ONE LESSON

I was at a real estate event several years ago and was introduced to an agent who was new to the industry. After a few minutes getting to know each other, I asked them about how their business was doing so far. They told me how stressful and frustrating things had been so far, and I could tell my the tone of their voice and the look on their face that they had begun second-guessing their decision to become an agent. Wanting to help, I asked them what they were doing to get clients. They mentioned the same things most new agents do: using social media and asking family and friends to help. Then they surprised me by mentioning their brokerage had made a deal with a marketing company and was offering agents the opportunity to buy advertising space on bus benches and billboards at a discount, and they just decided to take the brokerage up on the offer. They told me what it cost them (let’s just say it wasn’t cheap) and how it was pretty much their whole marketing budget, but they felt confident it would help. About six months later, I ran into an agent I knew who worked at the same brokerage as the agent I was speaking with at the event. I asked how the agent was doing and was told they had left the industry a month or so earlier, after not having any business or making any money.

LESSON LEARNED: Always spend your marketing dollars on what you can track is working or not.

When I was running my brokerage, my partner and I sat down with an advertising company to talk about buying billboard/signage around the office to get our name out more. We met with two salespeople who walked us through everything, including the different sign sizes, locations, and prices. They then told us about how much “traffic” each sign would get (or how many people they estimated would see it each week). After they finished their pitch, I asked them to show me the stats on how many sales their clients were getting from each sign. They looked at each other and told us they were not sure since they couldn’t know exactly if the sale came from the sign or not.

Famed advertiser David Ogilvy (one of the people the show Mad Men was based on) talked about how much he hated billboards because you have no idea if the money being spent generated a sale, since there is no way to track it. If David, who Warren Buffett called a genius, was opposed to billboards, no real estate agent should ever spend money on them. If you cannot track the analytics on the marketing you do, how can you know if it is working?

Instead, focus on things you can track, like emails, postcards, and calls/texts. This way, you can also make adjustments in real time and test to see what works best and double down on it.

If you want to know the best place to market, it’s your database (or sphere). If I were starting over, I would spend every single dollar I had on my database because it is proven to be the best place to generate business from.