A KPI (Key Performance Indicator) is simply a goal with a measurable metric attached to it. Turn your goals into results with KPIs!

How do you measure success?

For many new home builders, the answer lies in the number of homes sold or built in a given period. But there are factors that contribute heavily to that bottom line. The conversion rate of leads to sales and of inquiries to leads are two examples. But let’s go back even farther.

Where do those leads come from?

Are you tracking the leads from your website, third-party websites (e.g., Zillow, Realtor.com), and signage? How many leads are coming from referrals? What activity does your Facebook page generate? If you don’t know these key metrics, you can’t manage their growth, which means you can’t effectively impact your sales. Key performance indicators (KPIs) are measurement tools that every business owner or manager should use for daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly analyses. 

A KPI can be the number of form submissions you receive from your website in a given period, unique site visitors, social media followers, blog comments, retweets, shares, referrals, customer reviews—to name a few. Your website tracker provides valuable insight into the activity. You should be looking at the report to see who is visiting, how often, how long they stay, and which pages they look at the most and the least. You might discover that someone has repeatedly visited your site, but not submitted an inquiry form. Why is that? Knowing the reason is important to sharpen your website and make it more engaging. Find the gaps. Close the gaps.

Measuring Engagement

Are your social media posts and blogs being read? Is anyone commenting? If not, you’re having a monologue, not a conversation, which is contrary to the point of “social” media. When you send out an email, is it being opened? What’s the open rate? Do your recipients follow your call to action and click through to your site? If you’re not getting the activity you anticipate, look at the message and the list. The quality of your conversion rate is a direct reflection of the quality of your leads. If you’re not generating quality leads, you can’t boost your sales. 

So, a KPI is essential to measure the success of every component of your lead generation efforts. This is the yardstick by which you gauge the success.

Set Your Marks

You should set expectations before engaging in a marketing activity. Who are you targeting? What do you want the potential lead to do? It’s not enough to plan and implement your lead generation and marketing strategy. KPIs provide you with quantifiable data on the performance of your actions - actual numbers you are reaching, not just goals. Without these metrics, you’re working on a “Pass or Fail” scenario—with no way to determine whether a campaign barely succeeded or barely failed. Wouldn’t you rather know specifically where your results fall on the success spectrum? By setting 3-5 top KPIs, you can easily determine if a campaign is working. With a focus, you have specific metrics to view each month, rather than a full view of numbers that may be hard to decipher. Remember, your homebuyers conduct the vast majority of their research online. 

You don’t have multiple opportunities to gain their interest. When you don’t continually watch, measure, and adjust your lead generation tools, they lose their edge. Those prospects go elsewhere. In construction, you know the importance of “measure twice, cut once”. When you take care to check your lead generation process and accuracy, you reap the rewards on the other end. If you want more sales, whip out your KPIs and measure. 

Builder Designs specializes in understanding how to build and maintain a successful lead generation system. Talk to us to see how we can fine-tune your digital marketing.