Beyond The Basics: Mastering The 3 Key Pillars Of Digital Marketing With Bob McIntosh

Regardless of your industry, building an audience online is the key to success in today’s business landscape. In this insightful episode, Bob McIntosh, a seasoned real estate investor and digital marketing expert, shares his journey from flipping houses in Buffalo to establishing a successful digital marketing agency. With over a decade of experience, Bob emphasizes the importance of a strong online presence for real estate professionals, outlining three key pillars of digital marketing. He highlights the crucial role of a well-designed website in building credibility and converting leads, offering practical tips for investors at all levels. Tune in to discover how Bob’s strategies can elevate your real estate business and ensure lasting success in a competitive market.

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Beyond The Basics: Mastering The 3 Key Pillars Of Digital Marketing With Bob McIntosh

I’ve got an awesome guest, a personal friend of mine, Bob McIntosh. We’ve spent time together. You spoke at my conference, Generations of Wealth Voyage, in the past and helped us out with some of our digital markings. I appreciate you taking time out of your busy day to help my audience. Bob, if you wouldn’t mind, tell everybody a little bit about yourself, and let’s dive in.

Thank you for having me on, Derek. I appreciate it. It’s always great to be able to share information whenever I can. For all of you reading, thank you. I don’t take that lightly. Your time is the most important thing you can give. I appreciate that you took the time to read this particular episode. My name is Bob McIntosh. I’ve been in real estate since 2008 when we bought our very first property. It’s been a hot minute.

The short version is flipped a lot of houses back in Buffalo, New York. Although I was living in Los Angeles, my dad was in Buffalo. Back then, I’d figure out how to add value from 3,000 miles away to the business. One of the things I got good at was digital marketing. Since that time, I have been engaged in creating, building, teaching, and training some of the largest education platforms out there on digital marketing for real estate investors.

Years ago, I started my agency, helping investors and coaches as well with their marketing in that space. That’s the short version. At this point, we don’t flip houses any more but we do have rentals. We do some private lending, both borrowing and lending ourselves and then work on building out a fund in a couple of syndication deals.

You have a couple of things going on.

Just a few things like all of us. If you’re not doing twenty things, are you even an entrepreneur?

Why say no when you can take on numbers 21, 22, and 23?

I have gotten better though at saying yes to the things in the same space so at least it’s not running around like a complete chicken with my head cut off. We can leverage a lot of the same audience, messaging, and things of that nature. I did go down a couple of random paths for a while that didn’t make sense.

Shiny object syndrome has a tendency to grab all of us once in a while and some of us all the time. When we first got to know each other a couple of years ago, you would come and speak at the Generations of Wealth Voyage. It was on digital marketing. My big takeaway from that was you talked about the three key pillars. Can you dive into that high level and then we’ll go into each one more in-depth?

There’s one thing I’ve been teaching, especially for investors. It doesn’t matter if you’re a new investor, an intermediate investor, or one that’s been doing it for 40 years. The reality is these three things are critical to all businesses having more success. I want to be transparent. Can you have success without doing everything I want to talk about? A hundred percent but what you’re going to find is that if you set these things up the right way, not only do your leads convert easier, your conversations go easier, your credibility is higher, and it allows for deals that might have been iffy or maybe not closed before will close because of these things.

When you think about it that way, the reality is if you implement everything that I talked about and I’ll teach you, it’ll get you even one extra deal, one extra loan, one extra rental property, or whatever it might be. Just one for one year, that’s it. I never did anything else for you. It’d probably still be worth it. The reality is if you do these things, it’s going to have recurring revenue returns for you over time.

First Pillar: Your Website

What’s the first pillar, Bob?

These are the pillars of digital marketing, to be clear. Your first pillar is your website. It’s important to have a good, clean, and modern-looking website. The thing that most people get wrong is they think, “My mother said it’s not generating me leads.” The reality is it’s probably not going to generate leads unless you’re actively utilizing it for that purpose and there are things that you have to do for that.

Even if it’s not generating leads, I guarantee you it’s costing you leads because someone goes there. Unfortunately, what’s happened in the last few years is a lot of crappy wholesalers who made some money and think they’re good at what they do but aren’t started getting in the space, teaching folks, working in the space, and doing things in a shady way. It’s brought a whole bad nomenclature to a lot of us investors. With that, your credibility becomes more important.

