Episode 19: Data Analytics and Retargeting for Marketing Success

Clay Hepler (00:00)
Another week.

Justin Piche (00:02)
All right, welcome to the ground game podcast. This is Justin Piche.

Clay Hepler (00:08)
And this is Clay Hepler and we are here to teach you how to win the ground game.

Justin Piche (00:18)
All right, Pumped to talk this week. I think we got a great topic. Specifically, we're going to talk about data analytics and retargeting for marketing campaigns that we run and just kind of dive into how we do these things in our businesses. But first, what's going on?

Clay Hepler (00:37)
Well, dude, this is actually like a per like as you and I were marinating on this topic, it become it's becoming more and more apparent that this business requires a higher level of professionalization for every aspect of your business. And so, you know, the goal of the podcast, you and I both was obviously we get the the great time every week to get together and talk shop and and also to show people the

evolution of the ground game. This is like real time stuff. So you're listening to podcasts, you might listen to a main podcast and they're talking about their agency service or the new CRM or and then every once in a while there could be something that's like industry shifting, right? You know, in the word on the street here is the game is changing, the ground game is changing. And it is of course, it's changing over time. Markets get more efficient. And there's only one way to

change is and it's to change. If you don't change, then you get left behind and you hear people that are talking about distress acquisitions, talking about subdividing, talking about, know, hey, I just specialize in a certain area, a certain market. And really what we're going to talk about today is something that underpins all that. Something that provides the foundation for the decisions of what you should do.

And that's why I'm really excited to talk about this topic today.

Justin Piche (02:07)
Yeah. Well, man, it's been like an insane couple of weeks for me just in my business and life in general. I've got a lot of like things coming up, but the main things I've been working on these last couple of weeks is a couple of larger scale developments where I am actually putting together a fund or an SPV special purpose vehicle to take limited partners in and run these deals to completion. Both of them, the two main ones I'm looking at right now are both

They're with partners, Texas partners that are awesome. And they are basically two and a half to three year deals, Texas land and splitting up one of the subdivisions will be 34 lots in the Hill Country. We're gonna build roads, do a bunch of clearing work, put in power infrastructure, do test wells to verify groundwater for all the lots and then sell to builders and sell retail. And then another one is up near Fort Worth.

like an hour away from Fort Worth and it's going to be somewhere around 62, 64 lots. they're just both of these deals are pretty similar in terms of what infrastructure we're adding. But there's so many moving pieces. know, historically, I've talked about this on past deals of how I've gone through and the movement from using my own money to partnering with friends and family to utilizing bank financing. Now getting into the next kind of level, which is

using leverage, but also using like high net worth individuals as limited partners and sharing obviously pretty generously in the returns. These structures are way more complex as you get up in deal size and investor sophistication as well. Like I tried to initially basically pitch essentially like, hey, me as a developer, I'm not making a cent of money until the project is profitable and just do a very simple profit split on the backend.

But the feedback we were getting from investors is the GP promote or the percentage that the GP is making looks high. It's higher than anything like we normally do. And now that I understand how those funds are typically structured, which we can talk about that in another episode. We're not going to dive deep into that. the promote we were proposing is not high for the structure of how we were structuring it. But you still have to get your investors bought in. Right. And so.

Clay Hepler (04:28)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Piche (04:29)
We have to make this a way more complex thing and make it more normal so the investors can see a lower promote, something they're used to, but it involves adding in acquisitions fees and developer fees. It involves separating the GP co-invest to earn what the project earns and then the LP co-invest or the LP investment to earn its profits and then kick into a promote after the hurdle is met and there's water. Me and my partner Ben have just been in spreadsheets for

Clay Hepler (04:51)
You're pumped about this dude, you're pumped. You're pumped.

Justin Piche (04:58)
days and by tonight, you know, tonight I'm going to have to spend a ton of time getting all that, getting all that together to finalize the decks. But it's awesome, but it's crazy. And yesterday I went out to a property, drove seven and a half hours total back and forth to go visit the one in the Hill Country, set the well sites for the well driller, target clearing work we're going to do. And it was also really cool to just walk the land and see the views and the rolling and just visualize what it's going to look like, you know, on the GIS overlay as we're walking around the properties.

And then I got a verbal on a reasonably big entitlement deal that we're working on the contract for a two and a half million dollar purchase entitlement deal, which, you know, I mean, it's kind of a new area. I'm not trying to get shiny object, but it tees up really, really well in terms of what development is happening around it. And it could be a really big, deal. So we're keeping our keeping our fingers internally source internally sourced. Yeah. Yeah.

Clay Hepler (05:52)
Internally sourced or a partner to you Jill Yeah

for us You know, we're we're hiring a more making a couple of really big hires And the first hire is a senior operations manager integrator That will be managing a lot of what we're talking about today and then probably an acquisition hire maybe to full-time acquisition guys

that will be doing general blocking and tackling, getting deals under contract for flips, for developments, but also going out there and prospecting, right? And finding big deals, finding big opportunities. Really excited about what that can look like. For them, it's gonna be a big income potential because they're gonna get a piece of the pie on the actual developments, right?

Justin Piche (06:37)
Thank

you

Clay Hepler (06:51)
You know, the net profit, it's almost like they're paid like an acquisition person, but they're going to get like essentially what would have, what would essentially be a equity split of those larger deals, right? Because of their promote is the net profit, the realized profit. So exciting, exciting times for us. You know, I heard this really interesting thing this week that the cost of change in businesses is a lot higher than you think.

