Why Your CRM is Wrong About Your Top Marketing Sources (and What To Do About It)

Have you ever run an attribution report where every lead comes back as “Property Website?”

We feel your pain.

A CRM, or Customer Relationship Management tool, is supposed to be an invaluable asset for your community and marketing efforts.

It empowers you to efficiently organize leads based on criteria like the type of property someone is looking for or their budget. Now you can aggregate a score to see which data points rank highest to lowest.

Sounds great, right??

The problem is that you end up with only a small fraction of the most vital information.

Truth 💣: CRMs are not reliable when it comes to tracking the top half of your marketing funnel. Your CRM failed to track the entire journey from start to finish–before they submitted their info to a community!

Here's an example:

A resident drives by your community
Scours the online reviews
Does an online search for the community name and click on the Google Business Profile
Browses your profile
Clicks on the map to see exactly how close your community is to their job
Calls your property to schedule a tour

Your CRM will miss the entire journey of driving by your community and will instead attribute the lead to Google My Business (GMB) and maps. Your data is incomplete and lacks crucial clues for how to approach your marketing strategy.

Why Last Click Attribution Is Hurting Your Business

Here's the truth: Despite all the bells and whistles of CRMs, they can only do so much and will report the last click attribution.

You already know that last-click attribution isn't as valuable as the beginning of the resident's journey because most properties want to know,

"How did these prospects hear about us?"

You don't need to know, "What was the last source you visited before sending us your info?"

Tip💡 💣 : You could make an argument for using Last Click Contribution to your advantage. If you're focused on ads but notice the majority of your last click attribution is coming from Google My Business, you can adjust your time and ad spend accordingly.

Find Out What Sources Are Working in the Resident's Journey

The question is: How do you figure out what lead sources are actually working in the journey from first discovering your community to converting to a resident?

The good news is you can drill down to the answer pretty quickly.

Change one thing at a time and stay in close contact with your on-site team to gather feedback.

Here are a few areas to consider changing:

Google Ads (including Map ads)
Google My Profile FAQs
Responding to online reviews
Geofencing targets
Social media campaign

If you don't see much traction changing one thing at a time, try two at once and monitor the progress.

Execute a True Attribution for Your Lead Generation Strategy

What if your results are mixed, and there just isn’t a clear winner to your lead generation source?

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Uncover the true attribution for prospective residents by asking them directly.

Ask each and every prospect, "How did you hear about us?" and see what they say. Make sure your leasing agents and everyone on your team are doing the same thing.

But it's not enough to ask and squirrel away the information to review later. Create a system to record the data, so it's instantly shared with you and the rest of your team.

When that latest and greatest data is readily available, you can make quick decisions about where to allocate your ad dollars or where to scale back.

Tip💡: Avoid adding a drop-down option at all costs, or it will skew the results. Instead, keep it open-ended to determine the top responses. Most people will select the first few choices.

How to Make the Most of Your CRM?

We've established that CRMs aren't necessarily the end-all, be-all in multifamily marketing. But just because CRMs aren't failproof and don’t drill down to your lead generation source, they're still valuable.

After all, CRMs help you organize your leads, stay in touch, and collect robust data along the way. They're also invaluable at quickly parsing multiple data points to find patterns.

Just don't rely on CRMs to tell you how prospective residents found you. Here’s what to do insead:

Supercharge your marketing by creating a powerful dream team of true attribution and CRM data in one place.

Once you figure out where prospective residents are coming from, take the time to enter it directly into your CRM. Next, pay attention to how connections develop between your data.

For example, you may find the people who drive by on their way home from work all fit a similar income demographic.

Truth 💣: There may be some headaches with your CRM, but the shortcomings are also opportunity gems. Now you can refine your data and make it more reliable and robust than ever before.

What was your biggest takeaway from this article? Let us know in the comments!