Media-Leads Cost-Effectiveness Analysis (Beazer Homes)

Situation

Most businesses in the United States and around the world reach out to potential customers through a variety of marketing and sales techniques. They continue doing what they think works, and discontinue doing what they think doesn’t work. Beazer Homes, the 6th largest homebuilder in the United States (according to Builder Magazine), wanted to do more than guess at what works and what doesn’t. The homebuilder approached MLC New Home Marketing (MLC) to develop a system that would measure the effectiveness of every marketing move the company makes.

Services Provided

In order to assign a cost value to each lead, MLC first helped Beazer to quantify the cost of its marketing and sales activities, the revenue generated by its marketing campaigns, and revenue generated from branding activities.

Specifically, the firm helped Beazer (1) quantify the increase in qualified traffic to its website AND sales centers following targeted and focused advertising and marketing campaigns, (2) identify the point of diminishing returns on a campaign as related to the quality of leads and the effective use of employees time in following up on leads, and (3) assign a value to the marketing goals AND branding goals so that the effectiveness of individual marketing channels can be analyzed.

MLC then helped Beazer select a vendor and design a system that would crunch all of the variables and assign a return on investment (ROI) figure to each marketing activity. The result of this project was the selection of a proprietary system that categorizes the effectiveness of marketing activities both online and through traditional channels through regular reporting of defined ROI metrics. The system is flexible enough to be able to differentiate not only between different marketing channels, but also between different markets.

Using its new application, Beazer is able to analyze its marketing mix in order to increase the effectiveness of its branding, qualified-lead generation, and sales follow-up for each market.

Outcome

By being able to predict the outcome of particular marketing campaigns and advertising channels, Beazer is now able to accurately calculate where to spend to get the most bang for its marketing buck. The homebuilder is also able to adjust its marketing tactics to changing market conditions in order to best manage the flow of sales traffic.