Following is a transcript of the video.
Siddharth Taparia: I started at JLL in 2021, so that was, I think technically right in the middle of the pandemic. And the commercial real estate industry has changed so much with hybrid work, with different types of assets getting in and out of favor during the time, which is totally normal and totally cyclical in terms of how this industry has always operated.
But one of the things that we have recognized from a marketing standpoint is – brand continues to be really important, and it becomes even more important in a time of crisis, whether it is a pandemic, a change in the market and the conditions of the market. Clients always look for companies that have been there and that can be trusted.
And so one of the things that became really important for me was continuing to put that brand emphasis and continuing to put trust in our brand and making sure that that’s a key pillar because that’s what our clients recognize us for. But at the same time, also introducing the company to new clients that might have never had the opportunity to work with us.
And one of the things that we did was we built a system of measurement so that we could really define what the contribution of marketing was to the company’s overall goals, which center around revenue and profitability.
We developed 16 KPIs to track everything from our contribution to pipeline to our contribution to ultimately the revenue, our engagement on our digital channels, the effectiveness of our campaigns, the overall effectiveness of the marketing spend and the return on investment the company was getting as a result of it.
Over that period, so since 2022, our pipeline contribution from marketing is up 3x. Our revenue contribution — so that’s the conversion of that pipeline — is up 4x. And we’ve been able to do it with 11% less resources, and our effectiveness as a result of that is up by over 20%.
So, it’s been a really good journey for us, but we have done it by creating and putting everybody’s attention around core metrics that we need to drive and then making them available for everybody, for the business, for people in marketing. Everybody is tied back to the same set of KPIs.
And so one of the things that we did was we did a fairly significant rebranding of the company back in 2022, and we have been tracking the growth of our brand awareness with all of our audiences. And that’s a very straightforward way for us to say — we did this rebranding, we’re now getting much more focused on driving our brand awareness, and every year we are able to go back and look at how much awareness do we have with our target audiences.
We also have certain campaigns that we can directly attribute and say, someone clicked on this, they came to us, they raised their hand, they wanted to talk to us. For example, people reach out to us and say, I need to build a new office, or I need help in project managing a new construction project that I’m doing.
Once they come to us, we’re able to track them through that life cycle, through that sales cycle and determine what the impact of marketing was in that journey. And that gives us very credible ways of being able to go back and compare what revenue we were able to get and what the contribution of marketing was in that process.
