In business today, it’s harder than ever to earn attention. We have to understand our consumers on a much deeper level in order to consistently create marketing they want – instead of what we typically do which is create marketing that people simply tolerate.
If you choose to keep doing the same things over and over again without measuring them – but expecting a different result – I can’t promise that you’ll drive revenue and profit into your business.
But by measuring your marketing – as much as I know you do with your sales ratios – it will tell you exactly what you need to improve and it will earn you more clients and help you sell and manage more properties. Digital just happens to be a very good – and very affordable way of doing it compared with traditional marketing methods.
In this episode of Real Estate Pros, we’ll explore the pros and cons of both print and digital marketing for growing your real estate business.
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Before we launched our business in 2014, we hit the streets with a camera crew and asked everyday Australians – of all ages – this question:
“How would you describe people in real estate?”
Now we all know about the perception of real estate agents among the community but it’s not until you actually ask people, that you hear how they really feel. There was plenty of footage that didn’t make the final one and half minute video – for obvious reasons.
We followed that question by asking:
“What do you do with any marketing that you receive from real estate agents?”
The common response was either “in the bin” or “we ignore it”.
Now I’m proud to say I work in the real estate industry but I have to admit I do the exact same thing when we receive marketing material in our letterbox. It doesn’t make it past the front door. Not only that, but we have an electric gate on the front of our house that my wife loves to keep shut to keep out real estate agents from knocking down the door.
As real estate agents, you know this happens all the time. No-one waits at home for their local real estate agent to deliver a DL card or to knock on their door about listing their home. Seriously, no one does that.
While it’s easy to measure how many letters, flyers or DL cards have been delivered to mailboxes in your local area, it’s very difficult – almost near impossible – to measure how many people have picked it up out of their mailbox, taken it inside, opened it up, read it, processed it, pinned it to their fridge and then called you to list their house for sale or for rent. We can speculate on gut feeling, but with the direct mail technology we have available today, we cannot measure these numbers accurately.
Some say it’s all about the numbers. If you send out 10,000 letterbox drops and 10 people call you for an appraisal, that’s a success in some peoples view. While the commission per sale might make that the case, what happens when the market turns? Would you still invest those thousands of dollars delivering 10,000 letterbox drops if you knew people aren’t selling right now?
Take Image Property Management for example – a medium size property management company in Brisbane, Australia. Back in 2014, Shannon Davis – the principal of Image Property – were doing all the things a typical real estate business do. From letterbox drops, DL cards, flyers and even radio advertising on major AM and FM stations. Their offline marketing spend was close to six figures every year.
In conversations with Shannon, he would tell me about his frustration with the limited amount of return on his investment in traditional marketing but more importantly, his frustration with not being able to measure what was working and what wasn’t.
It was then that Shannon went all in with digital. Although it started with a new website, Shannon’s team continue to build their library of digital assets from infographics, market reports and helpful ebooks. They have a consistently maintained blog on their website and their FAQ’s page is outstanding – featuring answers to every property management question you could think of – and this continues to grow.
Image Property use social media and email to amplify all of this helpful, relevant content to their audience – driving over 10,000 unique visitors to their site each month. And get this – according to their Google Analytics data over the past 30 days –they have generated $78,840 in potential rent roll value as a direct result of their content marketing efforts – by using their helpful resources to drive traffic into their website and convert that traffic into leads for their business.
Shannon and his team measure every stage of the process from how many people engage with their helpful content, how many people visited their website as a result, how many of those visitors converted into leads and what each lead is worth to their business – and the reason why they’re able to do all of this, is because they can.
Digital marketing is measurable and when your marketing is measurable, it’s telling you in real time how people are interacting with your marketing – giving you valuable data to pivot, change and improve your content.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying for a second that print marketing doesn’t work – it absolutely does in a lot of cases. Even though I’m a digital guy, I am a huge fan of print. But if your marketing dollars are all in the print basket, you’re missing an opportunity.
In business today, it’s harder than ever to earn attention. We have to understand our consumers on a much deeper level in order to consistently create marketing that they want – instead of what we typically do which is create marketing that people simply tolerate.
If you choose to keep doing the same things over and over again without measuring them – but expecting a different result – I can’t promise that you’ll drive revenue and profit into your business.
But by measuring your marketing – as much as I know you do with your sales ratios – it will tell you exactly what you need to improve and it will earn you more clients and help you sell and manage more properties. Digital just happens to be a very good – and very affordable way of doing it compared with traditional marketing methods.
Good luck.
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