The True Value of a Qualified Lead in Multifamily Marketing

For commercial real estate marketing professionals, adapting to the rapid shift toward digital methods is both challenging and essential. Traditional property marketing techniques, honed over decades, are familiar to many. Yet, the evolution of the commercial real estate market trends points unmistakably toward the burgeoning significance of online platforms and digital outreach.

Navigating this digital realm can often feel like venturing into uncharted territory. While old marketing methods are quickly embraced due to years of experience, commercial real estate digital marketing strategies often face skepticism. These modern strategies’ tangible benefits and efficiencies, such as lower implementation costs, are frequently overshadowed by doubts and resistance. This evolving scenario poses a unique problem for multifamily marketing managers attempting to position themselves at the forefront of real estate marketing strategy innovation.

So, how can one effectively convey the value of a lead, especially a qualified apartment lead, within this digital framework? The challenge might seem daunting, but understanding and leveraging the potential of digital tools is crucial for marketers determined to stay ahead in the game.

The Quantitative: Doing the Math

When navigating the intricacies of multifamily marketing, one of the foremost concerns that real estate agents and marketers face is justifying the costs to their executive team. While these teams frequently zoom in on ROI as the primary measure of success, a holistic view of marketing efforts suggests this isn’t the only metric that matters.

Why? Understanding the ROI in the world of real estate marketing requires a deep dive into the needs and behaviors of the target audience. Further complicating matters, there are numerous ways to calculate marketing ROI, each offering unique insights tailored to different real estate marketing ideas.

For those deeply entrenched in commercial real estate marketing, the prevalent method to gauge ROI is the “cost per lead.” But here’s where many face a problem: Does this metric encompass all leads, or does it specifically address qualified leads? If you’re using a real estate website to generate leads, search engines can often bring a mix of visitors, not all of whom are part of your target market. When examining the broad spectrum of all leads, the cost-per-unqualified lead will invariably seem more economical.

However, a closer look reveals the nuances. Many of these leads, especially those seeking properties like office space or virtual tours of property listings, might not align with what’s being offered, making them a less-than-ideal fit or not ready to purchase.

This initial cost, often deceivingly attractive, fails to factor in the lead’s position in the buyer’s journey, whether they’re just becoming aware or on the brink of making a decision. Consequently, this metric overlooks essential expenses, such as the costs of nurturing these leads through tailored marketing strategies or the eventual sales pitch.

Cost Per Lead

However, the standard “cost-per-lead” is likely a sufficient metric for companies playing the lead generation game. That formula is simple enough. You take the marketing spend and then divide it by the number of leads.

Marketing Spend / Total New Leads = Cost Per Lead (CPL)

But depending on your end goals, this may not be the number your executive team wants. They may be more interested in your cost per marketing qualified lead (MQL) — or a lead ready to go to sales. This number is not too complicated, either.

Divide the marketing tactic spend by the number of MQLs you got through that method. That’s your MQL cost. Not tracking MQLs? You will not be able to backtrack your MQLs, but we have some tips on setting up your lead qualification for the future.  

Marketing Tactic Spend / Total New MQLs = Cost Per MQL

This metric will likely garner better interest than a standard cost per lead, but executives will likely want more. This is where “return on spend” comes in, which shows the actual value of your efforts by relaying how those efforts impacted your bottom line. In other words, it’s the amount you earn in the business compared to your spend. This number is much harder to get; however, it can be a significant selling point in convincing your boss of the value of your efforts.

First, you must know the lifetime value of your customers.

Lifetime Value

Calculating the lifetime value of your customer is simple enough, but your formula will vary based on the nature of your product or service. If you are a subscription-based service, you will want to know the average monthly spend of a customer. If you offer a one-time product or service, you must consider typical upsells, which can increase your averages. There’s no simple formula, but once you go through this process with your sales data, you should be able to come up with a reasonable average.

The next step is to look at conversion rates of qualified leads — namely, how many marketing-qualified leads become sales-qualified leads and the average close rate of a sales-qualified lead. Got that number? You are going to use it to calculate the MQL value.

MQL Value

The MQL value is vital because it benchmarks how much an MQL should be worth. It’s also key in calculating return on spend. With this number and your cost per MQL, you can calculate the return on any marketing spend — email campaign, social media ad, etc. It’s as simple as dividing the MQL value by the cost per MQL

MQL Value / Cost Per MQL = Return on Spend

This number can help commercial real estate marketers justify marketing endeavors. However, it’s not the only one you should look at. A better snapshot number could be “return on campaign,” which looks at your endeavors. Much like a standard ROI number, return on campaign operates on similar calculations, but while looking at the components of your marketing campaign over the set time it ran.

Traditional ROI computations look like this:

(Sales Growth – Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost = Return on Investment

However, with campaigns in mind, there are often different or additional costs involved, and not all sales may result from the campaign. If you run a single campaign at a time, you could modify this calculation to reflect any natural growth you see on average.

(Sales Growth – Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost – Avg. Organic Growth = Return on Campaign

This gives you a more standard return that executives are used to interacting with. However, if you run multiple campaigns simultaneously, you can calculate individual returns on each campaign by taking a more roundabout approach. This involves looking at customers acquired from the campaign and multiplying the average sales and margin. Then, you subtract your campaign budget. This gives a more accurate number as to the contributory effect of each campaign.

(# Campaign Customers * Avg. Sale Amt. * Avg. Margin) – Campaign Budget = Return on Campaign

These numbers may not be simple to master or even remember; however, they’re a great way of proving marketing’s worth to your executive team.

The Qualitative: Remembering the Immeasurable

People like numbers because they are easily digestible. A number tells a simple story. But a number can also be manipulated. And a number doesn’t always tell the full story. Often, having numbers is not enough — you also need a narrative. This is where “qualitative” value comes in.

A great return on spend will undoubtedly do well to impress your C-suite with your marketing efforts. But what if you told them you also could decrease your sales cycle by a few months? That would garner strong attention as well. This is just one example of qualitative value when discussing your marketing endeavors — and the unexpected benefits of running a solid digital marketing campaign.

