The Apartment Marketing Funnel and Renters Journey

Host:

What's up everybody? And welcome back to another episode of Loop It In, the DoorLoop podcast, where we pick the brains of experts in property management, real estate, and investing. Tech, we cover it. Marketing, that too. So whether you want actionable tips or the insider scoop from top performers in their industries, this is one show you won't want to miss. Be sure to subscribe so you won't miss out on any future episode.

Muhammed:

All right, hello everyone, and welcome back to the Loop it In podcast. Today I'm joined with Eden Chai, and we're going to talk about the apartment marketing funnel and the renters journey. Now, Eden, I would like you to introduce yourself for anyone who doesn't know you, so we can get a better idea of who you are and what you've been up to.

Eden:

Yeah, for sure. Thanks for having me, Mo. Really excited for the conversation today. It's a topic I'm really passionate about, and can talk about it for probably too long. But yeah, my name is Eden. I'm the co-founder of Flair, which is a marketing technology company for multi-family properties. I grew up in LA, and I actually went to Israel for college where I was kind of thrown into the whole tech scene. When I tried to get my first job, I stumbled upon this startup, and then was thrown into the whole world of startups, marketing, technology, all that fun stuff. And that's how I got my start and really just became fascinated with marketing and business, and it led me to where I am today. So I'm in the multi-family industry because I think there's just a lot of work to be done. I see a lot of fun challenges to solve, and I love marketing and real estate, so it's kind of a perfect fit for me.

Muhammed:

Amazing. Well, how'd you get your start in real estate?

Eden:

So I was in the marketing world just because I was working in this tight-knit startup that actually did digital marketing software already. And when I moved away from Israel to New York, my best friend from high school reached out to me, and he said, "Hey, I've been doing a lot of different marketing projects for my one client. Do you want to collaborate? I know you've done SEO stuff." I think he literally said it like that, like "I know you've done SEO stuff before." So I said, "Definitely warrant's a conversation."

So we started talking about it and we started collaborating together, and I realized that's when I learned the industry because he reached out to me and we started collaborating. And I was very industry agnostic before. Startups, service businesses, lawyers, I was just all over the place and just diving into everything. But when I actually started collaborating on these real estate projects, I realized that a lot of these companies have the same issues. So that got me motivated to actually take it a step further. And I realized that I could be solving these big problems for so many different companies and people, and that's why I'm in this industry. Because I realized that a lot of those issues weren't unique to the one project or company we were working on, but actually, industry-wide.

Muhammed:

So your attention was a little bit divided in the beginning.

Eden:

Yeah.

Muhammed:

And then you decide to niche down a little bit more into the real estate space using your marketing skills?

Eden:

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And some of those issues were really, you could say attribution, not knowing what's really working for the property. And real estate is such a numbers-driven industry, and I think it also attracts people who thrive off of numbers. I think a lot of people who are in real estate are definitely confident saying, "Yeah, I'm a numbers person. I like that. I take comfort in that. I thrive with that."

So that was one of the things that boggled me was for such a numbers-driven industry, there's so much lack of clarity and lack of tools to succeed in the marketing space in real estate. And marketing is a science. It's an art and a science. And the numbers are so important for understanding what is working and what you're going to do next. And that's what real estate investors and operators do is they use their numbers to plan their next move. This is how many people are migrating to Miami, for example. These are how much the cap rates are in that area. This is how much a unit is going for. Can we come in here with this business plan and make money? And that approach can be applied to marketing as well. But I didn't see it applied to marketing. So that made me motivated to start a company that I can actually help them solve those problems.

Muhammed:

I mean, it's interesting that you say that. Would you say that the general conception that people have about marketing is that it's more of a creative thing? Like, "Oh, I need to make a cool ad or something funny, something memorable, posting on social media," but there's so much more that goes into it.