Justin Piche (07:06)
you

Clay Hepler (07:21)
You know, you can assume that the cost of change in your business is going to reduce the output of a certain process by 20 to 30%. So say, for example, you take what Justin and I are going to talk about today and you implement it into your business. Well, you can assume that the productivity of your team for that specific process is 20 to 30 % reduced. Now you might say, well, that's, you know, that doesn't seem like a lot.

Right. But depending on where in your process, the actual percentage is reduced. If it's on the front end, for example, if you're in data, then every other part of your process is going to be dramatically changed, which is what we, I've recently made a change in our data and we're lagging behind two weeks because we made this change. It's, we think it's for the better. It's going to reduce our cost per lead, cost per contract and everything. But, you know, there's some gradual getting used to.

And so what I find that, you know, especially maturing in this business, you realize that the cost of change is greater than the cost of doing whatever you're doing just better. And that's something that I'm really focusing on in 2025. And I would encourage our listeners to listen what Justin and I talk about here, but don't go out there and just implement it right away. It might sound good what we talk about and do in our business, but gradually implementing it is better than going full tilt and completely ripping the Band-Aid off and saying, I'm doing this

this entirely new process in my data.

Justin Piche (08:52)
Yeah. And one of the things maybe I'll highlight too is that because we're to talk about data analytics and looking at our marketing performance, mainly it's going to be focused on like our marketing performance. And then how do we target those same areas better? What are we looking at? What is the key? What are the key features of that data that are those the leads you get and the contracts you get that that give you that higher chance of getting a property under contract. That's kind of the gist of what we're going to look at today. And one of the things for me is that we haven't really done this at all.

until recently. You we've been operating for three years doing a very, more than three years now, doing a very like broad marketing approach, handling a ton of data, a ton of outbound outreach, and it's worked. It's been great. But I see room for improvement. And one of the things that structurally we don't have well right now that we've been working on for maybe three months now, I think we'll be finished here in the next six to eight weeks, is our Notion CRM and our KPI analytics dashboards.

so that we can track all this stuff so much better. So there's like some key functionality that needs to be built into our systems that we don't have that makes this process a lot harder when we don't have it. And so yeah, to your point, just going on implementing how you do analyzing your data, it may be a little more challenging if you don't have the system set up to actually look at it. Like if you're not tagging your data appropriately, if you don't have the individual unique fields in each of your...

your leads that identify and tie it back to a marketing campaign or identify and tie it back to a, to a, to like a data export that you pulled from your data source or whatever. It's going to be hard to analyze this. So you need to have that process kind of built out and then you can actually look at these numbers with more clarity.

Clay Hepler (10:35)
And

Justin, let me just submit one more thing to the audience of the relevance of this and why we're talking about the most boring subject on the face of the earth. If you're in the hell-slipping world or you're in another business that is a direct marketing business, primarily, a lot of times you see that your data is actually filtered on the front end. So you might have, for example,

a list of probate sellers or a list of tax delinquent sellers or high equity owner occupied or all these lists, pre foreclosure, all these lists that show intent and show distress. But in land, it's completely different. It's the other way around, I've found. And Justin, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, but there is no perceivable distress unless you're targeting highly targeted

target list, but because we're doing such a volume, know, accounting might have a thousand records or 2000 records, which is so small compared to what you would get in your normal, you know, 20,000 probate deals per year in Los Angeles, let's just say, right? And so we have to do this thing on the back end and then look on the front end to inform how we're retargeting, remarketing. So our success looks like spending more time on the back end versus spending more money on the front end, like you would in getting a select list.

in the household selling world. And so it might be boring. It might be tedious. No, it's completely tedious, but you have to think of it as the reverse. So in order for you to get a higher return on your investment, you spend that extra money to do the data.

Justin Piche (12:19)
Yeah. So let's let's dive in because I think we're going to dive a little deeper into that kind of thing. So it's like, I guess the question I want to ask the audience is like, what if you could turn your past marketing efforts into new opportunities? And you can. And we're to talk about today how how we are doing that. And the real thing is return on ad spend is kind of a big topic in this industry. Right. How much money are you getting on the back end for ad spend? And if you go really broad like I do.

your ad spend is generally going to be a little bit higher per deal or per contract. So how do you get that broad and narrow it down? There's a lot of things that people do on the front end, right? You filter out anything with wetlands, you filter out anything that doesn't have access. You try to only target out of state owners or you try to, there's all these different things you try to do to get the highest likelihood sellers in your data and only market to them. And that's kind of what we're going to, we're going to talk about why.

those individual things and why we're doing the data analysis on the backend to retarget areas we've had success. So you should from this get out, what are you gonna get out of this podcast? Kind of a practical approach to how to analyze your past marketing efforts and then strategies that we use for retargeting leads once we've done that analysis. And then yeah, that's most of what you're get out of here.

Clay Hepler (13:38)
Yeah, I think the retargeting is a necessity in today's day and age with land. It's no longer, I'm setting up 500 mailers, gosh, I wish I started investing in land back then, and getting four deals, right? It's more about the consistent follow-up that is required. Now, you can have a business that makes 400K a year. You're jumping from market to market. You don't have to build out this data department. You don't have to retarget.

