Knowing Your Numbers When Marketing

By: Jacob Hicks

Jump To:

1. Recommendation #1: Leave Emotion at the Door
2. Recommendation #2: Commit to a 90-Day Program
3. Recommendation #3: Follow Up
4. Call to Action

Everything in marketing comes down to data.

Even before the digital age, real estate investors relied on feedback and data from traditional marketing strategies such as direct mail, radio and TV commercials, brochures, flyers, and cold-calling. With digital marketing, obtaining measurable data is not only expected - it’s also much easier.

By knowing your numbers, you can identify key metrics that are important for your business and track your progress towards achieving your goals. This includes metrics such as call tracking & data analytics, conversion rates, cost per deal, and return on investment. By tracking these metrics, you can identify areas where you may be overspending or underperforming and make adjustments to your campaigns to improve their effectiveness.

Knowing your numbers also helps you to make informed decisions when it comes to budgeting and resource allocation. By understanding the costs and potential returns associated with each marketing channel, you can make decisions that maximize your return on investment and help you to achieve your marketing goals more efficiently.

Let’s look at three key tips on how to analyze and manage your marketing numbers.

Recommendation #1: Leave Emotion at the Door

Emotions and gut feelings can be powerful motivators, but they can also lead to costly mistakes when it comes to real estate investor marketing. One of the biggest mistakes investors make is allowing these subjective factors to guide your decision-making process. It results in marketing campaigns that are based on assumptions or opinions, rather than data-driven analysis.

For example, let’s say you launch a Google PPC campaign for 30 days and spend $2,000.

While it’s possible to land a deal after only spending $2,000 on Google PPC, based on the averages, it’s not guaranteed you’re going to. After 30 days, you may have seven leads, but zero deals. For some investors, these results can lead to frustration, anxiety, and distrust in Google Paid Ads program effectiveness.

As a result, you pull out of the platform without giving it a fair shot at succeeding. However, the problem was not the platform. Instead, your lack of strategy from the beginning allowed your emotions to dictate your next action. If you went into the campaign understanding the numbers, you would have known you still needed up to five to eight more leads, on average, to land a deal (the numbers we are using here are based on our most recent nationwide averages with investors we work with).

Let's use an offline marketing example, such as direct mail. Let’s say you want to send out postcards to a list of 2,000 addresses you’ve collected from PropStream. You utilize a direct mail company and send out all 2,000 postcards.

Over the next week, the campaign results in a handful of phone calls but no deals. Once again, you abandon your strategy, thinking that it won’t work. But the problem was not the strategy. Instead, you didn’t understand how mailouts work and had unrealistic expectations from the start.

To avoid costly mistakes in your marketing strategy, focus on data-driven analysis and know your numbers BEFORE you begin. If you’re newer to a marketing strategy and don’t know what the averages should be, ask an expert. By gathering and analyzing data, you can identify patterns and trends, and make informed decisions that are based on objective information and not on emotions. This approach will help you avoid the never ending cycle that many investors find themselves in of jumping from one marketing channel to the next waiting to hit a home run right out of the gates.

Recommendation #2: Commit to a 90-Day Campaign

With any new advertising campaign, whether offline or online, committing to a minimum of a 90-day test is important. Others will recommend at least six months, which we could make an argument for. However, at minimum, you should test any new marketing campaign for at least 90 days. There are a couple reasons for this.

You Create a Deeper, More Well-Thought Out Strategy

Launching a 90-day marketing campaign allows you to create a more comprehensive and cohesive marketing strategy that is designed to achieve your goals over a longer period of time. This can help to increase the effectiveness of your campaigns and improve your overall return on investment.

Data Follows Your Marketing Dollars

What do I mean by this? You are not running an ecommerce business. People are not going to your website and making an immediate purchase where you can instantly calculate your return on ad spend.

We are dealing with people who are likely selling the most expensive thing that they own. While many sellers are forced to sell within a matter of days of reaching out to you, many of them have weeks, or even months before they truly HAVE to sell.

In other words, a lead you generate in March, may not convert into a deal until June. So in June when that deal goes through and you profit $15,000, you can’t attribute that profit from your June marketing spend. You have to go back and attribute that to your March marketing spend.

This is what I mean when I say, “data follows your marketing dollars.”

Because your leads won’t always convert into a deal the same month it comes in, means if you don’t run your marketing campaigns long enough, you aren’t going to truly understand the impact of those marketing dollars you were spending.

More Accurate Campaign Tracking & Data

A 90-day marketing campaign can help you to achieve better long-term results by allowing you to gather more data and insights about the effectiveness of your marketing tactics. This information can be used to refine your campaigns and optimize your marketing efforts for even greater success in the future. Only marketing for 30-60 days oftentimes will not produce you enough data to fully understand the impact of those marketing efforts.

Let's look at real data from Google and Facebook ads as an example here.

• Google PPC: Our nationwide data from 2022 shows that the average cost per lead on Google PPC ads is between $200 - $400. Getting one deal under contract takes between 12-15 leads.
• Facebook: With Facebook, the average cost per lead is cheaper, $100 - $150. However, getting one deal under contract takes 25-30 leads.

Depending on your market & other factors, you can expect to pay between $3,000 - $5,000 in advertising spend (whether Google or FB) to get one deal under contract. Do you feel more equipped to make better marketing decisions by knowing these numbers? Of course.

Think about the effectiveness of that extra 30 days:

• After two months: If, after two months of doing Facebook ads, you spent $2,000 and generated 20 leads but haven't gotten a deal yet. You may be discouraged and stop.
• After three months: However, if this trend continues during month three and you spend another $1,000 and generate ten more leads, now you have 30 leads.

You should have at least one deal within those 30 leads from a numbers standpoint. Now, are you glad you didn’t stop these ads and jump into a new marketing channel to restart this process?

Do you see how knowing the numbers can help you avoid making quick, emotionally based decisions?

Recommendation: Follow up, Follow up, Follow up

Some say, "the fortune is in the follow-up".

The time it takes from generating the lead to converting it can be anywhere from a few days to several months. If you don't have a strong follow-up process, including remarketing ads, you will not likely hit the averages you need for a successful campaign.

Nurture Your Leads Over Time

Having a strong follow-up process is critical for nurturing your leads and building stronger relationships with the motivated seller leads you’ve generated. By following up with your leads in a timely and personalized manner, you can increase the likelihood that they will eventually convert into deals.

Keeps You in the Front of the Line

Consistent follow-up helps you to stay top-of-mind with motivated sellers. By providing relevant and valuable content and information, you can establish yourself as an authority in your industry and build trust with them over time. This can help to increase brand awareness and recognition, and drive more engagement and conversions. This also prevents the seller from forgetting who you are so when they are finally ready to move forward, they end up going back online to search for cash buyers.

Improves Your Marketing ROI

Strong follow-up helps you optimize your marketing efforts and improve your return on investment. By tracking your follow-up metrics, such as response rates and conversion rates, you can identify areas where you may need to make adjustments to your campaigns and optimize your marketing tactics for better results.

When you reach out to motivated seller leads, you stand out in a crowded marketplace. By providing personalized and engaging follow-up experiences, you can differentiate your brand from your competitors and create a more memorable and impactful impression on your target audience.

Start Generating 15-30+ Inbound Motivated Seller Leads Every Month

Magnyfi can help you get more motivated seller leads through various paid and organic online marketing strategies. Learn more about how we can help you implement the Motivated Sellers Marketing System in your area.

To check the availability of your market, fill out our application form or contact us at 877-399-2259, and we will walk you through the process. We only work with a limited number of investors per area, so claim your market today!