Eden:

Yeah, I think a lot of people... Marketing is attached to fluff a lot, right? You ask someone, you're in marketing, but you don't really understand what they do. And I think at a lot of companies I've worked with, they don't really understand what the marketing company's doing, the marketing department is doing, or the marketing company that they hired is doing. So they're like, "Oh yeah, whatever." They just throw a bunch of acronyms at us, PBC, B2B, SEO, and charges for it and they think they're doing something. But when I think about marketing, I think about it in a creative sense. But I think about it very methodically too. I think about, even if you're just writing a headline for an ad or a landing page or a website, everything you're doing is really a hypothesis. I hypothesize that this creative is going to work with this audience. And I could be wrong, but we're going to test it. And the numbers are going to tell me if I'm right or wrong.

It's not up to interpretation. There's no opinions here. I'm going to find out. We're going to run this experiment. I have this hypothesis, and a lot of places marketers struggle is getting buy-in for their hypothesis, and they don't have the right communication skills to get buy-in for that hypothesis. I want to pitch you an idea. I want to pitch you this hypothesis. I think that if we get this billboard that says Loop it In podcast is the number one podcast in South Florida that we're going to get a hundred thousand downloads. So you might say, "Wow, why would that work?" You'd be, "Oh, because we're going to design it like this. This is the freeway where all the tech employees drive by." And you pitch the hypothesis and you get buy-in. So I went on a bit of a rant there, but that's the way I like to look at marketing. Everyone loves their own ideas, but they're all hypotheses in the end, and we're testing that, and that's a very fun process to me. And I think everyone could enjoy that.

Muhammed:

Right. So you've got a little bit of data. You say, "Okay, let's run this experiment, see if it works. We're going to measure it afterwards. We're going to see what the results were, and if it didn't work, we'll change one of the variables. And if it did, we'll double down on it."

Eden:

I was going to say, even when you're doubling down, you're just running another hypothesis. It worked the first time, but I'm still hypothesizing that it's going to work twice as good if I put more resources into it the second time.

Muhammed:

So you really never have any guarantees.

Eden:

It's a journey for sure.

Muhammed:

Well, yeah. I mean, I think we'd like to get into the marketing funnel. Right now, I think that's a big area that you want to focus on right now. Maybe you could tell us about some of the issues that people face whenever they have their marketing funnel, the way they set it up.

Eden:

So this is actually a very interesting segue from what I just talked about to the marketing funnel, because I was very sciency with my description right now, right? Married to the numbers-

Muhammed:

Oh yeah.

Eden:

You take a hypothesis. You A/B test it, double-blind study. What are the results? Did it work or not? But there's a big if there for being confident in your result. The big if is what are the context of all the data that I put in here? And when you get the result that you want, if you don't have context, then you actually don't know why you got that result, if you catch my drift.

Muhammed:

Wow.

Eden:

So as much as I love people who are numbers oriented, if you get tunnel vision, then you're going to be doing it all wrong. And that's what we're going to dive into in a minute here is how should you look at marketing holistically and be numbers-oriented and be scientific with your process where it makes sense. But where do you take a step back and use your intuition and knowledge of marketing and business and real estate to actually make the right decision for the property. I'll share with you a few different ways that I've assisted clients and real estate investors in doing this. But I find, in real estate, many people get tunnel vision because they're just married to the numbers, married to the numbers, married to the numbers, married to the numbers. But there are various times where you need to give that... You have to give numbers extra context so that you can figure out why they existed in the first place.

Muhammed:

Could you give us an example of what that would look like, someone who just focuses on the numbers and someone who can actually put everything into context?

Eden:

Yeah, absolutely. So I'll give you two examples. And because I'm in marketing, a big place that we see this pop up is really when it comes to attribution. In multifamily, in real estate marketing attribution is one of the biggest problems because of a number of reasons, one of them being that the customer life cycle's very long. If you're going to rent an apartment, that's a decision that you're making once a year, likely once a year. It's a very big decision. It's where you live, spend most of your time. You're going to be spending a good chunk of your salary, I assume, on that rent. It's not going to be a decision that you hop into. It's not like buying a t-shirt from Abercrombie. You're not just waltzing on the internet, you see an ad and you buy it. That's not how it works. Now, as marketers, our job would be a lot easier if it worked that way because it would be a lot more straightforward to figure out what's working. The thing is-

Muhammed:

Yeah. There's no impulse buying.

