The Digital Gold Rush - Mining for Land Leads Online

"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host Brandon Baitman, and today I'm joined by Shannon Ashton. Shannon is one of our account strategists and works with a ton of our clients that are having great success with finding wholesale or flipping deals through online marketing. She has also been opening up our new land niche and working with a select few clients of ours that are looking for land across the United States. We're going to talk about how that's going, what things we're seeing are working, what things aren't, typical results, benchmarks, and all those things that we've learned as we're entering this niche. If you are investing in land or you're considering investing in land, I think you'll find this episode very interesting. How are you doing today, Shannon?"

"I'm doing great. How are you, Brandon?"

"Yeah, I'm doing awesome. Super excited for this podcast. This is your first official appearance on the Collective Clicks podcast, so I think some introductions are in order. I'll start by just saying that Shannon's one of my favorite people in the world, and then I'll let you fill in with what you do on a day-to-day basis and all that kind of stuff."

"Awesome. Yeah, I'm super excited to be on the podcast today. Like you said, first time, which is awesome. I am an account strategist here at Baitman Collective, so I deal with our clients on a daily basis. I get to work with them and help them implement a strategy that's going to be the most impactful for them to have a successful campaign and get the leads that they're looking for."

"Yeah, that is awesome, and I am excited to speak to you because you have a lot of knowledge doing your job. Whenever I'm looking to anyone in particular to learn about what's working well, what's not working well, I look towards the team that you're on just because you guys interact with our clients so much. There's something that you do really well that I want to highlight, and that's part of the reason that I have you here today. I actually just heard this quote from a friend of mine, Jason Lewis, yesterday, and what he says is, 'When you can make the difference between what you think is true and what actually is true smaller, that's when you succeed.' And you, in my mind, are like the epitome of what I call being grounded in data. What that means is that there's all these emotions kind of flying out, right? Sometimes we have clients that have this idea that everything's going super well when it's not, or this idea that things are going really poorly when actually it's going well, or something like that. So emotions are all over the place. We can easily look at a streak of three leads that are bad and say that we need to make major adjustments to a campaign or something like that, but you're really good at being grounded in data. What that means is that the things that you say, I can actually trust that they're true and they're based on facts. No matter what the situation is, you understand those facts really well."

"So what we're talking about today that I'm excited for is land marketing, which is something that we haven't really talked about on this podcast before. You have been kind of heading an initiative that we have as a company to start working with more investors that work with land, and we're starting to gather some data that's pretty insightful. It's showing basically how this compares to marketing for houses, what are the key things that need to be different, and we have some early wins there as well. So I would love, if you're okay with it, just to pick your brain on all things land marketing and hopefully drive some insight for any of our clients that are thinking about it or anybody that could be listening to the podcast that is investing in land and interested in using online marketing as a method to get to it."

"Yeah, I think that sounds great."

"Cool. So first, just to give the overview on how this works for anybody not super familiar with land marketing, for the most part in this industry, it seems to be direct mail that people are doing. They're literally mailing out contracts that are literally a contract to purchase the property, and I have a few good friends that do this kind of marketing. They say you'll literally just get it mailed back to you signed sometimes, and that's how you do a deal. It's a little bit insane that anybody sells their property that way, but then of course, there's often going to be some type of acquisitions process or something in many circumstances."

"But this is a mail-heavy industry, which is kind of how houses were many years ago. It used to be that direct mail was like the primary channel that most people used, and then it starts to get saturated, and then you start to move into other channels and stuff like that. So because of some of those reasons, we had a few clients that are kind of looking for alternative ways to get land. Can you speak at all, Shannon, to some of the differences that they're seeing in online marketing channels versus what they're traditionally doing?"

"Yeah, well, it's definitely not a saturated market. The campaigns that we're running for our land clients have a ton of market availability. Because of that, we are seeing super low cost per click, and they're able to capture a significant amount of lead flow because there isn't that market competition that we see with other channels like direct mail. So that is a big difference for our clients and their ability to branch into a new area and something that's untapped, especially because people like to have contact with multiple points, and it takes multiple contacts in order to convert a seller oftentimes. So having a PPC channel is a way for our land clients to reach their sellers in a new way through that."

