How Much Money Are You Wasting on Marketing?

So we know that we hold our expenses accountable. It's all about roi. Anytime you spend a dollar, this is another thing. And this could sound a little preachy. Even if you spend like two to three hours a week or one hours a week, or it's that Saturday afternoon that you just get yourself away from the family and you spend time work on your books, that's a lower pay grade than you're worth. So even if you're not going to give those hours back to yourself or your family, you could be working on other things that make you more money. Just prospect for an extra three hours a month and don't do your books. Those are the decisions you have to make in order to climb this ladder. You could do everything and just be in survival mode all the time or just busy all the time. But the more stuff you can get off your plate, create a system around, that's where this thing gets really, really fun, right? So I want to do less. I want to do nothing in my real estate business, but I want it to be a kick ass, healthy business that's growing and has an awesome culture and people want, you know, to work for us and people get a great service on the buy side and sell side. I just don't want to do a lot for that business. So that's what we're building. It's just making those decisions about what you're going to touch and what you're not going to touch. And not everything can come off your plate at once. But it's a process, right? So when it comes to marketing and spending and ROI tracking, you've got to take this deep versus wide approach. It blows people's mind. We had someone in the boardroom who said he had $10,000 extra to spend a month on marketing and he really wanted to spend it. He wanted to go all in on radio, go multiple stations. And like, I really, I really held him to not to not do that. We ended up spending like 2,200 bucks a month with one station, the right station, and we're gonna monetize that one thing before we spend any of the rest of it. And if it takes six months to monetize that spend, that's six months of $7,800 that he can just bank, right? Because the, the tendency is just to start from four things at once, get moderate results, and you don't know what's working or not working because you're kind of not focusing on any of it. So you've got to go deep in your marketing for Me it was buyer Internet, raving fans, direct response and yard marketing in that order. So buyer Internet, no barrier to entry there. It's just a process. You just work the leads and you can get closings. There's nothing complicated about it. Raving fans. I was building up a database, worked on my database. People knew like and trust me, got business from that. Then I came real good direct response marketer, which is why we have 600 appointments this year is because we're really good at getting people to contact us and calls to actions and USP marketing and all that good stuff and then getting signs in the yard and have multiple calls to action with our yard marketing. So that's kind of the progression for me. And you could just go deep versus wide on all of those. You could do 50 closings from each of those. You know, get the 200 sides just by having four marketing pillars. The cash on cash, the way the business tracker does it is the way to do it. A lot of people do it just money in versus money out, which is fine because if you're at 10% marketing, so for every dollar you spend, bring in $10. That's essentially a 10 times return on your marketing overall. You just want to find out which ones are producing less than that and either get rid of them or have them come up to that. And so it's basically just year to date gross margin for that lead gen source or that marketing pillar divided by expense. Every deal must be sourced. This changed everything for us in terms of how we organize our business and our buyer info sheets, seller info sheets, our C2C files. So we have each lead source has a number. Right. So Internet, buyer Internet are 100 series. I had a sync platform for a while when Boomtown sold like a billion platforms. In my market we don't do that. We just do Boomtown and Zillow. We don't do Trilium. We don't have any 105s. There's just two Internet. Buyer Internet, lead sources, yard marketing. I honestly need to do a better job of tracking the different sources of yard marketing. Radio. We just do the two stations. Shark Tank. We stopped. That was not profitable. Expired. This is the direct response marketing stuff I was talking about. Expired Fizbos Circle prospecting. Just sold, just listed. All that stuff would go under 400. So this is the same thing as a bookkeeper. If you're not doing a bookkeeper, you got to do it. And if you don't have this lead source document going, create one of these for your business right away. It's a must. A must, a must, a must. And then in the business tracker, so you just want to make sure that you're tracking even better than I'm tracking these. I haven't done a real good job of keeping the number of leads. These are just kind of estimates. But you want to track these things, right? You want to go deeper, not wide, on your marketing spend. When you spend a dollar, you want to make $10.