Hosts: Ronn Ruiz and Martin Canchola

Speaker: Robert Watson, Digital Marketing Manager of iZone Marketing/Apartment SEO

Martin: Welcome to The Multifamily Podcast with Ronn and Martin. We are super excited to have back the one and only Robert Watson, Digital Marketing Manager for iZone Marketing and Apartment SEO. In today’s episode, we will be covering a hot topic around the new cookieless world upon us and what it means for us as digital marketers. We’ll also get into some other generative AI updates, so buckle up and let’s dive right in. It is my great pleasure to welcome Robert Watson, back to the multifamily podcast. How are you doing, Robert?

Robert: I’m doing good, doing good.

Ronn: Thank you, Mr Watson. Rob, we’re so excited to have you here today on our episode. Obviously, this is a hot topic. Want you to talk more about cookieless world in digital marketing and how apartment marketers can obviously prepare for this shift. It’s happening now.  So welcome. So let’s get into it right away. We have a great episode for you guys. I want to make sure that we can cover some of the topics. I know Rob has some great bullet points to share. So my first question for you would be, how is generative AI changing the roles of digital marketing? I know you would love this topic. If you can break it down and speak on each core marketing type, that would be great.

Robert: Yeah, so I can break it down based on our services that we offer. Websites, SEO, digital ads, reputation, and social media. And first of all, on websites, generative AI is a game changer. We’re testing some stuff, but it really has the ability to customize the website dynamically based on the user, based on how they interact with the site, so we can really customize sites now based on the user’s preferences. And what it’s doing is it’s resulting in a higher user engagement, which is increasing more leads for our clients. On the SEO front…

Martin: Just to add in there really quick. On the website side, I hear like generative AI is helping a lot with coding, coders. Like helping them maybe troubleshoot some of their issues and things like that. Is that a big item as well?

Robert: Yes. So, Chat GPT and some other programs are pretty good at writing like Python. So a lot of times we’ll have like web development projects. We’re mostly using HTML, CSS,  JavaScript. These are like the basic, you know, building blocks of any website. And sometimes we need to connect into other programs and before we’d have to hire a developer. But now we can literally say I’m working with this program and I wanted to connect to this program, can you write me a script that will connect these two? And not only will it write a script. It will explain why it wrote it, how it wrote it, and where you need to insert your custom things to make it connect properly. So yeah, it really is helping on the development side of websites versus maybe on the front end. The front end’s coming. The front end, everybody’s figuring out how to do the adjustments on the fly. And on the back end, we’re using those primarily as a tool to help us create faster. Yeah.

Martin: Yeah. that’s amazing.

Ronn: Amazing.

Robert: On the SEO side, I mean, this was the first thing that popped in my brain when I first started using Chat GPT because for a long time working in SEO production, content, content is endless for us, right? So, at a sense, we need to always be fresh, always be at the top of our game, always remember our checklist of what’s important for the copy.  And the beautiful thing is we can say, okay, here’s our requirements. Here’s how we want you to write it. Here’s the format we want you to write it in. We can kind of give it a little bit of our secret sauce. And we can say, okay, do it for this page and then it can rewrite your content based on what your requirements are. It could go and find other pages that might be good for an internal link. So, really, what it allows us to do is mix a data scientist with a copywriter, and that is kind of your two most powerful sets that most agencies don’t have. They have either somebody who’s really good at data. And they’re a data driven marketing company, but they’re not a copyright driven marketing company. And then you have a lot of companies that are so primarily copy driven that they outsource everything other than copy. They’ll do copy, they’ll design a graphic, but they’re not going to do anything marketing related because they don’t know the numbers. They’re not comfortable. And now you can kind of mix the two and say, Hey, I have this strategy I want to do and I want it to affect this and  with this data and now you can combine them and it can start making predictive analysis based on past search results or past data. What update should I make so I can get a higher ranking?

Martin: What do you think on like the content generation side? Like, what do you think are some pitfalls I think apartment marketers should be aware of using generative AI to produce content and things to look out for. I think they should know about that.