Eden:

No, absolutely not. There's desperation, sure. No impulse. So I'll give you two different scenarios here. The first one is I want you to think about how long... Well, before we get into it, I want you to think about how long that whole journey is, right? Think about the last time you rented an apartment. You might have asked your friends, "Hey, where do you live? Is it good there?" You might have Googled. You might have actually walked by a place and said, "Hey, let me write down the name of this place because it looks like a really nice property in a great location. I might want to live here if the price is right." So you got a lot of different touchpoints here. Let's say there's 15 touchpoints, right? Talk to a friend. You Google. You actually talk to the property. You go in. You do all these different things. Now you have this little CRM, right? This CRM is trying to tell you where your prospects are coming from. You have this whole 15-step journey, but the CRM is only telling you from step seven and on where they actually become a lead, right?

Muhammed:

Right.

Eden:

So let's go back to the two scenarios. The first scenario is somebody that looks at their CRM and says, "I'm going to try to figure out where my leases are coming from." And the second scenario is going to take the CRM data, give it context and get way better results. So in scenario A, let's say it's Mo. Mo has property. It's called Oak Park, let's call it. Mo's looking at Oak Park.

Muhammed:

All right.

Eden:

He's got a hundred different leases. 40 of them came from SEO, crushing it on SEO. People are just googling you. You don't know what keyword they put in. because you don't have that data, but it just says 40 of them came in from SEO, 20 came in from some apartment listing website, 30 came in from Craigslist, et cetera, right? That's Mo. You're both looking at the same property. Mo would say, "Okay, why don't we just get rid of everything and just spend all of our money on SEO? It's clearly bringing everything in. Why don't we just do that? It seems like it's the most effective source. It's bringing in all the leads, all the leases, et cetera." So let's say Mo does that.

Now let's move on to Jim. Jim also has a property with the same exact numbers. Jim could say this and say, "Okay, this seems kind of unlikely because I just don't buy it. All these leads are coming in through SEO, but the life cycle's long. If I'm looking at how prospects enter the funnel, there's so many different touchpoints. I have a hypothesis that they're just coming in when they're ready to reach out. But based on what my leasing agents are telling me is that we're getting a lot of referrals. And what my leasing agents are telling me are not what I'm seeing on my CRM here." So why would that be? Why would the numbers be different here? The numbers are different because of the information that's missing. Right?

Muhammed:

Got it.

Eden:

If somebody tells someone about an apartment and they go and Google that apartment like this, that would be a perfect example for this scenario. The CRM is not going to say, "Oh, they have a friend that told them about this and then they Googled it." It's going to say, "Oh no, you're crushing it on Google, keep it up."

Muhammed:

But they did not hear about you from Google.

Eden:

They did not.

Muhammed:

So you're not getting the top of the funnel.

Eden:

Yep. The top of the funnel is missing because a lot of these touchpoints aren't digital. Everyone's talking about digital, digital, digital, but the whole experience is not digital. I mean, they're touring the apartment in person. They're talking to people and getting referrals. They might be walking by signage or billboards or whatever. That's not a digital experience that's in person. So if you have a tool... The way you should think about this is if you have a tool that is only tracking digital touchpoints, it's not going to be giving you the whole story unless you only have a digital product. And even when you only have a digital product, you still have non-digital touchpoints. So it's still not going to be-

Muhammed:

You still have word of mouth and... Yeah.

