The famous nineteenth-century retailer John Wanamaker once reportedly said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don’t know which half.”

Fortunately, with the data they have access to, today’s multifamily marketers aren’t fumbling around in the dark when it’s time to evaluate the effectiveness of advertising sources and tactics. How forward-thinking operators collect and use marketing data, and how they would like to see data analysis evolve, were the subjects of the 2024 Entrata Summit session Harnessing Data-Driven Strategies for Smarter Leasing and Marketing.

For starters, in order to aggregate data that a company’s leaders and team members can trust, internal agreement must exist on exactly what each term means, said Valerie Gibson, Vice President of Community Support for Mill Creek Residential.  

“This is my biggest soapbox and a hill I will die on: you have to have consensus from the beginning on your definitions, and you’re going to have to start as basic as, what is a lease?” she said.

Once operators have committed to a data-driven culture, they have to be willing to follow the data, Gibson added.

“If you are going to invest in collecting, aggregating and analyzing the data, be prepared to act on it,” she said. “We talk about this a lot with our associate engagement surveys: if you’re going to ask for the feedback, what are you going to do with that feedback if it tells you something that you might not want to hear or didn’t expect to hear?”

Caitlin Garrison, Managing Director of Marketing and Consumer for Catalyst Housing Group, urged operators to make sure they’re aggregating clean marketing data.

“The hill I die on is ‘garbage in, garbage out,’” she said. “I believe so strongly in clean, good data, and I think it’s a lot more challenging than people give it credit for. It’s not just about validating the data and making sure it matches what you think it should match. Your teams have to know how to use your software. If they’re not trained well, everything that comes in is wrong to a certain extent.”

It’s also critical that marketers become conversant in operating metrics and consider them when evaluating their strategies and tactics, according to Garrison.

“A lot of times when occupancy drops at an asset, the 9-1-1 is, ‘Oh my god, we’ve got to get marketing in here. We need way more leads,’” she said. “But if you take the time to look at the operational metrics and not just the front-of-the-funnel metrics, oftentimes that’s not the story. Oftentimes the story is something operational. Maybe somebody new onsite needs to be trained, or maybe pricing is an issue.”

Looking ahead, Garrison said she hopes to see marketing evaluation software incorporate AI to provide recommended next steps. “There’s this opportunity to have these beautiful dashboards, but then have AI tell you, ‘This is what that means, and this is what I think you should do as a result of it,’” she said.

Gibson added that her ideal data report would feature a way to quickly access the raw data behind each metric.

“With every single data point on a report on a screen, I want to click on it and get the details,” she said. “I want to see what the raw data is in forming that number.”