"Yeah. What have you seen? You alluded to a few things. You're saying the lead flow is stronger than it is for houses due to lower competition. How much stronger? Like, are we talking for the same budget you're getting 10 times the number of leads, or twice as many leads, or 30% more leads?"

"Yeah, definitely at least 10 times the leads with what we're seeing right now. Especially with our clients who are targeting nationally with land, it's an opportunity to open up the entire United States to land. So rather than just targeting a more narrow area, it opens up a lot more and brings that cost per lead down to the point where our lead flow is, you know, 10x what you would see with a regular property investor."

"Okay, yeah, that's a little bit crazy. What cost per lead number can you put to that? What are we seeing as normal?"

"Yeah, for a national land client, we're looking at around $20 cost per lead. So it's significantly lower than what we'd see with the regular."

"And this is on paid search, like PPC marketing?"

"Yes, yep. Google Ads."

"Good old Google Ads for sellers. Yeah, okay. So $20 cost per lead, which is lower, obviously, than what you see in marketing to houses, which makes a lot of sense. One of the things that I think is really interesting about land, though, is it's more feasible to do it on a national level than it is with houses. Granted, we have a lot of people - we just had Nick Perry on the podcast last week who does national wholesaling and is very successful at it. Some people figure that out, but land is so interesting because you really never need to see the product, right? You don't have to trust the seller on how good condition are the cabinets and appliances and all that stuff, because there's kind of nothing to it. It's acreage and where your acreage is located, and it's a lot more fact-based and simple. You don't have to go walk the property."

"Yeah, it's very true, and a lot of the information is available online. So there's no reason to go and have to view the property. It makes it a lot easier to find out what you need to know. There's definitely still qualifications for the types of lands. Most of our clients want land that has road access or doesn't have wetlands or a cliff because that's still not really viable land for them. But it's a lot easier to know those things when you're virtual rather than trying to see the inside of a house and know what's going on with it. And then the other benefit to land investing being virtual is a lot of landowners don't actually live near their property. A lot of them live out of the state or they live in the city and their land is rural outside of the city. They don't want to go out to the property, so there's no reason for them to see it in person either. They're more willing to work virtually with you."

"Well, let's talk then, because you alluded to it a little bit. I would love to talk about some of the biggest hurdles that are natural to digital marketing and trying to get land leads generated. One of the ones that I myself am really familiar with is that, let's just say you're doing a direct mail campaign, you can choose exactly what addresses you want that to go to. I want land in this area, and then maybe the owners of that land are anywhere around the United States, right? But maybe if I want land in Utah, I could find all the people who own land in Utah. I can filter that by acreage and maybe zoning type of land, etc. So I can kind of get laser-targeted on exactly what product I want, and I can make that based on what my buyers want or what I think I'm going to be able to sell. Versus, we get into online marketing, nobody searches what you would want them to search on Google. They don't say, 'Sell my 4.5-acre plot of land within 20 miles of Salt Lake City, Utah.' Nobody says that. So it gets a little bit more tricky, especially from a location standpoint, and then also everything else. So what are you seeing? Have we had any clients that are a little bit too picky of what type of property they want so it's just not working? Are clients generally adapting well to just work with any type of property? What is the name of the game when it comes to qualifying the land, and how far can you actually push that with online marketing?"

"Yeah, that's a great question. Obviously, location targeting is a bit of a struggle. Like I said before, some landowners don't live near the land, so we can't target by location necessarily. We don't want to exclude anyone who might own land but live somewhere else. So that has been a limitation that's fairly different from buying single-family properties through PPC. We haven't used geo-targeting as frequently with our land buyers. We're focusing mostly on the form capture and the ad copy in the ads. I think the biggest hurdle that we've experienced with our land clients has been land size so far. When someone searches Google to sell their land, they don't say, you know, 'Search my 0.5-acre property' or 'my 4-acre property,' but most of our land clients are looking for those larger pieces of land. So what we've done is adjusted the ad copy and adjusted our form to reflect that they're looking for those large acreage pieces, which has helped to redirect our ads to sellers who actually have the types of properties that we're looking for."