Eden:

So that's where your knowledge of your customer, your knowledge of marketing, and your intuition and all that really comes into play to give your data context. Jim gave his data context because he said, "But I'm not going to take these numbers at face value. It seems unlikely to me. Why would my leasing agent be telling me that we're getting all these different sources and my CRM's showing me three. And it's saying, Google's crushing it. Wouldn't my leasing agents tell me the same thing?" So what Jim can then do by giving data a context is first of all, dig deeper. He can start telling his leasing agents to ask people when they come in, "Hey, how'd you hear about us?" And start referencing that data to what the CRM says. And then you can start figuring out where your CRM is falling short and what data you can be confident in and double down on. But if you just double down on that CRM data without giving the data context and without fishing further, then you're not going to be making decisions on the right data because you have half of the picture.

Muhammed:

Wow. So for those non-digital touchpoints, is the best way just to simply ask prospects that come in and ask them, "Hey, how'd you hear about us?" Are there any other methods that you can use?

Eden:

That's really the best one. I would specify, a lot of people try to automate it, but there's a few things to be aware of. So the two things people will do is they'll either ask in person or they'll add it to a form. So let's say they say, "Okay, we don't want to ask every person. Let's just add it to a form. Let's just say, 'Hey, just type in how you heard about us.'" The problem is if you make it an open-ended question, you're always going to have to manually look at their responses. You can't just filter them and easily put them into a graph. Because everyone's response is completely unique. What if I used a period and you didn't? What if I described how I heard about you in a different way than someone else described it, but it was the same source technically. So when it's open-ended, you're always going to have to manually look at the data. So what a lot of people try to do is do a dropdown. And they go, "okay, well let's just list the 20 sources we have, Craigslist, Zillow, whatever. Let's just list them."

Muhammed:

Multiple choice.

Eden:

Let's just list them and then people will select. The problem is studies have shown that the first three options on that list get the most hits regardless of what they are.

Muhammed:

So people don't want to look through all the options, and they just click one of the first ones. They're like, yeah, that sounds good.

Eden:

So that shortcut doesn't end up actually working the way you want it to because I don't care to tell you how I heard about you. I have a problem, I need an apartment. I need to get into one. Let's move on from this.

Muhammed:

I don't have time for this.

Eden:

Who cares about these details? Tell me how much it costs. Tell me when I can tour. I don't really care. But if you ask them open-ended, they're not biased in their response. They just start with a blank canvas and they go, "Oh, well, my friend Sally lives at the property. She told me about this place three months ago, and then I Googled you and I found you." And then you go, "Okay, wow, you just broke down your whole customer journey for me. That's amazing. I know how we found you." And what you're going to start finding is even though this is a manual process and it sucks, nobody wants to do anything manually. Everyone's talking about ChatGPT. You don't have to do manual work, everything's automated, like Zapier, everything is automated. No one wants to do manual work anymore.

The thing is, this kind of manual work is some of the most rewarding and most beneficial to you because you'll start identifying all the different recurring ways people find you. And you'll see the same customer journey. You'll see different themes repeat themselves, and then you'll say, "Okay, I'm comfortable putting all my money on black because 10 different residents in the last week told me they found me like this." so for example, 10 different residents told me that they found us because of the marketing flyer we put in that yoga studio down the street, and they love living here.

Muhammed:

It's working. Let's keep doing that.

Eden:

So that's how you give that a context. You have to do some manual work, you have to do some digging, you have to understand marketing and your customers, but it works and you'll get better results because of it. You're not going completely scientific. I'm not married to the numbers and only going based on numbers. Because we saw in the first example that that's not going to work for you because you only have half the pictures. So how could you be so married to the numbers with half the picture. It's not going to work. But I'm not going completely based on intuition either.

Muhammed:

Right. Yeah, I mean that makes a lot of sense. My initial thought was, okay, just have a dropdown menu or multiple choice. Give all the options and everyone will be honest, take the time. But that's not really how people function, especially when they're trying to solve a problem. So like you're saying, the best way to do it, the most accurate way is to leave an open-ended question?

Eden:

Absolutely. Open-ended question.

Muhammed:

Do you think eventually there'll be an AI that can interpret the data for us?

