Is your marketing washing it’s face ?

Can you imagine a landlord buying a property for investment purposes and not checking if it’s going to wash its face; in other words cover its monthly costs.

That would be risky wouldn’t it ?

A shrewd landlord is going to look at a number of factors from rental yields, growth appreciation, maintenance costs, local amenities, tenant profiles, and then make a decision to buy or pass.

Let’s face it, nobody likes making a loss.

Tell me..

Is your advertising /marketing working?

If yes, a round of applause, but could it be improved?

Honest answer please.

Here’s the naked truth – many agents’ marketing efforts can  be summed up by the following quote by John Wanamaker, the 19th century retail entrepreneur referred to as the father of modern advertising. He was quoted as saying; “I know half my advertising doesn’t work. The problem is, I don’t know which half.”

Now back in the 1800’s there was no fancy smart tracking technology, so when John Wanamaker  made that world famous advertising quote, he was on the money.

Top agents like you know that you can’t improve what you don’t measure, but with the plethora of tools you have at your disposal today, that quote should belong in a museum. But funnily enough it’s  still very  relevant today as critical metrics still get  ignored (but why?).

A tool that is readily available and totally free for measuring data in terms of online stats is Google Analytics. If you are not currently using it, speak to your web design team and get them to install it for you.

The beauty of Analytic’s is the rich Intel it gives you if you understand all the metrics. Let me illustrate   this in a couple of screen grabs from www.postcodemanifesto.com:

The first slice of data I’m reviewing here is the number of page views; the total was 799. Then how many of those were unique views; 434 (first time visitors), the average time spent on the page was 2.07 minutes.

What you don’t see is the data further down which tells me what pages on the Postcode Manifesto site has had the most views broken down by percentages. From there, I view exit page data which is the last  page a browser visited, and start interpreting data .

For example what post had the most views? I would track any links in the post, etc. If you’re a data driven person, your can have a deep data expedition with Google Analytics.

In this screen grab we’re looking at the customer flow or journey. It maps out  how the visitor came to the site, e.g. was it via social media, organic SEO, or paid traffic, e.g. Google Ad-words, a portal or any other referral site?

Then it highlights touch points in terms of 1st interaction, second interaction, also where they dropped off or left the site, this would allow you to change content or make it more engaging. When reviewing analytical data there are a number of permutations to be considered.

Decisions   Decisions    Decisions

Getting the best out of any data mining tool is like knowing the difference between an interpreter and a  translator.

I can her hear you thinking, is there a difference?

Oh yes, is my emphatic answer. Let me elaborate: interpreting and translation are two closely related linguistic disciplines, yet they are rarely performed by the same people.

The difference in skills, training, aptitude and even language knowledge are so substantial that few people can do both successfully on a professional level.

Let me drill that down to one statement: In essence most people can interpret the data, but only someone with a marketing bias can translate that into hard currency.

Google Analytics has lots of bells and whistles; in fact I think there are around 40 menu buttons that can lead to 101 critical thinking observations.

These can help you make better choices regarding design of website, content creation, website interaction, client acquisitions, conversions, and much more besides.

When was the last time you reviewed your marketing data?

Having difficulty interpreting forecasting or translating ?

We can help change the dynamics so  you’re  marketing  is washing it’s face  …

Alex Evans

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