An Outrageous Book For Real Estate Investors

You must read Marketing Outrageously by Jon Spoelstra.

This book is a no b.s. guide for increasing revenue on a shoe-string budget. I spent years at NYC ad agencies and this book taught me a lot that can be applied to real estate investing.

It was referred to me by one of my clients after I told him about an idea I was implementing. The idea is to give my residents of a large apt community a $1 scratch off lotto ticket if they pay the rent on time and have a zero balance.

He said, “oh, that’s marketing outrageously.” I was like, “yeah, I guess so.”

“No, I mean there’s an actual book on those types of tactics,” he said.

And after reading this book, boy did I get inspired to continue and enhance my current outrageous marketing ideas.

Here are my top 10 takeaways:

1. In every marketing project, think outrageously.
2. Earn at least a $4 to $1 ratio  of revenue to ad cost
3. Go for dominance when placing advertisements – forget reach and frequency
4. Ask these two questions every day:
   1. What’s it going to take to make this to best company in the industry?
   2. What did I do today to make my company money?
5. Ask what business are you really in? (ex. NBA teams aren’t in basketball biz, they are in entertainment biz)
6. How to improve revenue:
   1. Get regular customers to buy more
   2. Steal customers from your existing business
7. How to structure a biz for success:
   1. Adding more salespeople
   2. Having a nice work environment
   3. Training, training and more training
   4. More tools for sales people
   5. Big-time database marketing
8. Give away product for free them get them to stay for the long haul (ex. AOL did this with their disks)
9. Invent new ways to market your product every six months
10. Make the most important people in your business your employees, then customers then investors/shareholders – this hierarchy will produce the best results for all involved

Go buy the book – you’ll learn so much applicable stuff it’s, well, outrageous.