You may have heard this word being thrown around in a marketing meeting or two, but weren’t quite sure of its impact to your property–Big Data. Netflix, Amazon, and credit card companies all use it. It’s been a hot buzzword for quite some time, especially within the marketing realm, and it’s being used by companies all over the world to reel their customers in. And now, the apartment industry is taking heed.

According to a recent Forrester study, 44% of marketers are using Big Data and analytics to improve their customer responsiveness. Apartment marketers are quickly jumping onto this trend too.

As a multifamily apartment community, you are already capturing a ton of data–starting from the second a prospect makes contact with your property. Why not use this information to uncover trends to help you make your largest strategic business and marketing moves?

So, what exactly is Big Data?

Big Data refers to the large amounts of data sets that are gathered from multiple sources. For an apartment community, this information can come from the property’s website, social media, call center, referrals, applications, website analytics, etc. This “Big Data” is then analyzed to reveal patterns and trends that provide actionable insight into your renters’ behavior and/or interactions with your property.
Big Data can reveal in depth information in regards to your customer/renter base, like who they are, where they are, what their preferences are, and how they likely want to be reached. It can also help improve your retention rates by providing insight into what best motivates your loyal customers or renters. Last but not least, you can determine how to better optimize your marketing spend across various channels to ensure the most effective response from your prospects.

How can you take advantage?

So, you have all of this data—now what? You can choose to invest in a data warehouse or analytics program, or create your own structure to gather and make sense of all of this information. The beauty in analyzing Big Data is that you can establish queries, algorithms or other statistical methods to do a majority of this work for you.  It is important to remember that it is not the quantity of data that is paramount; rather, it is how you utilize this data to improve your business that’s most important. When analyzing this data, you should pay special attention to the efficiency of your outreach, customer satisfaction, conversions, renewal rates, target reach, and advertising/marketing, etc. You’ll then be able to tie the data to clearly define the performance of many of your business operations and strategies—right down to the daily operation of your leasing office.

Rentbot can help.

Your property website can be a world of data on its own. So, you’ll want to make sure that it’s performing at its maximum potential. In addition to added resident tools like online rental payments, maintenance requests, applications and chat features, you’ll be able to appeal to your renters while collecting mounds of useful data at the same time. And with a gorgeous layout, high definition photos and SEO capabilities, your prospects will be sure to find you each and every time.

Let Rentbot be a part of your Big Data efforts, and attract better leads and sign more leases in the process—we guarantee it.

About the Author

Jonsette Calloway joined the Rentbot team in 2015. With a background in public relations, advertising and copywriting, she has helped a multitude of clients achieve their marketing and communications goals within various fields, but she particularly enjoys working with the apartment industry.