You could probably go even to seven figures a year. But the thing is, if you want to have a higher return on your investment over the long term and continue to have a solvent business and scale, this is a requirement. It's not even like it's needed. So that's something that I just wanted to quickly add. So let's talk about how we actually go through this process. You want to kick us off here?

Justin Piche (14:34)
Yeah, and maybe just some like data information for my business that maybe the listeners are aware of, but it will help frame where my mind's at. We have a relatively large cold outreach team and we're going through somewhere between three and four hundred thousand new records a quarter. That's like bulk, the bulk data that we're exporting. So call it, call it one, call it a hundred thousand records a month or so, or maybe a little more than that, that we're going through new cold outreach that will burn through.

an entire state of data pretty quickly. So the first thing is I have to be across multiple states to be able to sustain that amount of outbound marketing. And I am quite a few of them at this point. So that's the first thing. Now, when we run a marketing campaign, we want to what I what I don't like to do is be like totally focused in one specific area. And like, let's say let's just use North Carolina, for example, let's say I'm marketing North Carolina, and my target market in North Carolina is five acres and up.

All right, let's just say that for ease of discussion. There may be 150,000 records in North Carolina that are five acres and up. There might be 170, there might be 130. It's somewhere in that range. If I'm putting all my marketing effort towards North Carolina in one month, I'm going to burn through it in about six weeks. All that data is going be gone. I'll burn through that market. Now, how often do you retarget markets? I typically don't like going back into those markets for six months, maybe even a year in some cases. And so what I do instead,

is I break up those campaigns for individual state into a six month campaign and then I layer and stack other states next to it. I'm marketing to multiple states and multiple at the same time through multiple seasons of the year. There's different times of year and different places where you get better buyer engagement. I'm just kind of trying to average it all out. Now, when I finished marketing to those people, I've only got about

30%, maybe 35 % of people who have responded to me in some way, positive, negative, indifferent, whatever. And we've taken those leads out of that initial list and we've categorized those leads into follow-up sequences. So that's kind of something we always do. The remaining 65, 70 % or whatever of leads that we've never been able to contact, it doesn't make sense to just retarget them with the exact same data we have.

there's probably some reason why most of those haven't reached out. It could be because they just blocked us and just don't respond to any marketing cold outreach. That's obviously a portion of that group. The other thing is it could just be bad skip tracing data. could be bad phone numbers, whatever. And so one thing we are starting to do now is in order to retarget taking that data and skip tracing it with a different provider than what we generally use. use Versium for our bulk skip tracing because it's the cheapest.

And if you want a referral link, you let us know. We have one tied to the ground game and you can literally help us out because of that money. We'll just, if know, the referral fee goes straight to the ground game, but I'm not, we're not really publishing it, but if you want it, let me know, send a comment, send us an email and we'll send that to you. It doesn't cost you anything, but it does help the ground game.

Clay Hepler (17:39)
We can put it, we can,

we can, I'm sure we can put something below for these guys so it's easy for them.

Justin Piche (17:43)
Yeah, that's actually

a good idea. If you guys are interested in that, we'll put that kind of link down below. So we can use another skip tracing provider that provides different numbers. And that's one way that we can go back and re-target. And then the other way is just to analyze that data. And that's what we're going to kind of get into now is analyzing our past marketing campaigns and figure out what is it about those leads or those contracts that made them more likely

to sign a contract with us than the ones who didn't. And that is where the real superpower, I think, is of your data analysis, is being able to see, I sent out 100,000 pieces of marketing or 100,000 contacts and I ran this marketing campaign on them. And in that 100,000 contacts, I generated 500 leads. And in those 500 leads, I generated, I don't know, 50 contracts. That's probably too much. Call it 20 contracts. I generated 20 contracts.

or something like that out of this hundred thousand leads. So what is it about? What are the commonalities that those contracts and those leads had? What percentage of them were a certain age demographic? What percentage of those leads were in-state versus out-of-state owners or even in zip code or out of zip code owners? And then how does that inform when I retarget those lists or those areas? How do I make sure I'm more niche and getting a better return on ad spend when I retarget?

And it's by pulling and figuring out all the commonalities for the rest of those leads that we weren't able to engage that shared in common with our leads that we did convert and doubling down on those leads, getting more specific, more detailed marketing campaigns to those leads. And then if you take that data and you extrapolate it across all the markets you're in, you may see some differences in those in different markets. There may be different things about people or about leads and contacts that

in a market that's market specific, right? So that's the benefit of analyzing each market independently. But there may be some things that are totally common between all your leads and that can help inform you where you market next. When you're picking a new market, you may be able to, you may have all this data now that tells you, okay, if I target folks who are aged 65 and up, who are out of zip code owners, that's going to lead to my highest percentage conversion. And so if I want to go, if I'm a small, if I have a small team and I'm not doing

mass outreach, that may be the avenue that I go to get all my data. And maybe instead of going broad in one market, I go deep in multiple markets and improve my return on ad spend and improve my ability to get things under contract.