Robert: Yeah, I think generative AI should be thought of as a tool and not as a solution. And what I mean by that is if you think about it as a solution, which is give me an SEO update and then I just copy that SEO update and I publish it, that might be better than doing nothing. But it’s not going to overall build your strategy because it’s not building it with any context. So the key really is, think about using it as an additional tool to help develop a better creative that Google wants, right? The problem you’re going to have is if you have your website and you do, okay, I’m going to add a thousand blogs a day, so I can get higher up in their SEO rankings, you’re going to get hit by Google and you’re just not going to be on the search results. And that’s the big fear of everybody using generative AI for SEOs. We don’t know when Google is going to say, we don’t want this.

Ronn: Yeah.

Robert: And they’ll say it one day. So what we’re doing is we’re doing what we’ve always done. Evergreen strategy. Exactly what Google wants. We’re just using AI tools to help us refine the content to produce it better, not produce more.

Martin: Yeah, and I really don’t want to live in a world, live in a world where the internet is just full of regurgitated content, right? And there’s no real value in it. And that’s my biggest fear with this. So ideally, if you’re using it you need to put your own components, your own authority, your own experiences into the content piece to really make it stand out because yeah, just on it is not going to be your soul go to.

Robert: I would say like with our prompts that we use, like that we’re doing testing on, on the iZone side, there’s no less than 15, no less than 15 variables on a prompt. So we’re giving it 15 layers of instruction to get the outcome that we want. So we’re feeding it as much data as we can, telling it how we want the data back, and which formats we want it back, because we can even have it spit out images now, we can have it spit out a CSV file if we want to. So it’s getting to the point where it’s essentially like having a digital assistant and based on what you know, it most likely already knows that plus more and then the stuff that you don’t know, it can go find for you. So, like if you needed a research assistant for something, or if I’m looking for, you know, what are the top 10 trends and apartment living in 2024, I could have a ghost scour the Internet, find all the blogs that have been written in the past two months. Bring me back and give me a highlight. What is all these blogs talking about? Give me the highlighted data and then I could build my SEO content based on. I want pages for these amenities because these are the most searched and the most written about. So there’s a lot of that kind of use your strategies to, use the, you could use the AI to help expand your strategies or help refine your strategies and make them happen quicker.

Martin: Okay. So moving on from SEO, let’s touch on digital ads. I mean, you can be talking Google with Performance max and Demand gen, and probably even on the Meta side as well. What are your thoughts there?

Robert: Yeah. So AI, I kind of love AI, and Google and Facebook have kind of, you know, they they’re taking AI, especially on the ads management side and their own direction where they’re trying to give you additional placements. They’re trying to find additional keywords for your search. They’re trying to find, write you additional ad copies for get better performance. So a lot of this is really giving you the ability to make that precision guided messaging. So for specific users or sub users, we can create different messaging and now it’s getting to the point where it’s scalable. Before we used to make, maybe have a team of four to manage a large campaign to create the creative ad copies, doing the bid adjustments, you know. That team now you can, you can probably get down to a team of one because they’re gonna have the tools to do everything. So, you’re going to have an AI that can optimize your ads budgets. You’re going to have an AI that can build your ad copies. You’re going to have an AI that can build your videos for your demand gen. And that’s where we’re going. That will eventually come down and I think this is going to give the ability for smaller advertisers to have more powerful campaigns. So you’re not going to have to compete, you know, with apartments.com to get a good listing. You’re going to be able to use all the best tools to get a higher placement through Google, because you’re doing a Google once. Yeah, reputation management, this is really cool. I think, I think Ronn, you guys are exploring it a lot right now on your end. And for me, it’s like a 24/7 watchdog. Keeps an eye on all the reviews across the Internet. It can write responses quickly. We can program them to with certain criteria and how they should respond based on it’s a negative or a positive sentiment. You know, and the best thing is it can help you put out those fires right when they start. So as soon as a bad review comes in, it can get in there. It can respond for you. You can ask them to give you, give the business a call, to try to squash it before it gets out of control. Because sometimes negative reviews, the platforms are. Rather tricky to get them to take them down. And it’s always, you know, in our view, better to get the person to take it down and solve their problem.

Martin: Okay.

