If tracking advertising success was as simple as using Where’s George a marketers job would be pretty cush! There are just so many places to advertise Real Estate, its tough to know which is providing you the best bang for the buck.
So where are you putting your advertising money, and is it really giving you the best return on investment? Is optimizing your ROI of importance, or are you sticking with traditional conventions?
There of course is old school print advertising, but that’s what created the ROI analyis dilemma to begin with. You can link each advertisement with its own phone number or extension, and keep track of which ads provide the best lead capture. You can also take this one step further and try to link a transaction back to the initial lead call, thus giving you a true profit-to-cost ratio.
That sounds like a lot of manual work to me. Isn’t technology supposed to make our lives easier so we can hang out on Second Life more? Heck, we’re even selling Real Estate there now.
Take this dilemma one step further. With the advent of the Internet, and digital advertising you have limitless options of where you can place your advertising dollars. Do you try to get in front of the consumer by purchasing search targeted ads such as Microsoft adCenter, Yahoo! Search Marketing, or Google AdWords? Or do you buy leads or banner advertisements from a specific market?
Additionally, you can choose to market your properties themselves either by enhanced pay models (REALTOR.com, or local newspaper portals, such as Tribune Interactive). You can even try to market them using free tools (as in cost, not time) such as Craigslist, GoogleBase, or Zillow.
Just looking at that should make your head spin. The options reach an uncontrollable level. However, the same underlying theme that troubled the REALTORS from the first day of handing out flyers still exists. Where are my dollars going, and which are benefiting me the most.
The beauty of digital advertising is that there can be an added level of automation to help streamline posting and determine the most optimized level of advertising. For example, there are various Automated Craigslist Posting Tools. Point2 offers a Listing Synidication, which will send your properties to a half dozen or more listing sites - for free! Google has also created tools to automate and optimize AdWords.
Do you see the commom thread? With all these automated services, there still is the underlying issue of really analyzing where the dollar goes. They help with getting the lead, and realizing which generate the most leads, but a lead isn’t money in the bank till they buy something.
This brings rise to a whole new level of advertising and profit tracking. Google has seen it, and has recently launched their Pay-Per-Action advertising program. You only pay when a defined action (ie a transaction) is complete. It’s hard to grasp if this will work in a world where the transation occurs offline, but you can definately see the potential in other markets where transactions occur start to finish in the virtual realm.
Another interesting concept that has emerged from this are services which will handle all your advertising campaigns and transaction tracking for you. Once such solution is ClearSaleing. Using thier online interface and a little programming magic, you can easily track all internet generated leads from start point to transaction. There is even the ability to track offline advertising (such as print or flyers) by manually tagging and linking a lead to a transaction in their system.
Ultimately, REALTORS will need to analyze where they are putting their money, as there are way too many options out there. Is having a customized website that is costing you $50+ per month and generating you one lead any better than taking a little time and posting to Craigslist, or even better, paying for that classified ad in the neighborhood newsletter? Its not about what has traditionally worked but what is going to work for you tomorrow and well into the future.
Good article, Chris. Measuring ROI on Realtors’ marketing investments used to be a tricky feat. As the majority of buyers nowadays have started their house hunting projects on the web, it’s getting easier to measure the ROI of online marketing investments. I first and foremost credit Google for probably being the first to make available their Urchin (now Analytics) product to online marketers.
There sure are a lot of wasted dollars. Many people use completely ineffective marketing strategies that merely end up cluttering up the Internet. I believe the advertising focus should be on trying to provide something of value and then benefiting from being associated with it…rather than simply trying to plaster a name across someone’s screen.