Clay Hepler (20:20)
And that's the entire purpose of this, right? We're not looking at data to just look at data. One of the things that we do in our business is we have a little form that our cold outreach team submits and it's just feedback on the parcels. Hey, why is this person not interested? Here's the reason why they're not interested. So we have this running tab of the markets that we're in, the areas that we're in, the counties that we're in. Why are these people not interested? Do we have a certain county or two, three, four counties?

that people are just particularly not interested in. Maybe it's just a county that doesn't have a lot of velocity of out of state buyers or out of county buyers. And so if we're trying to hit them with a different marketing channel, that informs our ability to do that. Now, this is exactly why I'm hiring an operations person to actually do this. The thing here that's important, I want to just interject this, is this doesn't have to be your job, but it does have to be a job.

Right. And someone with a data analytics background. don't know, let Justin, let me ask you, who is the person on your team that's actually analyzing this data? What, what, does the structure look like for that?

Justin Piche (21:32)
Yeah, so she's actually a what is it? Data science master's degree person. And you don't have to have someone who's that skill. Like you can have somebody who's really good at Excel and understands statistical analysis and understands these type of things. know, sure, could I do it? Yes, yes. Do I have a depth of Excel knowledge? Yes, yes, I do. But again, I don't have a ton of time to dive into these. They take time to put together and...

Clay Hepler (21:46)
Thank you.

Justin Piche (22:00)
I think the real work though, just so the audience understands, the real work is not necessarily doing the data analysis. That doesn't take a huge amount of time. The real work is making sure your data that you're utilizing and collecting and the feedback you're providing on it, that is uniform and updated. Like for us, the big thing is we need to make sure each lead that comes in is linked back to a marketing campaign. Like we have to know exactly which marketing campaign and at which stage in the marketing campaign, which

cold outreach number of whatever that was that they actually come in at. Cause that all informed like there's here's another thing I'm thinking about, right? We, we co-call, right? And we, we co-call through lists four or five, six times. Is that the right number? You know, like I, I'm the reason why I'm doing it that many times is because I've been told by other people and by the skip trade or the, the co-calling software, that's the right amount of times to go through a list six to eight times. But is that right? How many leads do we pull out on the first time through? How many leads do we pull out on the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth,

Clay Hepler (22:32)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Piche (22:58)
Like if you don't collect that data, you may just call a list way too many times or you might not call them enough. You might find, actually the fourth, the fifth, we're pulling out an equivalent amount of leads as we were the first and second. So if you don't go that far in your cold calling campaign, you're going be missing opportunities. That's the type of thing that we're looking at now that we maybe haven't been looking at in the past.

Clay Hepler (23:18)
Yeah. And what I remember when I was in the house wholesaling business and I would get these ads from direct mail companies and they would say like, you know, it takes seven true touches to get us, you know, the majority of the sellers in a specific market. Basically the, what they were saying was based on our data, you get them the biggest bang for your buck. you send out seven pieces of mail to a certain list, let's just say, that list just in

After you send seven reach outs, whether it's over a eight month, 12 month, whatever period, I think that they had like a sequential like every month for seven months or whatever. There is a massive, massive drop of response rate and return on ad spend. Right? So if you go up to seven times, then they're like, okay, first time you get, you you get 20 % of the total sellers that you could potentially get on a contract to flip.

Justin Piche (24:14)
you

Clay Hepler (24:17)
Second time it's 17, third time it's like 30. And then it gets incrementally lower, right? But after the seventh time, it drops off to like 1%. And so if you have this data, what you can look at is say, I can actually project out my targeting of retargeting markets and targeting of new markets based on this data. And what we internally have,

and say, I know I can put together a cashflow forecast of bringing new data into our business, reaching out to new sellers, reaching out to old sellers. And so I can use that to recycle my own data. And that effectively reduces your cost per lead and your cost per contract because you understand how many times it takes to actually reach out to them.

Justin Piche (25:04)
you

Yep, 100%. It's not, yeah, I mean, when I, so when I got into the, was doing household sailing type stuff as well when I, before I started getting into land and you know, I kind of did it myself. I listened to BiggerPockets. I like looked at blogs online or whatever it was back in 2019 that I was doing. And it was like, oh, you need to send three, four, five mailers to the same market. But my sample size was small. I was sending,

maybe to like five to 10,000 records. And I was sending the first letter, then the second and the third and the fourth. And what I saw was an incredible drop off. My first letter was okay. My second letter was not that great. My third letter, bomb, fourth letter, bomb, fifth letter, bomb. And it was such a small sample size that I don't think I really could have good data on it. And mentally what I did was I just said, okay, well, I'm never doing that again. I'm going to send one letter and that's it. Right. And never really revisited retargeting.

And I think I just had a lack of data, but now we have a lot more data to go off of to figure out what is the best way to retarget these things. And one thing I just saw or learned was through all of our contracts in 2024, we did not have a single contract signed with somebody under the age of 35.

not want, which makes up a decent percentage of landowners. I mean, there's obviously a higher fraction of landowners that are older than that, but that's interesting, right? That's interesting. So if I want to go to be niche down and niche into these areas, and I want that, and I'm to spend a lot more on a niche down marketing campaign than I might on a general marketing outreach. I'm going send more mail maybe or whatever it might look like. I probably want to pay that extra credit on Versium to pull the demographic data and just pull out all the people that are under that age.

because I had no success, right? I wouldn't know that if I didn't look at the data.

