Effective marketing is about so much more than just doing what feels right and hoping for the best. The best marketing is a mix of art and carefully drawn conclusions based on data, also known as your marketing metrics.
The problem is, with so many metrics to track, which ones should you track? How should you tie them together into a useful report? We'll cover building reports, metrics, and analyzing the data so you can benefit from better reporting for your property management marketing efforts.
1. Determine Your Purpose
When building your report:
- Start by creating a title
- List the reporting period
- Leave a space for a summary of your findings that you can write after building your report.
Not everyone is going to have time to look as deeply into the numbers as you are, so including a summary will help the "skimmers" get the big picture until they have time to go back and read everything.
Next, determine why you want to build a marketing report: what question do you want your data to answer? This is the first step to creating helpful marketing reports. A report can contain any collection of data—but that does not mean it will be useful. A useful report will answer a question—and give you the data that you need to understand the answer.
Determine what your question is and then list the data points that are most likely to answer your query.
If you are wondering whether to continue your paid ads budget, for example, you might want to look into data points like these:
- Cost per click
- Percentage of good leads versus bad leads (such as tenants clicking your ad)
- The overall conversion rate of the good leads
- Traffic.
2. Determine Your Audience
You're going to want to include different numbers for different audiences even though you're reporting on the same subject. This is because various stakeholders will each need unique data points to do their job. For example, a business development manager might want to know where leads are coming from—while their manager will want to know what percentage of leads are being closed.
How do you know? Ask them! When you connect with the people you are reporting for, you can build much better reports.
3. Determine Which Data to Report On
Based on your goals, here are some data sets that work well together for reporting.
Social Media
When reporting on social media, look at numbers like audience growth, reach, and engagement. This measures how many people are seeing and appreciating your content and sticking around for more.
When monitoring email metrics, you want to know opens and click-through rates to know whether or not your email campaign is effective.
Traffic
Look at traffic and conversions by the source to understand which channels are driving the most productive traffic. This is a good place to deploy more resources or focus on updating under-performing channels.
Blogs
Blogging is one of the best ways to build traffic as well as audience confidence. Report on which blogs are driving the most traffic and conversions, and take note of which topics are the most popular, so you know what your audience finds interesting. For blogs that are flagging, it might be time to consider updating their content.
4. Implement Your Reporting Program
Once you know what you are reporting on and who you are reporting for, you can implement a reporting program. A good reporting program is:
- Scheduled: Pulling data at regular intervals gives you better results than intermittent reporting. It is also helpful to keep on a schedule when numbers are negative, so you don't become paralyzed analyzing data. Instead, take action to change that data and then measure your efforts.
- Consistent: Use a template and stick with it for at least three months. If you keep changing your data points, you won't be able to tell if your changes are actually making a difference.
- Visual: Don't just list a bunch of numbers! Include charts and graphs to present your data in different ways, so it is easy for a broad audience to understand.
- Receptive: Listen to feedback! If your team is giving you feedback that they don't understand the report or it isn't answering their question, you'll need to revisit your report and make it more accessible.
5. Inform, Then Reform
Property management marketing is more than just creating content and leaving it at that. You need to look at your data and make informed decisions about what is and is not working and adjust your strategy accordingly. If you do, you should see a pattern of continuous improvement.
Does your marketing need a boost? Schedule a discovery call to learn about property management marketing automation from Geekly Media. We'll discuss your goals and how we can help you meet them through behavior-based automated marketing crafted specifically for property managers, by property managers.
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