Building reports for property

Listening to clients and becoming a part of their marketing team, rather than just being a planning and buying resource, has always been at the heart of what we do at Space & Time. Having a keen ear for the sales situation at a particular development and understanding if the right type of audience is being delivered for the current product mix, allows us to refocus on how we weight and target our media activity to make the most of budgets and refine campaigns. The growing wealth of data and integrations between marketing solutions, which we presented at EPM19, means this process of learning and taking action should be increasingly automated and accelerated. Although, the most crucial part in improving the understanding of customer journeys is real collaboration between sales, marketing and technical teams.

Bucketing 12 months’ of Insights Team job tickets into broad ‘data initiative themes’ in preparation for this year’s EPM event may not rival the new Bond film for excitement, but it does highlight a significant year of action from our property clients in terms of reassessing what data they collect, how tracking systems can connect together and what reporting should look like. Some of this was due to rethinking about customer touchpoints and data flows post GDPR and there seems to be a general concerted effort from clients to improve their own first party databases and the information recorded by sales teams  – the activation of that data can open up some real opportunities for understanding how our collective marketing efforts are really hitting the spot where it matters, getting houses sold.

A joint Adroll / Econsultancy survey from 2017 showed ‘72% of companies agreed that the perfect attribution model is impossible to achieve’. As recently as the end of 2019, the Data Driven Marketing Association reminded us that: ‘a buying process might include external factors that are invisible or immeasurable’. We’ll show some approaches to property reporting at this year’s EPM; not promising a definitive answer, just simple steps to bringing long range data from disparate sources into view and tracking multiple objectives at once, which are necessary for the complex research to sale cycle for property.

The goal of improving reporting and attribution isn’t just looking after budgets, but will also impact on customers’ experiences through the timing of ad campaigns, messaging and lead handling. The success and refinement of any reporting initiatives start with incisive conversations and can’t ignore what’s happening in the wider industry. EPM is an invaluable chance to get together, share experiences and evaluate the state of property marketing and data today.

We’ll be diving into this topic in further detail after our Effective Property Marketing event early March so be sure to pop back in a month’s time and take a read.