Years ago, I would have told you the website was far less important. It was more about being real, not looking like a real company but being an individual person. That’s detrimental now because of what’s happened. A website is not just about lead generation but also about building that credibility. Imagine for a second that you’re on a call with a seller and they’re like, “How do I know I can trust you?” You say, “Let’s go to my website. Take a look at my testimonials. Look through here.”

You start showing it. You use it as a sales tool. Even though it didn’t generate the lead for you, it might be the thing that pushes 1 or 2 extra sellers over the fence to work with you. In the real estate space, that could be tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars difference in your bottom line. The first one is having a great website. There’s one more thing on that.

People don’t understand how important the design of your website is. Different studies vary but between 92% and 96% of your website visitors will leave if the design is not modern, friendly enough, or easy enough for them to understand what’s going on. They’re judging your credibility based on just the design alone, not your case studies, testimonials, or history. If you’re a family business, how long have you been in business? They don’t care about any of those things first. They do eventually care about those things that will make some difference.

The first thing they’re looking at is if your design is old and dated, then your business is old and dated. Therefore, I don’t want to work with you. They’ll leave. That’s a huge thing. Case in point, the websites that we build for our clientele. We launched new designs for everyone. Part of the thing that we understand is how important that design is. Everyone who has a real estate site with us has a brand new design. They’re looking fresh, clean, and new. They don’t have to worry about it for the next 3 to 5 years because design takes about that long to iterate through different variations.

Some of this is going to be the challenges that I have with marketing teams that I’ve spent money with over the years. You and I have had candid conversations about this in the past too with my previous staff members who did marketing for us and other things. They get bogged down and they don’t modernize but to us small operators out there, we know we need to have a website. Maybe we have a CRM and we can get a website through the CRM but we don’t know if it’s good or not. It’s part of the package of our CRM. What should people expect to have to pay? That can be a wide range but how long should it take to build something out? How do you vet whoever you’re going to use if you’re not tech-savvy?

The answer is it is going to depend on a lot of factors. In the space of web design, you get what you pay for in most cases. If you’re going to go to Fiverr or someplace like that or you go to Wix and build a Wix site, but don’t do that, you’re going to get what you pay for, my team can help you. We have a very low-cost site that’s great for new investors getting off the ground. It’s not going to break the bank. As part of our monthly hosting that you pay with us, we include those design updates that we do whenever we do them.

All of our users that we updated, it’s everyone who’s active. Every single active site got some new design pushed down to their instance of their site as part of this. It’s less about what should I be looking for and more about who you need to look for. Look for someone who understands the space and what’s going on. If you’re going to build your custom site, we have a template site that we utilize for most of our clients. The cost can come down because it’s the same template site. We just change out colors, logos, and all that stuff.

Updating a custom site to a whole new design can range you from, I’d say on the cheap side, probably $1,000 to $2,000 to the expensive side being $5,000 to even $8,000, depending on a lot of variability. How many pages do you have? What’s the content? Who’s writing it? That kind of stuff. The thing that people don’t understand is that it takes quite a bit of time to build good web design. It takes no time at all to build a crappy one.

I love seeing all these AI websites. They’re like, “I can build a website in AI.” I was like, “Look at it. It looks like a generic, boring website,” which is fine. I’d rather you have a generic, boring website than no website at all. That’s certainly better but the reality is if you want something that’s going to communicate your credibility and help you stand out from the fray, then we’re going to probably make a sizable investment of a few thousand dollars to make that happen unless coming with a templated shop, which is what we do. We can do that for at this point about $500 plus the hosting. It’s very inexpensive in that case.

The point is this. When you look at doing this, understand that your design is important. If you’re looking at the site going, “This feels old or dated,” if any of those descriptive words fit into your idea of your site, then it’s probably ten times worse for your clients. Why? It’s because you’ve already got a generally positive bias to your website and company. If you’re feeling ick, that means most of everyone else is feeling ick.

Think about how your site makes you feel and make it even worse because these people don’t know you. It’s cold traffic most of the time coming to your site. That positive feedback is not going to be there and then go from there. If you’re like, “This is my site. This looks good. I like this,” then everyone else is going, “This makes sense.” It’s always a slightly toned-down version of how you feel. That’s how you can judge as well and then decide where you need to go from there.