Digital Marketing Is Iterative

Another positive qualitative value? Certain parts of a digital marketing strategy are iterative. Commercial real estate marketers may need to develop new content or web pages for campaigns, but much of the groundwork is already done. And most of it will not need to be done again. Or at least not soon.

Buyer personas and the associated buyer’s journey may need adjustments over time. However, none of that will compare to the initial costs of developing these items. This means that over time, your ROI will likely decrease, as the costs of these components can technically be spread across each campaign. It’s hard to calculate this as a number, but it certainly goes into ascribing value to the lead process.

Qualified Leads for Commercial Real Estate Marketers

The biggest qualitative value that inbound offers is qualified leads. Traditional marketing methods gather unqualified leads sent to sales — or worse, cold-calling. On the other hand, inbound marketing puts a process in place that qualifies leads naturally through offers and nurture campaigns.

This systematically improves the marketing process, allowing leads to qualify themselves as you push out more content. In turn, you shorten the time and resources the sales team spends qualifying leads. This means commercial real estate marketers’ qualified leads from the inbound process cost less than the qualified leads you get through another method.

The Bottom Line of Lead Value

So, what does this mean for commercial real estate marketers?

Pulling it all together, a digital marketing program like multifamily inbound marketing allows you to ascribe worth to the apartment leads you gather easily. Multifamily inbound marketing also enables you to prove that the costs and returns associated with those leads are of greater value to your business than leads garnered from more traditional methods.

In coupling calculations like return on spend, you can prove your leads’ quantitative and qualitative value. As we noted previously, inbound marketing offers improved cost-per-lead values and lower implementation costs. But it’s one thing to know it and another thing to prove it to your executive team.

How to Support Consistent Growth for Your Multifamily Business

The multifamily market has seen a paradigm shift with the rise of inbound marketing. A comprehensive perspective is vital as you construct your marketing funnel, from crafting insightful blog posts to launching targeted Facebook ads.

New marketers eager to build captivating campaigns and hone their content marketing efforts might sometimes overlook crucial elements like the leasing agent’s strategic role and the nuances of the target audience.

Without a dynamic strategy for enticing potential customers, even the most detailed funnel risks stagnation. Ensuring that every facet of your marketing efforts works harmoniously is essential for generating loyal customers.

Focusing on the Funnel

A successful marketing idea hinges on mastering the inbound marketing funnel. For those who are new to this approach, it’s common to launch numerous campaigns with a keen focus on the buyer’s journey at every stage.

However, the true secret lies in optimizing strategies for prospective customers. Emphasizing search engine optimization (SEO) ensures your business consistently appears atop search results, making it more visible to potential customers.

Campaigns certainly have their place, but the key to long-term success is concentrating efforts at the funnel’s top. This is where initial interest from potential customers is captured.

Without this interest, there’s no pool of leads to nurture or engage with. Excellent customer service and content tailored specifically for your target audience is essential. With this approach, you can guarantee a steady flow of visitors and create opportunities to convert them into long-term customers or clients.

Making Your Multifamily Marketing Funnel Scalable

The key to any business growth is scalability. But how do you translate a marketing funnel to meet scalability needs?

The first requirement is to look solely at the numbers. If you are struggling to bring in 1,500 web visitors per month and are only converting that traffic to leads at a rate of 3%, the outlook for company growth is not promising.

When faced with this kind of issue, it is essential to change your funnel, albeit one at a time. Again, your concern should be primarily on your traffic generation or how to increase that visitation from 1,500. If nothing else, an increase in site traffic to around 5,000 monthly with a steady lead rate of 3% can still significantly impact your top-of-funnel multifamily leads from 45 to 150 a month.

But how do you increase this traffic to such a rate? Again, your focus should be content. Experimenting with your content tilt, improving your content amount, and changing how you promote your content can contribute to higher traffic.

Maintain Consistent Conversion Rates

Achieving a scalable marketing funnel hinges on the stability of conversion rates, a crucial metric for multifamily marketing professionals. The effectiveness of your efforts, particularly in areas like landing pages, forms, and special offers, plays a significant role in driving these conversion rates.

For instance, if you’ve historically experienced a 5% conversion rate from visitors to leads and a subsequent 1% from leads to actual customers, it’s paramount that these figures remain steady or, even better, show improvement to ensure the potential for long-term growth.

Consistent conversion rates don’t just offer a static picture; they enable forward-thinking marketers to predict the number of potential customers or clients that may enter the lead generation pool within a given timeframe. Moreover, closely monitoring these rates allows you to gauge the number of leads likely to transition further down the sales funnel.

The integration of well-maintained buyer’s journey content, coupled with feedback from your sales team and tactics such as multifamily SEO, ensures that your content resonates with the target audience and that you are on track to meeting the overarching objectives of your marketing campaign.

Keeping Up With the Content

For businesses seeing inbound success, it is tempting to lapse in your efforts or change direction due to comfortable growth. However, this can be incredibly damaging to your business. Your content needs to be consistent.

Again, we return to the issue of scalability. Knowing that content is the basis of bringing in multifamily traffic, it’s important to maintain that generation to maintain results. But how do you do that without your content growing stale? It’s a matter of knowing your audience so that you can take a leading approach in content creation.

Ideally, as you grow, it should be simple for your business to put processes in place to become a content machine. Keeping up with your content ensures your business can continue to grow easily.

Leveraging Technology for Insightful Thought Leadership

Multifamily businesses can’t afford to lag. Integrating technology and data analytics into your marketing approach can offer significant advantages.

1. Harnessing CRM Systems

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools are no longer a luxury but a necessity. These platforms give you a holistic view of each prospective customer, tracing their journey from mere visitors to committed customers or clients. Analyzing this data lets you pinpoint where potential customers or clients might drop off, allowing for timely interventions and targeted strategies.

