Online marketing requires more than counting cash to succeed!

Ha!  Based on the title above, I bet you thought we’d be discussing the more ephemeral elements of social media marketing today.  Surely you know me better than that by now! We’re Streetsmart for a reason:  when the chips fall, it’s all about results (real results – be they increased visibility online to actual conversions in property sales).  I’d be willing to wager: most estate agents out there don’t have the first clue about what results to look for, or how they came to the results that exist.  How many of you are actually tracking your source enquiries? In other words, do you ask each and every customer how they found their way to you?  Hands up!  I see very few hands…  Naughty.  So the billion pound questions remains:  how do we know what to spend where? How do we calculate the value of our digital and social media activity in business terms our bookkeeper can get their heads around?  Simples!

Keeping it Real

Results are everything.  In our hard pressed economy, and our beleaguered sector, results make a very real difference in our lives. On a personal level, it’s the difference between sipping champagne or enduring Gallo.  On a professional level, it means flourishing in a troubled economy and setting yourselves up to rapidly expand and take advantage of the downturn in all of its opportunities, or clinging to mere survival.  But in a world with so many customer ‘actions’ and in the case of many businesses, a lack of hard ‘conversion points’, what metrics are needed to make sound business decisions about which marketing channel works best for you?  Everyone bangs on about social media – but is it working for your agency?  Are you seeing the return on investment (ROI) you’d expect?  If not, you’re not doing it right.  That’s as real as I can get, though let us not digress from today’s most serious of topics: return on investment.

ROI: More Bang for your Buck

You’ve got property stock and you either a) need more, b) need to shift it or c) need to accomplish both.  Your chief concern is property marketing.  You have multiple channels to get your business in front of the right customers.  But how can you measure what’s working and what isn’t?  Smart business owners know that diverting budgets from underperforming channels to more effective arenas pays big dividends, rather than following the herd and simply marketing in the way ‘everyone else’ does it.  You may feel safe reviewing your portal statistics, but it’s just not enough.  Property marketing portals, provide monthly reporting and analytics to show how much your property listings were engaged with on their site.  But that’s only the beginning of the story.  What happens when the customers arrive on your doorstep, or pick up the telephone and ring you, or navigate to your website and request a viewing?  How do you know where they came from?  The ads? The billboards?  Google search?  Facebook?  Portals?  Tracking your source enquiries at the point of contact is the single most important thing you can do for your business.

“But it will take time and customers don’t like it!”  You know, if you can’t ask a quick question in all of your customer contact with ease, then you’re in the wrong business.  Creating lasting relationships and trust is key to swaying customers for big ticket items.  If you’ve got time to get their email, you’ve time to find out where they’re coming from.   Why?  It’s VITAL in determining a true ROI figure.  We cannot do the math without it.  Okay, I am getting bored with the marketing lingo and for lack of a simpler language, we’re going to provide some clear examples and instructions.

Brains & Brawn: The Daniel Craig Way

I admit it. The above title is a shameless, unaffiliated plug for a current obsession of mine (flying the flag and setting standards for all of our older gents! No excuses!).  But there is substance too.  Bond isn’t just a pretty face.  Nor is he all cutting edge technology.  He’s a smooth operater, cunning, shrewd, fit and debonair.  He knows what he’s doing, why and how – which makes ad libbing under pressure all the more successful.  He’s got it all.  And so should you.

ROI Defined

ROI is simple:  is what you’re doing making or saving you money and / or generating positive brand experiences?   Any communications channel you use should be designed from a business point of view to do one of these three things.  What ROI is not:  black magic.  You cannot massage the balance books, or hang on to outdated modes of marketing simply because you’re fond of seeing your properties in glossy printed magazines.   You must examine everything (print advertising, direct mail campaigns, your website, PPC, and social media channels) with the same impunity.

Math Lesson Alert

Are we all still awake?  Good.  Time to grab a coffee to keep you going!  So the calculation is simple. There are a few ways to calculate ROI, but let’s go with the most commonly accepted, expressed as a percentage.  ROI = money (and/or time)  spent divided by money (and/or time) made x 100.  Yes.   That easy.  So let’s represent that a little clearer:

ROI = x(money/time spent on a particular marketing channel) / y (money/time earned or saved from a particular marketing channel) x 100

So you spent 20,000 GBP on your new website.  You’ve generated 10,000 more views of your site in the last quarter as a result.  From those views, you’ve had 30 new customers, each with a value of 5,000 GBP to your business (this figure should be calculated based on the average profit margin of each customer to your business in each service level of your business – i.e. lettings/sales).   Here’s how it looks:

£20,000/£I50,000 x 100 = 13.333%.