This is something that I’ve come across in the past. There’s what’s called the fold when you’re looking at a website, which you can explain far better than anyone else I know. First, explain what the fold is but what absolute information should be above the fold? What’s okay to be below the fold on a website?

The answer is it depends. In an ideal scenario when you’re looking at your site, the fold is where the page ends on your computer screen, tablet screen, or phone screen. Whatever I can see before I scroll is above the fold. After I scroll is below the fold. It’s no different than a newspaper. That was the whole idea. Where the term came from was I was above the folded edge of the newspaper or below the folded edge. It’s the same idea.

Above the fold on websites are a couple of things. One is your navigation menu. If I want to find something easy, it’s got to be there. As an investor, this is not your opportunity to get crazy creative and create weird menu structures and different play. That’s for artists’ sites, not for businesses. Let’s be real. We have to keep it simple. That should be above your fold. I will come back to the mobile issue in a minute.

Second, it should be a clear, concise message of who you are and what you do as the primary person for your site. The hard thing for investors is that we have to talk to motivated sellers, retail buyers, investor buyers, private money lenders, agents, and contractors. They all want something very different from each other. What we find is that talking to motivated sellers first is usually the best way. Why? It’s because most of us need sellers more than we need anything else. There are true good leads there.

Number two, almost all of those other people that I talked about will go hunting for the information they want but motivated sellers won’t. If they don’t see it immediately, they’re off to somebody else going, “They’re talking about contracting. That’s not me.” They’re already gone someplace else. We’ve got to deal with the lowest common denominator. In that case, it’s going to be the motivated seller. I usually have a clear, concise message.

It doesn’t have to be this exact format but I want you to think about it this way. I help blank achieve blank with blank. I help people who own a house in a bad situation and sell their house quickly without having to pay 6% commissions or something like that. I’m spitballing here. In a lot of our sites, we say, “We buy houses in XYZ areas.” That’s clear and concise with what it is.

Right below that, I usually have a form or a button that opens a form at the very least. I want their information. A lot of people say, “You don’t even know if they want to give you information before you put a form in. They want to learn.” No, get to the point. If you’re after their information, because you can’t do anything without it, then tell them, “This is what I want.” People get it confused. Your website is not supposed to be this journey where you take people on as a real estate investor.

If you’re an artist, absolutely. If you’re in some sort of creative profession, sure, that makes sense. As an investor, we’re dealing with, “What is the point? I can buy your house for cash and help you get close quickly.” It doesn’t have to always be that messaging directly but get to the point. Say, “This is what I’m here to do. Do you want this thing?” They’ll decide if that even resonates with them because if it doesn’t, they’re already going to leave anyway. All the rest of the stuff you have is irrelevant.

If it does like, “Yes, this is me,” then they’ll start going through other things. I want them to know, “When you’re ready and that still makes sense, this is what you do next, which is give me your information.” Don’t get confused about trying to be crazy. Keep it simple. This is not rocket science. It has to be clear, concise, and understandable for the average person.

You explained it way better than anyone else could. Are we still on pillar number one?

Second Pillar: CRM

Yes, that’s all pillar number one. We can dive into more details of this later. Number two is the importance of a CRM. When I say CRM, what I mean is an email and texting platform. There are lots of other kinds of CRMs that store information. If you don’t know what a CRM is, it means Customer Relationship Management. It’s a software that allows you to track all the contacts that you deal with and do certain things with them.

As a real estate investor, the most important thing that we can do is track all of our data. I’m going to talk about that in a second because it is important. Number two is to communicate with our prospects. That’s potential sellers, buyers, retailers, investors, lenders, contractors, and agents. Until they become an actual part of our business, we have to warm them up and get them there. You got to track all that. We need to keep tracking the data and we need communication. Ideally, it should help you automate those first two things.

We have a lot of data. We can communicate with our prospects and I can automate the communication and collection/management/storage/moving if I need to update it. As long as I can do those three things at a base, then it’s probably going to be a good system. Where a lot of people get hung up is they’re like, “I got to have the perfect CRM. It needs to do everything and all this stuff.” You don’t. You’re never going to find it.

