There’s a classic quote by management thinker W. Edwards Deming that states, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” And while there’s a lot more nuance to the idea when it comes to management, when it comes to marketing, it’s right on the money.

Real estate professionals have a ton of options at their disposal when it comes to marketing these days: Direct mail. Networking. Social media. Websites. Seminars. Email newsletters. Open houses. Referral sites. And on and on and on. But your time – and your budget – is far from infinite. So how do you choose where to spend your time and your real estate marketing dollars to get the best ROI?

There’s only one way to find out. You have to try things, and you have to measure your results.

You probably already have your favorite marketing strategies. Maybe you swear by advertising on bus stop benches, or by direct mail postcards, or by cold-calling everyone in the phone book. And the truth is that different markets respond to different things, so all of those strategies may have their place (ok… probably not that last one). But until you get some data to look at, it’s hard to know how effectively you’re using your time and money.

You need at least three pieces of information in order to start looking at the effectiveness of a marketing strategy: how many impressions you made, how much money you spent, and how many responses you got. For example, if you sent out a direct mail postcard campaign to 1000 houses at a cost of $580 (including postage), and you got 20 responses, your response rate is 2% and your cost per response is $29. Ideally, you’ll also have a sense of what percentage of your responses convert to clients, and what your average commission per client is.

This basic technique will let you compare results for the different marketing strategies you’re currently using (or any you decide to implement in the future). You can also narrow it down by making small changes to a single marketing strategy, and seeing how the changes affect your response rate. That’s called A/B testing.

For example, you might visit two different networking groups, using the same elevator pitch and marketing language at both, and see which group gives you the most referrals over the course of six months. Or you could divide your mailing list in half (making sure to get an even demographic mix in each half), send one group an “I want listings” postcard campaign and the other group a personal promotion postcard campaign, and see which postcard message nets the best response and conversion rate.

Ultimately, change is the name of the game. Reliability and great customer service are still the keys to getting referrals and converting leads to clients, but the way you bring in leads will inevitably change over the course of your career. Don’t hang on to a strategy that isn’t working – and don’t be afraid to try something new.