Why Real Estate Investors Need Organic Content Before Ads | Danielle Hollembaek

Danielle Hollembaek (00:00)

I am a strong believer that you need to have an organic presence before you ever even run a digital ad. Now, in the real estate world, go get your radio ads, put your bandit signs up, all that. That’s totally fine. Very local audience, do that. But if you want to start running big campaigns on Meta, on Google, you need to have some sort of social presence. And I’m not saying you don’t have to be 10,000 followers plus on Instagram, Facebook. You don’t have to have a huge YouTube following, but get content out every day because when you’re running an ad.

If you don’t have anything going organically, they’re gonna click on that little circle of who you are and your profile, and they’re gonna go to your page and say, This person has 10 posts and they’re three years old. Are they really even a company anymore?

Issa Hanna (01:12)

Welcome back to another episode of the Real Estate Pros Show. I’m your host, Issa Hanna, and today we have Danielle Hollembaek here to share our knowledge. Danielle, welcome to the show.

Danielle Hollembaek (01:19)

Yeah, thanks for having me on.

Issa Hanna (01:22)

I am super excited to have you. you bring an aspect of knowledge to our industry that is crucial, and that’s marketing, that’s CRM management, that’s keeping track of the people that you’re trying to sell to. So with that, for our viewers at home, can you kind of just give them a day in your world, like a day-to-day?

Danielle Hollembaek (01:40)

Yeah, so day to day for me is first off, I work from home. I don’t have an office. My whole team is remote. I know that that was very popular a couple of years back, but now people are kind of going back into the office. I myself like to work from home. I have five kids, so it’s a little bit easier to just be closer at the base. So I’ll wake up, get them all settled, work out, then I’ll sit down at my desk right here where I’m at right now. And my day is filled with client calls. I still

Do fractional CMO services. I have a couple other fractional CMOs that I also will have my clients work with, depending on the industry, whatever makes the most sense for them. but I’ll organize, okay, what client calls do I have? What sales calls do I have? Where I gotta jump on with prospects, do an insights call to look through your marketing to see what do you have going on right now. and then a lot of content creation. AI has made that a lot easier for me as far as creating my workshops, master classes, the social media content I put out there.

but really it’s just running the business, managing the team. I do have a team. So I have an operations director who does a lot for me. She’s amazing. but my day is really just working for the clients and then trying to bring more clients in to help them get their marketing, making the money.

Issa Hanna (02:51)

I love that. you people at home, you’re watching, you say work from home. the thing about business owners, right? We can work from home, but we’re not putting the nine to five in. our businesses, our minds are constantly turning. and we’re managing multiple different aspects. So, Danielle’s at the top, just kind of like, okay, what’s going on? And time management is super crucial when you do work from home and when you run your own business. So I just wanted to pull that out of your answer.

because it was definitely something that had to be told to the viewers. I want to rewind a little bit, right? I want to get your background story, right? You’re in a great field. I love marketing. I have a lot of friends in the business. you guys are always super personable, but I want to know how you got into the business. so can you give us a rundown on how you kind of fell into it or maybe you planned on getting into it?

Danielle Hollembaek (03:38)

I definitely did not plan on being a marketer. I don’t know if most marketers do plan on it. I think you kind of just find out like, I’m good at this. Like, let’s do it. I think that’s where most people I know who are marketers. It’s kind of how it’s happened. so I actually started with a background in journalism and radio TV. That was my bachelor’s degree that I got over a decade ago. And I was a weekend radio DJ and a video editor for a PBS station here in the Quad Cities. I live in Iowa.

Very interesting at when I was in these careers, I was like, I really thought I wanted to be a video editor. Like for in high school, I loved video editing. I loved YouTube. YouTube since I was in fourth grade has been like the one place that it’s like my comfort social media platform. I go there, I wanna watch the videos, I get to know the creators. So right away I was like, well, that’s awesome. I wanna make videos and do that.

Well, once I got into the career, I realized radio takes a lot of time because you’re going to be in events and you have to do your own social media. You got to do your own lives, your own videos. When I was a video editor, I realized you really have a cap on how far you can get in working for other people as a video editor. So I went back, got my master’s degree from Syracuse. They had like this hybrid program that I just launched. And I was like, that’s cool. I’m going to go learn PR and digital communications. Did I need to do that?

