Dear Tinkering, 

It’s not you. It’s us. We’re tired. Every day, you’re constantly fiddling with teensy little changes…and, not to be a drag, but we have big, BIG, things to do for you, and your mixed signals are confusing us.

Love, 

Automation

Okay, maybe that was a little dramatic, but you get the point. As humans, and as marketers, we la-la-love to tweak things to make them that much better. Raise your hand if you’ve done it. We know we have. The truth is, to cut your teeth as a marketer, you tend to be a self-starter, with attention to detail. So it makes sense that you want to make the best, better. 

When you’re working with a best-in-class marketing provider, wondering if your marketing is “good enough” shouldn’t keep you up at night. Keep reading to learn how tech advancements like digital advertising automation should ease this “good enough” anxiety, and take your digital advertising to the next level.

Consumers Swipe Right on Tech Adoption

If there’s anything we’ve learned through the COVID-rollercoaster it’s this: tech adoption is a one-way street. Think about it, why not pick up the items you need curbside, and skip the hassle? Why not order online to be mailed to your doorstep, if you’re working from home anyway? Why not watch the best shows, listen to the best pods, and buy the best stuff, through algorithm-curated Netflix binges, podcast downloads, or Amazon deliveries? 

Your customers receive tailored recommendations based on their online behavior for everything…literally everything ranging from new shoes (Allbirds, I see you), to an electric toothbrush, to subscription boxes based on your interests. If you can buy a car in four clicks, you better believe consumers expect best-in-class digital experiences when renting an apartment, leasing a storage unit, and researching a senior living community for a loved one. 

Tech Adoption, Meet Digital Advertising

Like we said above, tech adoption, including AI-based advanced technology is the way of the future. Let’s focus on AI-based digital advertising technology related to multifamily, self storage, and senior living marketing. 

This story starts with the advent of the internet, but let’s fast forward just a little bit to make this less of a long story long. Enter, 2018 when Google launched responsive ads. In case you need a quick refresher, responsive ads are actually Google’s most flexible search ad format. Unlike more traditional search ads, where a digital advertising strategist might write a headline and description as a pair, responsive ads can be written with multiple headlines, descriptions, images, logos, and videos. See the graphic below for a visual reference. 

This allows for many, many, many different combinations of headlines and descriptions. From there, Google uses machine learning and automation to test and come up with the highest performing combination of headlines and ad descriptions, the ones everyone clicks! Then, Google serves the right message to the right searcher depending on the keywords they searched for, their device, past browsing history, and other factors. But working with a best-in-class MarTech provider means you get something even more streamlined, right? Right. 

Dear Automation, Meet Marketing

It’s an understatement to say that tech has transformed marketing, but we know it transformed everything from grocery shopping to ordering takeout, so I guess we shouldn’t be too surprised. 

Here’s the thing, marketers who work with a best-in-class, open platform technology partner, have the ability to use rich first-party data to predict which user journeys will end in a phone call, tour request, or lease signing. Instead of answering the same questions over and over, or spending time in the weeds, your team will be engaging with qualified, interested, decision-ready prospects. Sound too good to be true? It isn’t. 

So, like we talked about above with responsive ads, Google’s automation figures out the best headline and description combinations. At G5, we took this one step further. G5 Intent Trends’ automation allocates your advertising spend to the highest performing campaigns, daily. Translation: your advertising budget is optimized, and Google ensures your digital ad content is, too. 

Rest assured, when first-party data is leveraged to understand customer behavior inside and out in order to optimize digital advertising, you’ve got a winning strategy in front of you. Digital advertising backed by advanced machine learning ensures that your digital advertising connects with the right prospects, at the right time — not through chance, or by a hunch — but through modeled, tested, statistically significant evidence.

Dear Marketers, Meet Your New MVP, Automation

Listen, we know most of you are super-human, juggling deadlines, tasks, communication priorities, and complex individual lives. We mean this in the nicest way, at the end of the day, even the BEST marketers are human — you need sick days, you aren’t always on your A-game, and you have personal biases — just like the rest of us. To be blunt, no one can possibly comb through the vast quantity of data that powers modern marketing, to determine the best campaigns to spend digital marketing dollars on, no matter how talented. 

When marketers allow tech to take the wheel and use advanced technology to guide digital marketing spend down to the campaign level, you get to zoom out a bit and focus on big picture strategy to create a better renter and resident experience every step of the way. Most of the marketers we know have to-do lists a mile long. Bottom line, time is the most limited and valuable currency we all have. If your time doesn’t have to be devoted to minutiae, think of what else you’d have time for… like, working one-on-one with staff to train, onboard, and reward excellent performance. Who doesn’t need a few extra minutes (or hours) back in their week? 

Mixed Signals

Okay, this sounds like the marketing dream team — so what gets in the way of turning this fairy tale into a Save the Date? Even as complex as automation and technology are, at the base level, they too reject confusing or mixed signals. We’ve all tried to choose a lunch spot with someone who says “I don’t care,” only to suggest 15 local eateries, and find out they really do care, but they won’t let you know in a clear way what they actually want. Frustrating. 

We promise this applies to digital advertising. When automation tries to learn which campaigns are the highest performing, it helps if your strategies are well thought out. Work with a best-in-class marketing partner who specializes in your industry. Why? So you can trust that they’ve tested and curated strategies that perform for your business and aren’t “learning the basics on your dime.” Then, get the most out of the partnership by sharing specifics about each property or community, including the locally-known neighborhood name, features and amenities, so they can tailor your ads specifically for your properties and communities.

Next, let the technology run real tests, in the digital marketing wild, on large data sets. Over time, this will refine your digital advertising to a level that only a machine, and automation, is capable of achieving. Remember your MarTech partner’s industry-specific strategies that we talked about? Know that those aren’t set-and-forget. Through automation, your MarTech partner will continue to iterate on these strategies as markets and industries change — meaning your marketing won’t stagnate. 

Here’s the catch though, this works if, and only if, we let the machines do their thing for uninterrupted periods of time. To be clear, constant manual changes to your digital advertising sends mixed signals, and slows the entire process down. Which we know, isn’t what you want. 

Happily Ever After

Want to learn more about data and digital advertising? Watch this webinar to see them ride off into the sunset together.