Leveraging AI in Real Estate Investment Marketing

"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host Brandon Bateman, and today I'm joined by Jeff Megs. Jeff is a strategist on our team and has worked with over 50 of our real estate investment clients. We're going to talk with him all about in-housing versus outsourcing your PPC, what makes the most sense for you and your situation."

"All right, how you doing today Jeff?"

"Doing great, how about you?"

"Yeah, doing awesome. Thank you. This is, uh, for anybody that doesn't know Jeff, he's one of our strategists. He works with many of our clients, and he's getting married really soon, right?"

"Yes, how long till the wedding?"

"August 11th, so it's like what, like a week and a half now?"

"A week and a half away, yeah. Soon to be the proud... I'm going from zero to four all at once, so there's a bit of a learning curve. But uh, it's... I'm super excited and really happy. I couldn't be happier right now."

"Well, so I was gonna rely on the rest of the episode to convince everybody why Jeff is a crazy person, but I guess um, I guess you all know right now. You now know you have to be crazy to be able to uh, to handle all of it, right?"

"Yeah, at once, but yeah, I love it. Love it."

"Yeah, absolutely insane. I couldn't imagine it, but uh, you do it with a smile and I guess that's how we would describe your job too."

"Yeah, so yes, thank you. Really excited for our topic today. We're going to talk about in-housing versus working with an agency, basically different ways that you can get the job done when it comes to PPC specifically. There are a lot of different layers of this and everything, and I know that you and I, Jeff, have both had experiences with this for better or worse, both ways."

"There's a lot of talk about in the industry. You're going to find people that are speaking really uh, bluntly about how you like must do this one way or the other. And I don't want this episode to be like an echo chamber. You know, obviously we're an agency, and being an agency, um, I do believe that it's better for someone to work with an agency more often than not. We'll talk about some of the exceptions to that and then also places where we might be wrong. So hopefully make this as balanced of a conversation as we possibly can."

"So, kind of starting it off Jeff, tell me about some of your experience or thoughts regarding like what are some of the pros and cons of going in-house versus working with an agency?"

"Yeah, it's... I mean there's a lot of debate about it, right? But I think there are some definite pros when it comes to being in-house. The most major one is just the amount of control you have over it. Everything that you do, you've done yourself, you know exactly how it works. If something isn't working right, you can either figure it out or look at it and say, 'Oh, maybe it's this,' and kind of go to work on it yourself. So a lot more control. I'd say that's probably the biggest thing when it comes to working in-house."

"That, and like if there's any adjustments as far as like location, you get it exactly right, exactly the way that you envisioned it and not having to describe it to someone else. Because that's always the difficult part, is the translation sometimes."

"But when it comes to taking it to an agency, I feel like there's such more depth when it comes to just figuring something out and kind of understanding it yourself versus letting like professionals kind of take it and run with it and saying, 'This is what we understand based on all this experience, all this spend,' versus kind of your own personal experience. I feel like it's really the two major layers to it."

"Number one is you have like you as a business owner do it, right? And you could technically bring anything in-house. You can cold call yourself as a business owner, you can cold text yourself, you can manage your payroll if you want to, you can do your own bookkeeping, right? Like you could... I mean that's a way that you can get anything done in the business. And then there's the concept of hiring in-house, um, and this is kind of that concept where you, you know, you have somebody and they're going to spend all their time."

"I feel like people that want different things tend to fall into one of these two buckets. The person who wants to do it themselves usually a little bit smaller of a company, right? I think I was kind of that way for for a while until I realized you can't actually grow a company that way. And some people don't want to grow a company, and that's fine. Like you don't... you don't have to grow a company to 50 employees if that's not your vision."

"If that's... yeah, that's not their version of success, then great."

"Yeah, yeah. So I mean, if you want to keep it really small, then you are going to have to wear a lot of hats, right? So some people envision like, 'I could be the PPC expert and that could be, you know, how I do things.' And then... and then other people, they just feel like they just want this person that they can see down the hall that is just sitting in front of a computer all the time, and therefore must just be making massive progress on their PPC campaigns, right?"

