Why Most Land Marketing Is Dead in 2025 (And How We Print 5X ROAS With Data-Driven Campaigns)

In this training, I break down why most land marketing is DEAD in 2025 — and the exact 5-step system we’re using to generate 4–6X ROAS in our land business.

If your cold calling, mail, or PPC campaigns are underperforming…

If your lists are broad, and your cost per deal is rising…

If you're playing “spray and pray” and hoping deals fall out the other side…

This episode will change the way you market forever.

✅ How to pull targeted data (not the same public stuff everyone else is using)

✅ Why most land investors burn cash on vague, unfiltered lists

✅ How we increased a client’s ROAS from 1.8X to 5.3X in 90 days

✅ The KPI dashboard I use weekly to double down on what’s working

✅ And why tracking inputs over outputs is the real game-changer

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👇 Resources Mentioned in This Video:

📊 LandStats → https://www.land-stats.com/?via=clayton

🌎 LandPortal → https://landportal.com/claytonhepler

📈 REISift (Stacking & Tagging Tool) → https://reiconversion.com/reisift/?via=clay

📦 FULL Land Architect OS (SOPs, Templates, Scripts) → https://land-man.kit.com/land-architect-os-framework

👥 Join the Landman Facebook Group

→ Post your deals, get feedback, and connect with top land operators: https://www.facebook.com/share/g/1FGy55wkYQ/

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Transcript

Clayton Hepler (00:00)
Hello, my name is Clay Hepler and I have built a multi-million dollar land flipping and development company. Last month we locked up over three million dollars of projected profit and today I'm gonna show you why 98 % of land investors are burning casts on marketing that does not work.

you ever blasted out a list, hope for leads, and prayed that your marketing would work, this training is specifically for you. Because the truth is, your next $100,000 profit deal, a life-changing amount for a lot of land investors, it's hidden in your data. But you are too blind to see it, and I was too blind to see it even just a year ago.

the next to 20 minutes, I'm gonna walk you through the exact five step system that we use to increase our ROAS and go from a land business that's barely making any money to one that is printing cash. This is something that we hear time and time again today. Why land marketing is currently dead today and what we need to do.

In the old days, five years ago, 10 years ago, you could just send out mailers, text calls, and get leads on a conveyor belt. Today, the land business is no longer like that. Data-driven campaigns is what is printing cash and creating four to six S ROAS for my business and my clients' businesses. And I'm gonna tell you exactly how we do that today. So as many of you know, the land model is currently

broken, people are using outdated tactics, they're not tracking KPIs, there are no feedback loops, people are living in emotional, not logical decisions and spray and pray.

So people are spending hours of their time every week, 10, 12, 15 hours of their time every week using public sources like Zillow, Redfin, and Landwatch in building out these campaigns in markets that don't actually have high velocity. So they send out lists to these markets and they wonder why are my marketing campaigns not succeeding?

Well, the core reason why here is because you are using public data that everyone else has and you're not actually looking in and going deep into your data, which is gonna be a theme that you will another thing that I think that I see a lot of people messing up is they have vague, untargeted data polling, right? People just say, hey, I'm just gonna call Santa Rosa County in Florida, right? They're not filtering by the price range that make a good flip. They're not flip.

filtering by parcels that are within their ⁓ acreage range that they can actually optimize for. If you have a thousand acre parcel, you are not going to respond to a blind offer or a range offer. ⁓ So they end up throwing away thousands of dollars in each of their marketing campaigns because they don't have a good band of price range or they don't have a good band of acreage range. And one of last things that they do, they're pulling parcels that are not buildable.

that are two-sloped, full of wetlands, FEMA floodplains, non-buildable, and if you stay until the end, you're gonna see exactly how we optimize this so we can increase our ROAS. We went from a 1x, 2x ROAS with one of our clients to over 5x ROAS in just three months by changing their targeting data pulling process. If you stay until the end, you'll see that. So the problem here is people are wasting money on leads that don't make any money, right? Imagine

that you are going into the rural parts of Oklahoma and you are trying to sell to a farmer a Prius. They have no use for it. They have no use for your services. But people seem to think that they just send more marketing, sell more Priuses to Oklahoma farmers who need trucks, who need large vehicles, and they're gonna make it happen. Sure, Oklahoma farmer might buy it every once in a while, right?

