Real estate marketing has evolved significantly from its traditional methods. The proliferation of online platforms, social media, and data analytics allows agents to target potential buyers and renters with pinpoint accuracy while enhancing their experience through tools like virtual tours.
Current market trends have further underscored the need for a robust online presence. The surge in remote work and the increasing demand for flexible rentals are two accurate examples.
However, traditional real estate marketing is still here. While its avenues like print ads, open houses, and signage still have their place, they are now intertwined with digital strategies.
In that environment, an agent’s role has evolved from selling properties to curating a holistic experience that aligns with buyers’ lifestyles and preferences.
As a result, modern real estate marketing doesn’t just advertise properties—it builds relationships, educates clients, and facilitates smoother sales transactions in an increasingly interconnected world.
Real estate professionals should equip traditional and digital marketing tools to attract, engage, and delight buyers and renters to achieve optimal results. However, this blend presents unique challenges.
Measuring marketing performance and attributing success to specific efforts is likely the most complex one.
In today’s article, we will break down this challenge into its various components and explore how real estate marketing professionals, agents, and brokerages can tackle it to optimize their efforts and efficiently manage their marketing spending.
Why Is It Hard to Measure Performance in RE Marketing?
To understand how we can accurately measure performance in RE marketing, we should first explore the reasons that lead to this complexity. Let’s dive deeper into each of its components.
- Multiple Touchpoints: Buyers might first see a property on a social media ad, later attend an open house, and then revisit the property online through a virtual tour. Each of these touchpoints plays a role in influencing their decision, making it difficult to attribute the final sale to a single campaign or medium.
- Delayed Conversions – Long Sales Cycle: Unlike other industries, where a click can lead to an immediate sale or a lead, real estate purchases and rentals are high-value and involve prolonged decision-making. A buyer or renter might see an advertisement but may only take action months later. This lag complicates tracking the direct impact of a marketing effort.
- Overlapping Campaigns: Agents often run multiple campaigns simultaneously across different channels. For instance, a property might be featured in a local magazine, on Facebook, and in email newsletters. When a sale occurs, pinpointing which campaign was most effective becomes challenging.
- Offline Conversions: Traditional marketing efforts, like networking events or word-of-mouth referrals, can result in offline conversions, which are harder to track than digital metrics.
- Data Integration: Integrating data from various sources, such as Google Analytics, CRM systems, and offline records, requires sophisticated tools and expertise. Not all real estate professionals have access to or the capability to leverage such tools to their fullest extent.
In response to these challenges, many real estate professionals are turning to multi-touch attribution models, sophisticated analytics platforms, and integrated CRM tools to understand their marketing performance better. We are going to explore each of these in more detail below.
Before that, though, we should never forget that the intersection of digital and traditional marketing means that some level of ambiguity will persist in calculating the exact ROI of any single campaign.
How to Measure Performance in RE Marketing?
Despite the challenges we discussed, there are methods that can help improve sales attribution and measure the success of marketing efforts.
First, it’s important to note that tackling these challenges requires a combination of strategic activities, tools, and a shift in perspective. Here are some steps to consider:
- Adopt Multi-Touch Attribution Models
Today, buyers interact with multiple channels before settling on a purchase. Traditional methods like last-click attribution, which assigns sales credit to the final touchpoint, can overlook the importance of earlier interactions.
To counteract this, consider multi-touch attribution models. These models distribute credit across several touchpoints, offering a fuller picture of a buyer’s journey. Using analytics tools that support multi-touch attribution lets you discern which channels and campaigns are most impactful at various decision stages.
- Unified CRM Systems
Utilize CRM systems that integrate both digital and offline interactions. This ensures all data related to a client or lead is in one place, providing a more complete picture of the buyer’s journey.
By doing so, every interaction, whether an email click or a face-to-face meeting, becomes part of the buyer’s journey narrative. This consolidated perspective aids in tailoring more effective, personalized marketing strategies.
- Regularly Audit and Clean Data
Data accuracy is paramount. Without regular checks, databases can become cluttered with outdated or incorrect information. It’s essential to institute a routine audit of your datasets. This ensures you make decisions based on the most current and accurate insights.
Employing dedicated data management tools or professionals can help streamline data management and ensure data reliability.
- Utilize Tracking Technologies
Use tracking pixels, UTM parameters, and dedicated landing pages for digital campaigns. Consider unique phone numbers or QR codes for offline campaigns to monitor responses.
- Set Clear Objectives
Before launching any campaign, it’s pivotal to define its purpose. Are you aiming for brand awareness, lead generation, or direct conversions?
Setting clear and measurable objectives upfront allows you to tailor your metrics and KPIs accordingly, ensuring that post-campaign analysis aligns with your initial goals.
- Educate & Train Teams
The best tools and strategies can fall short without proper execution. If you are running a brokerage or real estate team, ensure all team members, from seasoned agents to new administrative hires, understand data collection and documentation.
Organizing regular training sessions and workshops can promote best practices and ensure the consistent, accurate recording of data.
- Feedback Loop
Similarly, fostering open communication channels between sales and marketing teams can reveal ground truths. Regular meetings can help share insights on which campaigns resonate with potential buyers, allowing for real-time adjustments and more cohesive strategies.
- Leverage Analytics Tools
Platforms like Google Analytics and Facebook Analytics have become indispensable. They offer granular insights into user behaviors, interaction times, and conversion paths.
Integrating these tools into your marketing stack and setting aside dedicated review times allows you to continuously refine your strategies based on real-world data.
- Test & Optimize
Continuously test different marketing strategies and channels. A/B testing, for instance, can reveal which email subject line or social media ad resonates most with your audience.
Such tests can reveal what engages your audience, allowing for iterative refinements to maximize results.
- Holistic Viewpoint
While metrics like website traffic or click-through rates offer insights, they’re just pieces of a larger puzzle. Embrace a holistic approach that considers a combination of KPIs. This can help spot potential issues, like high traffic without conversions, and guide corrective measures.
- Survey Buyers
Direct feedback remains one of the most insightful data sources. Implementing post-purchase surveys can provide qualitative insights into which marketing channels or campaigns swayed a buyer’s decision.
While it may not be feasible for every transaction, sporadic feedback can guide future campaigns.
Conclusion
Attributing success and calculating the ROI of a single campaign in real estate marketing is undeniably challenging. Agents, brokerages, and marketing professionals should adopt a holistic approach to tackling the issue without necessarily using all of the methods mentioned above. However, every single one of them, even by itself, can help you understand what activities lead to better results and how to optimize your marketing efforts.