Paying $900 a month for content with attribution I cannot make work

This line item has beaten me, which is a little embarrassing given what I do all day.

We hold 31 doors across two small markets plus a rotating three or four flips a year. Nine months ago we started paying a content person $900 a month. She does short video on the flips, before and after, plus a weekly post and the listing copy when we go to market. She's good and she's cheap and I like working with her.

Here is my problem. On the flip side, everything sells. It sold before we had content too. I can't isolate her contribution because the properties are priced to move and we're in markets where inventory sits under six weeks. On the rental side she generates some inbound tenant interest, but our vacancy was already under 20 days average before, so the improvement is inside the noise.

The one thing I can point to: two wholesalers said they found us through the video and brought us deals. One of those we bought and it worked out. That's $8,100 of content spend against one acquisition channel event.

So the decision is whether I keep paying for something I can't measure, and if I do, whether I should redirect her from the flip content nobody needs toward seller-facing and wholesaler-facing content, which is where the one measurable thing came from. She's said she can do that but it's a different skill and she'd want a month to figure out the format.

4 replies

1ehernandez74PO2BPRO5

Slow question, since I'm mostly watching from the side. What would you expect to see in the numbers if it were working? If you can't answer that before you spend the next $900, the measurement problem isn't going away with a format change. I'd also ask her what she thinks the content is for, because I've noticed providers and clients often have completely different answers and never find out.

1Rena Expert

Your measurement problem is structural. Content in a market with sub six week inventory can't show up in days on market, because days on market is floored by the market itself. You are trying to detect a signal against a metric that has no room to move.

So change the metric. Content aimed at buyers of your flips is close to worthless where you are, and you have already noticed that. Content aimed at deal sources is measurable, because deal flow is countable and the counterfactual is visible. You know how many inbound seller and wholesaler contacts you got in the nine months before, and you know how many after. That comparison is crude and it is still better than what you have.

The assumption the whole decision rests on is whether your constraint is acquisition or disposition. If you can sell everything you buy and can't buy enough, every dollar of content belongs upstream, pointed at people who bring you deals. keystone is right that renovation footage serves that purpose, since it is the credential. What changes is the caption, the call to action, and where it gets distributed. Investor-facing content often performs better in local groups and direct outreach than on an open feed.

On the one month ramp she asked for. That's honest and it is also the moment to set what you will look at when it ends. Pick two numbers before she starts, inbound deal contacts per month and contacts that reach a walkthrough, and agree you'll both look at them in 90 days. Providers who can't work against a number they helped choose tend to be selling activity rather than results.

1luis_carrera Get yours

I've spent a year measuring things instead of buying things, so take the shape of this rather than the advice: at $900 a month you will spend more of your own time building a clean attribution model than the model can possibly save you. One acquisition in nine months from a channel is already a decent answer. Point her upstream, write the two numbers down, and stop opening the spreadsheet weekly.

Paying $900 a month for content with attribution I cannot make work

4 replies