"Yeah, and I feel like there's a lot of things... um, not to sound try and sound too biased, but when it comes to an agency, a lot of things behind the scenes that really people don't realize that we do. Um, because we meet with them once a month, you know, maybe we email throughout the month and talk about things, and they think that maybe that's all that we do when they don't realize that there's so much... so many more layers to PPC behind the scenes too."

"Like doing spend checks, doing bid adjustments, um, you know, having all the integration set up so it goes to your CRM, making sure people are filling out the lead sheet that we provide to them. So all these different layers that when you take it in-house, you now have to try and either figure out yourself or figure out your own version, whatever you feel like is going to be best for you. But there's a lot of things that we do that are extra things that maybe they might not realize when you take it in-house. You could be missing a few key important elements to make that successful."

"Yeah, there's... you're totally right that there's... there's a lot of... um, there's a lot of pieces there. I think uh, yeah, I think our clients generally simplify what we do a little bit. As an example, I was talking to one of your clients recently, Aaron Gaunt. I was on his... his podcast, um..."

"He's such a great guy, yeah."

"Yeah, he can't... he can't get enough of me, so... Thank you. Which is... we talk often. I love Aaron, he's great. Which is... which is strangely true, um, but the uh... yeah, one insightful piece of the conversation was like we started talking about our team size. I told them, 'Well, we have like, you know, 25 or 30 people at this company,' and he... he was like, 'Wait, you have like 25 or 30 people? Like, Jeff, there's more than just Jeff?'"

"Yeah, right. It's like, you do realize that like Jeff is just like a smiling face that you talk to. That's it, that's all I do, and there's a lot that gets done in your campaigns that Jeff does not do, right?"

"And he was like... he was fine with it, but some people actually take a... like a more... like they just assume like, 'Well, if Jeff's not doing it, then nothing's happening.' There's something you realize like, 'Well, we have like four Jeffs, and then we have like 26 other people.' What do you think those 26 other people do? Like, it provides like a little bit of concept to like the ratio of like how much um, you know, the person that you talk to in the agency versus like the actual back end we're getting done is."

"And it's a... it's honestly one of the more comical conversations I have is, you know, someone comes to me like, 'I want to do it in-house instead,' you know, when they're just deciding not to work with us. And it's like, 'Oh, why do you want to do that? You know, tell me...' You're trying to... you're trying to be nice about it, and they say, 'Well, I have a... you know, I have these other... um, yeah, I want this person to spend all their time on it. I want to get like all the attention and all the time.'"

"Someone comes to me like, 'I want to do it in-house instead,' you know when they're just deciding not to work with us. And it's like, 'Oh, why do you want to do that?' You know, tell me. You're trying to be nice about it, and they say, 'Well, I have a, you know, I have these other, um, yeah, I want this person to spend all their time on it. I want to get all the attention and all the time.' And then you ask a question like, 'Well, what do you think that person's gonna do with all that time?' And they have no idea. They just have this hypothesis that somehow somebody spending all of their time is going to make this impact. Like, if the tab is open, they must be doing something, right?"

"Yes, whatever they're doing is more valuable."

"Yeah, which if you manage enough employees, you start to learn how not true that is and also how sabotaging it can be to your culture to have someone not actually productive. You know, the president has sets for other people and stuff like that, and I'm not saying they won't find things to fill their time with."

"Yeah."

"I'm saying it might not be valuable. Well, then you start to think, well, then you start to ask questions like, 'Well, tell me about who you're going to hire for this role.' They usually have some idea. They're like, 'Well, I was going to find somebody that, uh, you know, I'm going to pay them, you know, 60 or 70,000 a year.' Or even worse, they're finding like some VA that theoretically has experience in this before or something like this. And you start thinking through, and it's like, well, there's a couple people that you could hire in-house."

"Option number one is you have somebody new, and we do a lot of this, right? We hire people out of universities and stuff like that that are less experienced with PPC. And they come in, whereas then you have to think like, what do you do with somebody like that? It's kind of like hiring, uh, like any role. Like, let's just say you're going to take a transaction coordinator. You're going to get somebody with that experience. You need to have processes within your company for that person to succeed in. You don't take—it's like my favorite job position I've ever seen is like the dentist office that's like hiring an intern marketer. And you look at the responsibilities. It's basically running their marketing, right? As if that's gonna work, right? Like, this person's not gonna know what they're doing."

