How Data-Driven Marketing Can Fill Properties in Record Time

Struggling to fill empty units? A lack of customer segmentation, relevant data insights and too-broad campaigns in your marketing strategy might be to blame. If this sounds like you, discover how data-driven marketing can help student housing providers go from zero occupancy to packed waitlists faster than ever.

Quick links

• The occupancy challenge
• Why traditional marketing falls short
• The benefits of data-driven marketing
• Real results: A success snapshot
• How to implement data-driven marketing into your strategy

The occupancy challenge

The occupancy challenge is a simple one – vacant properties mean you’re losing money. Whether your website UX isn’t leading to bookings, your marketing campaigns aren’t delivering the desired results or competitors in the market are steaming ahead, tackling occupancy issues as a property manager can be challenging.

Why traditional marketing falls short

Traditional marketing in the housing sector can often fall short due to outdated tactics and one-size-fits-all campaigns. Without data to back up decisions and goals, property managers and developers lack insight, personalisation and ROI tracking. This often means more trial-and-error approaches that waste resources and time – for little gain.

The benefits of data-driven marketing

Why is data-driven marketing the way to go in this industry? Where traditional methods fail, a data-driven approach puts data at the forefront of campaigns and strategies, letting student housing providers reach students at the right time, with the right offering.

By collecting relevant insights from as many sources as possible, you can customise the user experience for students, targeting defined marketing segments and acquiring new customers by engaging at key decision-making moments. All the while, you’ll use real-time analytics tracking to improve and build on strategies to point your marketing towards success.

The results? Student accommodation providers utilising data-driven marketing can boost efficiency, scalability, measurability and behavioural targeting, which, in turn, helps improve engagement and leads to bookings.

Real results: A success snapshot

Of course, real results speak for themselves. We worked with Nido Living, a multi-national provider of student and young professional co-living accommodation, to develop an improved data-driven digital marketing strategy that maximised their commercial gains and transformed customer targeting.

With an enhanced website and strategy, we helped them achieve:

• 28% increase in avg. revenue per room
• 90% occupancy by target milestones
• 36% reduction in cost per conversion

How to implement data-driven marketing into your strategy t

Implementing an enhanced digital strategy with data-driven insights can transform performance for student housing providers, future-proofing your business strategy and supporting your CRM efforts. From defining your goals to testing and optimising, here’s how to introduce data-driven marketing into your next strategy.

1. Define clear goals and KPIs

Consider exactly what it is you want to achieve with your strategy. Do you want to increase website conversions by 50%? A 15% improvement in customer retention rates? Your customer acquisition costs reduced by 10%? Whatever your objectives and goals, being as specific as possible with deliverables can help guide data collection and understand how success will be measured later down the line.

2. Collect and integrate relevant data

The key to implementing data-driven marketing is – you guessed it – data collection and integration. Customer data can be pulled from several sources, including CRM tools, website analytics, social media, email campaigns and purchase history. At this point, it’s important to think about the data that’s most relevant to your goals and KPIs, rather than just collecting as much data as possible.

But why is data so crucial? It’s simple – customer demographics and behaviour analytics help you piece together a unified view of your customers, unlocking personalisation opportunities to use in your marketing campaigns.

Work with tools like Google Analytics, HubSpot, Salesforce and CDPs (Customer Data Platforms) to efficiently collect and integrate the most relevant data.

3. Analyse and segment your audience

It’s nearly impossible to nail your audience targeting if you don’t take the time to understand who they are. That’s why you should be using customer insights to identify patterns and divide audiences into meaningful segments (e.g., by behaviour, demographics, or lifecycle stage).

Again, the more information you have and the more segments you can create, the better, because this is how you can pinpoint an exact customer profile. Use techniques like RFM analysis, clustering algorithms, and lookalike modelling to accurately and effectively segment audiences.

Once you know your typical customer inside and out, you can begin to develop relevant, targeted messaging that reaches students in the right places at the right time.

4. Personalise campaigns based on insights

So, you’ve optimised your customer insights – what now? The next step is to create campaign ideas based on this data. Tailoring content, timings and channels based on audience segments and data insights can increase engagement and conversion rates.

For example, you could look at triggering emails based on user behaviour analytics, such as time spent on pages or page views, or send personalised housing recommendations based on paid advertising engagement.

5. Test, optimise, and iterate

The final stage of implementing data-driven marketing into your strategy is to test it out on your customers. Start by running A/B tests and tracking performance against established KPIs. Once you’ve collected enough performance data to get a clear idea of how well each test is going, you can use this to adapt and improve over time, alongside creating benchmarks for success. Metrics to keep an eye on during this stage include conversion rates, ROI, engagement metrics and customer lifetime value.

Get in touch 

The housing market is competitive, so your marketing should be too. Whether your current website isn’t helping you reach your occupancy goals or you’re not hitting sales targets, reach out to us for a free CRO and UX audit to find out what’s holding you back.