Evaluate Your Marketing ROI By Tracking the Right Metrics

An Inevitable Task

Examining ROI - it’s often a painful but critical task for marketers, no matter which field they’re in. But for real estate firms, being able to track marketing ROI and seeing if incumbent processes really are working is only going to become increasingly important in 2023.

The issue is often multifold: 

• Agents and marketing leaders in real estate firms often don’t understand which lead sources are most effective and actually driving the bottom line, even if they might be ticking several boxes, such as working overtime chasing opportunities in social media and advertising streams.  
• These real estate professionals (with their marketing hats on) are often too busy constantly playing out new lead sources yet only tracking them for a short time. The lack of focus and dedication to long-term results means increased potential for valuable leads to fall through the cracks, only because they’re not being tracked all the way to the end. 

The Importance of Tracking - to the Very End 

Many marketing departments–in firms and brokerages–understand what it takes, and what it means, to track opens on emails, keep an eye on the amount of social interaction on their social media channels, and make a note of every new lead that drops into the CRM. 

But obsessively focusing on one or a few of these types of metrics doesn’t really tell us much about what’s working, and in fact, may actually divert attention from factors that drive true ROI. 

The Good News  

Thankfully, according to marketing experts, there are a number of points real estate firms can start considering to take their marketing ROI to the next level. 

• As mentioned earlier, it is vital to make sure leads are being tracked, no matter their position in the custom funnel. It’s especially important to ensure you know where your leads are coming from, aka the lead source.  
• The lead source will tell an agent or firm a lot about how successful their content marketing strategy is. Forbes reports that some of the most effective strategies that drive ROI include video, blogs, social media, and testimonials - content that piques customers’ interests and gets them to keep clicking their way through to a CTA. 
• Partnering high-quality content with strategic distribution and social sharing remains a powerful catalyst for converting leads to paying clients, so long as both are being tracked (the content piece, as well as the lead activity). 
• Surprisingly, a lot of firms have poor ROI because they don’t have a definitive standard of what a lead looks like to sales and marketing teams alike, so often team members aren’t even looking for the same data, let alone the right type. 
• Having a clear, robust process of lead scoring for digital leads is also crucial. From the moment an anonymous visitor signs up with an email and is registered in the CRM, that lead’s activity can be tracked, including activities like email opens, click-throughs, and social media engagement. 
• Cleary, the more activities and additional steps the lead takes, the higher their digital lead score. The higher the score, the more likely their transition from an MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) to an SQL (Sales Qualified Lead).

Agents don’t need to ask the question, “where did you hear about us?”. They’ll know - because they’ll be tracking the right data and identifying what factors have been effectively driving ROI. It sounds matter-of-fact in text, but the amount of missed opportunities that firms experience on a daily basis, because of fragmented systems, is alarming.  

All that, simplified and accelerated with Realforce. 

From all we’ve discussed above, it’s clear that choosing a system that serves sales and marketing teams alike is an important way to make sure the right data points are being tracked, while providing less room for error and miscommunication. 

While most CRMs and platforms are better suited to either sales or marketing, (and almost always industry-agnostic), Realforce offers an exciting ‘full-packaged’ platform solution that caters specifically for all real estate marketing needs, including (but not limited to!): 

• The Realforce platform provides a real-time central dashboard that retains full visibility of all ongoing multi-channel automation programs. 
• Engage programs provide additional backbone to the agent marketing toolkit with automated CRM integration. This means records are always updated, lead nurture happens seamlessly and intuitively, and customers can be located exactly where they are on their property journey via actionable insight.   
• All customers can be reached across all mediums in a hyper-personalized way - which means tracking that ever-elusive ROI value in the long term can go from distant dream to tangible reality. With Realforce, it’s now possible to close the loop that merges marketing and sales data under one platform, going from fractured to functional with one simple, painless setup. 

Realforce speaks to these pain points directly by offering a solution that is 100% designed to address and resolve real estate marketing needs. That means, unlike other tech softwares on the market, Realforce comes ‘fully assembled’ - no confusing setup and configurations, but fully flexible to meet every specific marketing gap and requirement.