If I had a dollar for every time someone in sales told me “I need more leads”, I would be living it up on a beach in the sun. Over the course of my marketing career, regardless of the industry I worked in, I have heard it all:

• We need more leads
• We need better leads
• We have too many leads
• What do you want me to do with these leads?
• Wait, what leads?

It’s 2023, and by now I think we can all agree that a team approach to corporate goals is truly the only way to achieve overall success. So I won’t belabor the age-old “marketing vs. sales” content…but I do want to highlight that it can be human nature to play the blame game when the stakes are high and goals are missed.

A great business intelligence (BI) platform helps even the playing field and allows leaders to access the same data and drill down into the true story behind the numbers. It empowers everyone to ask smarter, more intentional questions about their business rather than the easy ones.

From a marketer’s perspective, portfolio data is an essential tool to develop targeted marketing strategies to increase property occupancy. The right BI platform will give multifamily marketers true insights into their decisions, investments, and performance; bolstering their team’s ability to navigate scenarios where lead gen is being scrutinized or marketing budgets are being reduced.

Ask Better Marketing Questions

BI helps marketers graduate from asking easy (dare I say expected) questions like:

• Will occupancy go up if I increase our marketing spend?
• Will leasing schedule more tours if I generate more leads?
• Are that many people really just “driving by”?

To strategic, data-driven questions such as:

• What is the value of a 10-point improvement in our survey scores?
• Why is this property falling short of its occupancy goal despite a high cost-per-unit marketing spend?
• How does my CPL compare to last year? To pre-pandemic?
• Why are these conversion rates half of our sister properties’ & what operational/leasing tricks can we replicate here to fix it?

Increasing marketing spending to solve occupancy gaps is a knee-jerk reaction that lacks strategy and evidence-backed support. Drilling down into the numbers via a good business intelligence platform that allows you to correlate data in a way you weren’t before, highlights a myriad of opportunities that might not cost you anything.

So marketer to marketer, use all your data! Get in there, get curious, and start telling the real story behind your properties. I promise it’ll make it easier to partner with Operations, On-Site, and Asset Management teams. Instead of the blame game, you’ll now play the solution game and start watching your company’s overall performance grow.