How would you like a behind-the-scenes look at how our company has raised millions, seemingly effortlessly, within just a matter of days?
That’s what I’m going to share today…
The Three Pillars of Platform Building
Why is platform building something you should consider?
What can a platform do for you?
Should you even consider building one?
If you’ve raised money, and you’ve done well for yourself, but you’re struggling to attract more investors, then you should strongly consider an online thought leadership platform.
OR…
Maybe you haven’t don’t a deal yet, but you want to scale your business right from the start. In that case, this is for you, as well.
You can build a platform for anything, really, not just multifamily syndications.
Maybe you want to raise money for a portfolio of turnkey, or even single turnkey houses, or wholesaling, or holding – anything that requires raising capital – this is for you.
Because over here at Michael Blank brands, we’re in the syndication world, we focus our platform building on raising capital.
But platform building is broad. It can be used for building an audience for anything.
What will a platform help you achieve, you ask?
A core platform is designed to automatically attract investors you’ve never met before, and turn them into raving fans who want to invest with you.
Once you have your core platform, there are behind-the-scenes automations that attract your investors, welcome them, educate them, and build trust, so your focus becomes promoting your platform to more potential investors.
Because of the automations, you’re able to accommodate more investors without creating extra work, and as you attract more investors, you can do more deals and raise more money, which means that you create more revenue in the form of fees and acquisition fees and equity.
As you create more revenue, you’re able to invest more in the platform to attract even more investors to you, and this creates a virtuous cycle – not a vicious cycle – a virtuous cycle that allows you to continue to scale your syndication business and raise tens of million dollars per year easily, simply by continuing to invest time and effort into your platform.
With your platform comes great responsibility, because you’re gaining influence over a large group of people.
This is the best part, because you’re getting a message out and serving investors who have been shackled by the stock market for years and recently saw their net worth cut in half.
You can help them with their problems.
Investors have three problems:
- They can’t make predictable financial plans for their family because of the ups and downs and occasional recessions of the stock market.
- They want cash flow.
- They pay too much in taxes.
You can help them with all of that. You have a mission, which is financial freedom for your passive investors. With your platform, you serve your audience.
What is a Platform, Exactly?
Well, it’s not a website.
You may think a website is all you need, but a website is actually a tiny element of your platform.
A good platform automates the process of attracting the right audience, and developing raving fans who want to do business with you, allowing you to invest and grow your business.
There are three pillars of platform building:
- Attracting the right audience
- Developing them into raving fans
- Scaling your business
Attract the Right Audience
To attract the right audience, you have to do two things.
The first is, identify your ideal avatar. This is a marketing term that describes a particular person. In this instance, when we’re talking about your ideal avatar, we’re talking about your ideal investor.
Who is that ideal investor?
You will find that you gravitate and attract a certain kind of person, and subsequently, you repel another kind of person.
For example, I tend to attract people who want to find financial freedom.
If you’re a doctor, you might attract doctors. We had a Platform Builder participant who was a former NFL player. He, through his backstory, attracted professional athletes.
Getting your avatar right is the critical first step, because it affects everything you do.
If you play your cards, right, then you will attract certain people and repel other people. And that’s good. That’s exactly what you want.
Capture Leads
What does that mean?
It means you want to build your email list. Now, you may have heard that email is a dying medium, but our open rates are still upwards of 30% on our investor list, sometimes up to 50%.
Email is still the most reliable way to deliver content.
Unlike Facebook and Google that rely on algorithms to control who sees your content, you control your email.
So, you need to capture email addresses, but how do you do this?
You provide something of value for free.
You offer something that’s of high value to your ideal avatar – this is called your lead magnet.
For example, if your ideal investor is retired, their biggest fear is that they’ll run out of money.
So, you might have a free download that offers the insider secret to never running out of money in retirement. Your avatar would be very interested in this and would probably part with their email address in exchange.
People go to your website, they see your lead magnet, they give you their email address.
So you’ve built your brand, you’ve discovered your avatar, you’re saying the right things, and you are capturing leads as people come to your website.
You’re attracting the right investor, but what happens if they never hear from you again? They have their free download and that’s the end of the relationship. You need the second pillar…
Develop Raving Fans
There are two ways to develop raving fans, serving and leading them serve and lead, and promotion.
You serve your investors with valuable free content like blog articles, YouTube videos, and podcast episodes. You provide value to them and you educate them.
That’s how you serve, and in adding value, you’re also earning their trust.
When you do that, you can lead them to take action that benefits them, and hopefully you, as well. In this particular case, the action you’re going to lead them to is to consider investing with you.
So step number one is to serve and lead through content.
Step number two is to promote.
Once you’ve captured and collected email addresses on your website, and you’re serving people with great content, it is time to promote your message to find more ideal investors.
You might try to be a guest on other people’s podcasts, start your own podcast, or start using LinkedIn.
But here’s the thing, let’s say you’re a guest on a podcast and the hosts asks you where people can find you, and you give your website address…
No one cares. You’ve already told your story; they have no reason to go to your website.
But if you say, “Hey, go to my website and claim this freebie about how to never run out of money,” then you’ve motivated people to come to your site.
You have to have your core platform built before you go out and promote yourself, but with those automations in place, you want to put as many leads into your platform as possible.
Pillar number three is equally important…
Scale Your Business
There are two steps to scaling your business, as well. The first is, make a compelling offer to generate revenue.
If you’re selling courses, you need to come up with a course that your audience wants and is willing to pay for. If you’re putting up live events or virtual conferences, you better put one in place that people want to pay for.
You need to generate revenue in some way, or you won’t be able to scale your platform.
In our environment, the product is already taken care of because we have the best investment vehicle on the planet, one that generates predictable income, predictable returns, and less taxes. So, we already have a very compelling offer.
The challenge becomes raising more and more capital and doing more and more deals to generate more revenue for the business.
The critical step two is to reinvest a portion of your revenue into the platform, because a platform is fed by content.
The content creator is going to be you, you are the message, and you shouldn’t outsource that.
The actual production and distribution of the content should be outsourced, however, and that costs money.
What is production?
Production means to make a particular piece of content look good. If it’s a blog post, it needs a pretty picture, maybe some bullets, a nice catchy headline. If it’s a video, it has to be edited, it should have a thumbnail. You can get into that yourself, but it’s time consuming and technical, and is best outsourced.
You need revenue you can use to outsource the production of content, and the same goes for distribution.
Distribution means getting the content out. Someone has to schedule email and send that out to the list, plus there’s social media, there’s Facebook, there’s Instagram, there’s Twitter – who is going to do that?
You need to get your content out to notify your audience via different channels. It’s time consuming, and it can be outsourced, and for that, you need revenue.
IN CONCLUSION…
A platform for raising capital automates the process of attracting the right investors, developing them into raving fans who want to invest with you, so that you can scale your syndication business, and in so doing, attract more capital doing more deals, and raising millions, seemingly effortlessly in just a matter of days.
At the heart of that are the three pillars or platform building – attract the right audience, develop them into raving fans, and reinvest to scale your business.
If you’re interested in building a platform, we offer the Platform Builder Incubator, which is a 90-day workshop plus a year long program where we teach you how to build your platform, build it for you, then show you how to use it.
If that sounds good to you, click here and get on the waitlist for our upcoming masterclass where I’ll walk you through everything step by step.