How attribution makes your marketing dollars count

No single message is wholly responsible for generating a lead

Marketing is an art form that uses language and visuals to tap into someone’s emotions, and each message has to be interesting enough to cut through the noise of your competitors’ posts.

Too many sales professionals discount the value of warming up a lead ahead of taking a sales call, using marketing. Marketing is not sales, and it does not close the deal – instead it’s a combination of constant and consistent messaging that reinforces who you are and what you have to offer.

The way we track the success of the entire gamut of marketing activities is through attribution. Today’s video explains what attribution is and how it works.

Click below to watch the video.

Following is the video transcript.

Today I want to introduce you to the concept of attribution and how you can make your marketing dollars really count. The world of marketing analytics has made great leaps forward. You can now join the dots between each tool channel and device both online and offline to work out which ads and marketing messages lead real estate agents to your door.

What is marketing attribution?

Attribution in real estate marketing terms is the act of associating a result such as a property purchase, or the fact that you secured a new listing to the marketing activities you use to promote the home, or yourself as a real estate agent.

Today, home buyers and sellers have a variety of devices and channels through which to see a real estate agent, or agency’s marketing communications. Hopefully, most of us understand that the person who ultimately buys a property or signs you up as their real estate agent will not have come to this decision off the back of one single ad, or social post. No, they would have seen many different messages reinforcing the fact that this is a great home or that you are the best person for the job.

Marketing touchpoints – how do they work?

So, which marketing touchpoint tipped them over the line?

The Many ads marketing messages and channels through which you promote a property or yourself are called touchpoints. Historically, the last place that somebody engaged with you about the property or your services is the place that gets attributed as the winning method for getting you the results you wanted.

However, the truth is that all the many marketing activities that you use actually contributed to the final result.

Tracking your marketing results

Marketing analytics has reached a new frontier. Both Google and Facebook want us to gain a deeper understanding of our customers. Google has been helping us with attribution for some time. Google Analytics, in fact, is free and gives you a way to analyse your data for your real estate business in one place.

Facebook has now followed suit, recently launching its own Facebook analytics tool to help track marketing activities associated not only with Facebook advertising, but to also monitor activity on your website in a similar way to how Google Analytics works. So you can now have both analytics tools, monitoring your website traffic for you, for free.

The fact is, if you nail marketing attribution, you’ll have a clearer picture of which marketing activities contribute to helping you generate leads. Once you’re monitoring your marketing data, you can start to attribute each individual marketing activity to the end result.

Seeing people in person versus online traffic

Traditionally, in real estate, we’ve not been particularly good at doing this. Often I hear agents and principals say they’re confused by what the stats from the property portals or social media or their online ads mean, and they really only take comfort in seeing people walk through their door of their office or appear at an open home or better still take a contract for sale and hand them over money.

Seeing people in the flesh makes sense in terms of knowing a real estate marketing campaign has been successful. But which marketing element or elements combined resulted in that person walking through the door, that’s more important.

About this video series

Hopefully you found this video informative and learnt a little more about how marketing works. If you would like help from a team of digital professionals, including content creators and social media marketers, and paid advertising specialists, get in touch for a free 1-hour consultation.

Written by Melanie Hoole

My team and I specialise in helping real estate and property professionals perfect their personal brand, build a first-class digital profile and implement inbound marketing activities to attract leads. If you are unsure which direction to take with your digital marketing contact me for help.