How Much Money Are You Wasting on Marketing?


Transcript:

We know we hold our expenses accountable. It’s all about ROI. Even if you spend a few hours a week where you get yourself away working on your books, that’s a lower pay grade than you're worth. You could be working on other things that make you more money. 

Just prospect for an extra three hours a month and don’t do your books. Those are the decisions you have to make in order to climb this ladder. You could do everything and just be in survival mode all the time. The more stuff you can get off your plate and create a system around, that’s where this thing gets really, really fun. I want to do nothing in my real estate business. I want it to be a kick ass healthy business that’s growing and has an awesome culture and people get a great service. I just don’t want to do a lot for that business. That’s what we’re building.


It’s making those decisions about what you’re going to touch and what you’re not going to touch. Not everything can come off your plate at once, but it’s a process. When it comes to marketing, spending, and ROI tracking, you’ve got to take this deep versus wide approach.

We had someone in the Boardroom who said he had $10,000 extra to spend a month on marketing. He really wanted to spend it. He wanted to go all-in on radio, but I really held him to not do that. We ended up spending $2200 a month with one station, the right station. And we’re going to monetize that one thing before we spend any of the rest of it. If it takes 6 months to monetize that spend, that’s 6 month of $7800 that he can just bank. The tendency is just to start four things at once, get moderate results, and you don’t really know what’s working and what’s not working. You’ve got to go deep in your marketing. For me it was buyer internet, raving fans, direct response and yard marketing in that order. 

Four Marketing Pillars

  1. Buyer internet, no barrier to entry there. It’s just a process, you just work leads and get closings.
  2. Raving fans, I was building up a database, worked on my database, people knew, liked, and trust me. I got business from that.
  3. Then I became a real good direct-response marketer, which is why we have 600 appointments this year. We’re really good at getting people to contact us.
  4. Then getting signs in the yard and having multiple calls to action on our yard marketing. That’s kind of the progression for me. You could do 50 closings from each of those, 200 sides a year just by having four marketing pillars.

Cash on cash, the way the Business Tracker does it is the way to do it. A lot of people just do money in vs. money out, which is fine. Overall, you just want to find out which ones are producing less and either raise them or get rid of them. It’s basically a year-to-date gross margin for that lead gen source divided by the total expense.

Every deal must be sourced. This changed everything for us in terms of how we organize our business. Each lead source has a number. Buyer internet are 100 series. I had a distinct platform for a while when Boomtown sold like a billion platforms in my market, but we don’t do that. We just do Boomtown and Zillow. We don’t do Trulia. We just have two buyer internet lead sources.

Yard marketing. I honestly need to do a better job of tracking the different sources of yard marketing. Radio, we just do the two stations. Shark Tank , we stopped. That was not profitable. The direct response marketing is all under the 400 series. This is the same thing as a bookkeeper, you’ve got to do it and if you don’t have this lead source document going, create one of these for your business right away. It’s a must. 

And then in the business tracker. You just wanna make sure you’re tracking even better than I’m tracking these. I haven't’ done a really good job of keeping the number of leads. But you wanna track these things. You want to go deep, not wide, on your marketing spend. When you spend a dollar, you want to make 10 dollars.

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