Having a concrete view of who your ideal resident(s) are and how they navigate the lead to lease process should be the foundation of your marketing and lead management strategy. They should serve as the baseline for every marketing decision you make because they inform who, what, when, where, why, and how you should be engaging with prospects. Because of this, we’ve put together a refresher on how to build marketing personas (i.e. your ideal residents) and how to map out your renter’s journey.

Identifying your ideal resident

If you’re unsure what a resident persona is, it’s a composite sketch of individuals that are most likely to rent from you. Keep in mind that you shouldn’t base it off of any one person, but rather look at your audience holistically. There is not just one person that makes up your marketing persona, but rather a number of segments that will allow you to be more granular when building marketing campaigns.

A good starting point is to compare and contrast prospects that signed leases and those who didn’t. See if you can identify any trends that stick out. You’ll want to conduct both quantitative and qualitative research to help you determine specific characteristics like demographics and resident lifetime value, among other things. To conduct quantitative research on your residents, it is helpful to have a business intelligence program that can help you aggregate and visualize resident data to aid in your decision making process

When it comes to qualitative research, there is a little more legwork involved. It will involve reaching out to residents that signed a lease and interview them about the process, their likes, dislikes, what they were looking for in an apartment, etc.

Some things to consider when building out your resident persona are income levels, preferred communication methods, habits, long-term and short-term goals as it relates to their living situation, marital status, where they live, where they work, where they look for information. However, the most important thing to consider when building out your resident persona is ensuring you aren’t violating any Fair Housing Laws by discriminating against any of the classes protected under that legislation.

Once you have collected all the data, the next step is to document the persona. Key categories to include are an about section, what they value, triggers/motivations for moving, what their renters journey looked like, and what were the key deciding factors in choosing your property. From there, you’re ready to move on to start mapping out the renting process.

Mapping out the renter’s journey

It’s important to know all the key touch points and steps along the way in your renter’s journey so you can optimize them for both lead capture and lead nurturing. Essentially, you need to identify the criteria that a lead needs to meet to be advanced to the next step of the process from first contact to lease signing and everything in between.

When you map out the renter’s journey, you’ll be able to identify steps in the process where prospects might get delayed and abandon and areas where you can incorporate automations that will ensure timely engagement with the prospect to accelerate the process. For most properties, the journey will look something like this:

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Before and after every stage, there are opportunities to nurture and qualify prospects to move to the next step. For example, when prospects are looking for an apartment, how do they find you? It could be from a near me search, it could be from a radio ad, it could be from a billboard, but once they’ve landed on your site, what can you do to convert them?

With the growing adoption of AI and chatbots in recent years, that’s a first place to start. Chatbots can answer general questions, while also collecting the necessary data to qualify the lead, without requiring the bandwidth of your site teams. Because a vast majority of apartment searches occur after your offices are closed, it’s important to have a way to interact with prospects at any hour of the day.

Another tactic to consider is having a number of soft calls to action on your site as the prospect gathers information to help make their decision. Not everyone is ready to fill out an application at the outset of their search, so providing them with content that’s valuable to them is a good way to get their contact information for follow up. These can be forms to request information on something like amenities or even a virtual tour.

Once you have their contact information, you can utilize AI to analyze previous communications with prospects to tailor messages specifically for that individual and answer questions of the prospect. If that’s a little too advanced for you, a simpler way to approach touch point messaging might be to draft email nurture sequences that can be triggered once certain behaviors are displayed. Make sure you are creating text or email sequences for every stage of the renter’s journey.

Learn more

To learn more about how Entrata can improve lead management at your properties, request a demo, or check out our latest ebook Lead Management 101.