5 Multifamily Marketing Tactics You Should AIM For

May brings with it the traditional sojourn of all multi-marketers to the Apartment Internet Marketing (AIM) conference. This year’s agenda looks particularly interesting with topics ranging from practical marketing techniques to the impact artificial intelligence (AI) may have (hint: it’s not as futuristic as you might think).

This got me thinking about my perception of the way marketing is viewed in multifamily housing C-suites as part of the demand management platform. Marketing definitely has more attention from C-suite executives than it did 15 years ago. One could even have some fun debating whether AIM helped cause that, or was in itself a consequence of executives caring more? For the record, I believe the former. So kudos to Mike Mueller for founding the conference and to Steve Lefkovits for keeping it alive and vibrant.

However, despite that increased attention, I continue to be amazed at how many basic “blocking and tackling” things are not being done at many (most?) apartment operators. Here’s just a few:

• Email re-marketing. I’ve written about this before, but things have not changed much since then. Most operators do not have a programmed email drip campaign. You’ve spent hundreds of dollars to get the lead, so why not spend a few pennies to keep working the lead?
  
  
• A/B testing on website landing pages. A/B testing is the act of running simultaneous experiment between two or more pages to see which performs or converts the best. This is a bit more complicated, but most website providers have built in testing capabilities. The topic of A/B testing comes up whenever sophisticated marketers discuss websites. I don’t have any data on how many operators are doing regular A/B testing. Call me a cynic, but I’m guessing it’s not many. The only important question is whether your marketing team is doing this!
  
  
• Understand your cost per lead. Most companies don’t have the business intelligence platforms to do this well. They end up relying on vendor reports which, even if accurate, use different measurement methodologies and thus cannot be compared against each other accurately. It’s not easy to get this right, but given the investment in marketing spend, isn’t it worth it?
  
  
• Reputation management. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t say they have a reputation management program today. My question focuses on how sophisticated and complete most of those programs are. There are many tools out there, several designed specifically for multifamily housing, and they’re typically quite inexpensive. So ask yourself, “When was the last time I saw a sentiment analysis?” and “How do we compare to our direct comps?” as well as “Do we really have a process for our teams to respond to each comment or just say we do?”
  
  
• CRM systems. I haven’t met anyone using legacy systems who is satisfied with their CRM, both from a workflow and a data capture perspective. There are, in my opinion, at least three credible, contemporary CRM built explicitly for multifamily housing: LeaseHawk, Showpro (by AnyoneHome) and ILM (by Rainmaker). If you haven’t looked at these, I think you should. [Disclosure: I’ve had or still have some form of business relationship with all three, though I get no direct benefit from any of them based on their sales]

D2DS will be well-represented at AIM this year. Joanne Chapman-Reps will moderate a panel on creating a world-class sales organization. One of the panelists, Jason Whittington from the Gene B. Glick Company, is a client and subject of our case study on their success with our InSite Sales Performance Improvement^TM system.

I’ll be moderating a discussion with Yelp’s Vice President of Industry Marketing about the lessons Yelp has learned about prospect and operator behavior. Yelp has collected mounds of data (that’s a technical BI term) and I’m looking forward to what he will be teaching us. It’s always interesting to have a mirror held up to ourselves!

So here’s to another successful AIM, and I hope each of you takes just a few extra minutes to think about how important these marketing elements are to your demand management activities. With continued low cap rates, each incremental dollar of revenue is worth $15-20 of enterprise value. That’s why it’s even more important to optimize your demand management platform.