"Yeah."

"It takes talent to recognize talent, and so you might not realize that, but they're not gonna know what they're doing. So you need to like outline it, right? So if you're not going to hire that person, then you have to think like, what is it going to take for the person that's actually going to lead this? Then you're looking for a director-level person. So then you have to kind of put your hat on. You have to think in the candidate's shoes. Okay, on this director-level person, I'm capable of building processes and understanding how to run this in such a way that it works. What do I want to be paid? Probably like 130 to 150,000 or more. Unfortunately for a lot of people, yeah, that's, uh, for anybody that can like truly invent these processes, that's what you're going to need, right?"

"The other thing, you're going to be pulling somebody out of a job that's probably pretty good, or they are really not good because somebody with these skills, they're not looking for jobs, right? It's like recruiting a really good salesperson. All right, so you're gonna struggle to find them. Once you find them, do you think that person even wants to work for you? Like, you have to think that, like, am I creating the environment where this person gets to the next level in their career? Right? I don't think you are. I don't think most real estate investments are there because that person also has opportunities with other companies spending hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars per month on their paid ads where they can level up, or agencies where they can grow a team under them or something. They're probably used to having a team under them, and the last thing you want is now to have to bring down this director-level person that's going to be unhappy because they don't have four employees working under them. Because you have what should be like 1/12th of their time worth of work, but you need their expertise, right? And I think I just don't think anybody actually thinks this through. Like when you really lay out all the individual pieces of what's necessary to make this happen in-house with hiring, it just doesn't make sense. And you're not going to find the right person, and when you do find the right person, they're not going to work with you. So the fact that someone was willing to work with you means they're probably not the right person."

"And I'm not saying—"

"Market shifts: in-house vs agency."

"You can't get lucky, but like it's—right, it's gonna be a tough, tough game."

"Yeah, it's more of a gamble than it is an informed decision or the best decision for the company direction regardless of your size. If you're taking in-house and like you're saying you want to get that director-level person, well, you could pay someone less to do it, but you're going to get less from it. So really, the value that I see too is like you can get someone that knows like 20% here and 30% here, and maybe they know 40% here, but they know 10% here. Or you can get an agency—again, a big push for doing agency in-house. Stop being so biased, sorry I can't help it—but it's someone that knows maybe 95%, and then you get someone else on the team that knows 98%, and someone that knows 89%. So you get a better percentage overall of just knowledge because you have such a large team helping you with it for a cost that could be even less than hiring someone full-time throughout the entire year. So the benefit is a much greater benefit with more experience for less money."

"And like you're saying, you can get lucky. You can run it yourself, find a really good keyword list, maybe manage it on a maximize conversions kind of campaign where you're spending a good amount on it, you're getting pretty decent lead flow. But then really taking it to the next level is what I feel like hiring an agency is too."

"Yeah, and it also depends. I mean, there's bad in-house hires and there's bad agency hires, right?"

"Right."

"Like, there's always—so yes, we hear about the bad agency hires all the time."

"I think if you have enough spend to have a person or to do it yourself but not to have a team, I don't think it makes sense."

"I think once you pass that 100 grand a month mark, then it makes sense to have a team, right? And if you have like a really solid director, I think you can make it make sense."

"Yeah, finding that really solid director is really hard."

"Well, and you said something really important too earlier. You said staying ahead of the market is impossible."

"It is. You can do projections; you can kind of figure out what the market's going to do. But as soon as that change happens, how much more time is it going to take you to adjust and figure out how that works versus staying ahead? You can't really stay ahead of the market, like you said. But you can figure out how to adjust faster based on the data we have."

"Yeah, what about algorithmic things? I know you had an experience recently with a client that saw the impact of removing some of the algorithmic benefits of being part of a data collective, right?"