Robert: Social media is another. Oh, do you have any questions on that?

Martin: Oh, no, no, that’s good. Yeah.

Robert: On social media, I mean, I keep on this one because we’re doing it a lot for iZone. We’ve created like a whole new process for ourselves, cutting our time dramatically. Everything from crafting, our specific strategies for the content and then making sure all our content works together. Building out the full calendar at once, and this really lets us hone in on this specific messaging. Like customized messaging on social media is always going to be a little bit easier than on Google because we actually know the audience a bit more within social media. So, here we can really develop, you know, if you wanted to have 10 campaigns that go to 10 individual audience segments. That would be a lot of work to try to maintain, but I think with what Meta is doing, and with the generative AIs for ad copy generative AIs for graphics, I think this is going to be the future.

Martin: So, can you explain what a cookieless internet means and why it’s becoming a reality today?

Robert: Yeah, moving a cookieless, it’s kind of like turning the page on internet privacy. For those managing the properties, you know, getting your data in a smart way and collecting it on the firsthand. So the big thing with cookieless, it might not be as big in the multifamily world, but let’s say for Facebook ads. In 2014, Facebook ads, you could literally put a dollar in and just print $3 up all day.

Ronn: The good old days.

Robert: Because they were literally tracking everybody who they were, what device they went on, when they went on the next device, what devices were connected to those devices. So you were literally able to target specific people for specific products, and that got a little intrusive. And in Europe, Europe hit first and they went heavy on protections. And that started like with Apple removing cookies from Safari a few years ago. And now this year, Chrome is going to remove it by default by the end of the year. So no more cookies, but cookies are primarily like the big picture is. There’s two different types of cookies. There’s a first party cookie and a third party cookie. A first party cookie is a cookie placed on your site by you. This would be like a Google Analytics tag. And a third party cookie is something like you would use with a marketing platform like Klaviyo back in the day. They would give you a script, you’d put it on your website, and then they would take all that data and keep it in. You see it now with some kind of prospecting businesses, new prospecting businesses. Where they’ll have, here’s everything they’ve done, here’s what they’re looking for, here’s the sentiment of how their day is going. That’s all through cookies, because they’re tracking you throughout your day through different programs. When you hit it here, they’re tracking you when you hit it on another site. So, we wanted to get rid of that for your own privacy. So our key there was, the key there is, we want to keep everything on the first party cookie.

Martin: And that’s by just owning our data and…

Robert: Yeah.

Martin: Then really making use of it. I think sometimes we apartment marketers could do more that. I know like, even with like customer match us with the Google ads, you got to have like a thousand, right? So, I mean, how do you think apartment marketers could do it? If like say something that many, I mean, they might not have that many leads to kind of utilize.

Robert: Yeah, and the multifamily, you know, they’re no stranger to the power of data, right? And, you know, they guides all the decisions and which properties to invest in the forecast for the market, what the rent demands are going to be 18 months out. But when it comes to marketing, understanding like what the prospects care about, why they choose you over the competitor. That’s where the real magic and the data comes to play on the marketing side, because our job is to get them to remember your business and to choose you over the competitor. And how do we do that? We need to understand, we need to understand what the client really is looking for and what the client wants. You can think of it this way, like, while we’re using the data to navigate, like the high seas of property management investment. There’s an uncharted island where the treasure is a resident satisfaction and loyalty, and that’s where it’s buried, like as soon as you could figure out what makes your residents happy and how you can keep them on board. It’s just spreading that message throughout the community, because that’s what’s attracting them and understanding that. You know, that’s why reputation is so important, and it’s making such a big impact on SEO and why Google’s leveraging reputation so heavy right now, because it’s really the only thing where they feel like they’re getting a real look at how the business is treating the customer. And that’s what Google wants. Google wants satisfaction above everything right now, because they have a lot of competition on AI, which is going to take away from search. But if you know, if you go to Google and the reviews are good and you go to a 4 star place and it’s 4 stars to you, you’re going to keep using Google. If you go there and it says 4 stars and you think it’s 2, you’re going to try something else, like a Yelp or whatever the case might be.

Martin: It’s true.