Calculating time is fairly straightforward too.  Simply assign the hourly value of your team members and apply this value to the units of time saved.  The math lesson is over folks.  Now let’s tackle what we’re measuring.

BUT WHAT TO MEASURE?

Let’s go back to business basics.  The first step in any successful business effort is determining your key business objectives.  Whether they involve cutting costs in certain departments, getting more traffic to your website or expanding your online real estate – you can’t demonstrate ROI unless you’ve nailed this.  Take a look at all the core areas of your business performance and review your strategic objectives.  Here are some questions to ask to get to these bare bones essentials:

• Marketing and Communications:  How are we spreading the word to our customers and potential business partners/investors?  Are we doing this most effectively?  How can we cut marketing / IT costs while increasing business?
• Customer Service: Are we managing online complaints about our services?  Are we effectively servicing our customer needs?  Is there a way to do it better?  Can we make it cheaper?
• Brand Building:  Do new potential customers know who we are?  How can we ensure that we have most visibility online?  How can we make sure our customers feel valued by spending less time, not more?
• Human Resource: Are we attracting the right employees to our business?  Are we utilizing all tools and resources to do so online?  Can we cut recruitment agency / advertising fees by utilizing social media?

Brainstorm each area of your business and apply strategic objectives to the department(s) you are responsible for.  This allows a firm foundation for all of your future metrics.  Here are some example objectives and targets (but bear in mind, you must set reasonable and specific goals to each of them:

• Sell more products or services (10% increase in new home sales, 5% rise in property stock, etc)
• Cultivate influence and authority (more press inches and more online real estate, including engagement with key influencers in social)
• Customer Loyalty (25% higher customer retention rate, year on year)
• Cut business overheads (reduce customer service overhead by 20%)
• Optimise business efficiency (15% reduction in time spent on sharing property details in social media)
• Optimise marketing efforts
• Open new market demographic (50% increase in traffic to site from foreign markets)
• Increase Visibility in Market

Visibility in search engines for:

• - Company Profile (20% increase in rankings)
• - Property portfolio & intellectual property assets (i.e. area guides, etc) (100% improvement in ‘owning the search page’ for our properties and assets
• Increase Influence

Developing profile of key executives to:

• - Develop Partnerships & Relationships (2 new partners and business relationships developed via LinkedIn per quarter)
• - Increase share of voice with key influencers (5% increase in trade/ press enquiries for key market issues)

The Holy Trinity

Once you’ve decided your key business objectives, it’s vital to round them up and assign into areas that you can focus on with ease.  With so much to calculate, I can feel your pain.  However, we recommend using our Holy Trinity (Social, Digital and Business Objectives) to help you get started segmenting your measures of success in getting to your eventual ROI calculation.

Social Metrics:  From Likes, Shares and RTs to engagement with key market influencers online, you should set up your measurement system to include:

Quantitative Metrics – The numbers: Fans, Followers, Likes of FB page, etc

Qualitative Metrics – The value of the numbers:

• Clicks on content
• Re-tweets
• Shares
• Likes of content
• Comments on content
• Positive customer service experiences/referrals in social
• Social Bookmarking

Influencer Metrics

• % of following comprised of market influencers
• Volume of engagement with Influencers vs customers
• @replies
• Conversations in social (@replies, comments on blog, social bookmarking, forum discussions)
• Increased reach via Influencer Engagement (number of new followers reached through engagement with Influencers

Digital Metrics:  These are by far the easiest measures to collect (usually via a combination of Google Analytics).  They give you everything you need to know about how customers arrive at and interact with your website.  You should look at digital metrics in two segments: micro-conversions and macro-conversions.  Metrics should map back to your original business objectives at all times, so ensure you’ve accounted for them.  Sample metrics could include:

Higher macro-conversions

• Increased traffic from foreign markets
• Increased traffic from key search terms
• Property details download
• Registration onsite
• Requests for viewing
• Social shares

Higher micro-conversions

• Multiple category views (i.e Looking around your site for longer, in different property areas)
• Download of property brochure or informational pdf
• Increased dwell time on site
• Customer Survey responses
• Increased activity in registered log in area on site

Business Objectives:  These are by far the simplest measures.  Have you increased business in key areas?  Are you selling more houses?  Are more customers finding you in social media or online?  This is where your source enquiry tracking pays the most dividends.