2. Data-Driven Decision Making

Relying on gut feelings is a strategy of the past. Today, successful multifamily marketers bank on actionable insights derived from data analytics. By studying patterns, behaviors, and preferences of potential customers, marketing strategies can be fine-tuned to match the exact needs and desires of the target audience. This ensures higher conversion rates and, ultimately, more signed leases.

3. Automated Marketing Campaigns

Automation in marketing can be a game-changer. Imagine tailoring specific email campaigns for different segments of your audience, triggered by particular actions they take. This ensures that the content is relevant to the recipient and reaches them opportunely, increasing the chances of conversion.

4. Continuous Learning and Adaptation

The digital landscape is ever-evolving. What works today might not be as effective tomorrow. Therefore, continuous learning and staying updated with the latest marketing trends, technological tools, and best practices are crucial. Regular training sessions, workshops, and webinars can help multifamily marketers stay ahead of the curve.

While content marketing fundamentals remain rooted in understanding and catering to the buyer’s journey, the tools and technologies available to us have greatly expanded. These tools can help you maintain traffic and ensure sustained growth and expansion in an increasingly competitive market.

It’s Time to Take Digital Multifamily Marketing Seriously

Most digital marketers can probably relate to this social situation: Someone asks what you do for a living. After explaining that you work in multifamily digital marketing, the inquisitor follows up with some variation: “So, you play around on Facebook all day?”

Social media for multifamily vendors and developments, in particular, gets a bad reputation, with some business owners refusing even to acknowledge social platforms as legitimate marketing channels.

But if you think digital marketing is just fluff and noise, you are missing out on low-cost campaigns with great returns on investment that traditional marketing cannot compete with. Most businesses fail to realize that digital marketing offers more measurable value than traditional methods.

How a Company Generated $2M From One Blog

Over the years, blogging has transformed from a forum for teenagers into an affordable multifamily lead generation tool. To understand how this transformation occurred, let’s first examine how the internet has changed consumer behavior.

With a digital information repository at your fingertips, today’s consumers are more educated than ever. Gone are the days of visiting a store to speak to an expert or asking neighbors for referrals. Everything from pricing to reviews is found with a simple search.

No matter what industry or consumers you serve, customers have questions, and you can guess where they go for their answers — Google. So, how can you take advantage of this? By answering those questions on your company’s blog or FAQ page.

Marcus Sheridan, one of the earliest content marketing proponents, generated $2 million for River Pool & Spas when he published a blog post on the company’s website answering a simple question: “How much does a fiberglass pool cost?”

What did the blog post cost him? A half-hour of his time and maybe some web analytics tools? We’ll take that ROI.

According to Tech Client, businesses have a 434% higher chance of a high ranking on search engines if they feature blogs as part of their website. Additionally, HubSpot found that companies that implement blogging into their content marketing strategy receive 67% more leads than those that do not.

Content marketing might seem pretty straightforward, but like any marketing campaign, it is important to have a strategy. For most businesses, you are not blogging just to blog; you create content to drive your marketing funnel.

Social Media’s Biggest Value-Add for Business

Multifamily owners often ask, “Is social media a legitimate way to generate multifamily leads?” But those owners might be asking the wrong question.

The value of social media is not measured in leads, but rather, it is measured through customer experience. According to Forrester data, a relationship exists between customer experience and stock price. People are willing to pay a premium cost for the experience with a brand.

Additionally, improving customer experience can save your company big bucks. In fact, Sprint saves $1.7 billion each year by determining and mitigating the root cause of customer dissatisfaction from calls made to its contact center.

And as it turns out, social media is crucial to improving customer experience. The internet allows word-of-mouth communication to spread easier than ever, both positive and negative.

In the multifamily industry, for example, negative commentary from residents is commonly found across social media and online review sites such as Yelp, Twitter, and Google business pages. Residents who are frustrated with a property’s maintenance issues or poor customer service often express those feelings publicly online. How a multifamily property responds will determine how a negative comment affects your business.

However, each part of your marketing strategy should fit into one cohesive piece. Your website, social media presence, user experience, customer experience, etc., should work harmoniously to establish a successful inbound marketing plan.

You Must Talk Marketing ROI (4 Key Takeaways)

As marketers, we are constantly faced with the battle of justifying ourselves and our multifamily marketing agency’s role in a company’s ROI. We must always find ways to prove to CEOs that marketing contributes to the bottom line. 

But how? 

Here are 4 ways to convince multifamily owners and CEOS that marketing ROI matters.

1. Be relevant — set SMART goals.

Do you find yourself constantly sharing statistics that discuss retweets, follows, visits to the website, etc.?

These stats are important, but if you have not established true goals and understand how and if your work is contributing to the bottom line, STOP IT! It’s time to set up your SMART goals, communicate with your sales team, and start being relevant to what is most important to the CEO and company: ROI.

2. Play offense, not defense. 

Believe it or not, about 69% of CEOs believe that marketing is a waste of time, money, and resources. To stay on the offense, you must clearly define your goals, ensure that sales and marketing are happy, and discuss the purpose behind your goals.

3. Always go after the 3 Hs.

• Head – Explain your plan of action. Defend your strategies with case studies, numbers, etc. Win over your team with proof!
• Heart – If people aren’t truly vested in your idea with their heart, you will lose them. Find out what’s important to them and how to tie your new goals to theirs.
• Hands – Now that you’ve won over your team, you’ve got to get them to get back to (or start) work! Play out those call-to-actions.

4. Prepare to show your medal.

In business, you will fight many battles. You will be criticized and put through the wringer. But, at the end, these obstacles will refine your character — just like a medal has to go through fire to be reshaped and altered.

Take risks and be the change that will keep your organization moving forward.

Creating Marketing Qualified Leads With the Right Form

The excitement of starting an inbound marketing strategy for your organization can lead to initial eagerness to get things rolling. But in that sprint to kick off your multifamily marketing, you might find yourself missing a step or two.

The use of content to gather apartment leads is, without a doubt, the primary focus of inbound. Therefore, many marketers and property managers spend their time emphasizing content strategy to generate those apartment leads. 