Invariably, that thinking leads you down the path of saying, “I’m going to build something custom,” which then turns into a nightmare for every single person but I do not know a single person who’s tried to build a CRM in the real estate space or any space that was for themselves internally. I’m not referring to those who built it to sell it to other people. It’s a nightmare. It’s going to cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars and it’s still not going to work great. When something breaks, it’s going to cost you a fortune to fix.

What I tell everyone else is rather than trying to fit the CRM into your business, fit your business into your CRM. It’s most of these CRMs, ours included because we have one that we can plug you into that’s for real estate investors. The reality is not every system is going to be a perfect fit for your business but can you fit 70%, 80%, 90%, or 95% of your business into what’s already there or make a few adjustments to fit it in? If that’s the case, then you should do that.

You’re not trying to be a tech mogul, presumably, if you’re on this show reading here. You’re trying to be a real estate investor. Your time is not best spent trying to find the perfect CRM that will fit your process. Your time is better spent getting people in the door, closing them, and then letting the process work however it needs to work on the backside for you. That’s that.

If you don’t have a great follow-up system or CRM to track that data, or the communication platforms in place, you are falling behind. There’s no other way to say it but you are already way far behind anyone else who does have those things and even further to this point. In 2024, sometime in summer, we don’t know the exact date. The speculation is July or August, maybe September. There’s not been an official that I know of. Google is going to change a lot of what works for third-party cookies.

This may not seem super important to you but it’s the start of a bigger trend, which is control of data. Without getting into all the politics and the shenanigans behind it, the short version is there’s a war between Facebook, Apple, and Google for who controls your data. Google and Apple are the most likely winners of those two things because Apple controls most of the devices that your data is being collected on and Google controls Chrome/the internet/Google and how that’s being used.

You should be storing everything, even for those who never want to sell their house to you and those who opt out and say, “Stop messaging me.” Keep the data that you either pay to collect, pay to get, or do marketing for. However you got the data, save it because that data is going to become infinitely more valuable to your business over time as access. We got conditioned for years that we could access data.

I didn’t need data. I could go to Facebook or Google and they had all the data. I could access it not directly like seeing the physical data but I can run advertising and utilize it in my business without having direct access. That’s going to change. Control of your data becomes way more important no matter what you do. That’s for every business, not just for real estate investing so control your data.

The other side of this is that communication is getting harder and harder. The more that we can control our communication with our potential clients, the better our results are going to be. I can’t rely on other platforms to give me the communication. I need to take charge of it myself. That’s why you have to have a great CRM in that. Pillar number two is doing that in your business.

A couple of questions about CRMs. I’m going to keep it as simple as I can because it’s me. I’m simple when it comes to tech. I have used RealFlow for years. I like RealFlow. However, it doesn’t have some of the features that we would want it to have so we’re considering switching. We’re looking at all these different platforms. It drives me crazy anytime I have to change because I’m a slow learner when it comes to tech. Once I get used to something, I’m fine with it.

You didn’t say these words. It’s my words. Done is good enough to the degree that you can improve it as you go but if you have nothing and you’re not using anything, you’re falling behind. I don’t text. I got jaded once they changed all the texting rules, getting my website to be compliant getting permission to text people that reach out to us, and all that stuff did nothing but piss me off. What do you see happening with CRMs in the future? Ringless voicemail, texting, which already has a lot of rules with it, and cold calling which has no call list. What do you see happening next?

I can summarize all of the rule changes that have happened for calling, texting, voicemail, and all of that into one simple idea. Permission. This goes back to one of my favorite books from Seth Godin that he wrote years ago called Permission Marketing. That’s what they’re after. What we’ve gotten used to is that marketing, especially in this digital age, has been the Wild Wild West because it didn’t exist. The ability to mass text like we’ve seen in the last few years, the only way to do that before was in an expensive platform. It was cost-prohibitive for most business owners.

Now, the cost has come down to something nominal. What’s happened is the industry, AKA the government in this case mostly, has come down and said, “Consumers are complaining about these things so we’re going to step in in every marketers’ room at some point in time.” We always do. I wish I could say it wasn’t true but it is because we’ll figure out how to take advantage of it until you tell us we can’t.

