Optimization leads to improved results for your marketing efforts—but how do you know what to optimize? Without a clear testing plan to verify your strategies, you won't know:
However, without a plan for your testing strategy, it's wasted effort.
There are several ways to "test," but the most effective way to test any campaign or strategy is an A/B test. It's a simple concept that can have a significant impact on your property management marketing strategy.
Plus, testing helps you save marketing dollars by applying a strategy and analyzing the results with a smaller audience before completely rolling out any strategy (and spending more money). Here's what you need to know about A/B testing—and how to use it to fine-tune your business growth strategies.
A/B testing (or split testing) is a structured evaluation of two variations of a property management marketing campaign, email, landing page, or another marketing strategy. You can even test two versions of a digital content offer, then roll out with the version that generates the most interest and conversions.
When applying a test, you can analyze just about anything between Version A or Version B:
A/B testing sets up an "either/or" situation that creates a clear "winner" between two variations of the same element within a piece of content or campaign.
You don't have to guess what works best—your audience tells you! After all, your users are your goal. The most effective marketing strategies involve more listening and adapting than coming up with something "brilliant" that doesn't work because it doesn't connect with your audience.
You might think you have a great strategy—but if you are trying to improve your engagement and generate more leads, you need to listen to your consumers and adjust.
There are four main components to a successful property management marketing A/B Test. Plan your strategy and goal, set up the test, document everything, then track the results. Once you document a plan for how to test, you'll have a template to test just about any metric on your website, in an email campaign, or for your content forms.
Never test without an end goal in mind! You don't want to skew your results by "hoping" for a result. However, it's critical to know what you want to know about your campaign variations before you begin the test.
Take the time to document:
Use testing to fix a broken strategy or part of your website. Or, use testing to improve something that's already working well! Testing doesn't have to help you find out what's wrong—it can also help you fine-tune what's working well and make it even better!
Sometimes finding out if a small tweak or a completely different approach can generate better results is worth the effort to test a strategy.
Once you know what you want to get out of your test, the set-up and execution are critical! You must make sure the test runs in a way to answer all of your questions from the strategy component of your A/B test—without bias.
The only successful test is a clean test. Any bias in your audience or your metrics (even unintentionally) can skew your results and evaluation. A bad test can cost valuable property management marketing dollars! Rolling out the wrong test "winner" can be an expensive mistake.
Take the time to walk through these steps when setting up and executing your A/B test:
Sometimes, the simplest things generate big changes in performance. Other times, a significant performance improvement requires a bigger change. That's why your variable can only be one difference between the two versions—large or small.
If you have multiple variations that you'd like to test, create multiple A/B split tests to track the performance of each variable against a "control" version of your strategy. The "control" could be a past winning campaign or what you feel is the "ultimate" version of best practices that you know works well.
When variations beat the performance of the control, create a "new" control! Always give your audience the best content and strategy to generate better conversions and results for your property management marketing campaigns.
All of your work with the strategy and set-up for your test is useless if you don't document what you've done! Documenting "how" you test is as important as recording "what" you test and the results.
Develop a consistent documentation plan for all tests. This will come in handy when you review different versions of various tests. Just like documenting your workflows, everyone needs to understand and follow your company-wide strategy for testing.
Follow these steps:
You'll need to reference your testing strategy and results to evaluate performance and determine the next steps. Keeping good notes makes it easier to remember everything along the way!
Know the metrics you're evaluating and the tools you need to apply to get the information you need from your test. Make sure you're familiar with industry standards for conversion rates, sales percentages, and other metrics when evaluating your A vs. B strategies.
Know what works for your business, too. Meeting industry standards isn't always the right goal, especially when starting your new property management business.
What does success mean for your business? If it's an improvement of managing 10% more doors compared to the prior year, break that down into smaller metrics month over month.
Turn sales or renewal goals into actionable steps supported by your property management marketing strategy.
A/B testing will help you find the right pieces to your property management marketing strategies that lead to your success! Track the responses to determine the winner between the two variations, then test the next best variation to continue optimizing your results.
Depending on what you're testing, choose the right tool to make it easier to track, report, evaluate, and implement your winning strategies! The right tools and the right expertise help make testing simpler and more effective—while property management business owners focus on serving clients and tenants.
HubSpot makes it easy to design, set up, track, and report on your A/B testing campaigns. When you use Hubspot, you'll avoid common A/B testing mistakes while developing a useful testing scenario from the start! This is why we love to introduce our clients to HubSpot when modernizing their property management business.
Don't waste your property management marketing dollars guessing about ways to improve your lead-generating strategies! Investing the time and resources in excellent A/B testing will speed up your inbound marketing performance to help grow your business.
Geekly Media is a HubSpot Diamond Certified Agency Partner with access to the best A/B testing tools and resources. Our team can help you develop tests to analyze your strategies, then recommend solutions to convert more leads into long-term, delighted clients. If you're interested in growing your property management business, you can't afford not to use marketing campaigns based on data!
Contact us for a free consultation about how to optimize your marketing approach through techniques like A/B testing!