10: The Invisible Copy Problem

Hey, it’s Scott Todd. And if you are tired of being a servant to your business and you want to fix it so that you can grow it and gain the freedom that you seek, guess what? You’re in the right spot because this show is about helping you to build that business that you want. And we are going to talk about something today that a lot of people miss. And that is what I call invisible copy. Now, what is this invisible copy

invisible copy begins when we start to use generic language in our marketing. Now,

In real estate investing, we can say that marketing is when we’re trying to buy properties. We can also say that it’s when we’re trying to sell properties, if we’re the ones doing it, or if we’re trying to sell or rent out our units, that’s also the marketing component of it. So when I talk about marketing in this particular episode, what I’m really talking about is the broad sense of marketing. Again, offer letters or your marketing. And you have to find where this…

kind of fits into that point. And here is the problem. Oftentimes we use generic vague language that really could be targeted to anyone. And I mean, anyone. And you see this a lot when we think about offer letters to go out and buy things. You know, it’s like, hey, we buy this or any size fast closing. We’re not really talking to somebody other than the fact that they own a piece of real estate that we want to buy.

And when we go to sell it, we kind of do the same thing.

And what I’m seeing is that old adage that when you write to everyone, you write to no one. And that applies to every single business. What we have to do, what we have to do is we have to really think about who we’re writing these letters to, who we’re writing the marketing messages to, who are we trying to attract? Again, I mentioned this, but in episode eight, we talked about niching down

and finding your product market fit. Today we’re going to talk about how to write to that niche. And specifically what we want to think about is what specific problem does that particular person have? What are they trying to solve? And again, all marketing someone’s trying to solve something. When they’re trying to sell you a piece of land or piece of real estate, they’re trying to sell that. Okay, and so this myth is out there that says, hey, if I get too specific,

I’m going to exclude people. And for a very long time, I felt that same way. When we try to be narrow-nitched to somebody specific, we think that, well, we’re going to lose everybody else. And that’s really not the case. Let me tell you about what happened with my generic copy story. What happened was when I started mailing offer letters to buy properties, I started doing the same thing that, you know, well,

Everybody else did. Here’s my letter. It had that generic copy. And my results were, you know, all over the place. They really were. They were consistent, but they were sometimes consistently bad, attracting the wrong people to deals I couldn’t close. But then something happened. I slowed down and I said, wait a minute, who are the people that I’m actually closing deals with? Who are these people? And on the buy side, what I noticed was that there was a pattern.

70, maybe 80 % of these sellers, they were older. They were 50s. They weren’t 50s. They were 60s, 70s, 80s. I’m thinking I’m in my 50s. I’m like, oh man, I’m almost in that older group. I don’t want to be there yet. All right, but the 60s, 70s, 80 year olds, they were the ones kind of accepting my offer. Generally speaking, generally, like broadly speaking, that’s how I would define them.

And I noticed that there was a common theme of why they were selling me their property. And it really came back to a couple of things. One, I don’t want my kids to have to deal with this. So it became kind of like that end of life planning. And that was also reinforced when I heard words like, I need to simplify my life. I’m tired of making tax payments on these properties. All of this was end of life decisions, planning I had for the future. And that was a pattern that I picked up on.

And maybe your pattern is different. Maybe you’re dealing with a different type of people commonly. And we don’t really know this pattern until we’ve gone through and closed some deals. So we always have to start off with a broader audience and get that to narrow down to us. Okay, so that’s what-

That’s what we’re trying to do here. Now, what happened was when I transformed my message and I went from that broad message to a more specific message, talking to the people that I typically dealt with.

the people who were planning ahead, the people who were trying to get rid of the property that they had so that the kids didn’t have to deal with it, I was able to change even my offer letter to be more specific to what they were dealing with. And I might say something like, I don’t know, are you planning ahead? You don’t want your kids to inherit this? Or did you inherit something from your family? If so, I can help you. In 30 days, this property will be off your plate.

And what happened was because I was offering a solution to a problem, that they were already playing out the scenario in their head, I kind of walked right into that and it brought to them a level of peace. And that level of peace, what it resulted in is it resulted in my response rate going up. It shot through the roof. It really did. And what I realized at that point, that critical lesson that I had,

is that kind of the younger sellers, the people who didn’t fit that 60, 70, 80 year old profile, guess what? They still called. They still called. Because what they saw was they saw something that reassured them that, hey, I’m going to help you. Okay, if I can help them, I can help you. There’s no hassle here. And what happened was I thought that by being specific,

to that audience that I would kind of cut my response rate. But what happened was it actually went up and it not only went up with the people that I wanted it to go up with, it went up with the people that I didn’t expect it to go up with. So what I hope that you’re kind of realizing here and it was kind of a aha moment for me was that generic is invisible. When we’re generic, we are invisible.