I found out very quickly I did not need to go to college to do that. I will say it sparked my interest to be like, I can do marketing. Like everything that I have done with radio and having to advertise myself with radio and be on social media and do all these things. And also the video editing that I spent years learning how to edit videos, it’s all 100% applicable to becoming a marketing person that’s a social media marketer. And then if I want to be a director of marketing or whatever that is. So got my master’s degree.

the radio station locally here ended up unfortunately, like so many, got rid of all their local DJs. So I lost my weekend job, decided to leave video production and started working as a social media manager for get this, the number one gun auction house in the world. It’s right across the river from me. And I was like, Well, okay, they’ve never had social media and all they can do is organic reach. They cannot do any sort of digital reach with ads because it’s gun auction, which a lot of it was cool, historic, like Civil War guns and things. It’s not like random guns were being auctioned.

They did have those type of ones, but the ones I love were all these historic things. I’m a history buff myself. So it was really cool. I learned so much about how to direct a marketing team, grow an organic presence, have to use tools like Reddit and YouTube and Facebook to grow and get your word out because we had no other way to advertise. So me and one other guy, we were the team. And we grew that channel from I think it was 10,000 followers when I started to like 32 K on Facebook in one year.

After one year, it was a cubicle life. As you said, entrepreneurs don’t like being in an office. I had to leave, had my first son, I’m gonna move on and do something different. So that’s when I started getting into the entrepreneurial founder world. And I was working as CMO for a travel company right before COVID hit. Luckily they kept me on because I needed a crisis communication plan. and I was there vice president of marketing. We got through COVID. We actually made money during COVID, which like in the travel industry was insane. but we did insane marketing efforts to try to

make that happen. and then from there started just working in founders’ businesses as CMO, went to work for a finance company. That’s how I got really into the real estate world was with it was a passive investing company and we coached people how to passively invest. We started going to masterminds like investor fuel, started meeting real estate investors and seeing what a need they had for the type of things that I learned with the organic marketing, but also ads. Cause at that point I’d started running ads and how to actually track the leads that were coming in. Cause that was one gap that I found in every company that I work for is.

No one really knew how to track leads and then see the full customer journey, your CAC, your LTV. No one knew how to calculate that. And no one on their teams were doing it. So I thought, okay, there’s a gap here. So about six months ago, my current company is only six months old. I was like, okay, I’m gonna totally just focus on we prove it with the numbers. Provato, it means proven and tested. That’s what my company’s name is. So I said to myself, I’m just gonna be taking all the knowledge that I got from these other companies.

Putting it into my formula for how I can apply this to, founders across industries. I love real estate. I’m a real estate investor myself here in the Quad Cities. I know the numbers, I know the advertising, ways that we go about this in the world of real estate. So that’s where I’m starting my company. But this can be used with every founder, from coaching industry, from really anything, service providers. You could use Provato and the formula we have for actually tracking your leads and knowing the full customer journey.

Issa Hanna (08:49)

Amazing. and what a journey, what a background you’re bringing into this marketing, right? You didn’t go to school for the marketing, but you went and got the master’s and you did all this. I mean, unbelievable. You learned it from such a different angle from original angle, right? From the radio, the media angle. so you got to bring some of those old school tricks into the new school world. And I want to focus now on organic marketing, right? I hear it a lot. People pay for leads,

But you hear organic marketing is just plain better. So can you explain to us why organic is the way to go?

Danielle Hollembaek (09:21)

Yeah, so

I am a strong believer that you need to have an organic presence before you ever even run a digital ad. Now, in the real estate world, go get your radio ads, put your bandit signs up, all that. That’s totally fine. Very local audience, do that. But if you want to start running big campaigns on Meta, on Google, you need to have some sort of social presence. And I’m not saying you don’t have to be 10,000 followers plus on Instagram, Facebook. You don’t have to have a huge YouTube following, but get content out every day because when you’re running an ad.

If you don’t have anything going organically, they’re gonna click on that little circle of who you are and your profile, and they’re gonna go to your page and say, This person has 10 posts and they’re three years old. Are they really even a company anymore?

Or is this like some scam, especially now in the age of AI where you don’t really know who to trust all of the time? There’s a trust route. Make sure you’re posting organically, people are getting to know you, get to know your company. and also that will lead to actual customers coming in.

through your platform because just by posting and posting and posting and having your niche down, you’re going to reach people. It might be a long game, but you’re going to reach people.

Issa Hanna (10:26)

you got to build that following organically first. and like you said, you have to have a stock page of stuff because yeah, if somebody clicks on it and sees a three-year-old post and that’s it, it’s either a scam or they’re not going to take you seriously. So in this digital age, get out there if you’re a professional in the space. I’m a real estate agent. I post twice a day, every single day across three platforms.

Just to keep my presence out there, keep my name out there. and we have one of the foremost leaders on marketing in the country, one of our favorite people here at Investor Fuel. so you guys better listen to this advice, pull out your pens, papers, your notepads on your phone, take some notes. let’s focus on the future a little bit, right? AI’s taken over. AI’s here. There’s a lot of opportunities in AI, right? so.