They're a little bit, they like their Prius, right? They like the low gas mileage, but the majority of them are not gonna do it, and that's what people do. They throw away their marketing dollars or effort, their time, because they have untargeted data point. Last thing is no feedback Most people come to me, and I've made this mistake for years. I don't have clear KPI tracking. I don't have a clear feedback group. There's no attribution model for calls or deals. There's no KPIs whatsoever. There's no pipeline analysis.

So you might track your KPIs, but you're not saying, hey, how does this actually inform my future marketing? They just spray and pray. They hope on hiring more people, sending more mailers, sending more marketing, and the reality is, because they have no feedback loop, what they end up doing is they scale a broken system. They don't know what's winning, what's not winning, and what's bleeding them dry, and in a second here I'm gonna go into how to actually install this in your business very quickly so you can start to get wins in your land business.

So why do most line investors still use these tactics, right? It's the comfort level.

course, there is ⁓ difficulty in change and people feel very comfortable in doing the things that they've always done. But if your ROAS is decreasing, if your cost per lead is increasing, if your cost per deal is increasing, you have to look within, right and change the front of the process. How we've always done it doesn't mean this is the right way to do it. Years ago, people used to think that eating fat was the cause of cancer and all other health problems. And this has been massively debunked. It took a lot of

cultural research studies to show this. In our business, we don't really have that, right? We don't have the mainstream media telling us, hey, this is what's changed. But you can see within your business, your ROAS is decreasing, so we need to change things up, right? This is your call to do that. Number two, the data infrastructure. People don't, they buy lists from old data vendors without the filtering, the scrubbing or enhancing them. They might have scrubbing or enhancing, but they're not using the right data vendors, and this is so important. The difference between good and great here,

is miles, it is the difference between building a business that makes seven figures and maybe struggling to get a business in the mid six figures and having limited profit. And then lastly, they don't want to know the truth, right? It's like looking at your bank account, right? You look at your bank account and at the end of the month, you're like, man, I don't really have that much money in it, right? I remember those days. And that was stressful. And so I never wanted to look at that, right? But forcing yourself to

the visibility of KPIs is the step to get you into your next stage in your land business. And this is what is needed at this point. So why is the right data more powerful than ever? Because again, we are not in the era of blasting, we're the era of targeting. And that will be the theme for the next five years in land investing, right? So KPIs that actually matter. Here are the KPIs that actually move the needles.

We need to know what our cost per lead is. In a little bit, I'm gonna go into the green, yellow, reds for industry standards for cost per lead, cost per qualified leads, cost per contract deal, average profit in ROAS. So you can implement it right away and know exactly the KPIs that you need to be implementing into your business in order to take it to the next level. So the KPIs that actually matter here are the cost per lead. Of course, we need to know how efficient...

is our outreach. Our qualified lead is actually really important, right? We need to know of the leads that are coming in. Hey, if I get 10 leads a day or 15 leads a day, but none of them are qualified, there's a problem in the front end. The KPIs here, not only do they show us the health of the business, but they also show us what do we need to work on. It's like going out and doing a bunch of exercises and saying, hey, I have my running numbers or this, I can do this many pull-ups, I can do this many ⁓ bench presses.

And I know at this point where I need to focus my efforts on working out, right? What part of my funnel? My cost per deal is really high, but my cost per contract's really low. That means we're locking up a lot of contracts, but we're not actually closing on them. So is that a TC process? Is that a disposition process? Is that an underwriting process on the front end? That's super important. And then average profit in ROAS are the levers that we can pull in order to scale this business.

