What really works for your business?

One of the first things my company does is to begin tracking and measuring our client’s sales and marketing efforts. It’s almost life altering when we present our results. Our clients can’t believe that the things they thought worked best didn’t work at all, and the things they thought worked the least were actually generating 80 percent of their business.

Registration cards will get you inaccurate data.
Let me give you an example. One of the most common tools that developers in residential and commercial real estate use are standard, old-school registration cards. Unfortunately, 70 percent of the data on registration cards is baloney. People will check off the first box in the list nine out of 10 times. Now, people don’t mean to lie. But most of them can’t remember what they had for breakfast let alone how they came to hear about your project. So, if registration cards aren’t telling you where your leads are coming from, is there a more accurate way to track them? Yes, there is.

But before I explain how to track leads, let me stress again why it’s important to track leads.
When most developers do a marketing plan, they don’t bother doing projections. Typically, they do a media plan and say, “okay, we’re going to spend this much on the Chicago tribune. We’re going to do something on google. We’re going to do something on billboards and we’re going to do a print piece.” So, they write out a number of different initiatives as part of their marketing plan, and put a dollar figure beside each one. Done. The problem is that this is old-world thinking. There’s nothing trackable about any of these initiatives – and none of them include projections. So how will you know if the things on your marketing plan are actually working?

Cost-per-lead: Helping to strategically focus your budget.
What I’m challenging you to do is to add a layer of information to your marketing plan by writing down what you expect your cost-per-lead to be and how many leads you’re planning on generating. Then track that information every week, every month. Are you hitting your numbers with the tribune? If not, try changing the creative direction or try something different. If your google ads aren’t hitting your cost-per-lead or you’re not getting enough leads, make a change. Information like this is powerful because, with it, you can strategically focus your budget on things that are producing real results.