How much should you be investing in your marketing? I have agent partners that spend anywhere from $1,000 per month to over $20,000 per month.
How much you spend depends on a lot of factors including how much capital you have available to allocate and your sales process skill level to monetize from your marketing expenses.
For certain, the most difficult marketing decisions are in the early growth years of your business. Once established and capitalized, it is extremely difficult to out-expense your revenues. For over a decade I have been helping agents build highly successful businesses while getting through the challenges of allocating capital towards marketing. To help my agent partners in that endeavor, I developed a four-stage marketing budget process for growing a business.
Here are the four stages of marketing budgets:
A budget that you are committed to that consistently increases to Stage 2. The key to this stage is to spend enough to create momentum and never retreating. An on-again-off-again marketing budget is a guaranteed way to stagnate your business. You must create a high frequency of opportunities to succeed or fail while intentionally focusing on improving your sales process.
A calendar budget where you spend as much as required to fill your calendar with new appointments to the extent you want your calendar filled. In this stage, you will most likely need a minimum of two marketing systems working simultaneously to create a sustainable and consistent lead flow.
A budget that supplies 20% to 30% more leads than you can fill your calendar with. At this point you most likely have three to four marketing systems going and you start being more selective on which prospects you want to work with to maximize the return on your time.
A budget that supplies more opportunity than you have time to process so you can guarantee a sustainable business that never has blank spots in your calendar, unless intentional. This stage allows you to be selective on which prospects you want to work with and allows you to support an agency with sub-agents. The sheer volume of marketing exposure at this stage creates a neon sign above your business that makes prospect conversion much easier than in the previous stages.
Reprinted with permission from the 2021 online edition of ThinkAdvisor © 2021 ALM Media Properties, LLC. All rights reserved. Further duplication without permission is prohibited. For information, contact 877-256-2472 or reprints@alm.com.
Written by anthony-owen