However, optimizing your content without optimizing your lead strategy defeats the purpose of inbound altogether. Instead, marketers should spend much of their intro to the inbound process on apartment lead generation and business strategies to guarantee their content is meeting objectives.

What is the purpose of an apartment lead generation form?

Nearly every multifamily website these days has an apartment lead generation form. But the effectiveness of those forms depends on many factors, including:

• Type
• Location on the page
• The offer
• The questions
• How the contact data is used

Have you ever been interested in a new apartment complex or shopping center around town? Maybe you had a specific question while they were in development, so you filled out the contact fields — and waited. And waited. But no one got back to you.

Chances are, you provided a decent amount of personal information on that apartment lead generation form. You did so willingly because it was an exchange you found reasonable: your contact details for the offer or answers you wanted. Understanding this exchange is the key.

In short, an apartment lead generation form is a means of gathering information — the level of which is dependent on what you are offering on the other side. In multifamily inbound marketing, forms are also a means of progressive profiling (i.e., qualifying your apartment leads by asking for a little more intel) each time they fill one out. This progressive profiling is meant to get more and more information that qualifies leads by lifecycle stage and determines their point in the buyer’s journey.

What questions should you ask on your apartment lead generation form?

Now that you know the importance of your fields, the next issue becomes, “What questions should I ask?” This is where your apartment lead generation strategy comes in. If you followed the multifamily inbound marketing strategy correctly, your teams all came together to identify your buyer persona. Doing this should have resulted in defining your lead lifecycle stage.

If you have not done this, go back and do it now because this data is vital to your progressive profiling.

Let’s say you are a tenant representative for a large new commercial office building downtown. The project is not complete yet, but it has generated a lot of buzz, and companies are showing interest. You want to be sure you lease up before opening. However, you also need to make sure the companies you bring in are a good fit. This is where progressive profiling comes in.

Your first apartment lead generation form (the awareness one) will always cover introductory information. This includes the basics:

• Name
• Email
• Phone
• Company name
• Job title

If you are using certain marketing automation software like HubSpot, you have the opportunity to add smart fields that will populate if you already have this particular information. Smart fields help expedite the lead qualification process by letting you ask for additional relevant information. These fields also make things easier for sales down the line if the lead becomes “sales qualified.”

Developing your questions

Gathering your teams together for your apartment lead generation strategy would be pointless if you don’t have a process by which to direct them. Thankfully, that process is relatively simple. Early in the multifamily inbound marketing process, your team should have come up with an ideal buyer profile and a buyer persona, as well as SMART goals for the year to determine what type of leads you are hoping to attract. Need help building your ideal buyer profile? Check out our other blog here.

At this time, you get to bring all those details together. By using lead and customer goals, persona details, and sales data, your team should be able to determine the necessary lead information to create marketing-qualified leads.

Back to the tenant rep example from above. You know the office building in question has a specific number of spaces with an anticipated rent range. You also know the amenities that the building does and does not have. Given the nature of the building, along with your business goals, you know you will likely need to build a large awareness funnel to meet the occupancy goals by open.

While your awareness questions are simple enough, the details you need in the consideration and decision stage are much more in-depth. For one, the type of business and size is important in determining fit, as the building may not support the needs of certain companies. If the building is high-end, questions around “current rent” or “monthly revenue” may be important to help you discover if the company is a good fit from an affordability standpoint. By gathering this information early on, when it comes time to start leasing, the tenant rep’s job should be fairly simple in picking sales-ready leads that met the requirements.

Segmenting your list

While the ultimate benefit of progressive profiling is to shorten the sales cycle, there’s a secondary benefit that can help. List segmentation is the act of separating contacts in your CRM by various criteria. If you run a multifaceted business with a lot of different verticals, list segmentation is a lifesaver. 

If you have a new offer for clients in the senior living space, for example, you don’t want to send it to the people in the economic development of mixed-use developments. Furthermore, people interested in your ad services probably aren’t interested in what you offer in multifamily branding. By gathering this information from apartment leads, you can use it to segment your multifamily marketing for a more streamlined message.

For content marketing success, an apartment lead generation form is much more complex than slapping a few fields on a page. Forms require a certain amount of business strategy to be used for their optimal effectiveness. This is a powerful tool that can improve the life of your sales cycle while requiring little more than some upfront strategy. All it takes is asking the right questions.

How Do You Measure Success in Social Media?

When it comes to proving the value of a digital multifamily marketing strategy, return on investment (ROI) is the keyword all executives want to hear. It may seem a simple enough request, but calculating social media ROI can get pretty tricky.

While social media ROI is definitely important, there’s a different way to think about ROI that’s critical for marketers; the foundation that a strong initial multifamily marketing strategy can provide for all future multifamily marketing endeavors.

While it may seem minimal compared to the numerical value that a multifamily marketing strategy can provide a company, it’s important to remember that the work done in an initial strategy can make or break any future marketing efforts.

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Why Strategy Lays Important Groundwork

It’s easy to espouse demographic information about a brand. For example, most Oreos purchasers are parents between the ages of 24 and 39. But what does that information mean? This explains a core distinction between digital marketing strategy vs. traditional marketing efforts.

For traditional marketing, this information is simple enough for Nabisco to put out a commercial during daytime hours for stay-at-home parents that heavily features children enjoying Oreos.

For digital marketing, the approach is more complex. From this demographic information, what do we know about these parents? Where do they spend their time online? What does their buyer’s journey look like? What is a deciding factor in their purchase?

As Oreo is an established brand with years of name recognition under its belt, it’s unlikely that it would have to consider these factors to find marketing success seriously. For other companies entering the world of digital marketing, this information is “make or break.”

Knowing the important factors of your digital multifamily marketing strategy is important in your first campaign and campaigns developed down the road. Not addressing this information upfront could lead to catastrophe, forcing marketers to return to step one.

Stay Updated With New Multifamily Marketing Content

Multifamily Marketing By the Numbers

For multifamily marketers, content marketing can take time to show real results. That being said, it’s a long-term approach that improves your brand’s visibility online and helps you nurture stronger customer relationships.

