By Than Merrill
To learn about Real Estate Marketing, look at Marketing For Deals or to attend Than Merrill’s exclusive weekend seminar, check out the Marketing and Wholesale Bootcamp
One of the most common problems most real estate investors make is not tracking their marketing. When it comes to marketing and running a business the devil is in the details. Marketers are usually ultra-creative people and often times allergic to the bottom line. However, there is nothing more important when it comes to building a business. Your goal as a marketer is to have a system to concisely track your marketing and understand the numbers. Measurement eliminates arguments and tracking your results will help you build a profitable real estate investment company.
Real Estate Marketing Tip #1 – Determining your ROI
Any marketing decision you make should be based upon the past performance of your prior marketing campaigns or research you have gathered from other investors. If you did a good job tracking your marketing expenditures by campaign type and the number of deals you bought from them, then you should be able to calculate a Return on Investment. Return on Investment or ROI for short, is a mathematical calculation that determines how much money was returned by your initial marketing investment. For example, if you invested $1,000 dollars and at the end of the year it generated $2,000 in income then your return on investment is 100%. For real estate investors this is important to note because certain marketing campaigns may be much more expensive than others, but if they bring you deals with a higher profit margin, the ROI is going to be much higher. Ideally you should want to make $20 dollars on every $1 invested in your marketing campaigns. This is a realistic goal, but something you will never achieve if you have no way of tracking your results.
Real Estate Marketing Tip #2 – Time is Your Most Valuable Asset
Unfortunately, ROI is not everything you need to consider when you are making marketing decisions. Time is a very important element that is much harder to get a grasp on. Some marketing campaigns are very time intensive so there is an opportunity cost associated with your involvement. If you are spending half your week fulfilling your marketing campaign this means other areas of your business may suffer. The only way to factor this into your marketing decisions is to associate a pay rate for your labor hours into your ROI calculations. If you value your time at $100 an hour, then you need to outsource every other job under that pay scale to someone else. This is not easy to do especially if you are used to trying to do everything yourself. Remember – don’t skip over the dollars to save dimes.
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