While property marketing has never been simple, it has grown even more challenging over the last ten years. Marketing teams are responsible for managing more channels than ever, spanning from social media apps to individual property websites to ILS platforms, which can make simple tasks like updating pricing and availability tricky. Driving the right leads through the leasing funnel through prompt follow-ups has been made more difficult by the huge volume of unqualified leads all these channels attract. Measuring marketing impact in a data-driven climate without clear attribution metrics can be a mess. Additionally, renter expectations are also higher than ever, which increases the pressure marketing teams feel to deliver differentiated leasing experiences.
There’s a light at the end of the tunnel for the modern marketer, however—the continued development of artificial intelligence (AI) tools and automation-focused platforms designed specifically for the property management industry. Conversational AI solutions offer new ways of addressing contemporary marketing challenges while providing new insights into consumer trends and needs that will shape the property marketing campaigns of the future. Today, we’ll examine the gaps in the existing property marketing workflow, identify areas for AI-driven improvement, and showcase how marketing leaders are effectively deploying AI and automation to improve their leasing performance and management.
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The Current Landscape of Property Marketing
Aggregating numerical results and making ROI calculations is a key part of measuring marketing performance, but the unfortunate reality is most property marketing efforts hinge on inaccurate and messy data. Marketing teams are forced into a quality/quantity binary when evaluating campaign performance, either measuring the overall volume of leads generated by a campaign or the lead-to-lease conversion rates of an individual campaign. Whichever metric marketing teams use, they still fail to account for one thing: the effectiveness of lead management efforts. Leads falling out of the leasing funnel aren’t captured by overall lead generation measurements, and the wide variety of factors that weigh on conversion rates make measuring the empirical impact of lead management challenging.
Marketing teams traditionally attempt to get ahead of lead leakage with standardized follow-up policies, but these playbooks haven’t kept up with changing consumer expectations around response times and hours of availability. Anyone who has worked onsite at a leasing office knows that, in practice, a lead that comes through at 3pm on a Tuesday is handled much differently than one that comes through at 8pm on a Saturday. The same principle applies for leads from different channels, as a lead that comes in via phone call will inevitably be handled differently than a website-submitted guest card due to the multifamily industry’s continued challenge with phone call answer rates (as our mystery shopping data shows).
Fortunately, marketers trying to analyze the quality of their leads have a new tool in their toolbox in the form of conversational AI. With conversational AI managing follow-up efforts, marketers can empirically evaluate the value of their leads without the variability of traditional lead management efforts impacting leasing performance.
How Leading Operators Are Leveraging AI-Powered Lead Management and Conversion
Utilizing conversational AI to handle leads introduces consistency into the lead management workflow. AI ensures all leads receive immediate, high quality responses that address their specific questions, regardless of when the lead comes in or what channel it came through. EliseAI’s conversational AI solutions can communicate with prospects across email, text message, webchat, and voice calling, efficiently handling leads across channels while reducing reliance on expensive third-party call centers. So what does the impact of conversational AI look like for marketing teams?
Operators using EliseAI regularly see an improvement in their lead conversions rates across tours, applications, and leases as a result of improved lead management efforts & significantly reduced lead leakage. One key driver of this strong performance is that the AI talks like their best agent, incorporating learnings and knowledge from past interactions into personalized follow-ups that keep prospects engaged. This improved performance over time is a strong tool to combat the high turnover rates we’ve seen in leasing offices across the country.
For Casey Petersen, COO of PeakMade Real Estate, the impact of AI on their marketing performance and spend has been crystal clear. Peakmade “saw a 20% increase in [their] lead capture… with a flat marketing spend,” enabling them to spend “the same number of dollars and generate 20% more leads.” In addition, implementing AI for lead management has driven a “5% improvement in [Peakmade’s] lead-to-lease conversion rate,” proving that real-time, standardized follow-ups drive substantially better leasing performance.