Let me tell you about one of my favorite examples because I see these examples everywhere where companies are getting specific with who they’re trying to attract. And here’s my favorite one. It’s ConvertKit or today they’re actually called kit.com. And if you’re not familiar with them, they are an email service provider, kind of like MailChimp or any of these other mail service providers. They’ll they do it as well. Active Campaign, they’re in that same group. But ConvertKit,

What they did was they went on their homepage and they basically said, hey, we are the email service provider for content creators. Period. End of story. Content creators. Now, I wasn’t a content creator. I didn’t see myself as a content creator. I saw myself as a real estate investor. And what I realized is, I’m using their service. I like their service. It fits into the way that I like to operate.

And what happened was that their clarity and their confidence to me made them trustworthy. See, if they focused on one particular audience creators, well, then it has to be good for me, right? And oftentimes you might say, well, I’m not a creator, so I’m not going to use their services. But that doesn’t mean that they’re not getting people who are not creators, right? That specific messaging.

gives us all a point of view. gives us, it gives the company a point of view on who they’re going to focus with. And it gives me as the consumer, some level of understanding of where they’re coming from or how they’re thinking about it. The core principle here is this.

We want to write everything to one person. I am creating this podcast for you. I’m not doing this for everybody. You and I are having this moment together. And don’t worry, nobody else is listening. I can assure you of that. I mean, they are, but come on, come on. It’s just you and I. See, that’s the thing is we want that one person. We want them in our mind when we’re writing to them.

Okay, let’s put this into place. What we want to often think about too is we want to picture that ideal client. In marketing terms, we call that the avatar. The avatar is like, you know, meet Jim. He’s a 70-year-old owner of this property and we want to write every letter to Jim. And obviously we’re not going to write, dear Jim.

But when we’re writing these or when we’re creating our offer letters, we want to think about that specific person. Because when we write to that specific person, what happens is our writing becomes personal. Just like this podcast, I hope it’s personal to you. Because I get emails from you guys saying, get out of my mind. I love these messages, by the way.

You’re listening to me. I’m not listening to you. I am listening to you, but I know you because I’ve been there with you. You see, when we write to Jim, we’re showing him that we understand this problem. But writing to everybody, people look at this and they’re like, ⁓ same thing I got from another guy. We’re generic. We become commodities. And when you’re a commodity, bad things happen.

And here’s how we’re going to fix this. Here’s what I want to give you. I want to give you a three-step process to fix this. Number one, I talked about this in episode eight. I’m going to reflect on it a little bit today. I want you to think about your last 10 deals that you closed. In every deal that you close, I want you to try to find the common situation. Were they a tired landlord? Did they inherit the property? Are they just planning ahead? Find the pattern. When you find the pattern,

then what that tells you is, hey, these are the people that I seem to attract. And then you can go attract more of them. Okay. That’s the really the number one secret. So step one, think about what is the pattern in the deals that you’re closing. Step two, I want you to write to that specific person. Maybe it’s that tired landlord, you know, they’re long distance. Maybe they own, they live out of state and you’re mailing to their backyard. It doesn’t matter.

Hey, make that message specific to them. Maybe it even says, never fly back here again. Okay, you’re bringing them some level of relief because these are conversations that they’re having in their head. And then step three here is I want you to test it. Track the response rate. Okay, track that response rate.

What I have found is that oftentimes we need permission to do something. And I’m giving you permission to focus on that one person. Look, I’m not asking you to bank your whole business on it. I want you to test it because one thing that I often hear from people is I’m not getting the deals that I want, deal attraction, or I’m not getting the leads that I want. That is prospect attraction. When we’re not attracting the people that we want or that we can help, we have an attraction problem.

And most of the times it’s because we have this generic invisible language. Okay. This generic invisible language actually kills our attraction levels. Now, here’s how you can tell if you have an attraction problem. Again, it could be deal attraction or it could be prospect attraction. Both of these lie within the deal flow level of the IPP.

That’s the framework from my book, Fix This Next for Real Estate Investors. The IPP, you can take the IPP assessment. I’m going to put the link in the show notes below. Go take it. If deal attraction or prospect attraction is your problem, you are probably writing to everyone. And don’t write to everyone out of fear because you’re going to appeal to a very small audience.

Think about Jim, think about the person that you’re trying to help. Who do you want to be of service to? Be of service to Jim or whoever they are. Cut out the noise. And that’s how we’re going to move you past these attraction problems. And with that, I will see you in our next