$10k marketing budget. PPC or Direct Mail?

[Zach Faris]

I have about a $10k marketing budget and really want to commit to PPC or Direct Mail (or cold calling list). I realize I could spend $5k on each, but I don't want to go into both halfway committed and be disappointed that I don't see results from either. It seems with a $10k budget you should be able to commit to one and see results. 

I lean towards PPC, because that means someone is searching rather than me having to mail. I am looking for your wisdom.

[Adrien C.]

I've been doing DM for 15 months and have closed dozens of deals from it. I market to a population of about 350K and struggle to get 12000 prospects. 75% of those are owner occs with little to no motivation (10yr ownership with 40% or higher equity and over 50yrs old). My best list are the absentee owners and other hardship lists but that only accounts for about 20% of my mail. I average about $10K per month mailing to this broad of a list. We get tons of calls of folks telling us to go to hell and back but between the 10 angry callers, we get decent leads. Some lists return $35-50 per $1 spent while others return $2-3. 

Saying that, we just started PPC this week. The guy setting it up told us in our market, it would be a struggle to spend $5K a month. We'll probably be around $3500 and put the other $1500 towards Facebook pre and post targeting. The campaign went live literally today and we've had 5 leads. Most junk no equity stuff but it's instant calls. 

If you have the budget, I would recommend doing both. Pick a highly targeted mail list of 3-5K and put the rest into PPC. It doesn't take much effort to become efficient at both especially if you work with people who know what they're doing. You'll reach different groups of people. Probably 5 or 6 of our last 8 buyers don't have computers so PPC wouldn't work for them.