Can you kind of give us the opportunity you’re seeing with AI in your business?

Danielle Hollembaek (11:22)

Yeah, so AI, no joke, has made my business so much simpler. I actually had a full marketing agency that I ran as like a side gig back over five years ago now locally. And I had a team of VAs, I had a team of some in-person people here in the Quad Cities. And it was a mess because there was so much overhead with what you had to pay your employees, keeping control of having a team of, 10 people.

And making sure that they were actually doing what they needed to do. We were making deadlines. I got stressed because it was a lot to handle.

Now I have a team of four, including myself. And the way we do this when we have more clients and more volume is AI. my director of operations is an AI nut. She really is good at figuring out all the things in Claude co-work, connecting all of our systems and our tech stack into Claude. And she has simplified our process where

Not only can we deliver on time for every client, without a doubt, because we get our wrap-ups every day that says this is due today, So we are laser focused in, okay, we don’t want to miss anything. Like we can’t, because Claude is telling us, you got to get this done today. And then we have a human, my operations director, saying, Okay, focus. It’s these three things. Let’s get them delivered. And that has simplified the marketing game so much. and then when it comes to analytics, instead of having to go into every platform and grab analytics.

Which I know there’ve been some third-party things that could do that for many, many years. Honestly, using Claude, it’s so much easier because you can just connect in all of your social media pages, get your report daily, see what performed, and it will analyze it for you. And because it has my brain that I’ve trained it, it analyzed it like me for the most part. Now, yes, I still go in there, I still check everything. I still want to make sure that if I’m giving it to a client, it is accurate data. But AI has gotten pretty darn good at becoming me when it comes to the analyzing.

I do copywriting in there. I used to spend hours copywriting. Now the base of my copywriting is 80% done with Claude. And then I go in there, add the human touch, add the things to, make it not AI. But it has just simplified so many parts of marketing. And I’m upset to say it because I have so many friends in marketing. But if you are a person who’s just a graphic designer, a web designer, that’s like your specialty, I would go and try to learn some other skills because those are quickly being taken over.

And it’s a sad fact. Even me as a video editor, I’m glad I got out of that over a decade ago because I even a year ago tried to use things like Opus clips to do most of my editing. Wasn’t a big fan, didn’t always get the best clips out. Now I’ve re-downloaded it. I rehab it on my computer. It’s pretty good. it cuts out a lot of time. And I might have to go in there and take out some ums or some pauses, but beyond that, no, it’s perfect.

it’s sad, but the world of marketing, you gotta find something that you are controlling the AI because the AI is gonna keep up with all of the creative elements and pretty soon marketing teams are gonna be instead of twelve people that you need to produce everything you have, it’s gonna be three or four that really can do it all.

Issa Hanna (14:54)

Definitely. and it sounds scary, but this is the future. This is going to be the shift, the change. it’s actually going to create a lot more jobs, a lot more businesses. It frees up so much time. You guys have all heard it. Time is money, right? So we can do all this, right? Danielle can do everything she uses her AI to do, but it’s gonna take her hours and hours and hours to do it. So with AI doing it for her, she can just go over there.

proofread it. It’s like she has 10 employees underneath her. Hey, do this for me. And then she goes back and checks the work over as a human touch. And then integration with AI, right? Yeah. Don’t let AI do all the work. Integrate your business with it. I think those are going to be the keys to success with AI in the future. And it’s proven, right? a lot of successful businesses are integrating AI into their business. So

Amazing knowledge we’re getting from you today. I’m loving it. And I know the viewers are super thankful. I wanna ask you now the classic five-year plan, right? I look you up. I look Provato up in five years. Where am I gonna see you guys at?

Danielle Hollembaek (15:58)

So I have a pretty lofty goal for Provato in the next five years. fractional CMO services are, I would say, a newer field. I think a lot of fractional services have come up since COVID. People have started to get into this. But I want Provato to be the leader in fractional CMO services. And I want us to be the one that when you think of, okay, I want a marketing director, I want someone to sit on my accountabilities chart. I want them to look over on my marketing. So as a founder, I don’t have to make sure that.

The third party that I hired is doing what they need to do. I have someone who can do that. But I don’t want to pay them $200,000 a year because I don’t have that to hire a CMO. Bring in a fractional CMO. You’re going to get that attention to detail. You’re going to get someone who is in multiple businesses. So we are taking the knowledge that we have from other businesses and it works with so and so. Let’s alter it a little bit. Use it in your business to make it kind of match the frame of what we’re going for with your business.