"Let's get really specific with this. So let's just say I really want land that's five acres plus. What is an example of what the ad copy might look like?"

"That's exactly what we put in it. We just made updates to say, 'We buy land that is over an acre, over 5 acres.' Those are the adjustments that we've made, and that's what's made a difference in the sellers who are actually clicking on the ads because it automatically disqualifies anyone who has land smaller than that."

"Understood. And when you say you're also making adjustments to - well, first, I want to dig into this ad copy thing a little bit, and then we'll talk about the form, right? Because there's multiple layers of how you do this. Which, by the way, this is so foreign to anybody who's used to doing something like direct mail or something like that, where it's like you start with the property. I want this property, and then you move from there. Here, we're just saying, well, we can't do that, so you want to make an ad that nobody clicks unless they are your right seller. And that's kind of the magic of pay-per-click marketing if you think about it. Everybody thinks with their ad copy, I want to create the thing that's going to get people to click on it because they're still thinking CPM-based advertising where you have a certain number of impressions, and then your goal is to get as many people to click as possible and as many of those to convert as possible. In this world, though, we have to remember you only pay when people click. So if you say in your ad copy, 'We buy any land,' and then people click on it, you're paying for those clicks, and some of them are going to have pieces of land that are less than the number of acres that you're wanting to buy, and you're going to end up wasting money on that. Versus if you can start to train Google and have the right people come through, then you're getting a greater rate of people qualified coming through, and you're going to have people who are going to see the ad and think, 'That doesn't apply to me because that's not the type of land that I own,' and they're going to see the ad but voluntarily not click on it, and you don't have to pay for them. It's kind of amazing what happens when you align your messaging with what you want exactly."

"Exactly, and that was the issue that we first experienced getting into land because this was a newer market for us, and even our land clients didn't know exactly what they were looking for. But as we realized that, we've been able to make the adjustments to the ad copy, and just that change has made a huge impact in the types of sellers that they're getting and honestly has made their efforts more worthwhile. They're not spending time chasing leads that aren't what they're looking for."

"Yeah, that totally makes sense. So ad copy is a big thing, right? And everybody wants to think targeting. At some point, you have to realize your ad copy is your targeting when you don't have as much targeting. It's filtering more so than targeting. Alright, let's talk about the form then. What are you doing in the form, and how does that make a difference in terms of the types of leads that we're getting?"

"Yeah, the form is very specific, dependent on what our clients are looking for in their land, but most of them ask some particular questions about the land quality and especially the land size. So some of the most frequent ones that we include are the acreage, if they're above a certain acreage or below, and then if the land has wetlands, if the land has road access, or if there are any septic tanks or anything on the land. All of those questions have been adjusted in our form to teach the algorithm within Google which leads are qualified and which are not. So if someone fills out our form on the landing page and they indicate that the land they're trying to sell is below our minimum acreage, we automatically disqualify that seller as a conversion within Google, which then helps to teach the algorithm for future sellers to not look for someone who has below our minimum acreage."

"I completely understand. So you're doing something that we talked about in this podcast before called lead sculpting, but you're applying this to land where it's way different. We've never done lead sculpting based on if you have road access or not. Again, it's how do we filter and use that to target? Because what people don't realize is, if you filter properly in the form, then you can change the kind of people who are going to see your ad in the first place. Because even though we cannot target based on these different criteria, there are going to be things that correlate really well with that, and Google's going to get really smart at finding which ones correlate and which ones don't. So the lead sculpting that you're talking about, to make sure that we're all on the same page about how this works, essentially what you're doing - if somebody, let's just say your minimum amount of acres is five and I have a 3-acre property, so if I go through the form, are you going to still get me as a lead?"

"Yeah, I'll still get you as a lead, and you'll still come through. So they'll still be able to contact those sellers as well if they choose to and reach out to them if their team has the capacity to still contact those smaller acreage sellers. But Google's not going to know about the lead."