While it can be difficult to assign a dollar value to marketing ROI or ROMI (Return on Marginal Investment), numbers are still important to the marketer, more focused on marketing and results than the value of the marketing.

Consider the following statistics to understand the value behind marketing beyond ROI further:

• Companies that blog 15 or more times per month see 5x more traffic than companies that don’t blog.
• 82% of businesses report actively using content marketing, up from 70% last year.
• Marketers with blogs receive 67% more leads than those who don’t.
• Marketers who prioritize blogs are 13x more likely to have a positive ROI.
• Video content is 50x more likely to drive web traffic than plain text.
• Using photos of real people rather than stock photography can result in a 35% conversion increase.
• Video was the primary form of marketing media created in 2021, followed by blogs (used by more than half of marketing teams), and infographics.
• Social engagement as a success metric was also on the rise, up 187% from 2020.

These statistics are developed from analyzing a widespread amount of marketing data and are incredibly important as marketers decide what tactics work well for their strategy. For example, knowing that blogging daily can have a large effect on the chances of customer acquisition is helpful. It may lead to a heavier blog focus in a group’s digital multifamily marketing strategy. But if persona research suggests that the key personas won’t read a blog, it might be wiser for the strategy to put less emphasis on blogging.

While marketing statistics don’t guarantee that a tactic will work for all marketers, they allow us to see important trends. Though innovation is important in multifamily marketing, it’s also vital that you’re not constantly seeking to reinvent the wheel. By utilizing trusted statistics, marketers can make educated decisions about the tactics to funnel their efforts.

How to Plan Your Next Inbound Campaign for More Renters

How Companies Are Rethinking the Value of Social Media

Social media reigns supreme in the marketing space, even above multifamily websites. Last year, a website was the No. 1 marketing channel for business. This year, social media is the top dog. In fact, it’s at an all-time high. 

What does this mean for your multifamily organization? If you aren’t on social media in some capacity, you are already behind and missing out on qualified leads.

Did you know that 8 in 10 companies invested in social media marketing in 2021, and 39% plan to invest this year? Over the last year, companies had to rethink their strategies and some even hired customer experience officers to help lead the charge in this realm. 

The Easiest Way to Determine Your Target Renter

But how do you measure success on social media? Engagement metrics are helpful to track, but how does that translate to conversions and social media ROI? The primary tactic for social media marketing in 2021 was listening — something that will continue into 2022 and beyond. 

The true value of social media lies in the relationships you make. By establishing relationships with your followers, you can learn how to engage with them, support them, and  — most importantly — convert them into sales and loyal brand advocates.

While the most popular platform for marketers is Instagram, many teams are starting to see the most social media ROI and conversions from Facebook. This is likely due to Facebook’s robust advertising platform and ability to run lead-form ads. While listening to social media is critical to your marketing strategy, you can still achieve social media ROI with lead-form ads and an effective Facebook advertising strategy.

Assigning Value to Your Marketing Efforts

Assigning value to marketing efforts doesn’t have to be solely numerical. Instead, it’s important for marketers to understand that marketing strategy offers an important starting point to all future endeavors. A digital multifamily marketing strategy also offers social media ROI that is not necessarily easily measured but impactful.

3 Keys to Multifamily Branding That Attracts Renters

Despite the economic tribulations brought on the U.S. in the last few years, the real estate industry is hot. Aside from the increasing demand for more homes and commercial spaces, the multifamily industry is expected to grow remarkably up until 2030. So, how can you harness some of this data in your multifamily content marketing?

Let’s discuss …

A report from the National Multifamily Housing Council (NHMC) and the National Apartment Association (NAA) states that demand for multifamily real estate will be so great that at least 4.6 million units will be constructed within the next decade.

However, to make the most of these promising forecasts, multifamily real estate companies must learn to optimize data when creating multifamily content marketing.

Why Data Is Crucial in the Multifamily Industry

Data is crucial in every industry as it can improve conversion rates, increase traffic, and prevent knowledge gaps. To illustrate, a Bain & Company study states that businesses in the U.S. could increase profits by over $2 billion annually by utilizing data. Thus, data literacy is integral to professionals — including those who don’t work in the data analytics field.

In fact, today’s business degrees are becoming more interdisciplinary, covering topics like contemporary technologies and data methods. Modern online bachelor’s in business administration even have concentrations in data analytics and management information systems, which are taught alongside traditional business concepts, such as accounting, management, and business law. This shift only shows the growing expectations placed upon business people to be more data literate. 

And this translates to the multifamily industry as harnessing data effectively can lead to more intimate understandings when it comes to trends, more accurate insights into future movements, and more effective multifamily content marketing creation.

How to Integrate Data Into Your Multifamily Content Marketing Strategy

1. Use data to drive contextual storytelling.

Good communication should paint a vivid picture, even if the topic is technical. After all, consumers need to understand the material for it to be impactful. However, multifamily marketing campaigns must also present information that audiences can relate to or find use in to have a lingering effect. This is where gathered data comes in. Using soft and hard data, you can create a well-rounded customer story that provides context, evidence, and insights. Thus, when crafting multifamily content marketing for your customer story, use data collaborations to maximize relevancy.

2. Leverage data visualizations.

Nothing hypes an exciting data set more than visuals. Though some data diehards may disagree, the truth is that visualizations make data more appealing and digestible. In fact, a study by iScribblers found that humans process visuals 60,000 times faster than plain text. Thus, should you have any pertinent data that needs sharing, explore doing so via infographics, interactive tables, or even videos. 

Aside from being more immersive and interactive, data visualizations can increase recall value by upwards of 65%, making it a critical medium in data dissemination, externally and internally.

3. Only pick the most salient data points.

Although publishing every bit of data you gather may be tempting, the best way to share them is to circulate the most notable highlights in your multifamily content marketing. This benefits you two-fold. First, more succinct datasets allow you to retain an audience’s attention span (only eight seconds). And, second, shorter data — and content, in general — is more digitally compatible. 

