How Smart Property Managers Use Marketing & Sales Data

This guest post was written by Aaron Ramos — Director of Content at Knock Data is the new oil. And like oil, data needs to be drilled and refined before it can be useful. Often times, the multifamily industry manages leasing through many platforms, all of which collect and store data in different ways. This results in the continued reliance of data originating from legacy software which is often fragmented, inaccurate, and worst of all — confusing. Below, the Multifamily CRM experts at Knock explain the importance of using both sales and marketing data to generate actionable insights that improve portfolio performance. It seems that there is an almost infinite number of sales and marketing data points that can be gathered in the multifamily leasing pipeline, but it is essential to identify which are important to monitor and which are merely noise. Unfortunately, many property management companies (PMCs) cannot easily identify the difference with scattered data and complicated tools, and end up losing revenue due to inaccurate reporting and unrealized efficiencies. You Need to be Able to Track Key Metrics With social marketing tools like SOCi that track performance, and a CRM that evaluates sales pipeline data, management can quickly adjust marketing strategies in real-time and have full transparency into leasing pipeline performance. When examining lead sources, look at volume and Cost-Per-Lead. When examining social ad spend, look at Website Conversions and Cost-Per-Click. When analyzing reputation management, look at your monthly star-rating improvements and your response times. Accurate Lead Source Attribution and Behavior Data The multifamily sales cycle is complex, long, and with more touchpoints coming online daily, it is critical that property managers can trust the data. Manual data entry is never 100% accurate and leaves too much room for human error. Creating an accurate picture of lead behavior and historical interactions is next to impossible without a CRM to automate and organize inbound interest. Once your lead source metrics are all in one place, you can then see a snapshot of your entire pipeline with sources ranked against each other — but those numbers mean nothing if not compared against budget spend and financial benchmarks. Measure Marketing Efficiency Accurately tracking lead volume is only one piece of the data consolidation equation. With volume metrics flowing freely into your CRM, you can then easily generate a multitude of reports which will determine the efficiency of your marketing spend — Cost-per-Lead being a popular KPI. With real-time lead metrics and a social management tool like SOCi that tracks social ad spend and performance, property managers can now pivot spend strategies on a weekly basis as opposed to once a month or once a quarter. Real-time metrics become invaluable when understanding how to balance your paid and organic social campaigns. Facebook continues to be a critical lead gen channel for multifamily, with organic and paid social campaigns drumming up interest on a large scale. With proper tools, you can accurately track Lead Ad campaigns and compare performance against other lead gen channels. With social media marketing bringing in steady leads on an optimized budget, the job to convert leases now lies on leasing teams and sales insights. Measure Leasing Team Efficiency Meaningful interactions and persistent follow-ups are all additional data points which can be monitored and used to improve internal sales processes. With a CRM, all incoming communications are automatically organized, assigned, and data points are collected instantly. Management and owners are able to easily track user activity and proactively address any underperforming team members and finally enforce operational guidelines and metrics. Follow-up frequency has proven to be a reliable KPI that separates successful leasing teams from the rest. Insights-Driven Property Managers Will Win That brings us to the most important point of consolidating data — interpreting it. Having “data” for data’s sake isn’t the best strategy, just like reading books in a language you don’t know offers no new knowledge. A thorough CRM should be able to aggregate critical data and display it in ways that are easily consumable and which offer deeper insights than just numbers. As you can see, data truly is the new oil and multifamily is sitting on a nearly infinite supply of information that comes from marketing leads, social media and reviews. Collecting that data is only the first step in the “refining” process, it is in the consolidation and interpretation where crude data is turned into actionable insights that allow property managers to adjust spend and operational processes in real-time — always staying one step ahead of the renter and the competition.