Clay Hepler (27:00)
I got a great one too. So we found that the going in number of a seller when we offered on a deal, we couldn't move them more than about 20%, 25%. So like, you know, in the household selling world, you know, you might be able to talk to a seller, all of a sudden there's more distress, you know, someone that's selling it $200,000 house for those of you in California.

I don't live in California, a $200,000 house. And you might even be able to get it for 110, right? 120. There's so much stuff that's in the house. You need to repair the roof. You got to repair X, Y, and Z. And so you can reduce that number that they wanted for because there's true things that you need to improve in the house. And they're like, oh yeah, that actually makes sense. I'm getting the story. In land, we didn't find that we were able to, even with really good sales skills, reduce the price significantly.

So if a seller is asking for double market value, it's really rare that you're gonna pull this down. Now, Ajay might get on the podcast and say, you know what, can actually, I have the Sales Closer Academy or whatever he has, we can land Closer Academy, and we can drop it down. But I found that it's not like that. Unless there's true distress, you're not getting a big movement.

Justin Piche (28:15)
Land Closer Academy.

Clay Hepler (28:27)
Do you find the same thing in your business?

Justin Piche (28:30)
Yeah, I think so. One thing I'll say is about Ajay and the Land Closer Academy is he's he's pretty freaking good. He is really good. And I think I think with land a lot in a lot of cases, it's more of a relationship building and trust building thing to be able to move the price more than logic. So I do agree. We tend to struggle when somebody gives us a number to get them down substantially. You know, our second call is always a framing call.

where the salesperson is highlighting the things about the property that make it worth less than the surrounding comps that we're looking at. Is there access? Is there clearing? Is there a well? Is septic already installed? Is there power utility hookups there on the site? How does the slope lay? Wetlands, whatever it is, we're highlighting these negative characteristics, not in a way that's to say your property stinks, but just in a way to frame when our offer comes in, it's gonna be lower than what you're expecting before making that offer call.

And that obviously helps. But I think also in land, there's a lot of people that they don't need to sell until they need to sell. And so if you're able to create that good rapport through your conversations on your team and move them into extreme amounts of follow-up, like a long, long period of follow-up sequence, touch points in three, six, 12, 18, 24 months.

We end up converting quite a few folks who we didn't think we could get down. We weren't able to talk down more than 20, 25%. It was still, call it 10, 15 % above our offer target and eventually get some of those people to convert into leads. It's a lot of work though. That's a lot of work. I tend to agree. There's not a ton of distress in land. It generally doesn't take a lot of money to hold a piece of land that you own outright. Taxes are relatively low on land. There's a lot of...

conservation or agricultural or timber exemptions and a lot of places. And so, yeah, it is definitely tough.

Clay Hepler (30:28)
That's just a piece of data. Back to what we were talking about specifically with the data analytics as the, you know, using it to inform your marketing. You know, the key thing is actually track it, right? And so if we think about tracking data, what are the most important things to track? You know, I would suggest that you need to understand

where you start in the funnel, right? How many pieces of raw data are you pulling? Of the raw data that you're pulling, if you scrub, how much of that are you actually scrubbing out? What's the percentage of that you're scrubbing out? Of that percentage, if you're skip tracing and texting and RVMing or cold calling, what's the percentage of that that you get? This is to inform how you retarget. This is to inform the quality of your lists.

What's the percentage that gets mobile landlines? It's most specifically that you can reach right in general And then from there if you have a campaign, you know How many people are you passing through Justin? said 30 to 35 percent on your first go-round if you're cold outreach of those 30 to 35 percent How about the second one? How many people are coming out in the second one? third one If you're using one channel and if you're using multiple channels what we do in our business is we use a software called rei sift

REISift is a, it's kind of like a CRM slash like data stacking software that you can basically upload data and then tag, put specific tags on the data. And the tags that you have on the data indicate, know, is this DNC? Is this, you know,

Justin Piche (31:54)
you

Clay Hepler (32:20)
a lead, is this someone that's opted in? We add different tags for specific types of properties. And so what we'll do is we'll get this data and we'll upload it there. And so when we retarget an area, this serves as our sort data repository. And I'll put something below for those of you guys that are interested in investigating it a little bit more just for your ease. Just a link to check it out.

Justin Piche (32:45)
I just looked at their website. love their, they have a tagline here in here that says, for the data filters piece, which I think is probably what you're using or what you're talking about, put down your shotgun, pick up your sniper rifle. I love that. I love that.

Clay Hepler (32:48)
little ninja.

Yeah. So we use this to actually stack our data, you know, so that when we retarget, it's a lot easier to retarget, right? It's not that expensive. It's like 200 bucks a month, three, you know, and it's such a great source that you can use, at least for how you stack it so that if you do start to want to retarget your data, you can use it as the, this tool to restack it. Now, how's wholesalers do this? other businesses do this.

They say, I have all these distress tags that I attribute. Right? So what we did is we kind of.

Justin Piche (33:36)
Yeah, and if a piece

of data has multiple distressed tags, obviously that is a more likely to sell person that would be a higher priority lead to send more marketing to, for example, right?

Clay Hepler (33:47)
Exactly. And we've really used it as a function of how we retarget things. Because a lot of people are like, wait, how do you actually, like if you send a list, like where does it go? Do you put in your CRM? know, private coaching clients ask me this all the time. And so I love REISIF because it allows us to stack data really easily. And so when we retarget them, we're just like, all right, let's pull the list of this specific area, this specific county. It's great. And that's how we actually create a retarget campaign.

