It’s no secret, multifamily marketers are strapped for time and resources.

Too many questions. Not enough hours in the day.

How do I know my marketing IS performing? Which digital marketing channels are actually the most effective for our market size? How do I know they’re effective? Am I actually optimizing our advertising spend — or am I just adding spend?!

These are the questions that keep them up at night, the questions that they need to answer for their CEOs (and for themselves). 

Answer Questions With Data

Instead of handing out magic wands (although that would be nice…), we dug into G5 data, from June 2020 to June 2021 to find answers. G5 data scientists examined user journey patterns with our Lead Model to determine which channels produced the most leads, and if the differences in channels proved to be statistically significant. Spoiler alert: they did. 

Just in case you glossed over this, the Lead Model is incredibly powerful. By analyzing millions of user journeys, the Lead Model predicts a user’s likelihood to become a lead. At the same time, it quantifies the impact of each touchpoint along those user journeys. What does this mean? It means we can identify the channels that truly drive the highest quality leads to your property.

The Process

For this study, G5 data scientists examined a data set that included thousands of user journeys from all digital marketing channels: Google, Facebook, large Internet Listing Sites (ILSs), Zillow, Apartments.com, Google My Business, organic traffic, and direct website traffic. Below are some stats about the datapool. 

As a refresher, this webinar and associated blog, share context to how our advanced digital advertising technology leverages data to optimize our clients’ digital marketing. 

The Results

G5 data scientists don’t share half-baked numbers, (especially not with a bunch of marketers that are going to blast it on the internets  — hi, us). They checked that their findings were statistically significant, which is one way of saying that they verified mathematically if their findings were trustworthy and significant. They were. 

The graphic below illustrates the marketing channel golden rules that hold true regardless of market size.

Basically, don’t spread your budget across all marketing channels like peanut butter hoping for something to stick. Instead, first and foremost, double down on Google. Once you’ve tackled that, if you have time and budget, optimize for large ILSs. 

Meet Our Dynamic Duos: Digital Marketing Channel Cheat Sheet by Population Size

Need population-size specific data. Check out our multifamily marketer’s guide to learn more.