Lead Source Management: Evaluating Every Source in the Customer’s Path to Optimize Advertising Spend

By evaluating every lead source, you can gather new insights into a renter’s path, from their actions online to visiting your property. With more accurate data from multi-touch lead attribution, you’ll have a better understanding of how a renter researches apartments and condos, so your multifamily properties can make smarter marketing decisions. The Franklin Johnston Group based in Virginia Beach, Virginia, strongly believes in following multi-touch lead attribution. The multifamily property management group tracks multiple lead sources on all guest cards using the multifamily CRM system from Anyone Home.

“We just recently implemented chatbot services in Facebook Messenger. Once a person goes on Messenger to chat with us and submits their contact information, we can go right into our CRM and are able to see the primary source, how they got there and where they ended,” says Christopher Beckwith-Taylor, vice president of marketing at The Franklin Johnston Group. “We can see they’re not just utilizing one source to research and contact companies,” he says. “They’re using multiple sources.”

Leveraging Your CRM to Optimize Advertising Spend

Todd Katler, CEO of Anyone Home, says his multifamily property software shows every inbound and outbound touchpoint that ever happened with a prospect so companies can really understand a renter’s journey. “A really good CRM will illuminate the path,” Katler says. “It will show you all of the ways a prospect is communicating, not just with one of your properties, but across all of the properties.”

Katler’s qualifications for a good CRM include focusing on tracking prospects instead of individual properties and evaluating both sales and marketing activities. “Most of the lead management platforms in our industry only look at sales activities,” he says. “No other industry does that.”

He spends time with clients looking at the data to figure out how to optimize spending on advertising. While he says switching from a first-in to a multi-touch lead attribution model rarely influences a major change in marketing budgets, it does help companies evaluate the effectiveness of marketing efforts, like comparing PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns and deciding if a premium internet listing package is more profitable than a cheaper basic package. “Our clients, on average, cut 15 to 20 percent of inefficient ad spend because they’re capturing the true value of a lead,” Katler says.