Right, so the retarget campaign is not like in Excel spreadsheets. It's using REISift. so, when it comes to tracking, if you think about tracking, gonna retarget this list, it's not really that difficult to track because we all kind of have it connect to our CRM, right? And so when we pull lists, like, okay, we upload it with the new tags that these are people that said they're interested or not interested, Justin, and then,

When we pull the list, it's like, okay, so we had a thousand first. Now we have 200 that we're uploading on a second round or third round or whatever. And so we can just add those to KPIs or the data that we're tracking to just see it. And it's a really good centralized place to use.

Justin Piche (35:03)
Yeah. Awesome.

Now, one thing I think that's important to talk about too is like how your, what your copy looks like to these campaigns. Cause it's one of the things that is, that I see a lot. Okay. I own a lot of properties and so I get a lot of texts from other land investors who have skip traced me or found me from properties that they're looking for that I own. And I cannot, I get so much mail and I can't tell you how similar it all looks and sounds.

everybody says the same exact thing. They, I mean, I could just go through and probably pull up like three texts I've gotten the last week on properties. say the same kind of thing. And I can tell, actually, I can even tell the which software if they're sending me a text they're using based on what their message is, because I've used all of them in the past. And it is, is not, so you need to, you need to be able to personalize your message a little bit better. And one thing that we do that we didn't, we didn't used to do, but I think helps a lot is

When you're marketing to a county, let's say you're sending a piece of mail to a county, you may highlight that county tag in your mail merge. You may have a field for that county and you may say, Hey, property owner, my name's Justin and I'm looking to purchase land in Columbus County. I noticed you have a parcel there. Here's my offer for it or whatever your marketing looks like. When people live in small towns inside of a county and they see you say the county at large immediately, they're like, okay, they don't really know where my property is.

Now, one thing you can do is there's a website called clay.com. Now, I don't use clay right now. I've been able to use abacus.ai, which I think I've talked about before, which is kind of a multi-LLM software where you can basically have access to all the LLM models through one subscription. But we've been able to build out with our coordinates a kind of workflow where we upload our spreadsheets.

into our model and it finds those coordinates and actually finds the nearest small town. Now some of the data programs, a lot of them, you can export the city, but even still when you export the city, sometimes it really is the closest big city. It's not the small town that the property is actually in. And that helps a lot. It does increase conversion. I can't give you a specific number, but when somebody, when you, when you reach out to somebody and you say, Hey, I'm looking at your, property in, I don't know. Here's an example. I live in Houston.

Clay Hepler (37:05)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Piche (37:33)
there's a bunch of towns on the outside or a bunch of like kind of little towns inside of Houston or around Houston. So if you were using the city tag that your data exports, it might say Houston. But if you use the GPS coordinates and you're able to tag the town, it might say Katy or it might say Pearland or it might say like the really specific. Yeah, that's where I kind of grew up is Katy, Texas.

Clay Hepler (37:50)
80 baby, where legends are born.

Justin Piche (37:59)
That helps a lot. Little things like that, little personalization things help a lot. And when you're retargeting, if you didn't do that in the first round, retargeting with more specific personalized marketing also is another kind of superpower you can do.

Clay Hepler (38:11)
Yeah, and it's just going to get better and better with using artificial intelligence until everyone's using it. And then it's like, then you have to like, you know, scrape their data from LinkedIn and say, I saw that, you know, a couple of days ago, you posted this photo.

Justin Piche (38:25)
That would get into some creepy. I think that would be pretty creepy. That'd be a little creepy.

Clay Hepler (38:27)
That'd be a little creepy. Hey, I saw that

your 70th birthday was last week. Hey, by the way.

Justin Piche (38:35)
Ha ha ha!

Honestly though, don't know how, we're probably not all that far off from that. Yeah, how about you buy yourself a 70th birthday present by selling your land to me and using the cash to go on a cruise with your whole family. I noticed you have seven grandchildren. No, that would be weird. Don't do that.

Clay Hepler (38:38)
Are you interested in selling your land?

No.

Yeah, yeah, right.

Dude,

I'll tell you a crazy story about personalization. So one of my coaching clients, he's probably gonna listen to this and he's gonna laugh out loud. Really great guy, really great guy. he's doing great in this year and crushing it this year. I think he's gonna double his business. And he had this deal that he was on the phone with the seller and this goes into personalization and the seller's like,

He's probably going to message me after and said I'd butcher this story. But the seller was like, you know, he kept saying like, I have to go and get dinner with my wife. And so, and then he ghosted and then he would ghost this guy. And so this guy, you know, my client took a gift card to Alpac and sent him a $50 gift card to Alpac and said,

you know, take your, take your wife out for me. And he enclosed the contract and he got a signed contract.

Justin Piche (39:58)
That's awesome. That's awesome. You know, I've heard I had this bring another story. had a coaching client of mine actually went to a real estate event. I don't remember which one it was, but it was just there. It was last maybe last week or two weeks ago. A lot of double close type stuff that people were talking about. But one of the things that.

Clay Hepler (40:01)
It's awesome.