Here’s what’s happened. All of this digital stuff has been wrapped into the idea of permission. If you don’t have permission to do these things with these folks, you shouldn’t be doing it anymore. In many cases, they’ve either made it illegal or made the fine substantial. Side note, for any of you guys who don’t know this, I know nine different real estate investing companies that have been sued by the FTC for between $2 million and $9 million a piece for cold texting. This is not one of those, “It doesn’t apply to us.” No, it does.

What does that mean though? Trust me, these technologies are not going anywhere. They’re becoming even more important. The difference is we can’t use it as a mass reach-out tool anymore. We have to use it as a warming-up tool and drive more inbound traffic, which requires doing different marketing. It’s no different than cold calling and cold texting. It was kind of a thing years ago but not really. It wasn’t leading to the fact that it is now. All of a sudden, it got huge. That went by the wayside and there’ll be something else.

I’ve been in this industry enough. There are only about 10 to 15 different ways you can market for a property. We seem to rotate through a circle of those 10 to 15. That’s the reality. What will become of these things is not that they will become mass outreach tools as much as they will become communication builders, automation builders, and ways for us to improve our communication and automation with our clientele.

Case in point, we started building chatbots because we said, “If we can’t do cold texting, cold calling regulations are getting harder and harder. We can’t do a lot of other things. Even ringless voicemail technically falls under the TCPA and is illegal. It doesn’t mean that we can’t do these things we can still do them. You take the risk. Not that you’re going to go to jail but that you do face potential fines.”

For some folks, that’s okay. Those companies getting sued for $2 million to $9 million, I don’t know what the revenue was. They might go, “Here’s $9 million. It’s still worth it because we closed 1,000 deals at $100,000 a piece. Who cares? Here’s the fine. Go away. We’ll keep doing it.” The point is this. You have to learn to adjust and adapt. We started building chatbots for example.

What we find is we can get a list by list from wherever you buy it from. It doesn’t matter. Skip trace a list from wherever you skip trace from. I have a couple of resources that I use but wherever you do it, take that list, upload it to Facebook for example, and run a targeted marketing campaign using Messenger. The message activates on Facebook Messenger, which doesn’t have any regulation around it. It comes into my CRM and then my chatbot takes over qualifies and determines their motivation. How serious are they? What are they looking for in a price point?

If it makes sense, then the bot automatically hands it off. It says, “I’ll schedule an appointment for you.” It finds an appointment in my calendar, schedules a time, and books for me to talk to the seller. All that happened without me having to do anything. When we look at what’s happening, it’s not necessarily that all this stuff is becoming harder. Yes, in a way it is but we have to shift where we focus our attention and how we attract these people. If you understand that, then all of a sudden, the importance of a CRM becomes so much more important.

Here’s the reality. Even if I wanted to hire a good VA, let’s say, who can speak English well and that’s $8 an hour, I might be able to get someone for less but I do need him to have some qualifications. The reality is it’s probably more than $15 but let’s say you get an $8 an hour person and that person is going to cold call for you for 40 hours a week. That’s $320 per week. That’s $1,280 per month.

The reality is for chatbots on our side, including the CRM, you might pay $300 a month total and the chatbot is working 24/7 365. If at 2:00 in the morning they decide to message in, the chatbot’s going to answer. What would it cost for you? Even at $8 an hour times 165 hours a week times 4 weeks, that’s $5,200 at an $8 an hour VA if I spread them out. The cost differential is insane. I can have the same thing happening for less than a tenth of the cost of the same thing. While there is more regulation, there’s also more opportunity than there’s ever been if you understand how to plug the opportunity into your business.

I’ll be real candid. You and I have talked about this in the past. I’ve had a marketing struggle for years. You hire somebody and put all your faith in their knowledge and experience but you don’t know for months if what they’ve been doing produces results. As things shift, if you’re dealing with a marketing agency, company, or staff member that doesn’t keep shifting with the times, it doesn’t take long to spend six figures and get no return.

That can certainly happen. What you have to think about and need to look for is, “Who in my space understands this business? What are our communication metrics?” Here’s my experience. I’ve had plenty of companies I’ve worked with that didn’t produce results. Every single time, though, if I look back without fail, when the results weren’t being produced, it wasn’t necessarily because of anything other than I wasn’t tracking it appropriately.