Eden:

I'm sure. You know what? There already is. I think IBM has this thing called Watson, which it's like a natural language-

Muhammed:

Watson.

Eden:

I think it's natural language processing or something like that. And what it does is it scans open-ended responses and it can spit out recurring themes to just simplify that process for you. So what it could do is if you inserted the reviews of your company, it will spit out all the recurring themes in the positive reviews and all the recurring themes in the negative reviews. So if in the negative reviews everyone's talking about one customer service manager, that would be the number one recurring theme and you can do it that way.

Muhammed:

Interesting.

Eden:

So there are ways to automate it still to just make your life easier. You're still going to have to look through, but half of the work will be done for you already because all the filtering will basically be done. So there are ways to automate this still.

Muhammed:

That's probably something that I would try since I tend to be a little bit lazy with those kind of things.

Eden:

I wouldn't blame anyone for trying that.

Muhammed:

Have you ever tested that, Watson?

Eden:

We used it for reputation analysis at the last company I worked at, just analyzing a lot of different review profiles and it would tell you exactly why that reputation is the way it is and what people are saying. So let's say you were doing this for an apartment complex. It could say, "Pool is the most recurring theme in all the negative reviews." And then you would basically take it from there, and you'd figure out okay, to improve the reputation, clearly the pool needs to be addressed because everyone's having problems with it and they're taking out their frustrations online.

Muhammed:

So I guess tools like that, they'd be a helpful guide. They'd save you some time, but you'd still want to go in there and manually look at everything.

Eden:

Yeah, exactly.

Muhammed:

Awesome. All right. Are there any other issues that people run into with their funnels?

Eden:

Well, another big issue is just confusing whether you have a top of funnel or a bottom of funnel problem. So obviously understanding where you're going to get the most bang for your buck and where you're getting the most leads and leases from is the number one question people have. But when they're not getting the right results, there tends to be an assumption that the top of the funnel is the problem. And this is tricky because, as we've just discussed, you don't have a lot of clarity in the top of the funnel. Unless you try really hard and you actually run this kind of manual attribution process, you don't have a lot of clarity. So that's a pretty hefty assumption is to go, okay, property is not get where I want it to be. Let me just dump a bunch of more leads in here. Right? That's not a great-

Muhammed:

I'm probably not getting enough leads. Let me just get more.

Eden:

probably not. It's also an easy cop out for let's say onsite teams to say, "Yeah, we're just not getting enough leads. We're doing a great job with the leads that are here, but we're not getting enough." So it's pretty common feedback. But I would challenge everyone to take some of the tips I'm about to give you and think a little bit extra hard on it so that you don't just go straight to that top of funnel assumption. It's probably one of the most common problems I see is just diagnosing a bottom of funnel issue as a top of funnel problem.

Muhammed:

Really?

Eden:

Yeah, it's probably one of the most common problems I see. A lot of properties don't need more traffic, they just need a better way to handle it or a better process, better tools, better follow up.

Muhammed:

I guess that makes sense. Properties are always in demand. There's no getting around that. There must be something that's stopping them once they get into the funnel, once they get a little further down.

Eden:

But also it's far easier to increase performance by improving the bottom of the funnel than by widening the top. It's way easier, way easier. Think about it. Let's say you're converting one in every 20 leads to a lease. If you get that down to one in 15 or one in 10, your results are going to jump. Your life is going to be a lot easier and you didn't spend any more money. You just improved your process and your follow up. I'll briefly explain how to figure out each one, but the first step is tracking all of your metrics. No matter what, you always want to be tracking number of leads, what percentage of leads turn into an app, an application, phone call, email, everything. And you want to track those ratios, ideally weekly, but a lot of people do it monthly, which is also fine in my opinion.

