An effective marketing strategy is an essential cornerstone for a multifamily company’s success. But the marketing department doesn’t work in a silo, and the C-suite usually has specific key performance indicators for long- and short-term campaigns., Multi-Housing News spoke with several multifamily leaders to learn what matters when it comes to marketing best practices.
Here’s what Jamie Gorski, chief experience officer at Windsor Communities; Brennen Degner, founder & CEO of DB Capital Management; Ashley Sinclair, executive vice president of marketing and brand loyalty at Village Green; Kristi Nootens, co-head of CP Capital US; and Heidi Jehlicka, vice president of marketing for The Bainbridge Cos. had to say.
How do you strike a balance between short-term marketing goals and long-term brand building?
Degner: This is a consistent conversation we have especially as it relates to advertising via social platforms like Instagram. There is a cost to staying active and building engagement on social media, but it is really difficult to evaluate on a short-term basis the return on investment of this marketing spend. We take the position that although it might not be one of the marketing tools that you can point to on the weekly box score that is driving leads, it is an important aspect of building a long-term brand for the asset.
Gorski: It’s difficult to set aside the time and budget needed for long-term brand building, but it’s an essential investment to make in order to grow the brand. Historically, we have spent more of our marketing budget on lead generation. However, we are driven by a commitment to our brand’s mission of creating communities where people feel truly cared for. Windsor is dedicating more resources to brand-building through consistency between properties, a focus on delivering superior service and developing partnerships, awareness campaigns and brand activations across our portfolio. Our goal is to build loyalty with our customers and trust with our associates, which we believe will lead to better performance, year after year.
Nootens: When we are launching a fund or actively fundraising, the marketing collateral we create becomes a top priority. With new prospects, these materials are often their first impression of us so they need to be thoughtful and engaging, tell a clear story and highlight our experience, performance and investment rationale. In between fund launches we focus on longer-term goals like brand awareness and improving our corporate materials that can be used in many instances and across many fundraisers.
Sinclair: Regardless of whether you are planning for a short-term marketing goal or a long-term brand building campaign, it is important to establish and stay true to the brand’s purpose. If you can do that, your short-term marketing goals will feed into your long-term brand building. Overtime, the imagery and message may, and likely will, evolve as your brand evolves and new mediums and platforms are introduced, but your overarching theme remains and stays true to the purpose.
When it comes to determining how well a marketing campaign is doing, what key metrics are important?
Jehlicka: There are three key KPIs when determining the effectiveness of a campaign. First is lead volume, then lead quality or lead score and conversion of lead to appointment.
Degner: The most closely tracked weekly marketing KPI that we track for each source would be total leads generated. If you think about the hierarchy as a funnel the widest point in our analysis would be total leads. As we work down the funnel, we try to understand leads not just by quantity but quality as well. We track conversion by lead source closely so we can ensure we are allocating our marketing spend appropriately. In order to adequately analyze that marketing spend, we track our cost per lead and return on investment to best track our customer acquisition cost.
Sinclair: The most critical measurement is evaluating the spend versus the return on investment. In digital campaigns this is most often seen in the cost per lead or cost per click. As with any campaign, many variables can impact the user journey or experience which further reinforces the need to monitor, analyze and optimize to meet the changing needs and wants of your target audience. So set a goal or benchmark as a light measurement to help determine when to adapt and pivot as necessary to ensure a strong return on investment.
Nootens: Our marketing strategy can be broken down into three categories: marketing collateral for our latest fund offering, ongoing investor engagement and brand awareness. While our fund marketing collateral is an integral part of the fundraising process, there are many other inputs like relationships, our team’s messaging expertise and our track record. We regularly launch investor white papers, webinars, in-person investor conferences and newsletters and provide commentary on industry trends and news in order to stay engaged with current investors while also boosting brand awareness and maintaining a strong online presence that we can showcase to new prospects. Our investment philosophy is based on unlocking value for our investors. Therefore, a key performance indicator for us is their satisfaction with our services, which we are able to measure through our consistent communication with them on a quarterly basis.
What matters more: How many likes/interactions a marketing campaign or post receives or how many conversions it leads to?
Gorski: We generally weigh conversions more heavily than likes and interactions. Performance is our priority! However, we recognize that there is immense value in likes as that is an indicator of interest in the brand. Based on MRI Estate Software data, 80 percent of apartment hunters look to social media before signing a lease and choosing their next apartment. Social can boost the sense of community which translates to emotional currency, especially when connected to “home.” But ultimately the most valuable metric for the business is when a customer moves from the awareness to intent stage, marking the beginning of a customer’s journey through the sales funnel and increasing the likelihood of converting a prospect to a renter.