"I believe he said it sucked when he was removed from our collective data, and just how much worse the data was on his own. We have clients that have worked with us for a while, gone off and done their own PPC, and then they've come back again. They're like, 'We're so sorry. We didn't realize what all this took.' But they also didn't understand the shift that happens when you're only relying on your own data, the small amount of data you have versus our large amount of data."

"I had a client that was running his own PPC for a while. He was getting tons of leads; the lead flow was great. He said, 'Lead flow is great; we don't want to mess with that, but we're looking at better quality leads.' Well, he came on with us, and the lead flow dropped, but the quality improved greatly because of all the data that we have collected. It wasn't so much about the lead flow as it was about the deals. Sometimes we forget that, right? It's not about how many leads you have per month; it's about, at the end of the day, how many deals do I have? How much is my return on investment, not just how good is my lead flow?"

"Right."

"One final topic that I want to touch on is, I don't even know how you summarize it, like action. I think in real estate investment, more than anywhere else, most entrepreneurs are heavy action takers."

"And honestly, if you want me to just call it straight as it is, that's like 90% of our clients, and it makes it hard for them to delegate things, right?"

"Um, it also makes it hard. Here's the crazy thing: if you're in SEO and you see a drop in rankings, what do you do?"

"Content and backlinks, and optimize the page."

"Technically, if your rankings are doing awesome, what do you do? Content, backlinks, and optimize, technically, right? It's kind of the same thing. Everybody wants it to be the major strategic shift, but it doesn't. What I'm saying is true. More often than not, sometimes there is, 'Oh shoot, we got rid of that page, and that page was getting a lot of SEO traction. That's the problem,' right? Sometimes there's stuff like that. But oftentimes, things flow up, things flow down. There are sample size issues, stuff like that. I feel like our clients are very action-oriented people, and it creates friction. I think that's why some people struggle with working with agencies. We have this problem, 'Oh, this month the leads weren't great,' or something like that, and they want to solve that problem so bad. The last thing they want to do is just say, 'Okay, agency, solve that problem for me,' and just sit down and wait, right? It's such a hard thing for that personality. They want some type of email to say, 'These are the action items we took to fix this problem,' right?"

"Yeah, or they want to do it themselves or something like that. When I see people managing their own PPC in-house, one of the most common mistakes is they're making way too many changes way too quickly. It's like you start 100 tests, and you don't even finish one of them. You just keep on moving on to a new thing before it stops. One of the biggest issues we see internally is that people don't give campaigns enough time to succeed when they do it in-house."

"Oftentimes they do, and I think the reason is when they're working with an agency, the thing they change is the agency. When they're working in-house, what they change is their campaign or something like that. You can keep on making those changes, and your campaign will eventually get where you're wanting it to, but at the end of the day, they have more exposure over a longer time to the PPC versus when they're working with an agency. They lose that patience because it just feels like madness. 'This isn't working, and I can't do anything about it.'"

"Any action is better than inaction, is what they feel like with that."

"Yeah, which is good for getting deals, but for PPC, sometimes action is what's going to hurt you, right? You have to be a lot more like it's a sniper approach, not a shotgun when it comes to optimizations. You have to figure out exactly what you're going to do, be surgical about it, get it done, and then use the data to make your next smart decision. But it's slow, and seeing tests through takes patience. If you want to actually finish the SPA test, but if you don't finish it, then why did you start it, right? It's a waste of time, it's a waste of resources, and it's a waste of money too to not finish it. I see a lot of times when clients don't finish out our termed agreement. We have that termed agreement not because we want to keep you on for that amount of time, but because we believe that's when the growth really happens, is when you give the campaign enough time to succeed. If you cancel before then, or if you decide, 'This isn't really working for us,' well, how do you know based on your own experience and not based off of the countless number of tests that we've done and clients that we've had who have succeeded? So, I feel like when it cuts off too early, that action of cutting it off early, they feel better about that than they do letting it ride out and trusting us based on the knowledge and experience we have when it comes to that termed agreement. We're saying, 'We know that this will happen. We can keep you on track for this to happen if we watch out for these indicators,' right? Those indicators can keep us from going the wrong direction. We can say, 'Oh, you have this many leads coming in, that's great, but look at these other things you have too. You have this many opportunities now or this many contracts now versus just lead flow before.' Seeing it out to the end is really going to help with that return on investment as long as we follow the indicators to indicate success along the path."