And you want to take a look at those, compare it to what the property's gotten historically, try to compare it to other properties that are similar if you can get that data. And ask yourself, okay, why did these numbers come about? Why do we only convert one in 20? And actually dig deeper and you'll understand. What you'll find if you actually ask yourself that question, you ask the team that question is either those leads weren't going to rent here, regardless of what we would do, which is a lot of leads. What I've rented apartments, I'm not going to rent at every place I've reach out to. Of course not. I'm shopping around. Or you'll find that the ball was dropped somehow and we could have created a better process for them. They would've given us a shot, but we didn't follow up in time, they missed the tour, whatever happened, and they kind of went dead.

So if you calculate those ratios and then you figure out what's actually happening, you'll be a lot more confident because if you find that the process is lacking and a lot of people are dropping off when they could have stayed in your funnel with a better process, then you're not going to try to dump more leads onto that because the same thing is going to happen to the additional leads.

Muhammed:

You're just burning through money without getting any results.

Eden:

No one wants to do that. So if you actually find that the reason that the ratio is let's say one in 20 is just because a lot of those people rented elsewhere and they had a good process, but we just couldn't get them in, and the team is really doing everything they can and has a good process, then I would put more leads on this process because I know that that is really probably the number one thing preventing me from getting me to my goal is really just more leads in the funnel and I'll get more leases. But if the process doesn't work, that's not going to work that way.

Muhammed:

You don't assume that's the problem right from the start. You want to do your research first, investigate a little bit further.

Eden:

Yeah, 100%.

Muhammed:

All right. So what's a common issue that people face in their funnel, that companies have in their funnels that could be easily fixed? What could help convert those leads that you are getting?

Eden:

I mean, easily fixed... I don't know about easily fixed. I have a couple of go-tos.

Muhammed:

I might have taken it a little bit too far there.

Eden:

I don't have any magic pills. But yeah, if I get one I'll be happy to share it with the world. But I would say the number one thing you can do to tighten your bottom of funnel is just focus on response time. So a lot of renters and prospects that are reaching out have had a poor experience in the past with another apartment building or complex. And when they don't get responded to in a timely manner, then they're going to associate that with poor management most of the time. Like you reach out, they don't respond to you-

Muhammed:

I've seen that, yeah.

Eden:

It's like, if I'm trying to give you money, I'm not even a rent a renter yet, then what's going to happen After I'm a resident? Are you ever going to respond to me? Right now is when I would expect your response times to be the best because you're trying to bring more people in. Once I'm a renter, I'm expecting this to go down. You're less motivated. I'm already in the door. I have a contract with you. So I would say the number one thing people can do is focus on response times and just be organized. If you have an organized process for the touchpoints of how often you're following up with people, you're not going to let leads go dead.

And HubSpot actually ran a study that talked about how the first five minutes a lead comes in are the most valuable five minutes to reach out to them, and how it really heavily drops off afterwards. So if you can get back to people in five minutes... And a lot of people are using AI to do this. A lot of people are using AI leasing agents just to send that email back instantly, which helps with that dramatically. However you choose to do it up to you. But figuring out response times is probably the number one way to improve bottom of funnel. It's the easiest way I can think of, not that it's easy at all.

Muhammed:

So for the people that are responding manually, they're like, "Oh my god, five minutes. That's impossible." For those people, what advice would you have for them to start using some kind of automated email service or an AI like you mentioned? Is there an easy one to get started with?

Eden:

There's a lot. I'm not going to recommend a specific one. There's tons of them in the industry. I don't want to recommend one specific one because I know a lot, but I would say that's definitely an avenue you should explore because that response time is so valuable. But if you are doing it manually and you don't have an automated system, the number one thing you can do is just prioritize and understand how important it's. Some people say, "Okay, well I'll have an hour at the end of the day and I'll just get back to all these emails." You should prioritize that above all else because the timing of that is so important. And you have a ton of stuff to do today, for sure.

But the timing of getting back to these people... So what a lot of people do is they say the first hour of my day is just follow up because leads came in overnight, leads came in after I left the office, all that kind of stuff. So a what a lot of people do is they'll schedule the first hour of their day is just getting back to the leads because they want to make that follow-up response time as fast as possible, and that's very effective. I've heard great things about that strategy.