Bringing Home the Bacon

Once you’ve gotten to grips with what to measure, your ROI calculation in social media, digital and other marketing channels should be straightforward.  Of course, we’re always here to help answer your questions and guide you.  Feel free to email me at tracy@streetsmartsocial.co.uk with your issues and we’ll continue this discussion in weeks to come.  But before we leave you all to counting, there are two key points for consideration:

• Measuring impact on brand, sentiment and reputation is hard to measure.  If you’re getting it right, you’ve ‘averted a crisis’ – so it’s hard to measure something that you’ve avoided (like www.ihateyourestateagencyname.com or an all out petition discrediting your property management expertise),  but it’s no different to measuring PR activity in a traditional since!
• Most marketing uses for social are about relationship building. Measuring the return on a relationship happens over an extended period of time, and you need the technology in place to capture this customer data to really calculate full return on investment.  Social, of course, can be a campaign channel, but social relationships just don’t work this way.  It’s about constant relationship building through trust and giving good content/value, to get real monetary return.

Happy number crunching!

*  This article first appeared in PropertyDrum magazine.

Streetsmart Social & PropertyDrum invite readers to take part in the world’s first real estate social media survey.  Please email tracy@streetsmartsocial.co.uk to participate. We’ll be collating the results and publishing them in a special PropertyDrum article in the near future!

[Originally published in PropertyDrum Magazine]

Spent good money on your website lately?  Happy with what you’ve got?

(Can you hear the pin drop?)

Or do you wish there was a Dominic Littlewood  for the property industry who’d go round your web developers for a wee argy-bargy?

There’s not much I can do to help you recover lost costs and opportunities arising from a bad website.  Nor can I give you a full overview of what you must do to execute a web development project successfully in a handful of articles.  BUT – we’ll illustrate some common pitfalls and streetsmart solutions to selecting a good web developer. 

The Usual Suspects

You can spot them a mile away:   great sales, a dream team intent on dizzying you with digital jargon, and a low low price!  When you get into the nitty gritty of actually making the website you want, they weave their web and before you know it you’ve signed a 2 year deal for a software product, web development, and rights to your first born child.

Heaven help you when your company grows and you want to make changes to your site, or just need some basic tools to keep you up to speed in a fast moving digital world.  Need social media buttons to connect your website customers to major social media platforms?  Sure!  But that’ll be XXX per month.  Want to connect your property stock database to social media products that allow customers to search for property by area, postcode, street name, tube stop or more?  Of course – but that’ll be new fields in the database and api development which will cost you XXX?  Want to make sure your site is visible for key customer searches  in Google?  No problem, BUT, we have to reengineer our whole ‘code base’ to cope with the industry standard best practices in development that occurred over 10 years ago!  And you’ll need to pay for it!!!!

Don’t Get Done, Get Dom

There’s probably not a single one of you reading this article that hasn’t seen the havoc cowboy builders wreak.  From horror stories following the 1998 tornadoes, leaving a slew of homeowners with unfinished, not to mention dangerous, building repairs and renovations, to the tawdry tales of deceit regularly filling a prime time slot on Channel 5’s Cowboy Builders series, the property sector is plagued by people promising the world and delivering ….!  The obvious question: How do I avoid being the next mug?

Top Tips for Avoiding ‘Cowboy (Web) Builders’

1.       Beware false profits!

First things first.  Of course your website needs to work hard for you.  But it’s hard to place an ROI figure that’s accurate for the property industry – given the multiple channels you advertise and market in without an accurate portrait of the sources of enquiry to your business.  But how many estate agents take the time to actually investigate which channel their customers found them by?

In addition, high ROI figures are nigh on impossible to promise in the shifting landscape of the online property sector – given that property portal prices have gone up, while referrals to your business stagnate.  Unless you find out where each and every one of your customers come from, you cannot possibly begin to calculate the best channels to market in, the best product to purchase for your digital needs, or the best budget to allocate to digital marketing?

Any developer selling his software or web dev services by utilizing ROI figures needs to be interrogated more intensely than the Spanish Inquisition.  What is he basing his figures on?  What is the calculation used to determine ROI – specifically?  Can you contact any of their customers referenced in ROI case studies to confirm the claims?