Considering that mobile compatibility and software development is credited by 59% of those in the multifamily industry for improving customer service, it’s also no surprise that there is now a demand for software programmers with a degree in computer science. However, whatever platform you use, your audience won’t be engaged if you present them with a hodgepodge of figures and statistics. 

In line with this, data expert Dr. Stephanie Evergreen told Forbes that “cutting to the chase” with your findings is a better way to engage the 50% of audiences who view such content on their mobile devices.

Although experts agree that the real estate market’s long-term future remains unclear, the influence of multifamily content marketing and the power of data is undeniable. As multifamily businesses aim to adjust to the New Normal, data-enriched content can act as an anchor and a propeller for industry stability and profit.

Selena Perkins is a freelance digital marketer, with a keen interest in data analytics. She believes that knowing how to use data to make decisions is a must-have skill for everyone. When she’s not busy with work, Selena unwinds by watching shows on Netflix.

Technology moves fast, as do digital marketing trends. As we live and breathe commercial real estate at our multifamily marketing agency, we understand where the industry is headed.

The following is our breakdown of the current trends in social media, augmented reality, and more — plus where we think the multifamily marketing space is headed in the future.

1. Content still reigns king.

Content marketing certainly is not a new concept and it certainly is not going out of style. By now, most companies know they need to create content that engages prospective customers. However, the question is how to do it more effectively. As the year continues, we will see commercial real estate companies creating more meaningful content than ever before.

As the commercial real estate industry turns to content marketing, the smart ones will be more targeted. The key here is that you don’t need a thousand views per blog. Rather, you only need your target audience to view your content. Once you segment your audience base properly, you can launch individualized advertising campaigns and target those segments specifically. This approach will help you gain more apartment leads and conversions from these retargeting ads.

Truthfully, there’s no way around this. The success of your digital multifamily marketing campaigns will depend on your use of originally created, high-quality custom content — as content continues to reign in the realm of digital apartment marketing.

2. You need to pay to play.

Now is the time to focus your efforts on paid social media apartment marketing. The organic reach across most social media platforms is dying. By investing in paid social media apartment marketing you will increase your engagement and get high organic reach, as well as better search marketing.

With paid social media multifamily marketing, almost all social media networks will give you clear metrics to measure your performance and ROI. Another benefit to utilizing paid social media marketing is the ability to reach completely new target customers and enhance your apartment lead generation. By paying to promote your post, you increase the chances that people might share your content or engage with your organization.

3. Social media for apartments is where it’s at.

Social media has come a long way since its early days of simply sending a message, selfies, or favorite links. It has matured enough to become an effective tool in digital multifamily marketing for engaging with targeted customers on an interactive channel. However, oftentimes those in commercial real estate forget to actually be social on social media.

Unfortunately, many property professionals do not take advantage of social media for apartments. Many times, they don’t reply to the influx of messages on social media. They also don’t maintain a frequent presence or put marketing dollars behind campaigns. Social media is an untapped market for properties to set themselves apart from the rest and can be the difference between turning a prospect into an apartment lead.

4. Instant messaging and chatbots are game changers.

Connectivity is another great advantage of social media. The simple ease of using functions such as direct messaging makes it easier than ever to engage with your residents. However, the conundrum that property managers now face is how to respond fast enough and accurately to prospective residents.

Cue multifamily marketing automation bots, also known as chatbots.

Today’s consumers want to engage with a company when and where it’s most convenient for them. For real estate, this could mean losing possible apartment leads if we are not able to respond to needs instantly. Chatbots seem to have cracked the code, quite literally, on instant communication. According to Botpress, a chatbot is defined as “any software that performs an automated task … the most intuitive definition is that a bot is a software that can have a conversation with a human.”

In addition to being programmed to have realistic, human-like conversations with prospective clients, chatbots are also able to gather specific information relevant to the seller or the marketer.

In the context of commercial real estate marketing, a chatbot can mean providing 24/7, instant responses that do not require an individual behind a screen scrambling to answer a question. Chatbots also provide a smoother user experience for the resident, and user experience is always critical.

5. You need to utilize live video to increase engagement.

Video’s popularity as a multifamily marketing medium continues to grow yearly, and this year is no different. Particularly, live video is where we see social media platforms migrating. Live video contains much more engagement and fares better with many social media algorithms. More and more companies in commercial real estate are recognizing the power of video as a digital multifamily marketing strategy.

There are huge opportunities for leasing agents to really innovate and get away from traditional apartment marketing by utilizing Facebook Live to conduct virtual tours or answer real-time questions. Likewise, property managers can get in on the fun, as they may use Snapchat or Instagram Stories as a way to engage with current residents and alert them to fun events.

6. It’s time to embrace virtual real estate.

Where do we see the future of multifamily marketing efforts? Virtual and augmented reality. As our industry rapidly embraces technological innovations, integrating VR and AR can set you apart from competitors.

Implementing VR elements into your apartment marketing scheme can prove effective when done correctly. Virtual reality opens the door to prospective clients that may have otherwise not been able to see your property, as they digitally tour units and enter a lifelike simulation of your multifamily property. Moving forward, we see this trend taking off as we can expect more and more companies to design 3D commercial real estate models through virtual reality.

Augmented reality is used by multifamily industry thought leaders today. It brings blueprints to life by taking a traditional flat layout and turning it into a lifelike 3D model. AR will provide a unique opportunity at every level of commercial real estate as it continues to evolve. Professionals believe that AR provides great value at the early stages of a construction project, and at the final stages of selling and multifamily marketing.

7. Drones can set your multifamily marketing apart.

Drones are a defining piece of technology for commercial real estate. Just a few years ago, it was conventional to hire a professional photographer for aerial shots of a property. Sellers now are capable of capturing stunning images and breathtaking videos of their property with camera-equipped drones, all while cutting back on costs.

Drones can depict a great layout of the entire property, especially when recording video. For larger areas, the unique benefit that drones provide is navigation beyond the property and into the surrounding area. They are able to capture incredible bodies of water, beautiful landscapes, and nearby neighborhoods. This particular feature can be optimized if paired creatively with live streaming.

