Multiply Leads with Your Multifamily Lead Analysis Report
As renter behaviors change and competition grows for their attention and wallets, PMCs are putting pressure on business expenses that roll up to their net operating income (NOI), and this affects marketers directly. Regardless of occupancy levels, multifamily marketers are being asked to reduce marketing costs in order to help profit margins and give the property manager room to be competitive on rental rates, if and when needed. But knowing what to cut and why (without crippling marketing performance) can be difficult and a source of anxiety for many teams — unless they’re equipped with the proper tools.
Nearly a century ago, famed magnate John Wanamaker is quoted as saying, “Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Nearly 100 years later, those words are still true for many marketers, though that’s quickly changing.
What if you could pinpoint, with certainty, which of your marketing efforts and dollars are going to waste? Or where opportunity lies to meet your revenue goals, cheaper and faster?
It turns out you can.
In a nutshell, that’s the value of a lead analysis report: a study of how each of your lead sources are performing so you can drop underperforming investments and uncover opportunities to improve lead to lease conversions, often at lower cost. If you’ve been a professional marketer long, you’re likely familiar with the concept of lead source attribution to achieve that. A best practice that’s long proved successful in other industries, lead source attribution is finally catching up in the multifamily realm.
As you plan for the year ahead, your lead analysis report, complete with well-documented lead source attribution and performance metrics, is a vital tool to meet revenue goals and minimize marketing spend.
Why track lead source performance?
Traditionally, marketers seeking evidence for how their marketing channels, campaigns and lead sources were performing had to spend hours corralling incomplete data, with little payoff for their effort.
For starters, you had to chase source data on separate platforms: Google analytics, social networks, ILS, email, and other traffic sources. You’d try to compile all this disconnected data, then piece it together in a way that could be recorded in your CRM and accessed easily by your team.
During that process, catch-all attributions like labeling a variety of sources as “website” or relying on fellow agents to fill in referral sources failed to capture specific touchpoints (like a Google ad or Facebook campaign) that moved the prospect to make contact.
With so many manual steps and low visibility into true lead sources, the process was a tremendous resource suck, prone to error and rife with blind spots. And yet, it’s still how many multifamily marketers operate today.
Such methods also failed to measure traffic quality. Platforms like Google Analytics might tell you how much traffic they brought you, but not what happened to those visitors after they landed on your website. Did they become a viable lead? Book a tour? Sign a lease? As we well know, traffic quantity doesn’t necessarily equate to traffic quality.
Thankfully, there’s a better way. It’s why forward-looking marketers have sought to integrate and automate attribution insights, so their teams can always access a reliable lead analysis report without having to stress over spreadsheets.
Lead Source Attribution Benefits
Improved lead generation.
Understanding what details move visitors to click, engage, or complete an action helps you set better lead generation goals and optimize campaign budgets.
Understanding renters.
Knowing your prospects’ digital activity patterns help predict their preferences and behaviors to inform your strategy and campaign tactics.
Increased ROI.
Track sources, engagement and conversions to more accurately calculate ROI and reduce wasteful spending.
Putting lead source attribution & integration on autopilot
You’re a marketer, not a data scientist. We’re guessing you have no desire to spend hours poring over data instead of building relationship, fine-tuning your strategy, or driving conversions. Thankfully, we’re living in the age of AI-powered marketing tools that can do the heavy lifting on repetitive tasks that often weigh and slow your team’s performance.
By pairing your team’s skills (e.g. creativity, relationship building, critical thinking) with AI-driven insights, you enable your team to perform at a higher level while countering burnout, wasted effort or spending.
Attribution insights in your lead analysis report can help your team answer questions like these:
- What customer segment gives us the greatest chance to meet revenue goals?
- What’s our cost-per-lead, cost-per-lease, conversion-to-tour, and conversion-to-lease by each lead source?
- What’s the best combination of digital touchpoints to attract renters to our doorsteps?
- Which tactics/campaigns/channels deliver best-fit, high-intent multifamily leads?
- Where are we wasting dollars reaching the wrong audiences?
- How can we cut costs without compromising results?
- What evidence can I use to defend my proposed investments to our leaders?
It’s important to note that lead source attribution shouldn’t be limited to website traffic. Rather, your lead analysis report should be able to track attribution cross-channel, not just the first touchpoint in their renter’s journey. When you reply to a prospect, or if a prospect engages with one of your SMS nurture messages, for example, your tech stack should be able to carry their attribution source between channels. The same goes for emails. Let’s say your AI platform replies to a website visitor via a chatbot, or sends them a nurture email. Your lead nurture platform should dynamically link those to ensure attribution is passed through if the prospect switches to another communication channel (e.g., clicking on an email link to visit the website, calling or texting the number listed in the email).
Put another way, your lead nurture platform should ensure the source attribution sticks with the individual consumer, regardless of what channel they start engaging with, versus what channel they ultimately convert to a lead on.
Once you have a clear picture of how each of your lead sources is performing, deciding what lead source spending to stop, reduce or grow becomes much easier to define and defend.
The right [technology] partner must operate with a strong ‘technology wrapped in services’ approach, with the right tool to product instant results and push out recommendations, complementary analytics, and insight services to help dive deep into results for added value.
Pairing your lead analysis insights with personalized nurture
Reasonably, your lead analysis report can’t exist in a vacuum. To be effective, it relies on (and is made more powerful by) an integrated lead capture and nurture ecosystem.
Multifamily marketers we’ve worked with report that deep visibility into lead source performance has enabled them to double conversions while reducing their cost-per-lead by as much as 80% when paired with personalized lead nurture.
Common traits of marketers reporting these results include the following:
- As a starting point, they’ve installed the PERQ platform on their website and integrated it with their lead sources.
- Online visitors engage with interactive website experiences such as quizzes, floor plan match, neighborhood finder, and more, exchanging personal information (e.g., contact info, move-in timeline and preferences) for information about the community and options available to them.
- Those individual insights are used to personalize prospect experiences, messaging and lead nurture, “warming up” prospects without requiring agent contract.
- The platform sees the origin of every lead and maintains source data while across the renter’s journey, even as the prospect switches communication channels over time.
- Once a lead is agent-ready, the platform automatically passes the prospective renter card to the marketing CRM with the clean lead source information.
To summarize it further, they’ve set out to accomplish three things with the help of artificial intelligence:
- Compel prospects to reveal information about themselves through interactive website experiences.
- Use self-reported (first-party) insights to personalize nurture messaging and experiences at all stages of their renter’s journey.
- Automatically record all lead sources, behaviors and activities, translating that data into actionable intelligence for agents.
Back to our focus on lead source attribution and performance metrics, the offshoot is that your marketing team can easily identify what’s working (or isn’t) to convert leads, so you can make smarter decisions and more profitable marketing investments. From there, Forrester researchers recommend continuous testing and experimenting with new campaigns, strategies and ideas based on attributed results.
Once marketers receive attributed results, they must identify opportunities to test in channels or tactics that are driving conversions and make changes to those that aren’t. A testing approach will help them identify winning marketing programs and develop repeatable interactions to acquire and grow profitably.
In closing, PMCs that have the right tools to gain richer prospect insights and measure lead source performance will win out, Forrester concludes, “increasing engagement and relevance, and improving ROI.”
Improve lead conversions and ROI
When you’ve been operating in the dark, it can be tough to discern next steps. At the same time, you shouldn’t have to become a data expert to benefit from it. We’ll help you clarify your next best move.
Take PERQ for a test drive and see results for yourself when you sign up for a 90-Day Trial.