If you missed it, you don’t need to miss out. Our Marketing Solutions team at RealPage, combining G5 and LeaseLabs, came together to talk about all things right and left brain during this year’s RealWorld 2022: The Pursuit of Excellence at the Wynn in Las Vegas. That’s right. We introduced this audience to The Invisible Period, got techy and nerdy about Predictive Analytics, then showed our flair for brand in a Brand Workshop, which dived into Google Business Profile (GBP). Let’s get started! 

The Invisible Period

Renters in multifamily are spending about three weeks researching before they ever pick up the phone and call an apartment community. We call this “The Invisible Period” and our goal is to help make the invisible, visible so marketers can take back control. During these three invisible weeks, renters are engaging with various online channels including digital advertising, search, GBP, various review sites, and of course, property websites.

We know this because we’ve spent years stitching together data across all these channels to the tune of 325 million renter journeys. That’s a lot of data (!) and a lot of people looking for apartments. (Learn more about this technology below in Predictive Analytics.)

What About Senior Living?

For seniors and their families, The Invisible Period is even longer at 4-5 weeks! We know that the adult child often making this decision is doing it for the first time and frankly, it’s complicated. This means that they are going it “alone” for a very long time before they reach out for help over the phone. We looked in our data and found that over the past two years this research window has increased by about 18%. That means people are researching even longer alone, making it even more important that you show up consistently across online channels to help them get a true view of who you are.

Predictive Analytics for Marketers

Let’s start with the why. Marketers need predictive analytics because in today’s world, their customers, aka renters, are getting all their information online and are hyper informed. But at the end of the day, marketers really need to know where to spend their next dollar.

In the past, marketers turned to attribution, which too often gave credit to renters’ last touch for that lead or lease signed. Maybe it was a search ad. Maybe it was your website. Marketers used some type of multi-touch attribution from linear, to time decay, to various others. But all of this is simply telling the marketer what happened in the past. It doesn’t really tell them what’s going to happen next. In other words, it doesn’t “predict.”

This is where G5+LL technology and data science comes in.

Collect and Connect Data

  • The Customer Data Platform, or CDP, which we’ve built over many years, stitches together prospect journeys with both online and offline information, then layers data science models on top of it.

Convert Data Into Meaning

  • Next, Call Scoring, which uses AI to understand the caller’s intent with real-time feedback.
  • Then, AI-based attribution, which uses “Markov statistical models (utilizing the removal effect)” on the lift of each marketing channel and the context of where those channels are in the prospect journey.

Capitalize on Data Insights

  • Lastly, the Lead Model, which uses data science to apply a score to each researcher, applies scenarios, then predicts what happens next so we can drive the prospect to the next highest value step.

Viola. Our Marketing Optimization Platform.

When Brand Is Reduced to the Parts, Not the Sum

You know the saying. “The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” When we’re talking about your brand, this is true! When your brand is experienced from the tactical side of colors and font, and then from the human side of your brand promise, your brand should show you off end-to-end. But the reality is that your prospects are getting just pieces of your brand across the many online steps they take when researching for a new apartment or community. That means you need to think more granularly about your brand and get honest with yourself about how your brand “shows up” when distilled to stark characters in black and white like in a search result or an ad.

At the most basic level, brand includes the tactical (colors, logo, font), the experience (how people experience your brand like engaging with your team while on an apartment tour), and the messaging which bridges tactical to experience with the messages that convey your unique value. Brand has an important job while your prospects are researching during The Invisible Period. That job is to help create memory. Each time your audience engages pieces and parts of your brand, there is the chance to build memory through repetition and consistency. As a brand steward, few places afford you the luxury of owning a full brand experience so you must take care of the many places where just parts of your brand are on display.

Our data shows that GBP is where many interested prospects turn to and call from (thanks to our AI-driven call scoring technology). So really, how good is your brand when you think of the actual prospect searching on Google then engaging with this most important Google Business Profile (fka Google My Business). We suggest you audit your GBP for the following:

  • Show Up – Get the basics right, everything from your legal name to your precise US Postal office address. Being accurate here makes it easy for prospects to call and find your business.
  • Show Off – Being able to showcase your brand on GBP is very limited so make sure to show off, when you can, in anything visual including your photos and floor plans. Pay close attention to where your brand can really shine and make it count.
  • Show Empathy – Your brand isn’t just the colors and logo, but as we all know, it is how customers experience it on the human level. GBP includes two areas where this matters: Q&A and Reviews. Make sure you get alerts so nothing goes stale and be sure to respond to everyone, including positive, negative, and neutral reviews. It matters.

Bottom Line

Today’s marketers want visibility and control. Want to learn more? Schedule a demo.