How to Improve Your Marketing Strategy by Using Your On-Site Team

If you're all about the data in your multifamily marketing, you're on the right track, but you're still missing something integral to your community's success: feedback from your on-site team.

Research shows the U.S. multifamily industry is a $3 trillion industry that spends about $10 billion a year advertising hard costs alone.

You want to make every dollar count.

But your data only goes so far and still requires context to know what prospects are actually saying and doing.

Instead of spending countless hours and resources poring over data, use it in tandem with direct feedback from your on-site team.

The idea is to be direct and ask questions that you can use to shape your next marketing campaign.

Here’s where to get started.

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What Top Benefits Do Prospects Ask About?

Your sales, leasing, and on-site team members have deeper insights about what’s going on with your prospects than what your numbers say.

Quiz your team to find out what your leads are asking about:

👉 Do our prospects ask about paying online?

👉 Which amenities are people asking about the most?

👉 Do potential residents ask about the community’s safety features?

👉 Do our prospects want flexible lease terms?

👉 Do our leads ask about pool or on-site fitness hours?

👉 What have you noticed about the community’s leads and prospects that keep coming up over and over again?

You want your team to feel empowered to speak up confidently and contribute to the marketing process.

Create a culture of open communication where no idea is too trivial or complicated to consider.

(Source)

Tip💡: You’re probably marketing your pool too much. Ask your on-site team what prospects REALLY care about to make sure you’re focusing on the right things! (Hint: you might just find that prospects just care about the Costco that’s across the street)

What Objections Does Your Team Hear About the Most?

Perhaps more important than what potential residents are looking for is what their objections and concerns are.

Let’s start with the price.

It’s a common objection, but why?

Is it strictly the cost of the monthly rent or is there something your competitors are doing that your leads are looking for, such as:

✅ Waived application fees

✅ Move-in specials

✅ Longer lease terms that come with a cheaper price point

If your team isn’t sure where the objections are really coming from, create a system to collect more zero-party data feedback.

Instead of relying on outside, third-party data to shape your marketing campaigns, zero-party data comes directly from your leads and is more reliable and accurate to dig into.

Start by sending out surveys to your prospects with open-ended questions about what they liked about the community, didn’t like, and any objections or complaints.

You can entice more answers by offering the chance to win a gift card for their response.

Tip💡: Beyond incorporating their feedback into your marketing, you can run with their ideas and fix any obvious problems going on in your community that made them do a 180 and walk the other way.

What Does Your Team Hear from the Residents?

At the end of the day, your on-site team members aren’t the ones living in your community.

Your team is approaching the community as a job and isn’t going to see the nuances of everyday living.

Ask your on-site team what they’re hearing directly from your residents.

What are their complaints and objections?

Next, go right to the source by asking your current residents what they think about your community.

Bonus points if your former residents will also share what they thought about your community.

Send a survey and raffle away a gift card in exchange for feedback.

Ask everyone what they like, don’t like, and what they would improve about the community.

Tip💡: You also want to know what residents would tell a friend about your community to entice them to live there, too.

Research shows that referred friends are four times more likely to rent an apartment when referred by a friend. And once a referral becomes a paying resident, they can refer friends too.

(Source)

The information you get back is a treasure trove of info for your marketing as well as your resident retention strategy.

The more you can drill down to the essence of what potential residents want, the more you can close the loop with your data points and shape your marketing accordingly.

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