Drones also allow high-rise offices to capture images of the entire building along with attractive neighboring hotspots. Drones are one trend guaranteed to set your marketing apart from competitors, and will surely spread within the commercial real estate industry.

What does all of this mean for multifamily marketing?

It’s a game-changing year for apartment marketing, especially in terms of how to reach prospective buyers in your area. Up until now, the marketing landscape has remained more or less the same, with social media for apartments claiming the throne in every corner of influence. However, we are now seeing increasingly fast-paced developments in the form of new and updated features such as live streaming and instant messaging. 

What does all of this mean for multifamily marketing? Put simply, it means that content will have to be creative and engaging in order to gain more activity online. Are you ready to get creative?

5 Steps to Improve Your Multifamily Marketing Analytics Strategy

The world of digital marketing analytics is always changing, making it difficult to understand the correlation between ad dollars spent and revenue. As a multifamily agency, we know there is not a one-to-one correlation between the two, and it is nearly impossible to prove to upper management that our efforts are actually worth the investment.

The tracking and analyzing of your content mix to measure return on investment (ROI) is what digital marketing analytics is all about. And thankfully, there is no shortage of multifamily marketing resources to help collect and manage these data points.

Gearing Up With the Right Digital Marketing Analytics Tools

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free tool marketers use to track their multifamily website or app. While the interface seems daunting at first, this tool allows you to seamlessly monitor everything from the demographics and behavior of site visitors to bounce rate and what they are clicking on the most.

Social media insights

Most social media platforms offer their own analytics if you have a business account. Social media insights allow you to measure post reach, follower demographics, engagement and interactions, and even what time of the day your followers are most active. Additionally, you can track ad spend, cost per click, and more through Facebook’s Business Settings.

Hootsuite and Buffer

While Hootsuite and Buffer offer free platforms for social media management, the paid memberships allow you the ability to track all of your social media analytics on a single dashboard. Rather than logging into each of your social accounts to schedule posts individually, these platforms also give you the ability to schedule posts across multiple platforms from a single app.

Multifamily marketing automation software

While there are several tools to track digital marketing analytics, HubSpot, SharpSpring, and other marketing automation software allow you to wrap all of these into one. With these platforms, you can schedule-out email campaigns, social media posts, blogs, and more as well as track the digital marketing analytics for all of them.

Practicing Patience With Digital Marketing Analytics

Just as “a watched pot never boils,” you cannot expect to see immediate results from your multifamily marketing efforts. Patience is key as you track the success of your labor.

More likely than not, you will not see significant progress within the first week, month, or even quarter. Successful multifamily marketing takes time. While you should track items daily such as Facebook ad conversions or clicks on a CTA for your weekly e-newsletter, it is more important to monitor these metrics over a more extended time to see real improvement.

For example, your Facebook Business Page may receive 60 new followers in one week but only a handful the next. The change in followers is not necessarily a reason to be concerned, but it is a trend you should track closely to discover why your followers did not increase as much as in previous weeks.

After all, when you spend countless hours each month planning, scheduling, managing, and tracking your content marketing analytics, there’s no better way to enjoy the fruits of your labor (like increased ROI) than to track and improve your strategy continually. The key is to not get frustrated with your digital marketing analytics results. Stay patient and keep tracking.

How to Improve Your Digital Marketing Analytics Strategy

Reaching your buyer persona in the right place at the right time is paramount to multifamily marketing success, and digital marketing analytics are essential to the evaluation stage of any apartment marketing strategy. However, if not collected diligently, they are of no use.

If you are not achieving your multifamily marketing goals or seeing the results you want from your efforts, it’s time to adjust your strategy. The following are a few good practices to make habits that will increase your data’s relevance:

1. Identify your problem areas

First, decide where you could use some improvement. Focus your efforts on a few specific areas such as social media engagement or website traffic to track relevant data for your business.

2. Create SMART goals

To prove your analytics efforts are worth your time, you have to set SMART goals — Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely. This way, you can continue to track your progress in comparison to your end goals. Without this step, there is no way to assess the performance of the strategy you have put in place.

3. Stay committed

Now that you have the groundwork set, here comes the hard part — staying fully committed and on track with the goals you set. Tracking and reporting your analytics data weekly as well as monthly, quarterly, and yearly is crucial to finding different trends, so stay committed. Pausing your efforts or adding multiple layers to your pre-constructed plan will only lessen your impact.

4. Track your digital marketing analytics

Follow different trends in your digital marketing analytics data and make adjustments accordingly. Then, track and report the results to find new insights. Luckily, there are a variety of digital marketing analytics tools to help you with this crucial step.

5. Report and repeat

Successful multifamily marketing is a long, winding road of strategy, testing, retesting, and careful planning. When you have met your goals, report your data to your team and set new ones.

Trust the Experts to Become the Experts

Use digital marketing analytics to make informed decisions about the time, place, and manner in which you advertise. This way you can focus your ad spending in specific areas, to better reach your target audience and improve the value of your multifamily marketing.

Remember, if implementing and executing a successful multifamily marketing campaign is not your business’ specialty, you do not have to go at it alone. You can leave the heavy lifting to a multifamily marketing agency like Criterion.B. You spent time and energy creating multifamily branding that offers a unique value proposition, so now it is time to trust the experts to develop a multifamily marketing mix that sends the right message to the right people.

Not sure if your apartment marketing strategy needs the boost of working with a multifamily marketing agency? Check out our worksheet that helps you identify where your business’ apartment marketing strategy stands!

What’s the True Value of Multifamily Inbound Marketing?

Marketers should be wary of a few things when committing to a new multifamily marketing strategy. With overcrowded markets and constant construction in major metropolitan areas, it’s difficult to know how to distinguish your property.

When adopting nontraditional strategies, it’s hard for marketing veterans to understand how they add value.

