Create a Marketing System for Any Budget
Make the Best Use of Your Marketing Dollars to Create a Major Impact
By Kori Covrigaru
As the end of the year is coming to a close, your budget may be running low, or the looming recession might have your CFO reducing budgets for 2023. Now, you must decide how to get the most from every marketing dollar.
When working with a reduced budget, utilize this four-pronged approach to marketing: Analyze, Streamline, Automate, and Delegate.
Analyze Your Current Marketing
What brings returns on investment (ROI)?
Once you understand which marketing activities bring in leads, conversions, and sales, you will know what to prioritize.
To begin, set up goals in your analytics platform. Utilize tools such as Google Analytics or Hubspot to track which activities influence leads and conversions. The key to proper tracking is setting up a conversion page.
In GA4, you can set up event conversions in the Configure tab. Toggle the event as a “conversion” to track those actions.
Every marketing activity you test should be tracked for effectiveness. For example, PlanOmatic conducted a study in North Carolina to track the effectiveness of 3D tours for reducing days on market in SFRs. It found that adding a virtual tour to a listing decreased days on market in Charlotte by 8.1 days.
Assuming it costs $100/day to hold a vacant SFR, adding a 3D virtual walkthrough saved $810/listing in this particular market. That is a substantial return on investment.
What activities bring the most exposure?
While ROI is important, exposure matters, as well. Which activities bring your business the most impressions and brand awareness? Analyze your listings.
PlanOmatic found that listings with these features get more impressions and conversions:
• Professional Photography
• Virtual Tours
• Floor Plans
In short, review those listings! Which ones get the most exposure? What do they have in common? In that analysis, you will find the magic formula for reducing your days on the market and increasing your ROI.
Streamline Your Marketing Processes
After reviewing your marketing activities, you will understand which ones are worth keeping for 2023. Now it is time to streamline.
First, test & choose a project management platform to organize all marketing activities. To be an asset, you will want the platform to:
• Automate recurring processes
• Assign tasks internally and externally
• Share resources
Second, review your marketing activities from a birds-eye view. How can you streamline them? Look at each task individually and study the SOP.
For example, PlanOmatic uses one appointment to get assets for photography, virtual tours, and floor plans. So, in just one appointment, they can get three major components of your listings done at once.
Automate Marketing Tasks
Review this checklist to help identify where you could be automating your marketing tasks:
• Are you automating email nurturing?
• Are you manually adding social media posts to each platform?
• Are there APIs that could automate marketing processes?
• Are you manually assigning tasks to your team?
• Are you using syndication services for listings?
• Are there any manual steps in your lead-to-renter process?
How many processes are you currently conducting with manual steps? If you have identified at least one process with manual steps, look closely. Can you automate them?
Before working with PlanOmatic, many marketing departments manually downloaded photography assets, uploaded them to their listing syndication site, and published them. With PlanOmatic, a simple API integration automates most of this task, saving many hours each month.
Delegate Through Outsourcing
Finally, it is time to review what tasks can be outsourced. With lower spending, maybe you do not usually consider outsourcing, but it is the right direction if potential subcontractors:
• Have tools you cannot access.
• Have a skill that your team does not.
• Can do the task faster than your team.
If you are unsure what to outsource, try the Eisenhower Matrix.
Look at the list of activities you created when analyzing your current marketing. Add the marketing activities that provide the biggest impact on the Eisenhower Matrix. Anything added to the Urgent/Not Important column should be delegated. This quadrant is a great place to start when deciding what to outsource.
Many marketers will face tight budgets for 2023, but that does not make it impossible to run successful marketing campaigns! Utilizing this four-pronged approach, you can determine the best use for your marketing dollars and create a major impact.
