In the last 5 years, marketing has become a more technology-driven, data-oriented career path.  The rise of technologies, specifically focused on creating, disseminating and tracking marketing campaigns has created a cross-functional job description, wherein marketers must become technologists.  In order to better understand customer demographics, customer needs and customer communication channels, marketers must gain an understanding of the fundamentals of their company’s technology to create a holistic marketing technology strategy.  

In essence, the lines between marketing and technology have blurred, and the multifamily housing industry is no exception.  We have typically seen the IT Department fall under the CFO or Operations; but, this organizational structure creates an IT focus built on cost containment or back office operations.  When marketing and IT operate in tandem, technology can supercharge the customer experience and customer engagement.

Property management is in the business of people, our customers.  As multifamily marketers, then, we are responsible for the customer experience.  Thus, we are responsible for all customer-facing technologies.  If we can marry an understanding of basic technology, programming and data architecture with an understanding of financials, communication, customer behavior, market analysis and marketing best-practices, we have the ability to produce an amazing customer experience.  We need to become Consumer Technology Managers and Marketing Technologists, yet, there are many challenges that marketers, especially multifamily marketers, still face when it comes to better managing the technologies we use.

First, the pace of change has shifted and marketing is being disrupted constantly.  Technology has driven consumers to a real-time, social, mobile world.  Consumers are far ahead of marketing when it comes to their use of technology and this gap is growing, especially in the multifamily marketplace.  Marketers can no longer rely on the mindset of finding one big idea.  There are new ideas and new touch points all the time.  Second, marketers by and large rely on outside vendors, especially technology vendors.  This means that we need to be able to communicate with our technology vendors, not just sales reps but the people who are actually managing the technologies we use.  We need to think like technologists think.  Yet, most of us in the multifamily industry have little to no experience in the tech trade.  Although we are seeing more multifamily Marketing Directors come from outside industries, for the most part, our industry has a lot of Marketing Directors who are property managers at heart.  Third, as property managers, we get frustrated at the pace of technological change because we still have a strict reliance on hard and fast plans.  Technologists and programmers, meanwhile, have moved away from the expensive, slow and often over-engineered planning stages toward agile and behavior driven development.  While property managers try to force a linear sequence of activities that lead up to a big launch and a semi-permanent workflow, the technologies we use, and more importantly, the technologies we will use in the future, are delivered over multiple iterations, each iteration refactoring code to add new behaviors, streaming requirements and evolving design.  Described this way, we can easily understand why the technologies we use change so often, yet, property managers have not yet developed agile marketing strategies that match our agile technologies.  

So, where do we start?

If you are interested in learning how multifamily marketers can begin to use data and technology to supercharge the customer experience, don’t miss my session, “The Data-Driven Don Draper” on Thursday, June 25 , 2015 starting at 10:15AM at the 2015 NAA Conference and Exposition!