Latest / Results Driven / Episode 188: How to Stop Wasting Thousands on Bad Marketing Decisions

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Episode 188: How to Stop Wasting Thousands on Bad Marketing Decisions · Results Driven

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: If we're not tracking these types of numbers, I hope hopefully we can see now we might fix the wrong problem.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Or, like I said, if you sent out a mailpiece to this data set and it didn't work, that doesn't necessarily mean it's the data set or that this channel doesn't work.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: It might mean, oh, I tested this mailpiece and it just doesn't resonate with this specific type of avatar on this list.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: Are you a driven real estate investor tired of inconsistent deal flow and ready to scale your business?
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Tiffany High.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm Josh High.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: And this is the Results Driven Podcast, where we share proven strategies to build systems, master sales, grow your team, and create a self-sustaining business with predictable income.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: Whether you're a one-person operation or building a team, our mission is to give you the tools, support, and mindset shifts you need to succeed.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: Let's dive in.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of my students lately have been asking me, is it sales or is it marketing on why their deal flow has been inconsistent?
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: So what I decided to do was build a marketing KPI guide to understand the fundamental KPIs that should be tracked in marketing.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: That way we can understand from left to right how to optimize our marketing and make more effective decisions.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: Because if we're not tracking marketing and acquisitions every single day and our deal flow falls off for a few weeks, how are we gonna know what to fix next?
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so I'm gonna dive into that guide today a little bit.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: And if this is something that you wake up and you're like, I'm not tracking my KPIs, I don't track these, I don't make decisions on these.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: I highly recommend you jump into our group coaching program to start.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: It is less than the cost of dinner tonight per month.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: And we go over everything from marketing optimization, acquisition KPIs, onboardings, trainings, you name it.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: We cover it in that community.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: All right, so I made this little playbook for my students, and I just want to cover a few things in it.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: What are some of the basics that we should be tracking in marketing before we get too advanced?
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: One is how much did we spend, right?
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: How many leads did that spend produce?
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: How many of those leads were qualified?
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: And by qualified, that means they want to sell their house.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: So, for example, if you send out direct mail, more than likely, you'll also get calls that say, remove me from the list, take me out, you know, I don't want to be mailed.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: Now that's not a qualified lead.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: But if they say yes, I want to sell, even though you make an offer, you don't get the deal, they're still qualified because they want to sell their house.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: We call this processes.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now, some people qualifications, it's where we go through the entire discovery, property condition, et cetera.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Then we either make an offer or we don't.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: We either get a contract, a closing, and then actual profits.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: And your scorecard should be broken up as a company as a whole when it comes to marketing.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: And then you should also break it down by every single marketing channel.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you don't do that, you'll really never know how to optimize what's working and what's not.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so, for example, let's say I have two marketing channels right now, both are producing a profit.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: So that's not the problem, but one's producing a 7X and maybe one's producing a two to three X.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: I might see that and cut off or cut down on the two to three X channel, take that money, move it over to the 7X and verify if I still get a 7X if I spend more money.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so your KPI dashboard should be tracking these basics by marketing channel.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: So marketing spend, right?
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: How much should I spend on it?
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: And then you drive leads.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: So you'll take that spend divided by leads will give you your cost per lead.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: And you should have a benchmark per marketing channel.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: So by the way, all marketing channels have different industry benchmarks and by the market.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: So for example, let's say you're getting a$35 to$50 cost per lead for cold calling.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: That is not to be compared to a two to three hundred dollar lead in PPC because one's hotter than the other, right?
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: One takes one of like 55 leads to get a deal, and one takes 12 to 18 leads to get a deal.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: So you cannot compare like versus like in terms of leads to deal.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: So on our dashboard, we want to create a red, yellow, green in terms of is this above or below what I'm thinking of for that specific marketing channel.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, your cost per lead.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: Then you have your what you call qualified lead percentage.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: So you take qualified leads divided by all leads times 100, and that'll tell you your percentage of if leads are qualified.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: Now, you want to set a benchmark for that as well.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: Now, for example, if you do direct mail, it is common.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: People are gonna call and say, take me off the list.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: So it's never gonna be probably 100%.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: If it's PPC, for example, you might have spam leads or someone who opted in who's like listed or maybe selling land, something you don't do, or whatever.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: And then from they want to sell to I actually process them from I qualified, process them to offer, offer to contract, contracts.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: Then we look at, okay, we spent this total amount of money.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: I got four contracts, right?
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: Let's say I spent 12,000.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: I got four contracts.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: My cost per contract is three thousand dollars, right?
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: If it's too high, you can break it down for cost per lead.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: Is it in the qualified lead percentage?
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: Are we processing them?
