We get this question a lot:
“Where should I spend my dollars for advertising and marketing”? It comes in many different forms — questions about the effectiveness of online advertising, print and other forms.
If you’ve read my previous post about cloud software, then you probably realize the cloud has another hidden benefit. And that is that we can collect aggregate data to share back with all of you to solidly answer questions like these (instead of guessing).
We had our data team pull some interesting metrics from the quoting activity along the east coast that you might be interested in. These are aggregate metrics from a sample size of about $8M of sold jobs, spread throughout multiple states across about 50 dealers for the past few weeks.
We looked at traffic sources (where leads originate from in the showroom). By far the lowest traffic comes in on print forms of media. This is consistent with the rest of the country as well. This includes:
- Ad: Paper/Magazine
- Ad: Radio
- Ad: Internet
- Ad: Sign (performs slightly better than other printed forms)
- Ad: TV
- Ad: Other
Less than 6% of the sales revenue came in from these sources. They are the worst performing ways to advertise for dealers. They are also the most expensive.
Referral sources (salesperson referrals, manufacturer referrals, etc.) account for over 60% of the lead generation. Nothing better than a customer sending in their friends, right?
Home shows accounted for a dismal 2% of leads this month so far. Maybe that’s because the majority of people there aren’t buying kitchens but rather looking at homes? Not sure, but you can ponder that one.
Walk in traffic in general accounted for around 25% of leads. This could be because the salesperson didn’t ask how the prospect found them, or they could just be walk ins in general.
By far, the highest conversion rates still remain in the referral category. So any marketing dollars you do want to spend should, in some way, include your current customers.
And finally, many dealers are starting to use social media (LinkedIn, twitter, facebook, etc.) to generate leads. It might sound funny, but consumers are more plugged in than most people think. In fact, we are seeing a growing portion of referrals coming in through social media (maybe they are seeing pictures of beautiful kitchens on people’s facebook pages?).
I hope this helps.
