There's no denying it: the pace of change in our modern world is dizzying.
If you don't believe me, close your eyes and think about life just 10 years ago and consider how different things were then -- especially in the business world. A decade ago, nobody had high-speed Internet or HTML interfaces. There were no iPods or BlackBerrys. Google was just coming out of Stanford and had yet to revolutionize the way the world shares and accesses information. Back then, nobody was tweeting or had a Facebook profile. And although cell phones were available, they weren't everywhere like they are now.
The painful truth is that what sold your property a decade ago is terribly outdated now. Today, smart, skilled builders and developers are trying to market everything from million dollar developments to single-family residences using antiquated methods from the Dinosaur Age. My goal is to change all that.
One of the first things my company, N5R, does it to begin tracking and measuring our clients' 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.
Let me give you an example. One of the most common tools that developers in residential and commercial real estate use are the 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 registratio 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 with 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?
What I challenge developers to do in my real estate consulting business and through N5R is to add a layer of information to your marketing plan by writing down what you expect your cost-to-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.
Another thing: not only should and lead-generation tool be trackable, it should also give you results in real time. The days of waiting weeks and months to find out what's working and what's not over. And if you don't feel that trend already, let me assure you that your clients certainly do.
For information on how to make your strategies trackable and in real time, download my eBook.
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