Muhammed:

All right. So if you are doing it manually, like you said, you want to do it as soon as possible. Does that just apply during the day or do you want to reply after hours as well? Or do you think there's an expectation from the customer that, okay, I'm messaging a little bit late here. I'm probably not going to hear back till tomorrow.

Eden:

Well, most people don't get a response outside of leasing hours, which is another reason that people are really leading on AI. A lot of prospects have a simple question that could probably be answered if they just looked at your website, but people's attention spans are short, so they still just ask. And what AI can do is it can reach out to you immediately. If it's 1:00 AM, middle of the night, it can just respond and be like, "Yes, our cool hours are 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM Monday through Saturday with fob access." And obviously, that's something that probably would be on your website or at least the agent can respond to you. But the fact that you'd use AI would let you respond to people after hours. That's a big pain point in this industry because a lot of people are searching for apartments after hours, especially if it's online. I'm not going to be searching at work, most likely. I'm more likely to be doing it at home. But leasing agents and onsite teams are usually 9:00 to 5:00, 8:00 to 6:00 type of thing. So those hours are flipped, which-

Muhammed:

The timings are not matching up.

Eden:

It makes it tough. So you have to get creative with how you combat that.

Muhammed:

All right. So I know we talked earlier about how we can fix some of the problems with the bottom of the funnel, but what about the top of the funnel? What if you find out that that's actually where the problem is, you need to bring in more leads? Do you have any tips what someone should do in that case?

Eden:

Well, if you need to bring in more leads, you should think about what we spoke about in the beginning, in the first half of this podcast, which is figuring out what sources are working best for you. So if you've done the manual attribution well, and then you've actually dived into figure out why is this property not performing? I'm figuring out that it really could use more leads. My team is crushing it, but they only get 200 leads, and that's turning into 10 leases. If I gave them double, we'd just get 20 and then we'd hit our goal.

But what leads should I send them? I don't want to just send any random source. Let's figure out what the top converting sources were, which you can use the manual attribution method that I described in the first half, and that will give you confidence. You might not be a hundred percent confident, but you would have an idea of what makes the most sense to test out to widen that top of funnel. So if you did the first half well then it will be pretty clear to you, what should I do once I figure out that I have a top of funnel problem? What should I do here? You'll have an idea of what bet you should make, what play you should make.

Muhammed:

All right, so whenever someone first hears about you, their first experience to reach out, they're probably going to go to your website, perhaps, your landing page, or maybe check you out on social media. What are some ways that you can improve on that front?

Eden:

Well, I would say social proof. Social proof is so, so powerful. These are all digital touchpoints that most properties, most businesses have. But one thing that most businesses lack is actually social proof. And if you get creative with it, if you take a picture of one of your residents, you feature a testimonial, or if you even take it a next step farther and you take a quick video testimonial, that's hands down the best kind of social proof. So that's also going to make your ratios better. Your conversion is going to be better because if you're using that social proof, prospects are confident browsing through your website. This is legit. I'm looking at resident who's really happy here, talking at the camera. The first thing that comes to mind to me is social proof, because that's a really big area of improvement.

It takes effort. Obviously, if you want to do it right and you want to get a videographer and stand out, you could even take the video on your phone. That still works. Obviously, it takes a little bit of effort to do it professionally, but it really helps you stand out, and it'll make your sales cycles way shorter.

Muhammed:

It could even be in some cases that a phone might be better because it looks more natural, more organic, doesn't look like it was maybe scripted by some big producer.

Eden:

Yeah, it could be. And it'll still help you stand out because most people aren't doing video. So even though it might not be professional, it still helps you stand out and people will still watch it. Because in this case, they really just care about the content. They just care like, "What is this person going to say? Oh, this is real. This gives me confidence. Let me reach out. This gives me a lot of confidence."

