Want Better Real Estate Marketing Results? It All Starts with Tracking!

One topic that often come up when we talk to agents is the concept of them wanting their marketing results to be better. You can't really fault anyone for that, can you? After all, they are spending their hard earned money on their marketing campaigns. It's totally natural to want to squeeze as much success out of this as possible.

What I do get hesitant about, though, is how many agents want to go about getting better results. Their gut reaction is to immediately look at increasing the budget on their campaigns. After all, "If a little brought in good results, a lot will bring in fantastic results, right?" WRONG! You can't go about it this way. If you do, you risk over-spending on things that aren't going to add more money to your bottom line and risk going out of business.

With that in mind, today I'll share the very first thing you ALWAYS must have in place before you look at spending more money on your marketing campaigns.

It's All About Tracking and Analytics

The long and short of it is if you are not using tracking and analytics so you can generate metrics for ALL of your marketing campaigns, you simply cannot ever improve and/or spend more money on them. It's just not safe to do so. The logical, simple steps to any new marketing strategy or vehicle you roll out are this: Test it, Analyze it, Tweak It, Repeat.

If after a few iterations, you still don't have it working like the well-oiled machine you want, and you are confident you are following the best practices of that particular marketing engine, it just may not be something that is right for you or your marketplace.

So what about the marketing vehicles you know you are already getting leads on, you ask? You have to do this exact same inventory. Just because something is bringing you leads doesn't mean that you should dump tons of extra marketing dollars into it. What if you are getting tons of leads, but they aren't converting? What if you are converting all the leads you are getting, but when you look at your ROI, you figure out it's too expensive to nurture those leads into clients?

Without metrics, you cannot do any of this.

You NEED Tracking and Analytics for EVERY One of Your Marketing Platforms

Period, end of story. There is not one example of a marketing engine you can suggest to me that, with today's technology, is simply untrackable. If it's postcards, use capture codes. If it's Facebook Ads, use some sort of landing page or hook your ad to Facebook Messenger. Even if it's shopping carts, you can put a shortcode or 1-800 number that has some item of value attached to it, so you can register someone that acts on whatever that ad says.

I know I'm going to get tons of comments from you all trying to stump me on how to track results on a particular form of marketing. That's cool. Throw them at me! For a second, though, let's discuss the possibility that one of you does have such a platform. What then? It's simple. Drop that platform. This day and age, any platform that cannot give you analytics DOES NOT deserve to be part of your marketing budget.

Okay, I Have Analytics and Tracking on Everything. Now What?

Only once you have analytics and tracking available for all of your different marketing initiatives can you say it's time to "go shopping" and determine what you will be spending more money on. It's important that when you spend your money, you do it just as methodically and intelligently as you tracked your response rates and ROI on your marketing efforts. Do not dump more money into a marketing vehicle that isn't helping your bottom line in the hopes that one day it will pan out. Instead, focus on the marketing vehicles that are over-performing and bringing you great ROI.

Once you pinpoint those, analyze if it makes sense to increase your budget. For instance, if there are a finite number of people you can reach with a particular marketing engine, and you've hit a threshold that will not yield any increased results, it doesn't make sense to increase the budget for that tool. That is okay. Again, this is your analytics and tracking helping you. Instead, look for top-performing marketing initiatives that have runway and grow those.

So there you have it. I know analytics and tracking aren't "sexy," but just remember this: Nerdy is the new cool. Take a deep dive into your analytics and you will methodically and intelligently grow your real estate practice in ways you never imagined possible.

To view the original article, visit the Leading Agent blog.