Every marketing team, budget, and company is built differently. The strengths and weaknesses of your marketing team, support (or lack thereof) from your executive team, and the services you offer are unique to your business value. Answer three quick questions below for a quick pulse-check on things (and as a reward, get a relevant video or webinar recommendation based on your answer). Let’s go!

Define Success With Data

No matter what result you got above, we’ll be blunt: how marketing “success” is defined in your company and the technologies used to define that success matter. We’re here to help you define that and share a few pointers about selecting the right MarTech vendor for your properties and community.

First things first, each time a customer interacts with your property via an online search, Google My Business, your website, calling your property, or filling out a website form, a data point is created. This data can be used to understand the unique challenges of your industry, to understand your customers, and then to alter and inform your marketing.

But, the volume of this data is frankly overwhelming, and too much for any one person, or team to make sense of and then adjust digital marketing tactics in a timely manner. What do we mean by overwhelming?

According to G5 Data, on average a researching renter in multifamily has around 35 touchpoints. In self storage, this number is around 15 and in senior living it’s around 14. If these numbers seem approachable, keep reading. What does this mean in quantity? On average, we observe between 20 to 50 events, or touchpoints, every second.

How much data do we have coming in for a single day? Get ready for three numbers that will blow your mind.

  • 1.5 million web events
  • 18,000 on-site interactions (such as tours)
  • 75,000 phone calls, emails, and form fills

These numbers are big, but data that’s left to sit in the cloud and isn’t implemented in a meaningful way isn’t valuable to you, or your marketing insights. We look to automation to make it valuable.

Data + Automation

There is SO MUCH DATA. Particularly now, as so many of our activities are funneled into an online space, data scientists need help from advanced machine learning to connect disparate actions taken by a researching prospect on your website to stitch them into a buyer’s journey. How do we do that? Simple, we use a customer data platform or CDP. (Read this blog for more information on how a CDP works.)

Once the CDP connects these data points into customer journeys, data scientists use algorithms to discover patterns in user journeys that end in conversion. Attribution algorithms give credit for how conversions — like a phone call to your property or community, or form fill on your website — are assigned to touchpoints in the online research journey. Attribution helps marketers understand which sources are driving leads by considering every touchpoint in the journey and looking for patterns.

Today’s buyers’ journeys are complex, and involve many touchpoints. Leads could come from an organic search, digital search ads, display ads, Google My Business listings, an ILS, or a social media post or ad. With so many online sources to track, attribution is valuable for understanding which sources – and more granularly, which media, content, keywords, etc. – are working the best for your audience. To leverage first-party data-backed marketing, automation is a NEED, not a want. The granularity, and scale of the data is simply a deluge. And, it can be used to fuel predictive, multi-touch attribution models. (P.S. If you want a 101 version of attribution models, read this blog before continuing.)

How You Measure Matters

How you measure attribution, and then report on marketing success matters. And with a heightened focus on data privacy, working with a MarTech provider who is already leveraging first party data to generate results will put you ahead of the competition. Learn more about the G5 approach to data-backed marketing, by downloading the Data + CDP report in the G5 MarTech Series.