If I was, I had KPIs in place, and I understood what was going on, there were regular metrics and reporting back. I knew what my leading and lighting indicators were and whatever we were working on. Usually within 1 month or 2, especially on the marketing front, we’re going to have a pretty good idea of, “Is this thing achieving what we intended for or not? If not, what is it achieving? If what it’s achieving is so worth it, do we continue, shift, or tweak?”

It was Tony Robbins who said this. I’m sure he’s still from someplace else. “That which is not tracked is not measured. That which is not measured does not produce results.” It’s something to that effect. Like anything that you do, look at the marketing metrics. Let’s say I’m going to do the campaign with a chatbot that I talked about. How many leads am I going to put in? How long am I going to run this for?

Like any marketing campaign, you have to give it time. Everything needs time to operate and give you usable data. The metrics are I spent X number of dollars. I reached X number of people. I conversed with Y number of people. I set appointments with Z number of people and ended up closing thirteen or whatever the number is. I got to look back, reverse numbers back from there, and say, “Does that make sense?”

In the course of two months, if I close two deals on a campaign and let’s say I made $10,000 a deal for easy numbers, it’s $20,000. How much did it cost me to execute that campaign? If it was $20,000, maybe that wasn’t a great campaign in that case. If it was $18,000, am I still happy with that number? If I can do that at 10X the size that I want, maybe or maybe not. I don’t know. If it was $5,000 and you made $20,000, that looks pretty good all of a sudden.

Like any project in this marketing space, set forth what the metrics should be. Not necessarily the actual numbers because we won’t know those many cases. There’s too much variability in a lot of that but what numbers do I want to track? Your marketing firm should know that. If they don’t, that’s probably a sign that they’re not a good marketing firm. Most good marketing firms want to be held accountable because they know that what they do will work. If it doesn’t work, they don’t want to work with you anymore. Without metrics, there’s a lot of guessing, and guessing is no good in a marketing game or any game.

We’re through the first two pillars. I don’t know that we touched on email but we touched on texts, phones, and stuff. Anything on email before we jumped to the third pillar?

Email still works. A lot of people think it doesn’t. It does. The 2023 stats are, and I could be a little bit off on the number here, but it was hovering around a $40 ROI for every $1 spent. Those who say email marketing is not working, then you’re not doing it right. That’s as simple as that. I see it across our CRM. We are sending hundreds of thousands of emails per day to all of our users and it’s working.

If your campaign is not working from an email standpoint, then it’s a bad campaign. It’s not the email’s fault. It’s your fault for writing bad emails because it is working. Use it not just for communication of what’s going on and how things are working but for marketing. Even if they never open a single email from you, without getting into the specifics, there are a lot of bad reasons to do that, but if nothing else, they’re seeing your name pop into their inbox. There it is. There’s Bob’s name.

Presumably, if they understood why they signed up on your email list because you got permission to email them, whenever they’re ready, they go, “I need help with email marketing. That Bob guy keeps emailing me. Let me reach out to him first.” You’ll be the person they think of first, even if they never opened an email. Why? It’s because they saw your name in there from the last 2, 4, 6, 8, or 12 months.

What’s the third pillar, Bob?

Third Pillar: High Value Social Profile

The third pillar is going to be what I call a high-value social profile. What do I mean by that? In the world of social media, there are good, better, and best. The best is you’re actively posting every single day, multiple times a day in posts, stories, and everything across every single platform, and it’s great. The reality for most of us is that it’s not feasible without a team of people behind us. There are too many platforms, variabilities, variations, and things.

What does a high-value social profile mean? It means focusing on the 1, 2, or 3 platforms that you feel like you use the most for yourself because that’s where you’re most likely to be anyways, most likely to engage with people and see what’s going on. If that’s Facebook for you, great. If that’s Instagram, great. If that’s LinkedIn, great. If that’s TikTok, great. Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. Pick the platform, focus on that, and create content on those platforms as much as you can.

There are good, better, and best. The best is multiple times a day, every single day, seven days a week. I get that that’s probably not reasonable for most folks. Can you post three times a week? Cool. Do it. Can you post one time a week? Cool. Do it. Can you post one time a month? Nah, it’s probably not worth your time then. Don’t get it twisted. Effort is rewarded on social over the long haul, not the short haul. People are too short-sighted to give it the long haul though.