2.       One size fits all

So you find a developer and they flash a range of website choices for your project.  You try to ask if you can change this or that, if they can make it look more like the designs you’ve drawn up,  or if you can have x, y or z feature.

“Sure! We have a social media module that does just that”

What you should hear inside your head right now is the sound of tyres screeching to a stop, leaving long black lines of tar behind you.  This way lies danger!  Module coding means many things (very few of them good):

• Almost all of your web developers’ clients will share a single code base.  This means that any changes you request and pay for will be available to your competition.  Any client’s your developer has will be able to access these changes, sometimes for free, other times by paying an upgrade fee.
• Modules are often built in bloated javascript code, which is – in layman’s terms – renowned for creating long, long, long lines of code that slow down Google’s crawl of your website (a crawl: what Google does to read and index the content on your site that visitors can see).  Bottom line?  You decrease load speed of your site, a Google ranking factor, and Google also gives less importance to the IMPORTANT readable content on your site because it’s too busy reading 1000 lines of javascript code.
• Every time you want something that doesn’t exist in a current developer module – you’ll have to pay!  Remember what we said about paying for the rest of the developer’s clients as well!!!

Not all modular coding is bad, and certainly, if you’re on a budget and/or don’t have much choice  – there are ways to work around these issues – but careful digital consultation and a decent development team capable of implementing recommendations is the key to salvaging value!

3.       Getting what you pay for

We’ve all been strapped for cash. But would you jeopardise your business’ future just because you’re hard up?  The recession dictates we’ve all tightened our belts.  So let’s do a little math.

 Thousands upon thousands per month to property portals

+ local print advertisements and papers

= LOTS OF MONEY!  Let’s call this “traditional spend”. 

I am willing to bet that you spend MORE in 3 months on “traditional spend” than you spend on a single website set to represent you in the digital world for years to come.  Can you see where I’m going with this?

Classic blunders in choosing a web developer can often be traced back to being miserly.  Either you choose a bedroom developer, someone who has shown aptitude and is ‘pretty sure’ he can build you what you need, hire an “IT guy” – with or without nepotism involved – or go with a cheap package that promises the world.

Your business pays the piper:  not being able to update your site without development requests,  or connect to new technologies (such as social media platforms and products), or specify ANYTHING really.  Oh yeah:  your site looks pretty bad on mobile devices too!

Solution?  Map out your website aims.  Hire a digital consultant (but beware here too!).  Create a user experience that is perfect for your customer base.  Create wireframes and initial designs for the site you want to see, even if you do it with paper and pen!   Create a ‘brief’ for your web developers to show them  exactly what you want.  Send this brief to multiple developers. Get quotes. Ask for example work. Have these website vetted to make sure they’re technically up to scratch for the modern digital world.  If it sounds like hard work, you’re right!  But it’s the single most important thing you can do to protect your business online and prevent bad (present and future) spend.

PMH (NOT hormone related!)

PMH.  Otherwise known as Project Management Hell.  We’ve all been there.  Your web development firm is spending more time on conference calls, being pedantic with fancy spreadsheets or arguing deadlines with your internal teams than they are coding your website.  You meticulously check your website product, and document your requests for changes, and package it all up to make it easy for you to track and trace project progress.  But STILL, things seem to drag on, and you’ve got more emails than solid code?  This is a typical outcome of property sector specific web development firms.

Your project manager isn’t your friend, he’s your attendant in the 3^rd ring of Dante’s Inferno.  If you find yourself in this position, you can almost guarantee your developer is juggling a range of clients utilizing a ‘single’ code base product and your needs and request for change are in a long queue of updates requested via their customer base.

How can you step out of the ring of fire?  Document once and document well.   Make sure you know what each and every page of your website looks like and will contain.  Check outcomes against this.  Call for real-time accountability by putting all your development requests through easy to document and track online tools such as BaseCamp or Lighthouse.  In fact, go so far as to put the whole project through Odesk.com – where you can even track live screenshots of developers working on your project!  Odesk also allows you to set up a budget and stick to it – it will not allow invoicing over and above the budget and time you have set for a project.

The golden rule: your developer is working FOR YOU – not vice versa.

We invite all of our readers to submit their tales of Cowboy (Web) Builder woe totracy@streetsmartsocial.co.uk for a chance to win a free consultation.  In addition, we’ll select individual entries to highlight and help solve in upcoming articles.