Understanding Property Management Leads

What is the 'Customer Journey,' and why is it something you should learn more about as a property management company?

The Customer Journey is the series of steps a potential client takes on the path to becoming a customer. This is not to be confused with a 'Brand Story,' which is based more on understanding the emotions and motivations behind a purchase. Instead, this is the thought process that ultimately leads to hiring a property manager.

Understanding how a person goes from learning about your business to hiring you can help you remove roadblocks and make the process smoother and faster, so you can close more clients from converted property management leads.

Because all users are going to have a different Customer Journey, you'll need to gather a lot of data from individual clients to find the common points to build your Customer Journey Map. This is generally done through conducting a healthy amount of research through interviews, surveys, and by using tools like heatmapping.

If you're ready to create your own Customer Journey Map, use these tips to help you on your way.

1. Understand Your Buyer

This is where the creation of buyer personas enters the process. Starting all sales and marketing efforts through truly understanding your client, their needs and pain points, and who they are is pretty straightforward.

We've written a lot about buyer personas, and you can check out those posts here:

• Creating a Property Management Buyer Persona
• Property Management Marketing Campaigns: The Power of Research
• Optimizing Personas for Property Management Marketing

A good buyer persona goes above and beyond demographics and includes their pain points, where they go for information, and creates a story about who the persona is and why they're seeking you out. Understanding personas is valuable for a lot more than Customer Journey Maps; it is also a fundamental sales and marketing tool.

2. Understand Your Persona's Motivations

If you conduct persona research, adding in questions about motivations and goals should be easy and fit within that research without coming across as out of place. You'll want to understand your persona's needs at each stage of the journey. An example might look like this:

• Awareness: This is when your potential property management leads begin searching for services descriptions to see if a property manager can solve their pain point.
• Consideration: At this stage, your more qualified leads are doing research to ensure that they're making a good decision, seeking reassurance that a property management company is going to make their life easier and is worth the price.
• Decision: At this stage, your potential clients need to know that they are choosing a company that is a good value for the price point.

Understanding the goals and motivations of the persona makes the next step easier!

3. Mapping Out 'Touchpoints'

The next step is to map out all the ways that a person will interact with your business while meeting those needs/motivations. 

There are a few ways to do this, such as conducting interviews with recently-signed-on customers and asking them about their process.

However, it can be hard to get clients to take the time—and your information will still have some holes from gaps in memory. Who truly remembers the order of the pages they visited on a website before calling to speak with sales?

The good news is with a tool like HubSpot, a user's journey on your website is already recorded, so when working with your sales team, you should be able to pull the background data from the clients they had the easiest time closing. You'll be able to see the pages they visited (in order), the content offers clicked, emails opened, and social posts liked. This will fill in the background information.

After you see the commonalities in touchpoints such as 'visits pricing page,' 'services page,' and 'looks at about us page,' you can map those touchpoints to goals and motivations. This creates a genuine road map of which actions accompany the customers' goals.

4. Look for Roadblocks

• Is there a part of this process that isn't working well for clients?
• Is there a lot of drop-off from leads at a certain point?

Asking yourself these questions while looking at your mapped-out touchpoints can identify areas where you need to improve your messaging, user experience, or sales process. Remove these roadblocks to make it easier for leads to become clients.

5. Hire Geekly Media

Do you want to utilize the benefits of your data but need help putting it all together? Give us a call.

Using HubSpot, we can build accurate and helpful data sets for your team, implement sales, marketing, and property management process automation solutions, and the best part: we do it all for you!

Our team of HubSpot experts can help you gain the insight you've always wanted into your business—so you can take a step back and enjoy your company again. Get in touch using the link below!