You have to do it for twelve months consistently. I guarantee you that if you posted twice a day, 7 days a week for 12 months, you’d be shocked at what would happen to your profile in 12 months. It won’t happen for 6 to 8 or 9 of those 12 months. Almost nothing will happen but as you start going and you’re consistent, things will start tracking at that point in time.

What does the high value mean? High value means this. Number one, do you have a good profile picture? It’s clear. I can see your face. If I see your profile picture and its small form, not blowing it up, and then I meet you in person, am I going to recognize you? If not, then it’s not a good photo. If you’re like, “Bob, I don’t have any good photos,” get your iPhone out, go to portrait mode, and have someone snap a few photos for you. It’s amazing how it looks.

If you’re still not sure, you don’t want to do a selfie because you don’t want to do it, go to Craigslist. I guarantee you, everywhere has a local college. Community colleges are usually the best that have some photography-based program where you can find a student, who for $100 or less, will take several thousand photos of you wherever you want and then send them to you. I guarantee you, out of 1,000 photos, there’ll be 2 to 5 that are great or maybe more. You got 1,000 photos for $100.

You can then go pay to have them edited if you want them and all the other stuff but the reality is getting great photos of you is not an expensive prospect. For social media, I don’t need a super high-quality thing. Here’s the reality. There was a great photographer in Chicago. If you’re in the Chicago area and you want to hook up with her, her name is Akara. I’ll send you her information. She’s fantastic. I paid her, if I remember correctly, $500 two different times for a photo shoot. She shot 1,000 photos that I negotiated access to so I got all the photos. She beautifully edited 60 of them for me for $500. My headshot, Derek, that I sent you for this episode, was from one of her photo shoots.

It’s not expensive to get this great stuff but it’s got to be clearly you, not you and your wife, you and your business partner, you and your kids. It just needs to be you. I’m not saying you can’t talk about those things in your profile but your picture should be you and across every platform. It should be the same photo on every platform.

Number two, a high-value social profile also means being on every platform in so much as owning your space. Think about it like the Oregon Land Rush. If you got there and you shoved your flag into the ground, it was yours. For every single social platform, you should have an account with ideally the account usernames with your handles. My Facebook is Facebook.com/TheBobMcIntosh. It should be the same, ideally, if you can make it across every platform.

If you look for me, you’re going to find @TheBobMcIntosh on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or X whatever it is called, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Parler, or Clubhouse. Pick one. There are 40 other ones out there. Anytime I hear about a new social platform, I’ll go in and create my account. Where are you going to see me is on Instagram, Facebook, maybe LinkedIn a little bit, and very occasionally on Twitter. That’s about it.

I have all those other ones. The reality is I don’t have time to be on all of them but you will find me at every single one in the same place. In every single one, I got the same photo. I point them ideally back to where else to find me on other platforms. Let’s say they’re on LinkedIn and they find me. I don’t go to LinkedIn very often, just once a month maybe. I probably should do more but I don’t. It’s very easy for them to go there and find out that I’m on Facebook, Instagram, and these other platforms and where I’m at. If they can’t reach me here, this is how they can reach me instead.

What this does is it enables me to be on the platforms that I’m most likely to be on anyway, which means I’m going to use it as a business owner. It allows someone who’s on a platform that may not be the same as me to come find me on the platform that I’m on and be able to connect with them. That’s what a high-value social profile looks like. Last but not the least is make sure you fill out the basics. Have a simple description of what you do. Have a link to a website, contact card, Linktree, or somewhere where they can get information, watch you, connect with you, get your phone number for your business or you, fill out a form often for the thing, and make that the same across all platforms.

Consistency will be key to this because A) If you want to change it, it’s easy to change on every platform. You don’t have to write it one time and B) It allows everyone to find you as easily as possible. For example, if you connect with me and if you want to do this, go to Go3DC.com/BobMcIntosh. On that link, there’ll be several things. Number one will be my whole contact card. It’s going to have my photo, phone number, and CRM phone number. Both of those are in there. Also, my birthday, all my social profiles, and email address. It’s all there.