"I think that's something that might resonate with everybody listening to this. Think back to when you started your business. Everybody goes through some period where they've invested a lot into their business, be that money, be that time, and they don't have anything to show for it yet, like enough revenue to make it worth it, etc. Every business goes through this period. Now, just think, what if instead of starting a business and hustling and putting your own blood, sweat, and tears into making this happen, what if you just hired an agency that starts businesses for you? That might be a thing. I don't think it's a thing, but let's just say. How many people in that tough time would give up if they did that because they don't feel like they have enough control? They don't feel like they're making progress because they themselves aren't making progress. As you grow in your business, you start to realize that other people making progress on your behalf is the most beautiful thing that's ever existed in the world of business because you can move forward without you doing it. The first person I ever hired, I gave them some work to do, and they came back, and it was done, and it was good. I was mind-blown. At every level, you hire higher and higher-level people. At some point, you're done delegating tasks, and you start to delegate projects. Then at some point, you stop delegating projects, and you delegate results. When you can delegate results and actually see that come through, it's the epitome of happiness in a business. But you don't experience that right away. I think everybody that's listening to this had a business at some point. If they weren't controlling every aspect of it just because of the faith that they have in themselves that they wouldn't have in other people, they would have quit, and they never would have gotten where they wanted to go in their business."

"That has nothing to do with the viability of what they were doing. You have to get through the hard time to get to the good time. Sometimes, when it's hard times, you only trust yourself."

"That's my hypothesis for why some people do better self-managing their PPC. I've actually talked to quite a few people that are very successful with it."

"So somebody's probably thinking, 'Well, you're telling me all this stuff that's wrong about self-managing, why is it that those people are successful?' What I've seen from those that self-manage PPC, I think the personality that wants to get into the details can be really good at running a business. From what I've noticed, those people usually have extraordinary acquisitions and disposition skills, and when we take them on as clients, they do exceptionally well. That comes

back to one of the points you made earlier. PPC is a rocket fuel. PPC just amplifies what you already have, and if you don't have it, then PPC is not going to do anything for you. When you work with an agency, you're already at a level where you should be fine-tuning everything else."

"Then you just add that to it."

"We have some people that make so much money from the stuff that we do, and I look at that, and I'm like, 'Man, you must be a freakin' monster on the phone.' Then I talk to some people and I'm like, 'Okay, well, the numbers are fine, but we can get the same exact results for somebody else.' This isn't the magic button. This is a huge accelerator."

"Right, exactly."

"The people that are very successful on the PPC side of things are the people that have their acquisitions and dispositions dialed in, and their conversion rates are way better than the next guy's. The opportunity for them to get more and more leads just makes it all the better. I mean, you can give 100 leads to somebody, and they'll convert, let's say, one deal out of 100 leads. You give 100 leads to somebody else, and they can convert maybe 10 deals out of that. Just because they're better at converting, they're better at dispositioning, they know how to talk to people, and they have that skill set already. I feel like PPC is really the rocket fuel to those already successful individuals. So when we talk about clients that are successful with PPC or agencies that are successful with PPC, those clients already have all of that figured out. Then they go to an agency and they're able to scale even faster with all of that."

"It's so interesting because I see people go back and forth and they say, 'Well, this agency isn't working for me, so I'm going to try another agency.' I see them do that a few times, and I'm like, 'Maybe it's not the agency; maybe it's you.'"

"You have to be real with that and say, 'What am I doing? How am I setting them up for success?' Because that's what a partnership is. It's a relationship. When you have a business and you're working with an agency, it's a relationship. You have to set them up for success just as much as they're setting you up for success. You can't just say, 'Here's a pile of money, make it work,' and expect them to do all the magic behind it. You have to have your stuff dialed in as well for that to work."

"So here's the action item: If you're really good at acquisitions, dispositions, and conversion rates, and you want to be freakin' amazing, go to ppcpitbulls.com."

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