Five steps for getting a bigger bang from your marketing bucks

We all know it takes money to make money but frequently we have lots of money going out without a precise plan as to where it’s going and how well it’s working. Here are five recommendations for getting maximum return on your marketing investment.

1. Cut back-not out. Most real estate professionals are still spending too much money on print advertising. Consider reducing your advertising budget and the advertising you do invest in should be focused on driving prospects to your website. The web is where you are going to capture the majority of your leads. Apply the one-third, two thirds rule to every printed piece and e-mail: The top third of every ad will promote the website and the remainder will be for properties.

2. Maximize your direct mail and email campaigns. For most agents 70 percent of their business will be repeat or referral customers yet they spend 90 percent of their budget on unmet prospects. This makes your money work too hard and your relationships aren’t working hard enough. To foster better relationships with existing customers and referral sources utilize your direct mail and email campaigns to stay in touch and provide value to your sphere of influence.

3. Make you website a lead capture machine. Try adding more lead capture forms to your website. Create a minimum of 10 forms and specifically link them to your listing pages. For example, you could offer free reports that answer specific prospect questions, with topics like “101 Things You Need to Know Before You Buy” or “Top Ten Mistakes Sellers Make that Cost Them Money On Their Sale.” Each report could be a PDF with a simple auto-responder.

4. Ramp Up Your Website SEO. Develop a list of what key words and phrases most buyers and sellers will put into a search engine to locate your products or services. Next, take each page that’s important to you and make sure that keyword or phrase is used prominently. Use it early in the text and at the end of the page. Put ti into a heading with an H1 tag or a subhead with an H2 tag. But, be careful and don’t overuse your keywords, it’s better to have good content than to have too many keyword phrase stuck in the wrong places. Make it a priority to get links to your site and start a blog that helps the search engine index your site more often. (Don’t forget to add something interactive to make people come back.)

5. Track and measure every dollar you invest. Keep records of every marketing dollar you spend, the leads that are generated and the source of all transactions. This gives you the ability to make adjustments and utilize more of what is working for you and less of what isn’t. Use separate response codes and different email addresses in advertisements and on marketing pieces to route your responses and make it easy to tabulate the effectiveness of your marketing investments.

Remember, it’s not how much money you are spending…It’s where you are spending your money that counts.

Have a profitable day.

BF