Over the last few years there has been a proliferation of new platforms that will enable you to connect with prospects and hopefully convert them into paying customers and this presents a significant challenge. Not only does it seem like you need to be everywhere at the same time, you also need to understand how and if your marketing spend is actually generating any new customers.
When it was just Facebook and Twitter it was hard enough but now we have content creation and distribution platforms, specialist mobile apps, picture and video sharing platforms, messaging platforms and many more. At times the list seems almost endless and each one is vying for our limited time and resources.
Getting set up on all of these disparate platforms can be tricky but once you have taken the time to create your marketing campaigns and allocate some budget this isn’t the end, it’s just the start.
What many businesses forget is the mechanism by which prospective customers might respond to your marketing efforts. And in the property industry, a large proportion of enquiries arrive via the humble telephone call. There are lots of industry stats available showing that an inbound call has higher intent, a higher propensity to convert into business and a higher value per sale than many other online response mechanisms. However many companies overlook phone calls.
So the questions to ask yourself before you activate any marketing campaigns are do you understand how people are calling your business? Where are they calling from? When do they call? Why do they call? This kind of information can help you allocate your marketing budgets across all of the different platforms much more efficiently but also gives you insight into how you should distribute internal resources to maximise the value of every inbound enquiry.
Some recent analysis by Iovox - the call tracking provider used by some property industry heavyweights like Zoopla and OnTheMarket - has shown that in the property industry, over 10% of people make phone enquiries on a Saturday. However, many businesses are closed on the weekends which means they could be missing out on potential new business. The same analysis has shown that over 10% of calls are made between 5pm and 8pm whereas only 2% between 8am and 9pm. Of course this won’t apply to every single business but these kinds of trends give us insight into how the modern consumer behaves. They are typically very busy during the day and often take time after work or on the weekend to make calls to businesses.
So when you are planning your marketing budgets you need to think about not only measuring the outcomes but also how you are actually set up to deal with any enquiries that are going to be generated otherwise you might end up spending lot of money with no idea whether it was worthwhile.
