It’s time to tighten your belt. Going into the end of the year, your budget might run low, or the looming recession might have your CFO reducing budgets for 2023. Now you must decide how to use that precious budget to get the most from every dollar.
When working with a reduced budget, it’s important to take this four-pronged approach to your marketing: Analyze, Streamline, Automate, and Delegate.
Analyze Your Current Marketing
In a downturn, marketing is still crucial to success, but it’s a good time to reassess your marketing strategy. When analyzing your current marketing activities, ask yourself these questions:
What is bringing a return on investment (ROI)?
When you understand which marketing activities bring in leads, conversions, and sales, you’ll know what to prioritize and cut. How do you figure out what activities are bringing a return?
First, set up goals in your analytics platform. Whether you use Google Analytics (GA), Hubspot, or another tool, there is an option to set up goals, so you can easily track which activities are tied to leads and conversions. The key to proper tracking is setting up a conversion page. Once a form or a shopping cart has been processed, send the person to a thank you page that triggers your goal conversion.
In GA4, you can set up event conversions in the Configure tab. Toggle the event as a “conversion,” and you can now track which actions are leading to conversions.
Every marketing activity you test should be tracked to analyze its effectiveness later.
If renters can apply for single-family rentals (SFRs) on your website, set up an event to track the funnel for those who applied to rent. Tracking the funnel will show you how the renter found you first, what pages they went to while deciding if they should apply, and when they convert and submit an application.
PlanOmatic recently conducted a study in North Carolina to see how effective 3D walking tours were for reducing days on the market for SFRs. The study found that adding a virtual walking tour to a listing decreased the days on the market in the Charlotte market by 8.1 days.
If we assume it costs $100 per day to hold a vacant SFR, adding a 3D virtual walkthrough saved this market $810 per listing. That is a big return on investment!
Look at activities like listing features (virtual walking tours, professional photography, floor plans), and determine: is this bringing me a return?
What activities bring us the most exposure?
While ROI is important (it keeps the business afloat), exposure matters, too. What activities are getting your business the most impressions and favorable brand awareness? For example, you might have a podcast that isn’t bringing in leads, but it is getting plenty of downloads and building relationships with important people in your industry through interviews. It’s worth keeping.
Review your real estate listing sites and analyze the listings. Which listings get the most views? At PlanOmatic, we’ve found that listings with these features get more impressions and conversions:
- Professional Photography
- Virtual Tours
- Floor Plans
Don’t take it from us, though. Review your listings. Which ones get the most exposure? What do they have in common? You’ll find the magic formula for reducing your days on the market and increasing your ROI by analyzing your listings.
Streamline Your Marketing Processes
After you’ve reviewed your marketing activities, you’ll better understand which ones are worth keeping for 2023. Now it’s time to streamline them so they are easier to manage.
First, choose a project management platform to track and organize all marketing activities. Test out platforms like Trello, Clickup, Teamwork, Asana, or Monday to streamline your project management.
To be an asset to your marketing department, you will want the project management tool to do a few things:
- Automate recurring processes. For example, if you regularly post rental listings, you have a standard operating procedure (SOP) for that task. Add it to your project management tool and set it up as a template so it automatically sets due dates, assigns tasks, and categorizes itself.
- Assign tasks to internal and external resources. When you have internal marketing department personnel and outsourced support, you want a single source of truth, which should be your project management tool. So when choosing a tool, ensure you can communicate with internal and external people.
- Resource sharing. When collaborating, resources are always a source of contention. Not everyone has access to the drive for this resource, or that resource is only available to internal people. With the right tool, you can keep copies of all related resources within that project, so everyone can access them.
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 that activity. Are there areas that can be automated or systematized?
For example, PlanOmatic uses one appointment to get the assets they need for photography, virtual walking tours, and floor plans. So in just one appointment, they can get three major components of your listings done at once.
Another way PlanOmatic clients are streamlining their marketing is through repurposing. They are taking the professional photography used for SFR listings and repurposing it into social media graphics, Reels, and even office decor.
Automate Marketing Tasks
Now that you have reviewed your current marketing activities, prioritized the tasks, and streamlined your processes, you have a good idea of what can (or should) be automated.
We’ve already discussed how you can automate through a project management tool, but many marketing activities automate manual processes.
Here is a checklist for you to identify where you could be automating your marketing.
- 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 those steps?
For example, 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 will automate most of this task, saving you hours every month.
Delegate through Outsourcing
Finally, it’s time to review what can be outsourced. When tightening your belt, you don’t usually think about outsourcing, but it’s the right direction if:
- The outsourced party has tools you don’t have access to.
- They have a skill that your team does not.
- They can do the task faster than your team.
Determining if outsourcing is the right step comes down to simple math. How much time would it take to do the task internally? Do you need to pay for additional tools or resources? If yes, how much will it cost? Add up the time value and cost of resources. How does it compare to the cost of outsourcing? Now, look at the time value again. What could your team have accomplished in the time it would take to figure out how to do the task you could outsource? What would be more valuable?
If you are unsure what to outsource, try the Eisenhower Matrix.
Look at the list of activities you created when analyzing your marketing in section one. 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.
Budget Your Marketing Department in 2023
Many marketing departments are facing tight budgets for 2023, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make that work for you. Through this four-pronged approach, you can determine the best use for your marketing dollars and still see a big impact from your marketing.