Nootens: Conversions are most important but very hard to track given that a conversion to us means someone has decided to invest in our fund. Investors will have many touch points with us along the way prior to investing, including presentations of our fund marketing materials, in-person meetings, webinars, etc. So, it’s not as simple as tracking clicks on an article or whitepaper or who opens our materials when we send them out. It’s much more nuanced.
Jehlicka: It really depends on the purpose of the campaign. Is the social campaign’s intention to create awareness and brand recognition? If so, then likes and interactions matter more. Likes and interactions help marketers know the confidence in the audience is growing and the awareness campaign is working. If the social campaign is intended to drive leads, then the metric that would matter most is conversions to leads.
Degner: We focus primarily on the conversion rate when evaluating social media marketing performance. Specifically, the conversion of any posts to leads is what we value the most. Likes and interactions are generally a better indicator of existing tenant engagement and can be examined to help the team understand overall tenant relations and expected turnover.
When the C-suite of a company and the marketing department meet, what does the C-suite typically prioritize? What can the marketing team bring to the table to ensure a productive meeting?
Sinclair: For starters, make sure you ask the C-suite for the company goals or areas of improvement and evolution before you launch a campaign. This approach allows for greater collaboration, efficiency and direction for strategy and tactics regarding campaigns and initiatives. From there, you have a clear understanding of what is most valuable to your C-suite and the meetings become focused and productive. Of course, the results and insights and opportunities learned from the campaign are always top of mind for executives, but it also provides dedicated time to pitch new ideas or campaigns that further align with the goals and needs of the company.
Degner: Every week we discuss leads generated, quality of leads (identified through conversion ratios of leads to tours) and strategy on marketing spend. To facilitate a productive meeting, we expect the marketing team to have reviewed the information and be in a position to provide recommendations, if any, to areas of opportunity in driving better results. We leverage the expertise of the marketing team in identifying all best practices and creative solutions when we need to drive traffic.
Gorski: At Windsor, performance is our priority. It’s essential for us to present our marketing efforts as they relate to our top-line operational goals. It’s essential to lead the conversation with data that illustrates how marketing efforts, like customer satisfaction and branding, add value for the future and ultimately drive the bottom line. Our C-suite also appreciates conversations that have an eye on the future and how we will address the shifting trends and expectations of customers. Our team recognizes that the investments that we make in our brand today are an important part of ensuring a secure future.
Are there any emerging marketing trends or technologies that you think will have a potential impact on the real estate industry?
Gorski: Artificial intelligence will revolutionize the industry and the world. The ease of use and sophistication of these tools have already had a transformative impact on the way that we do business. Our AI leasing tool, Elise AI, had a major impact on our day-to-day operations, streamlining our customer communication and allowing our associates to focus on the tasks that matter to our mission. AI tools have also been essential for personalized marketing, allowing us to leverage preference data and present customers with the information that matters most to them. We continue to test ways that we can use AI effectively, such as through AI voice to help manage telephone volume and generative AI to help with content creation, personalized marketing and identifying trends in customer needs.
Additionally, Windsor is evolving our business model to centralized leasing, maintenance and support services. We strongly believe that this investment in our people, processes and technology will allow our associates and customers to thrive. Using AI, as well as regionalized sales and maintenance, flexible touring and new CRM technology, we can streamline the experience for customers while freeing teams from mundane tasks so they can take on bigger, better roles within our company and deliver on our mission to create communities where people feel truly cared for.
Nootens: As with other industries, AI is currently the buzz. This trend could potentially affect some aspects of marketing in real estate, although we don’t anticipate much carryover into the investment management space since we provide highly tailored touchpoints. We are also seeing the boom of ESG take hold. Going green and good stewardship has become a larger part of the conversation, but authenticity must be the guiding light over brand elevation, and this is hard to decipher at the moment.
Jehlicka: Video and social technologies are not new to the real estate industry; however, I think they took a back seat during the pandemic and are now going to have a comeback during the last two quarters of 2023 and into 2024. The customer of the rental real estate market is now more than ever wanting to see and feel through video what it would be like living in the apartment home and community as a whole that they would select to rent.
Sinclair: Most notable at this moment is the build-to-rent model. Given the housing market and interest rates, we are seeing this sort of product gain momentum. In terms of technology, residents are made up of so many generations that it’s hard to completely pinpoint if there is one technological advancement to integrate, but the one thing that remains true is that residents expect a great experience that is efficient. Therefore, it is critical to arm the teams who are serving the residents with proper tech stacks to ensure we are moving at a pace that doesn’t create a negative experience balanced with the service team having fair and equitable expectations. An example would be iPads and apps that allow our service teams to receive work orders in real-time, so they aren’t headed to the office every few hours. This also allows us to logistically assist and prioritize needs via reaching out to the residents on when they can expect their work order to be completed, etc.
Read the October 2023 issue of MHN.