And you don’t have to worry about the strategy. You don’t have to worry about the people management. You don’t have to worry about the AI management that happens in businesses now with marketing. So my goal is in the next five years, I want this company to be at least a five million dollar company. That’s revenue goal wise. And that’s hefty for a marketing company. Anyone knows marketing companies getting to that level is not easy. it’s a stretch goal for me. but I was want us to be able to serve founders. My best friends are founders because of all the events, like investor fuel that I’ve been in over the years.

I want them to succeed because my company succeeded. Because if I’m getting you revenue through your leads, we’re gonna grow together because you’re gonna keep me on and we’re gonna keep doing more cool things together. And you’re gonna keep making money and growing your business. So really it’s just a circle of founders helping founders, which if I could have a community where I am just helping founders by having that high CMO service, that’d be the ultimate goal. That’s my five year plan. Let’s make a bunch of people happy and let’s make a bunch of people lot of money.

Issa Hanna (17:47)

And I love that answer because it shows that you care, right? You’re an owner operator, you’re in there, you’re not a big box brand. And then the consistency of that answer was I just want people to make money. I just want them to be happy. when you come into any business with those intentions, A people are gonna love you and they’re gonna love to do business with you. B, you’re gonna be successful 100%. You always have to put your client first.

and I love it. And it projects right through the screen, Danielle. and actually perfectly leads into my next question. I need a piece of advice from you for our young professionals, right? Our new founders, our new agents, whatever new professionals in the space we have here watching the show. Our business depends on building these relationships, right? Growing your network. So if you had to give them one piece of advice on how to start growing that network, what piece of advice would it be?

Danielle Hollembaek (18:39)

My major piece of advice would be put yourself in uncomfortable situations. Go to those events you don’t want to go to. If you’re a real estate investor, go to those local RIAs where you know there’s the 10 guys who are the big guys in your area and they’re gonna be there, talk to them. Cause I guarantee you they want to help you. I think a lot of people we have these fears that creep up in our minds about, they’re so big, they’re not gonna want to waste their time having to help me. No, if I would not have had my first real estate mentor who was actually like my entrepreneurial mentor.

I would never have been where I am today. Like I needed someone to direct me and be like, you are, you could do so much more than where you’re at right now. You are an entrepreneur. You can do this. And just having someone who’s been in that spot tell you that, it’s gonna be that motivation. It’s gonna be that little piece of like glimmer of light the distance that you need to keep moving forward. And they’re gonna be willing to help you. If you’re in a pinch,

You need some help with your business, whether it’s advice, maybe you need capital. I guarantee you, if they know you are working your butt off every day and you are really trying to grow this thing, people want to help you. That’s just what I’ve found out through my years of entrepreneurship. No one is out there to against you. They want to help.

Issa Hanna (19:49)

One hundred percent. Successful people are flattered if you come ask them their advice. They want to help. They want everybody to be successful. don’t be intimidated. Don’t be that wallflower at the events. First, hey, get to the events. Because you can do all the social media you want. Face to face stuff is so important. So, like we’re kept saying, you got to integrate. You integrate a little bit of the old school and then the new school in.

amazing advice to our younger guys. That is exactly how you build your network. That is exactly how you meet people that you need to meet on this long, bumpy business road that we all love to take. Danielle, if people wanted to get a hold of Provato if they wanted to do business with you, where could they reach you guys at?

Danielle Hollembaek (20:29)

Yeah, so we have our website, getprovato.com. So if you want to reach out through the form there, totally cool. I am on my Instagram all the time. so it’s Daniel Hollenbeck, just my name. look that up on Instagram, you’ll find me. Shoot me a DM. That’s usually the most direct way to contact me. and I’ll get back with you I’m here to help founders. So if you need some help, I’m here for ya.

Issa Hanna (20:50)

All our founders make sure to go slide into Danielle’s Instagram. we’re gonna provide all our social media links in the description. Danielle is one of the foremost leaders bringing this knowledge into the United States with their system. And also just very personable and will care and will go above and beyond for you guys. So make sure you slide into those DMs, get a hold of Danielle.

Danielle, it was an honor having you on the show today. You brought so much knowledge and a different light. I’m usually talking to real estate guys, multifamily, this, that. and marketing is so important. So thank you so much for coming on and sharing your knowledge.

Danielle Hollembaek (21:26)

Yes. Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited. Excited to see the episode.

Issa Hanna (21:30)

And to my viewers at home, if you guys enjoyed my conversation with Danielle and want to see more like it, make sure to hit like and subscribe. I talk to people every day that can bring us different knowledge on every aspect of the real estate industry. Until next time, the Real Estate Pros are out.