Justin Piche (40:17)
he learned there that folks are doing, which I thought was really good is on those double close contracts. You know, sometimes those can have a little more hiccup, a little more challenge than if you're just buying the property outright, especially if you're trying to line up a seller. I mean, line up a buyer, line up the seller, contract extensions, et cetera. But there were some folks there that were sent when they got an executed double close contract, they were sending cookies, like just sending a little gift to the seller, you know, maybe cost you 20 bucks, 25 bucks, whatever it was.

Just that action of giving a little gift made people so much more willing to do contract extensions and work with them. It's just, you know, it's just, they didn't want expecting it. You provided them something nice. It didn't cost you a lot of money. And then it keeps, makes your negotiations a whole lot easier on the backend. I thought that was really clever. You know, in practice you'd really need it be, if you're a larger volume player like myself, it may be harder to implement. need somebody who's focused on executing that task.

Clay Hepler (41:14)
setting

200 dozen cookies a month. Yeah, yeah.

Justin Piche (41:16)
Yeah,

this is a random story. I don't know why I just thought of this. So when I was in the Navy, was a pretty good student in college, but I didn't go to class a ton. I would sleep a little late, I'd kind of skip some classes, but I was really good at memorization.

really, really good at learning and calculations and things. So I would always go to class and perform really well on my exams and ended up doing really well. Then I joined the Navy and it was my job now to learn. So I was in these training programs and there was this thing called nuclear power school, which when you're training to be a nuclear submarine officer or nuclear surface officer or whatever it was, you have to go through this. It's pretty grueling course of education to learn nuclear power systems. And it was maybe 80 something people

in there and the very first test I didn't realize at the time but there's this huge competition for who scores the highest on all the tests. So the very first test I did really well. I think I got second out of 80 something people and there was this other guy I'm not gonna say his name I'm sure he's never gonna listen to this but he got first and there was a there was a a tradition that whoever got first brought donuts for everybody else the next day.

And there's probably 13 exams or somewhere in that 10 to 15 exams. I don't remember the exact number. And so he got that. He brought donuts. He gloated. He was so sure of himself. He was so cocky and that just drove me nuts. And I made it my mission to buy as many donuts for everybody as possible. I think I scored the highest score on like eight of the next 10 or like whatever 80 % of the next exams to finish first in the class.

And I didn't gloat per se, but I certainly, it cost me a pretty penny to buy all those donuts back then for everybody.

Clay Hepler (43:17)
man, that's great. So back to data. so, you know, when you're thinking about, your data, really it's about tracking and then analyzing tracking and then analyzing. And so let's just talk about how you can realistically integrate this into your business. so the base level,

Justin Piche (43:19)
Great segue.

Clay Hepler (43:43)
of what you would do and you know what we've kind of do is just start tracking what markets you're targeting, what the response rate was with a specific you know marketing channel. For those of you that are new, I don't suggest doing this with multiple marketing channels. You can, but it might get a little overwhelming, right? And start to track that, right? That's number one, right? Start to track what the marketing, the response rates, et cetera.

and then build that list of, of tracking. And then when you get, when you target the market again, whenever you do it, create that extra list, it could be a spreadsheet columns, make it super simple. These are the amount of people I called. This was the area. This was the response rate. We got this contract, et cetera. You can make it super simple. It doesn't have to be difficult. Right. And then

Justin Piche (44:15)
you

Clay Hepler (44:34)
You have to do this a couple of times. I imagine this project as a six month project. Anything less than six months, you're really not gonna get enough data to inform how you should retarget and how you should target areas. In most cases, people, you're not mailing places maybe twice in two months, depending on your model, right? And calling people or texting or RVM or whatever. After you do that,

then you can have this clarity of data and you can say, okay, so I have 30, 40, 50, 100 markets that I went after, these are the top markets, I'm gonna re-hit these markets in this way, and that begins the very base level of what you do in your business. Do you have anything to add, Justin?

Justin Piche (45:00)
Okay.

Yeah, I think that's a good first pass is more of a geographic. It's more of like a geographic, which campaigns and which areas of the state, which counties, which areas of counties that I have the most or the highest success rate in. Let's go back to those places. I think that's the first iteration that every land investor should do. Now there's a lot of people that do a lot of filtering on the front end.

and they use things like sell through rates specifically to target markets and they only pick niche markets that have really high sell through rates. I think that's important if your strategy is primarily double close, you have to pick high sales markets or markets that you can sell inventory into because otherwise you're not going to be able to line up a buyer in time and it's going to be hard to do a double close. But if you do more general and you have more strategies to take advantage of leads where you can take title or or you can double close as well, then you can be a little more broad.

You don't necessarily have to use self-derate as your primary driver for data. And if you're really broad, like we do that, we did this exact thing that Clay you're talking about. We'll market to an entire state, hundreds of thousands of records in some cases. And then once we're done with that state, we'll look at all the geographic areas we had the most success and know that those are the best places we want to immediately retarget. And then we'll go a step further that we get into the kind of the next step, which is our kind of our demographic and like location of where the owner lives in relation to the property analysis.

and figure out what percentage of those leads or those contracts that we got were from owners that lived outside of the local geographic area of the property. And that can help us on our next campaign be better targeted. And then the other is what age are they? What age are these sellers? Who's the most likely to sell to us? And that can help us again be a little bit more targeted. one sec, Let just take this little bit out. My wife's about to leave on a work trip, so she's gotta get some things.

