is to find a company already doing it, offer to split the cost if you can get on one side of the flyer and they are on the other.