They can also book a call with me. They can also connect to every one of my major social profiles from that same place. I link that same thing everywhere. Why? It’s because it’s easy for folks to find me. That creates high-perceived value in the folks who find me no matter where they find me. That’s the goal. We look more professional to these folks. We have a great website and CRM for follow-up and communication. I’ve got a good high-value social presence. Those three things by themselves will help you close more deals in the long-term.

We’ve talked about so many different things. The reality is it’s overwhelming but necessary. We will also have your contact information. Go to TheGenerationsOfWealth.com/DigitalPillars. For a lot of us, that’s overwhelming because we’re not techie. We don’t know what to start with first so we start with nothing. It’s a reality of our business. We have got to change. When I started in 2003, we were advertising in newspapers. If I was trying to run a business in 2024 advertising in newspapers, we wouldn’t have any business. We don’t have a choice.

Surprisingly, they work well. You put a QR code in and it takes them online. The people who are old school still do it. It’s so cheap because no one does it. It’s a fun fact. It’s not going to be like your biggest lead generator by any means but for the cost, there’s usually still good traction there.

The point is if that was all you did, it doesn’t work. We have to go with things as we go. Bob, I have a question I ask most of my guests. What is something that I should have asked you that I haven’t?

The Cost

The question that I would say that you didn’t ask me that you should have is, how much does it cost to do all of this? That’s usually the biggest factor. We’ve only got so many marketing dollars to spend. How much should it cost to do all of this? The reality is if you take on a good chunk of this yourself, which won’t take more than a handful of hours a week, usually at most in most cases, and you were to hire someone to do all this, you’re talking a few hundred dollars a month to make all this happen so it’s relatively nominal.

That’s the thing that people need to understand. If you were to pay all the monthly things for everything I talked about like creating your social and doing some basic posting, you’re going to pay if you want to about $3,000 a year. There’s some variability in that depending on certain factors but let’s say you spent $3,000 a year. Do you think that if you had all these things set up for a whole year for $3,000 you could generate at least one deal to cover your cost of spending that $3,000?

My answer is probably you could. I’d be hard-pressed to say someone couldn’t do that. Understand what is your input versus your output. Too many of us as investors get caught up on the actual number instead of looking at, “What did the number generate for me? I spent 3 and made 2 extra deals this year that I don’t think I would have gotten at $5,000 a deal so I made $10,000 grand for 3. How many more times can I spend 3 to make 10?” That becomes the question. I told you to ask the question simply because a lot of folks do. I also had you ask the question because the answer is it shouldn’t matter if you’re going back to your KPIs and tracking those results.

I can’t tell you how much I got out of this. I get the joys of having you as a personal friend so we get to have conversations outside of the show. I appreciate you taking the time and sharing with my audience/ I would love to have you back on the Generations of Wealth Voyage, which anybody should be checking out. It’s GOWVoyage.com.

We got back on a cruise ship for the last voyage before we were on land for a couple of years. It was a fantastic event. We also do a lot of socializing and networking, which is where Bob and I got to spend a lot of time holding some adult beverages, standing in swimming pools, and getting to know each other, which is always awesome. You’re a wealth of knowledge. I know where your heart is and how much you give to everyone’s community. I appreciate it.

Thanks for having me on. For all of you reading, I truly appreciate your time. It’s the most valuable thing. If I can help you in any way, go to that link I said earlier. I’d be happy to connect and see if there’s a way that I can make your business even better.

We’ll wrap it up. We’ll see everybody else in the next episode. Go out there, live your vision, and love your life.

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Important Links

• TheGenerationsOfWealth.com/DigitalPillars
• Reicot.com
• TheGenerationsOfWealth.com/fbGroups
• Gowvoyage.com
• TheGenerationsOfWealth.com/YTChannel
• TheGenerationsOfWealth.com/Instagram

About Bob McIntosh

Bob is a national speaker and entrepreneur having spent over 3,500 hours on stages and helped more than 15,000 people across the US, he’s a #1 Amazon best selling author and has been personally responsible for helping thousands of entrepreneurs generate millions in profits.

He has been featured on over 30 podcasts, is a founding member of the Forbes Real Estate Council providing direction and information in the real estate space for all of Forbes readers.

He has been published on ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, Yahoo News, Small Business trendsetters, The Money Show, The Miami Herald and Wall Street Select.