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: Each one of those KPIs, left to right, is gonna tell you where the gap is if it's off the benchmark so that we don't fix the wrong problem.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: So, for example, maybe it's like, don't think that direct mail just doesn't work if you're doing direct mail.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: It might have been the list you were mailing, or it might have been some new piece you were testing that just didn't resonate with the messaging.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: So a lot of times investors freak out when something doesn't perform.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: One, they're not even tracking the right metrics.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: And if they don't get deals or something, they make all the wrong decisions because they don't look at the data to say what is it exactly that I need to optimize or adjust.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: Then we look at average profit per deal, our gross profit, and then our ROWAS, which is return on ad spend.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: So our return on investment.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: So that'll say like if we spend 60,000 divided by 12,000 per deal that we made on average, then we made a 5x.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: So things that we want to potentially also track our contract to close rate.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: So if we lock up 10 contracts and we close six, that's a 60% close rate.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: If we close eight, that's an 80% close rate.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: I'll give you an example.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: We recently launched a new marketing channel.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: It was directly to the auction list.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: And we realized actually just recently with our new process that our fallout per contract is higher than any other channel.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: But our deal size is much bigger and they're much more urgent.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: And the the list itself is not that big in general in our county.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so we have made the decision because it's still very profitable, that we are going to continue forward.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: Why is the contract rate so high, fallout rate?
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: Because we're getting in front of these people like three days before they get auctioned.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a lot of variables that are out of our control that it could fall out apart.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: So if they get auctioned, we can still redeem them in the state of Ohio.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: But let's just say that the bank doesn't cooperate with us, they don't give us our paperwork and time, and then the transfer of deed is already transferred by the county, and then we can't close it.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's things like that in that specific marketing channel that we're doing, that we are going to see an increased fallout rate that's completely out of our control.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: So from there, we have to say, okay, is the time, energy, effort, people and spend making sense to the profit to deal that we're making?
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: Cost for closing.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: We have a whole different direct mail tracker.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm not going to get into that.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: If you guys do direct mail, we have a big tracker that tracks everything you can imagine for direct mail.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: And then some of the things that can impact this is speed delete.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: Like a lot of times we don't know, is it a marketing problem or a sales problem?
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: Now, when you're tracking your acquisition KPIs religiously, you can then verify your marketing left to right and your acquisitions left to right and see where is something falling off guard.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I know one, where to go spend my priority time looking at why it's off.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: And then verify, is it really the data, the leads, the channel?
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: Or is my closer, whoever's on the phones, skipping parts of the acquisition process?
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: And it's really not because of marketing that it's not performing.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: And so we want to make sure from left to right, it's like, how much do we spend?
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: Our cost per lead, how many leads are we getting?
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: Is it aligning with what we expected with the spend?
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: Are they actually qualified and want to sell?
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: Do we actually qualify them or process them, give them an offer and get deals?
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: So, anyways, I wanted to walk through this because ultimately, if we're not tracking these types of numbers, I hope hopefully we can see now we might fix the wrong problem.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: Or, like I said, if you sent out a mailpiece to this data set and it didn't work, that doesn't necessarily mean it's the data set or that this channel doesn't work.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: It might mean, oh, I tested this mailpiece and it just doesn't resonate with this specific type of avatar on this list, right?
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: So if let's just say, for example, you're mailing some type of absentee list, like sending some urgent scarcity type of mailer, they might just throw out.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: But if they're getting auctioned or in foreclosure and they know that they might lose their house soon, it might work for that list versus the other one.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: So we have that's why we always say test and measure, right?
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, guys, that's a benefit of being in our community, our coaching community.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: Me and Josh spend thousands of dollars a month testing these things first.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: And we've also lost thousands of dollars testing things for our community because we want to make sure, hey, we can at least do our due diligence, test a new channel, a new company, a new mailer, et cetera, before you guys, so that I can tell you, hey, here's what we got.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: I would do it or not do it.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: So, for example, right now we're testing all different companies' AI calling agents, and we've had some that just literally suck and don't work, and some that are crushing it.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so we're getting ready to show our community.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, I blew over$10,000 just on one company that didn't work out because I had to pay their onboarding, their monthly cost, et cetera.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: Once I typically find something that works, I then take that to a couple of our one-on-one students and I let them test it.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then we make sure, hey, I got results, but let's make sure someone else gets results and then we bring it into the community.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: So if that is of interest, I highly recommend you jump into our growth track community.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's$197 a month for the first hundred members.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's inching up in price after that.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: But guys, let's just cut out one night at the bar and really hone in to dialing in and optimizing our companies.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: See you on the next one.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: If this hits home and you know you need to go deeper, I want you to download the free resource that I recently just built.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's at www.rdebook.com.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: Again, that's www.rdebook.com.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's called 26 Mistakes I Made as a Real Estate Investor.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: You'll get the playbooks, the stories, and the breakdown so that you can shortcut all the mistakes I made while building this multiple seven-figure real estate business and start doing deals way smarter than I ever did sooner and faster.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: And hey, if you got value today, it would mean a lot to me.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: It actually would mean the world to me.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: If you left a five-star review on Apple or Spotify and left me a review and share with a friend who you think is stuck doing it all themselves right now.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: Because one shift in strategy could be worth six figures or more.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: Talk soon and see you on the next episode.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: This episode has come to an end, but your journey continues.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: Subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: If you want direct help from us, join our free community by visiting the results driven podcast.com.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's the results driven podcast dot com.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: We'll see you next time on the results driven podcast.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: We'll see you next time on the results driven podcast.