Clay Hepler (47:02)
my gosh, good luck. Good luck.

Justin Piche (47:04)
Good

luck. Are you leaving right now? All right, one sec.

Clay Hepler (47:07)
Yeah, yeah,

Justin Piche (47:13)
Yeah, I'll be done right at 530.

OK, she's yeah before. OK, back.

Clay Hepler (47:21)
Maybe before 530.

yeah. So, I mean, the reality is we really wanted to plant the foundation here of what success looks like. And most people aren't even doing this on a basic level. and if you start to do this, you'll start to add the layers, right? The second iteration, third iteration, as you get deeper, deeper, that that's a, a three one four one, which if enough people say, Hey, we want you guys to kind of go into a little bit deeper, happy to share that.

and maybe another follow-up episode. is the data, this is data 101 and 201 and 301 would be kind of going deeper. But at this point, collecting the data is the critical thing that you need to start doing in order to make predictive decisions and data-driven decisions on what you are targeting. Justin, what else you got?

before we hop out here.

Justin Piche (48:28)
You know, I think that's a good high level kind of overview with some more niche discussion points. You know, I think the other thing I'd want to maybe just add is obviously your business and how your team is structured is going to inform a lot of how you do this. Clay and I both have larger teams. We do a lot of marketing. And so my process may look different. So if I if I was a solopreneur, for example, and mail was my primary marketing outreach tool.

I would be doing a ton more analysis on the front end to identify good markets. And I would try to do data stacking and do characteristic stacking of potential leads to find what are the highest converting leads and really only go after those people, especially if I'm sending a a high cost marketing channel, like, like mail as my outreach. When you're doing larger volumes of cold calling, you can be more general and you're going to pull leads out of that. I think

For me, I've just seen a lot of success in lower sell-through-rate markets or lower transaction volume markets, more rural markets. And I love being, I love going after those types of properties. I know not a lot of people are targeting those. I know a lot, there's not a lot of competition in those because none of the data would tell you that's a really good market to be in. But through my approach, which is very broad, full state marketing, I'm able to see those pockets of low transaction volume that are actually really good. There's a lot of demand. It's just not a lot of

sales that are public. Maybe it's like family to family transactions or that kind of thing that doesn't get recorded. So you don't see there's movement there, but there is and you won't find it unless you market there and collect the data.

Clay Hepler (50:05)
Yeah, and let me just submit one thing as a cautionary tear to all the listeners. I don't mean to contradict you man, but I think this is important. Justin also has a dispositions team that works day and night to sell his properties. So if you are starting out, I would not necessarily recommend to go after in, you know, illiquid markets because they are still illiquid, right? But again, this is your business. I'm not, I'm not, let me take back. I don't recommend or not recommend. I think you should decide what's right for you and your

Justin Piche (50:11)
yeah.

Yeah, that's true.

Clay Hepler (50:34)
your comfort level, but just know that Justin has a really sophisticated disposition process and that allows him to actually sell these properties probably a little.

Justin Piche (50:43)
I

I agree. No, no, no, I agree. If you don't have in-house kind of Dispo and you're not skilled in that area and you're reliant on realtors to sell your properties, I am in some markets where I have tried. I probably sold gosh, there's one market one County that I'm thinking of specifically where I've sold at least 15 properties. I have not found a single realtor to take any of my listings, not one in the entire County that would take a listing.

And these are, they're not huge listings. I would say the average market sales price for these properties is 45 to $50,000. So they're kind of small for a broker to want to take. But the fact that I can't find anyone to take any of my listings in that county is crazy. But we have an in-house sales team and we offer owner financing and we're able to display those types of properties relatively quickly. And we're skilled there.

Clay Hepler (51:31)
Right. So, you know, every, everything that we say guys on the podcast is it's meant to be a context that you apply to your circumstance. you know, like I said at the beginning, we hope that this helpful, the data thing is helpful for you. it doesn't mean that you should go out in and implement this right away, but it should, it should allow you to start to think through, Hey, this is important for my business. If I want to, to scale it. So guys, I mean, you know, we know the gentleman's agreement here at the end.

rate review and subscribe. And when you review, you know whose name to put there. And if you got benefit from this podcast, guys, you know, a lot of people find us on social media through the podcast, sharing the podcast. And if you got benefit, please let us know, share it, rate review, subscribe. means less than 10 % of people that do that. And Justin and I also really like to, on a one-on-one note, help people.

help people take their business to the next level if we have enough bandwidth. Now we're both kind of getting to the full part of our bandwidth, but below there's a couple of things that you guys could take advantage of. Working with Justin or I, if you have that interest, we'd love to do it. It's not our primary business, but we can help you out. And if you also need any help with getting any deals across the finish line, there's an application below to submit a deal to get your deal funded. And yeah, other than that, Justin.

signing off. My man. See you next week, Bye bye.

Justin Piche (53:01)
That's it. See you next week.

All right, mid roll. Hey guys, this is Justin interrupting your podcast again, like I always do to just say again, thank you so much for listening. I know this may get monotonous. If you're listening to these podcasts on repeat, you're like, come on, Justin, I get it. But seriously, it helps us so much when y'all rate, review, subscribe, and more specifically, leave us a comment about what you like and what you want to hear. It helps us bring more valuable content so you can improve your business. And now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Wait, I'm gonna stop.