Multi Housing News August 2012 : Page 34
marketing Keeping Tabs Managing and tracking multiple marketing channels By Philip Shea, Associate Editor hile many industries adopt a va-riety of methods for tracking the effectiveness of certain market-ing channels, multifamily is moving toward an all-in-one approach that could become a standard bearer for the acquisition and maintenance of prospective leads, or “lead management.” Whether it’s online advertising, print advertising, signage, social media or event sponsorship, having a way to both manage and track all such channels rep-resents a huge advantage in terms of budgeting and maintaining revenue. “It’s very important to have a single plat-form so that your lead management as well as your marketing management fl ows,” says Eric Broughton, president and COO of RentSentinel, a lead management ser-vice that assists and tracks multiple mar-keting channels. “When a person calls in to the property and they’re asking about availability for a unit, they’re able to see availability and it’s the same as they’ve seen in the marketing message they just looked at. So you have that single source of truth for your marketing information, and we’ve become that context syndica-tion tool.” Israel Carunungan, director of property marketing at Greystar, agrees. “We have a lead management system in place, and via [this], we’re able to have a very strong lead attribution system—meaning we can, with 100 percent accuracy, see where our leads are coming from,” explains Carunungan. “We want to make sure we’re advertising in W our best-performing ad sources, and having a lead management program allows us to be more scientifi c.” The best channels In terms of which channels are most fi t for a single-platform solution, Broughton states that his service strives for an all-in-clusive approach, with a special emphasis on those that are Internet-based. “I believe we’re looking at support-ing all marketing channels… that are rel-evant, that are effi cient and effective for the property management organization— everything from Craigslist to [Apple] iOS to, now, social media channels as well,” he adds. Broughton goes on to describe the lev-els of focus RentSentinel ascribes to cer-tain channels, giving an indication of the effectiveness of each one. “So you have your primary marketing channels, which would be Craigslist and ILS. Then you’ll have your secondary, which I would say would be social media. You also have your tertiary, and that would be tracking items such as banners [or] even tracking walk-ins. So we look at three levels of focus.” Kim Atkinson, director of marketing and public relations at Mark-Taylor Residen-tial, indicates why such a high premium is being placed on Internet-based marketing channels at her company. “Far and away, our number one lead source is our company website,” says Atkinson. “It is responsible for half of all emails, walk-ins and phone calls to our communities in all markets. Search en-gines, ILS, promotional signage and resi-dent referrals split the remaining half.” Carunungan agrees that the Internet and technology-based marketing channels are taking the lead and states that his compa-ny’s lead management system is primarily what alerted them to this. “We’ve seen a clear migration of people going from primarily print-driven ad sources to online ad sources, and we’ve seen that shift very clearly,” says Carunungan. “I’ve seen that paradigm shift from print-driven ad sources to online sources through that [lead management single-platform] meth-od, because when you chart it you can see the decline of how many leads and leases 34 August 2012 | Multi-Housing News
Marketing: Analytics
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