Courtney Bastian, Sr. Director of Marketing at Dayrise Residential, emphasized to us that “consistency is essential to effective lead management,” and that leveraging EliseAI’s products has enabled Dayrise to “identify [their] top-performing lead sources and expose inefficient marketing contracts.” For the Dayrise Residential team, having AI nurture their leads has given them “greater certainty in making marketing decisions" when it comes to allocating budget and prioritizing effective contracts. Removing erratic follow-up cadences from their leasing workflows and replacing them with consistent AI reachouts has empowered Courtney and team to make better decisions, utilize budget more efficiently, and drive better financial results across the Dayrise portfolio.
But, as the best marketers know, marketing doesn’t stop when a lease is signed. Marketing continues even once prospects become residents.
Enhancing Resident Engagement Through Automation
Conventional business thinking holds that it’s exponentially more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to keep an existing one, and that approach is just as true for property management as it is for any other industry. Fortunately, conversational AI can have just as outsized an impact on resident engagement as it does on leasing performance and lead management.
We’ve seen operators have success leveraging AI for resident services in order to ensure timely, accurate responses to residents about their day-to-day needs. Rather than take a reactive approach to resident needs, as most onsite teams today do due to the high volume, low value nature of work on their plates, AI enables property management teams to take a proactive approach to the resident experience through automated outreach. This isn’t an earth-shattering development—the hospitality industry has been proactively messaging guests after check-in to connect them with a hotel’s team or head-off any concerns—but the multifamily industry has failed to keep pace as a result of system-based limitations on communication channels. Automation platforms like EliseCRM can automate these conversations and touchpoints, improving the resident experience without the need for added payroll or tools.
The continued development of AI-powered workflows will give marketers more insights to drive their marketing strategies and budgets, both in regards to attracting new residents and retaining old ones. Insights like EliseAI’s “Likeliness to Renew” functionality takes into account past resident behaviors, conversations, and in-home issues that give marketers added insights into community-specific needs at scale, without having to rely on anecdotal insights from every onsite team. With conversational AI handling outreach and communications at scale, marketers have the data points they need to effectively position their communities from a branding and marketing perspective. The ability to gather actionable, valuable insights with AI also enables a whole new model of property marketing—Centralized Marketing.
Centralized Marketing 2.0
As more operators turn to centralized leasing models, the role of marketing will continue to evolve. Increased focus on performance optimization and data driven decision-making at scale adds new complexities to the responsibilities of marketing professionals, forcing them to adapt to keep pace with a new way of doing business. In order to standardize their workflows and efficiently support multiple assets at once, marketers on centralized teams are going to need to use new technology, like AI, to keep up.
AI allows these regional marketing team members to work more effectively at scale by automating their lead management, rather than requiring them to coordinate with operations and training to ensure leasing policies and procedures are followed at every community. With AI, regional marketers are now better positioned to pursue asset-specific marketing strategies without concern that their efforts will fall flat as a result of inaction by onsite teams. Multifamily marketers can continue to add additional value within their organizations through their front lines experience managing customer conversations and measuring leasing performance with AI clearing their lead dashboards on a daily basis and generating comprehensive reports on every resident’s likelihood to renew.
The Future of Property Marketing
So, what does the future of property marketing hold with AI? We see three major trends emerging: personalization at scale, AI-driven content creation, and increased usage of predictive analytics. In terms of personalization at scale, AI will enable property marketers to ensure timely, personalized management of conversations with both prospects and residents, while aggregating additional insights on audiences and behaviors to further refine marketing campaigns. For AI-driven content creation, marketers will continue leveraging AI tools to help them create community-specific content for internal and external use. Finally, AI will continue to provide marketers with even more actionable data to draw upon when determining budget allocation and assessing the effectiveness of varying lead sources, while leveraging AI to help sort through all of these new data points.
Improving Your Property Marketing with AI and Automation
While AI is having a transformative impact on all aspects of the property management industry, there’s an argument to be made that no team is feeling the impacts of AI as acutely as marketing. Marketers can have more confidence than ever that their leads are being managed effectively, allowing them to make data-driven decisions and take on strategic marketing initiatives without fear of communication breakdowns negatively impacting their leasing velocity. Want to learn more about how AI can help you improve lead-to-lease conversion rates and improve resident experiences at your communities? Get in touch with us to learn more.