Right? So I really like to track cost per qualified lead in ROAS by list, SIPs and channel. ⁓ Then we'll go into marketing meeting my weekly KPI review a little bit later, but we like to clone the top 10 performance and then we cut anything above that 2x ROAS. here's the blueprint. Here's what you've been waiting for. The five step marketing system by the land man. Right? So number one is to find the right markets, pull the laser targeted data.

launch A-B tests, track the right KPIs, scale what work, and kill what doesn't. So we're gonna go through this first. So defining the right markets is so important. Instead of using Landwatch, instead of using Zillow, Redfin, we use ⁓ new software that we can analyze zip code demand, recent sales volume, dates on market, velocity. We're looking for markets with high cash activity and very low competitions. We wanna find those go-de-lock markets. If we're...

trying to buy land in the middle of Los Angeles, it becomes really difficult. It's incredibly competitive. We want to find the markets that are fast, that there's a lot of buyers, but it's not incredibly competitive. That allows us very early on to have those higher ROASs. Finding those perfect markets is critically important. You'll see this is the first step of the process, so this is one of the most important steps. I have land sets here. If you look in the link down below, you can

Click the link and set up a land stats account. I love land stats. I think it's an incredible software There's a plenty of other really good softwares out there as well land insights being one of them I've a lot of respect for the team They have a little bit of a higher price tag and if you're starting out or you're being price conscious land stats is incredible alternative to defining the right Sales volume by acreage bracket. This is super important

So number one, we want to find counties and areas that have at least 20 plus sold comps in your desired bracket. I define this as across the entire market. But for example, if you're looking earlier trying to find properties like we talked about between 20 and $200,000 in purchase price or if you're beginning 20 and $100,000, if you look in your specific acreage range, because that could only be between one and five in a specific market.

You don't have a lot of inventory there that could be problematic because what it means is there's not a lot of comps It's harder to actually when leads come into your system to actually comp the properties and sell them also makes it so that when you talk to brokers it becomes more difficult it really clunks up your process

But we wanna know what's our sales volume by acre bracket and across the county one at least 20 plus sold columns per year. We want a median price per acre by bracket. ⁓ This is a little bit of advanced level 201, but if we have a 100 acre that's selling for 10,000 an acre and a 20 acres that's selling for 20,000 an acre, we cut the acres up into We make that spread, we can pay market value. That's a really awesome subdivide

that we can use so we can look at medium price per acre bright bracket to see that. At the beginning, if you're a new investor, I don't really recommend you spend a lot of time on this. Really the reality is finding those honey hole markets and targeting them and then getting feedback. But if you're more advanced, I put this in here for you. Days of market is incredibly important, right? So days of market, this is context dependent as well. This is county dependent in the general state. Of course, Florida is a very, very hot market. And so,

statewide days on markets will be different than national but as a national level yellow is 92 180. Red is over 180. Land tends to sit possibly poor liquidity. But again, we are in the business of selling land quickly. And we want to price our land to sell quickly. So we are not like most buyers cash buyers.

But the reality is this is a very good heuristic to start to use to see, in this market, in this county, in this specific state, what are our days on market that we need to focus on? List to sale ratios. So you can go through the discount, 20 % discount, 10 % discount, if you see a ratio between, hey, what are most properties listed for, if there's a massive discount that does show an unhealthy market, so we wanna be aware of that.

And then the sell-through rate, right? This is the holy grail. This is what we want to focus six-month period, the strong is right here. Strong is hot market. As you can see, there's an okay market there. And then weak demand or unrealistic pricing is less than that 50%. That's something that, I don't really want to target the market. Again, down below, you can start to look into this with the link below.

⁓ And then absorption rate, right? This is one thing that I love at Landsat Hats about how fast is stuff actually selling. ⁓ You want to use these both. These are both kind of the most important thing. I added an extra bonus here so that you can have that competitive advantage. I a lot of people talk about absorption rate, but it shows how quickly inventory is selling. So you want to use this with the context of the greater days on market. And so you can have a really good understanding of what's actually strong, what's working in the specific market.

All right, so we are finished with step one, we're gonna go to step two. land portal, I think is incredible with data. We use land portal to segment and scrub. We use it to remove wetlands, floodplains, and slope. We like to pull ownership of 10 plus years. This is not needed, to be honest with you, especially when you're starting out. You want a lot of reps, but as you get ⁓ more and more reps in, then you can use this to...

focus in and if you're doing high volume marketing like cold calling and texting, I don't know if I recommend 10 plus years because that's going to really severely restrict your list, maybe five, maybe two. But this is the targeted data that we really like to see and there's a link down below to sign up and go through a trial and with a thousand free exports down after we pull that data, we export it into REISIF to stack and tag.