Muhammed:

Well, so what else falls under social proof? Maybe you can give a broader definition of what that includes when it comes to real estate and your marketing.

Eden:

When it comes to multi-family marketing, it's really just all about showcasing why your residents are happy living there. A lot of people don't just want an affordable apartment. They want to live a certain kind of lifestyle. So if we're going to talk about specifically the Miami market, I would drill down to not just asking someone, "What is it like living here?" but drilling down on why do you like living here? Because if you know exactly who you're marketing to, if there's a specific demographic or psychographic of who you're marketing to, then asking why and getting down to the core is going to make that social proof so much more valuable. Because they're going to say, "I love living here because I'm in a community of like-minded professionals who like to work out. I'm really close to downtown Miami where my office and my friends' companies all are," and you can describe this certain lifestyle.

So I would say the best kind of social proof, describe why living there allows you to reach your goals or why it allows you to live a certain lifestyle, which goes way beyond, just, "Oh, I like living in this apartment." It's like, "No, no, no. This apartment allows me to live this kind of life and actualize A, B, and C."

Muhammed:

Well, I think in sales they call that features versus benefits, right?

Eden:

Absolutely.

Muhammed:

So instead of, like a robot, it has three bathrooms, it has this much square footage, but actually talking about the lifestyle, why someone would want to live there could be a lot more powerful.

Eden:

Exactly. And I guess it's tough. It's a fine line in real estate because people really do care about the features. The features are so important, but your marketing is going to take off when you understand the real benefits. So you'll see all these communities are just talking about their pool. But if you talk to some residents, they'll say, "Oh, well, I love how there's a Costco down the street," or, "I love how they're open after hours and I live in this community," or whatever it might be. The features and the benefits are very intertwined in this industry, so it makes it tough. So that's why most people just focus on the features.

But if you take the time to do the customer research and actually figure out the real benefits, not just the benefits that you thought the property or community has, but the ones that people told you it has, like, "I live in this community. It's these kinds of people. I love the aesthetic," whatever it might be, I can live this kind of lifestyle, then your marketing will really take off.

Muhammed:

And the best way to get that kind of information, would that be to reach out to the tenants that you already have, or is there another way to do that kind of research?

Eden:

So it's kind of tough. If you have a new development, obviously you don't have residents yet. So what I would do in that case is just get research on direct competitors who are targeting the same kind of people and see what benefits people are describing in their reviews and things like that. If you're not on lease up and you're not a new development and you're existing, residents is by far the number one way to get that kind of data, just the most accurate, you can be confident in it.

Muhammed:

Amazing. All right. Let's see. I think we've covered most of what we wanted to talk about in this topic, but now I want to give you the floor and see if you have anything else that you'd like to talk about or if you have any final thoughts on how people can improve their funnels.

Eden:

No, I just wanted to say thanks everyone for listening in. This is obviously a topic I'm really passionate about, and if anyone has any questions on how to execute this, since I'm very passionate about this, super happy just to answer any questions if you just add me on LinkedIn. You can look me up. It's Eden Chai, that's spelled E-D-E-N C-H-A-I. Just search me on LinkedIn and add me. You can just mention this podcast. I'll be happy to connect with you, chat with you on what you're doing and help you out. So good luck with your attribution, with your funnel, with crushing it on all things marketing and real estate. And thanks for tuning in.

Muhammed:

Amazing, Eden. It's been amazing having you on here. I feel like I learned so much. It's always a pleasure to talk to you, and hope I can bring you on again very soon.

Eden:

Looking forward to it. Thanks, Mo.

Muhammed:

All right, everyone, thank you so much for watching. We're going to have more podcasts just like this very, very soon. So make sure to stay tuned and subscribe to us on the channel of your choice. Listen on Spotify, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, and so many more. So we hope to see you again very, very soon. Take care.

Thanks for listening all the way to the end. Don't forget to give us a good rating on whatever platform you're tuning in from. And we'll be back soon with another new episode. We hope to see you there. And until next time, this has been Loop it In.

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