Most marketers fail to realize that digital marketing offers more measurable value than traditional methods. Traditional methods bring prospects and residents at largely unknown rates, whereas multifamily inbound marketing offers measurable results.

In fact, multifamily inbound marketing offers three times more leads per dollar than traditional methods, and inbound leads cost 61% less on average.

This form of data intelligence is one of the many values that a digital marketing method like inbound offers marketers.

Maximizing Multifamily Marketing Analytics to Produce Measurable Insights

Perhaps the biggest benefit of digital marketing is the ability to track everything. Traditional marketing material printed and displayed cannot always track how many people saw your billboard or looked at your mailer. However, digital marketing tactics can provide this information with the ability to set goals that produce measurable insights.

Tools like Google Analytics and HubSpot or SharpSpring offer data on multifamily website visits or what pages they looked at. Email marketing platforms can tell you who opened your email and which links were clicked on most. And social media for apartments can give you the reach of organic posts and paid advertisements.

The world of analytics in the realm of multifamily inbound marketing is deep. It is just a matter of keeping up with that data.

Nurturing Your Apartment Leads to Land the Lease

Consider a marketer trying to lease up a workspace in a renovated building. Looking at digital efforts independently, they could know the percentage of traffic on the leasing page from social media versus referral sites versus organic searches. However, a multifamily inbound marketing approach further emphasizes integrating various methods to maximize a prospect’s educational experience.

For example, a well-planned social media post might lead to a blog with a call-to-action that leads to an offer describing the benefits of working downtown. By emailing the prospect after they download the offer, they’re given information on what to look for in an office space. Continued follow-ups via email might ultimately lead to a lease.

Using Data to Optimize Your Multifamily Inbound Marketing Results

Digital marketing can also pull data and analytics to understand the interactions at each point. A multifamily inbound marketer can figure out how many people who saw that social media post chose to click on the link. On average, they can tell how long people spent reading that blog and how many people on that blog clicked on the call-to-action feature. Insights like these allow marketers to make changes where necessary.

This is an underappreciated value of multifamily inbound marketing. Regularly tracking and offering such insights in the conversion funnel allows marketers to optimize their efforts better. Businesses can save time and money by ensuring their strategy is always on track, and that goals are within reach.

Per HubSpot, the less a business knows its key performance indicators (KPIs), the less likely it will be to meet revenue goals. Therefore, with this “track, test, and re-test” approach, properties using multifamily inbound marketing are certain to know and meet their vital goals.

Supporting the Numbers

While marketers in their daily life may care more about achieving goals efficiently, most executives care about the numbers. This is another area where multifamily inbound marketing offers strong value. Calculating ROI, cost per lead, and customer acquisition cost is simple when using inbound methods, as the data can be tracked easily.

Consider cost per lead: It’s as simple as knowing your ad spend and dividing it by total leads.

Cost per lead (CPL) = Total Marketing Spend / Total Leads

If you want to understand your cost down the pipeline, you dive deeper, calculating the cost per qualified apartment lead. To do so, you would need to divide your spending by the number of apartment leads classified at each point. Remember how we mentioned earlier that multifamily inbound leads cost 61% less on average? This is how marketers can prove that number.

For marketers looking for more comprehensive numbers, cost per customer acquisition can show each customer’s value. For this, you divide spending by amount of customers. The value of customer acquisition cost is its use in calculating overall ROI. This, along with lifetime value (Annual Spend on Product or Service by the Customer * Expected life of customer), can help you develop the ROI number your CFO desires.

ROI=( Lifetime Value – Cost Per Customer Acquisition)/ Lifetime Value

This number is key to gaining support for your efforts.

An All-Encompassing Multifamily Marketing Solution

It can be tempting for marketers and property managers to rely on the world of traditional advertising. For so long, our lives have been surrounded by intriguing commercials, radio ads, and billboards, making the digital world seem unfamiliar.

However, multifamily digital marketing efforts like inbound offer a true measurable ROI that is often absent from more traditional methods. With this, apartment marketers can ensure that their efforts are consistent and effective.

Reaching your buyer persona in the right place at the right time is paramount to marketing success, and marketing analytics are essential to the evaluation stage of any marketing strategy. However, if not collected diligently, they are of no use.

If you are not achieving your marketing goals or seeing the results you want from your efforts, it’s time to adjust your strategy. The following are a few good practices to make habits that will increase your data’s relevance:

1. Identify Your Problem Areas

First, decide where you could use some improvement. Focus your efforts on a few specific areas such as social media engagement or website traffic to track relevant data for your business.

2. Create SMART Goals

To prove your analytics efforts are worth your time, you have to set SMART goals — Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely. This way, you can continue to track your progress in comparison to your end goals. Without this step, there is no way to assess the performance of the strategy you have put in place.

3. Stay Committed

Now that you have the groundwork set, here comes the hard part — staying fully committed and on track with the goals you set. Tracking and reporting your analytics data weekly as well as monthly, quarterly, and yearly is crucial to finding different trends, so stay committed. Pausing your efforts or adding multiple layers to your pre-constructed plan will only lessen your impact.

4. Track Your Marketing Analytics Results

Follow different trends in your marketing analytics data and make adjustments accordingly. Then, track and report the results to find new insights. Luckily, there are a variety of marketing analytics tools to help you with this crucial step.

5. Report and Repeat

Successful marketing is a long, winding road of strategy, testing, retesting, and careful planning. When you have met your goals, report your data to your team and set new ones.

Trust the Experts to Become the Experts

Use marketing analytics to make informed decisions about the time, place, and manner in which you advertise. This way you can focus your ad spending in specific areas, to better reach your target audience and improve the value of your marketing.

Remember, if implementing and executing a successful marketing campaign is not your business’ specialty, you do not have to go at it alone. You can leave the heavy lifting to an inbound marketing agency. You spent time and energy creating a brand that has a unique value proposition, so now it is time to trust the experts to develop a marketing mix that sends the right message to the right people.

Not sure if your marketing strategy needs the boost of working with an agency? Check out our worksheet that helps you identify where your business’s marketing strategy stands!