But that right now is just for the advanced people and you can set up an ARIA SIFT account. There will be a future video for that down below. So the step three is after we pull the list from Land Portal, then we will launch A-B testing campaigns. So what we're doing with the Land Portal is they have really good filters to remove 50 % floodplains, wetlands, slope, really focusing on buildability of land.

And then we A-B test. This is where most people fall down. They will not select the right markets. They will not scrub out using amazing software like Lamportal. They will not A-B test. And so they're stacking the decks effectively against themselves. So we love A-B testing everything. So when we send a mailer, we send two variations. When we do a calling, we'll do different variations. If you're doing texting, different variations, right?

So the mailing and calling are both here, right? So when you look at these two variations, a key point is that there's not a lot of differences. As you can see in the mailer, it's my photo, ⁓ there's a

pretty similar types of structure. Maybe there's a ⁓ photo of our brand below. There's still letter of intent. says my company information. there's not a lot of changes in what's actually being written. And that's super important because if we're testing something out, imagine you test a page and you test 15 different variables.

a landing page. And another page you text 15 different variables. So you have 15 total different variables that you're testing between these two pages. It's really hard to know what you are optimizing for. So when you're doing a calling script or a mailing or texting or whatever, you want it to be pretty similar, right? You want it to be relatively similar. You have a couple tweaks and then you test that over time. A lot of people will do neutral versus range. That's just a general mailing A-B testing.

And I think that's excellent thing to do. You can say, hey, what's working neutral versus range? Keep pretty consistent, you're writing there in the actual mailer, keep it pretty consistent the outside of the mailer, keep that all consistent. But that's what we like to A-B test. We A-B test everything and this is gonna allow you to, all these little nuances will allow you to get a higher row. So go from maybe what you would have gotten, which is a 2.9 to a 3.8, just by doing these little nuanced things.

Next thing is tracking the right KPIs. This is what you've been waiting for. We talked about this earlier, cost per lead, qualified lead, contract deal, and ROAS. Your cost per qualified lead, if you want to go really in, and this is some bonus, it tells you which list is the money printer, and your ROAS says, hey, where do I actually pork out? What I mean by that is the qualified leads is what matters more than the

So you might get a ton of leads from one list, but they're asking crazy unrealistic prices. In another list, you might get really good, low leads, but very qualified leads, and you have more qualified leads, and that yields obviously a better result.

So, I remember a story when I was starting to land first year, we sent 2,000 mailers to Florida. We landed two deals worth 25K each, so 50K gross profit off an $8,000 campaign, which was a 6.2X ROAS. Right, I'm gonna talk to you in a second here about a little tweak that we did with one of our clients. They went from a very low ROAS to 5Xing

We track this to figure out where did exactly this come from. we re-mailed the same zip code that this came from and we just murdered it again. We got another And if we didn't track all this stuff, we wouldn't have known this and it would have prevented us from scaling. So are some critical KPIs that we track and the green, yellow, reds for all these, we go leads per contract, leads per deal, cost per lead, qualified lead.

Contract deal Roas now you can have texting in here. You can have calling you can have direct mail Whatever you want to have then you can see there's some variation here and there's some trailing periods of time I want to talk about that right now So T for weeks is trailing for weeks T three months is trailing three cost per contract deal we like to do three months we fought even about six months because

of the cash conversion cycles are increasing slightly in land and it gives us a better picture. But these are, you can screenshot this, some of the most critical KPIs that we track. Left side column is yellow, left side is green, middle is yellow, right is red. This is where you know if you're on track or not for your critical KPIs. All right, so step five is scale what works, kill what doesn't. alluded earlier to the weekly review.

