How to Convert Leads Into Deals in 2015.
2015 has arrived and a new year brings fresh ideas and new strategies to make sure you stay on top of your game when it comes to marketing and selling property.
With so much available information which is often contradictory, the difficulty for marketers and sales teams is often knowing where to start.
My advice is numbers speak louder than words so back your plan with cold, hard data. And if you’re still getting your strategy together you’re in luck! Analytics experts Implisit have just released an infographic revealing the most effective channels for converting leads into customers.
For instance, Implisit took a look at the average time it takes for a lead to become an opportunity and eventually convert into a deal. They found that “it takes an average of 84 days to convert 13% of leads into opportunities. Then, the decision process is much faster: it takes 18 days to convert an opportunity into a deal.”
This data gathered by Implicit is an average taken across a multitude of businesses and therefore not specific to the real estate industry. However, it does act as a benchmark for how real estate professionals might plan to put online or digital marketing materials out to prospects over the coming year in a way that is likely to achieve the best results according to a general majority. At the end of the day the methods for interacting with prospects is more or less the same across the majority of industries, we all use the same tools, social, video, websites, mobile, email – it’s merely the contents that differ.
One of the points highlighted in the study stood out as particularly interesting to me for the real estate industry and that’s the decline in popularity for events. As an industry that loves a party, be it an open house, trade show or conference, I found the news that events are out quite shocking. Another interesting finding in the same category is that purchased lead lists (as opposed to nurtured lists like those Propertyshowrooms.com offers) were also among the channels which had the lowest lead to conversion rate. Whereas the best performing channel with a total of 3.63% of leads converting to customers was customer and employee referrals, closely followed by leads from Facebook and Twitter. Social and referrals were also among those most likely to result in closed-won deals as opposed to closed-lost deals. Meaning social once again is a big contender for the coming year.
Perhaps one of the most interesting insights I thought the Implisit infographic offers is it highlights what works best in terms of converting prospects at each stage of the sales process. For example webinars are among the most effective methods for converting leads to opportunities, but are among the least effective for converting those opportunities into leads.
Meaning webinars should be used during the earlier stages of the marketing or sales process, but not towards the end.
Here’s a quick FYI on what to use when; website, referrals, webinars, social, marketing, and advertising are the top achievers for converting leads to opportunities (to be used in the early stages). Whereas referrals, social and email campaigns work best to convert opportunities to deals (to be used later in the process).
Take aways:
- Invest heavily in customer and employee referral programs and possibly reduce frequency or spend on events
- Take a closer look at how best to utilize social channels to your business’ advantage
- Structure your marketing cycle to gain attention with social, webinars and advertising but to hook serious prospects with email campaigns and referrals.
So there you have it, I hope these ideas have given you some inspiration for mapping out your marketing/ sales strategies for 2015. Got more questions about which online channels to use to boost real estate deals? Check out Propertyshowrooms.com’s For Agents page or contact us, we’d be more than happy to help in any way we can.
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