"Got it. So to Google's eyes, I just wasn't the right fit. I never converted. But then on your side, you still get the lead. So we start to create this because normally, the way that people run ads, leads and conversions are actually the same thing because the conversion we're going for is a lead. But in this case, we're going for a sculpted lead conversion, which is a little bit more specific, and it cuts out - what percentage are we generally cutting out of the leads? Do you have any idea?"

"Yeah, our cost per conversion has been closer to $60, so we're cutting out about two-thirds of the leads."

"Two-thirds of the leads. Okay, so lead sculpting with all these questions that I imagine have been fairly custom based on each client and what they're looking for, because everybody has their own criteria of what kind of land works with their process. So lead sculpting and then the right ad copy that works for it - is there anything else that has contributed to the targeting, or is it mostly just getting those filters set up properly and then the campaign starting to naturally optimize towards them?"

"The natural optimization is definitely a big part of it, and with such high lead flow, it feeds a lot more data back to the algorithm, which is helping to teach it faster. But another part of it as well has been the specific keywords that we're targeting too. We've had to make some adjustments there and specify with, rather than just 'land,' we want 'rural land,' but we don't want commercial rural land. There are different changes that we've had to adjust with the keyword targeting itself as well."

"Got it. Yeah, and that completely makes sense. I imagine that the search terms are a completely different game with what we're talking about, but there is some filtering based on the type of land you're targeting based on keywords, which is interesting. Which doesn't usually apply to houses, you know. People don't search based on different types of houses and things like that. Maybe sometimes they search like 'mobile home' versus a normal home, or they could say it's a multi-family property or something like that, but it seems to happen a lot more in land."

"Yeah, definitely. Especially with commercial, that's something that one of our clients loves and the other one doesn't like. So for one client, we're specifically targeting it, and for another client, we've specifically applied an exclusion for commercial land. It just depends on exactly what each individual client is looking for."

"Okay, yeah, that totally makes sense. Alright, let's talk about results. We talked about cost per lead numbers, so it sounds like the benchmarks so far, the way they're working out, is maybe something like a $20 cost per lead, and then closer to a $60 cost per conversion or qualified lead based on really minimum qualification criteria. It just has to be the right kind of land - maybe the person never answers the phone for all you know, but it's qualified in some way. How many of those leads are converting into contracts, and what is cost per contract looking like?"

"Yeah, cost per contract is around $700. So fairly low cost per contract with those land clients right now."

"Yeah, and do we have significant revenue for any clients yet?"

"Yeah, we have one client who is going to close around $250,000 in revenue off of a $2,000 budget. So he's looking at a pretty significant return."

"Yeah, that is - yeah, we might have to edit that part out of this podcast because I don't want anybody to get too excited. That's - we're not advertising 100x returns in land. That's a little wild. We'll see if it holds true. I imagine when he says those projections in revenue, it's like we have a buyer, we have a seller, we just - it hasn't closed yet?"

"Yep. So they've got three deals currently pending right now, which must have a really significant average spread."

"Two of them are over $100,000 each. Wow. Which I wonder how typical that is. I'm sure it depends on the type of land that you're working with."

"Yeah, that's a great question. That's probably something I should look more into on that."

"Yeah, that's super interesting. Well, that's cool. Anything else that is notable to you that we shifted in our strategy to make this work with land? Or any advice for people considering this?"

"Yeah, I think it's definitely a different market from the regular property investing, but I think it has a lot of opportunity and I think it's fairly untapped in comparison to regular property investing. And I think that if someone is looking to get into land, it'd be easy to start out with if you just have a - if you are already running PPC or you're already doing some sort of regular property investing, sometimes those land leads come in. Maybe try working a piece of land and see if you can move it and start establishing that precedent so you can open up a whole new channel and a whole new revenue stream for your business."

"Yeah, super awesome advice, Shannon. And I mean, it's all real estate at the end of the day, right? Whether there's a house on it or not, it just makes it more simple. Granted, there's a lot of different - you know, it's a very different world when it comes to finding buyers and stuff like that. The level of discount that you have to sell and buy at with land is significantly higher than it is for houses. But it's super interesting. Well, thank you for taking the time today. This was awesome. Hope this episode adds some value for anybody considering this type of investing, and I will see you next time."

"Of course. Thanks for having me."

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