We want to isolate the top 10 % converting audience, the 10 % converting everything. The text, the calls, the direct mails, whatever you do, we want to know what is the 10 % best converting approach. We do this in a weekly marketing review. So we have our different departments, whether it's direct mail, texting, cold calling, whatever you're using, come in a weekly marketing meeting and we see, what's working, which counties are working. And we double down on those, or which texts or calls are...

or direct mail is working and we doubled down on those in whatever your marketing channel of preference is. One thing I will say see this happen for my clients more often than start a marketing channel, hear it on a podcast and whether it's texting, calling, direct mail, RVM, whatever they want to use.

and they do it for three months and they quit and go to another one, do it for three months, quit and go to another one, and then they end up coming to me and saying, man, I need consistency in my business. And a lot of times consistency is just about saying, hey, I'm gonna commit to whatever marketing channel it is, let's say direct mail for six months, I'm gonna commit to doing these four steps, A, testing, pulling the right data, finding the right markets in this specific marketing channel for at least six months. This is launch period. We call it the launch period.

and the six month launch period is required to get any ⁓ marketing channel off the ground. And at that time, if you have less than a 2X ROAS, right, you're less than doubling your money, it just becomes.

very difficult to scale. So I'll give you a perfect example. We're doing cold calling. It took us like four to five months to actually start to make money out of cold calling because you started this first month, you make a mistake. The second month, you make mistakes. You learn from it. You're tracking KPIs. Most people don't even track KPIs so they don't know what's working or not. And then the third month, they're starting to get steamed. They might get a couple of deals under contract first or second month or second or third month. And then it takes them another 180 days.

or 90 days to actually close. And so that is the, that's why we wanna give it six month, a six month period, right? this is the old way versus the new way. The old way is buy a big list with no filters, no zip code logic, no list cleaning. They choose markets based on Zillow screenshots, gut feeling. There's a generic blind offer with vague pricing. There's no A-B testing whatsoever.

They just send out 20,000 pieces of direct mail and they get one deal maybe. I know people that send out 20,000 pieces and get no deals. And they end up getting a one X row as in they burn out. This is essentially what I refer to as marketing roulette. You're stacking everything. If you were to build a perfect plan to not succeed, this is exactly what you do. And this is the new way land investors are doing data driven marketing.

They pull high conversion zip codes from Landstats. They filter by sales volume. They use the portal you can do templates to your owners if you want. Like we talked about earlier, that depends on you. Out of state, remove wetlands, FEMA slope. They run it through REISIF to stack, clean, and tag, which all these links to get this set up with discounts are all below for you guys. They send text or call strips, not generic.

They send 10,000 targeted pieces and they get two deals at $25,000 in profit each because they're doing feedback, because they're tracking, because they're targeting properly. This result is a 5.2 X-Row S, 5X-ing your money, right? You put in a dollar, you get five out. That is really good and that allows you to scale. Now because of the longer cash conversion cycles, being in the lamp business,

It's more difficult to scale if you have a lower row. It's like a three X rise even with that. So I like to say peg it at four to five X is kind of where you want to be in order to have a healthy lamb. Is there anything lower than that? Even though we talked about earlier, lower than two X kill it. Anything lower than that over a long period of time, you got to do more data driven marketing too. Stop guessing, start printing. So the old standard versus the new standard is here, right? This is the new standard.

data, outreach, KPI, scale. ⁓ This is your playbook, right? You've seen it. What are you gonna do with it, right? If you're not tracking, you're not scaling. If your lists are broad, your results are gonna be broad. Your results are gonna be generic. If your follow-up's bad, your deal flow will be bad too. So I want you to go deeper this week. Map out your process against these fine steps. Fill your gaps. Find one thing. Fix one thing this week. You wanna audit your process. wanna identify based on these five steps. Identify.

the Mrs. Peace is what you need to do. Apply one data later, apply one later to improve, test track and scale. Hey look, we send this stuff every single week in land letter. So if you like this, if you got benefit from this, please rate, review and subscribe. Leave a comment down below, let me know what you want and if you want me to go deeper in anything, I am happy to do that. But you can just take a photo. There's also a link to the land letter to sign up. You'll get our campaigns, our KPIs, marketing insights every single week.

If you are serious about scaling, this is the number one scaling newsletter on the internet, bar none, absolutely without question. So until next week, we appreciate it. Please rate, review, and subscribe, and happy land investing.