Ronn: So, I think it’s so important. I mean, by the way, you shared so many great points right now. I think 1 of which was that how the strategy, like how you speak to AI. So, going back to the AI is really how you’re going to get it, you know, so, you know, as they say back in the day, crap in, crap out. So, making sure that you have the right strategy. I think it’s not just for everyone right now, but definitely the tools are powerful.  And I love how you were speaking about the data and the visualization. I think that that is exactly what our customers are trying to look for, is understanding truly their prospects and why they care about, or why they choose them over the competition. So, that is the world we live in. Huge, huge, huge. Thank you for sharing the cookieless because I’ve been wondering like if how, I’m a cookie monster. So are we, do we still get to eat cookies? The first party I got, obviously, and third party, I just didn’t know how expansive that list is, but it seems pretty expansive, right? Because everybody was let’s go in there.

Robert: Yeah. Third party’s been kind of on, you know, on the skids for a few years and that we know it’s going to be going away. And most of the people who had cookie driving systems are now switched to server side tracking. So, it just removes, it removes the ability for someone who don’t want spying on your customers from spying on your customers. That’s kind of, was kind of the big kicker.

Ronn: Yeah. And we knew that obviously the focus was there because of, you know, the recent unveiling of like having to identify that there’s cookies, you know, on us, right. So that data transparency element was there. And then now it’s like, okay, that’s still not good enough. Get rid of it.  We want to protect our peeps. So my question next would be how can apartment marketers in particular get more first party data with Google tag manager?

Robert: Yeah, so the first party data that we’re currently getting, that’s all going to stay the same with this kind of cookie change. Google Analytics, that’ll all stay the same. Nothing’s going to be affected there. The main thing you’re going to want to think about, especially in the multifamily world with a lot of data to actually leverage, and we’re kind of in a spot right now where it’s the perfect timing as we’re switching to potentially these Google Tag Manager server side tracking. To think about how we’re going to connect all the data into Google Tag Manager. Because now, we actually have a spot where we can say, I got a lead from Google. I know that for sure. I’m sending that data to Google Tag Manager. And now I can have that tag manager right to rent cafe, for example, and say this lead 100 percent came from this ad, this click. So you’re going to be able to get that transparency through the Google Tag Manager server side tracking, but it is not a simple thing. You have to get a Google API. You have to pay for an instance of a server. If you get too many requests, the server will crash. It’s kind of like we’re adding web dev into tracking. So it’s kind of a, It’s kind of a different beast than just Google Analytics or just putting a script on a website and you’re done. But it does give you a lot of additional leverage that a lot of the market is going to be losing because they’re not gonna, they’re not going to want to deal with us. It’s gonna be a lot of headache to get set up, and if your numbers aren’t right, you’re not gonna want to do it, right? But when you do set up, you get way better privacy protection. Because you’re the only person that lets anybody get any data. You cast a pass through the server, it doesn’t pass through the browser. Another huge performance enhancement is, you don’t put the script on the website anymore. So all those scripts that load that take time, this one takes a half a second, this one takes 200 milliseconds. Those go away. Everything runs off the server. Your data collection should be 100 percent accurate versus right now with Google Tag Manager. Because technically Google Tag Manager is a cookie. So sometimes data is not being transferred properly. So right now, like on e-comm, you get about a 20 percent difference between your Shopify metrics and your Google Analytics metrics, and then you get your custom data handling, like kind of like what we talked about before where I got this lead. Now I’m going to use my server to send it somewhere else. So you’ll have a little bit more dynamic handling of your leads versus just whatever comes in and sends, comes in and sends, comes in and sends. This will allow you to only send data when necessary.

Ronn: That’s awesome.

Martin: I mean, that’s some amazing stuff. And I’m sure a lot of our audience can, I mean, that’s a lot to take in. Right in, there’s a lot to do right there. So of course, you know, if you don’t know where to start, honestly first start by talking to your web developer, or wherever you’re working with or a marketing partner. Because there’s probably, definitely a lot of steps into getting that squared away and set up properly to make sure it’s all functioning good.

Robert: There are there are some third party companies right now working on how do we create the user friendly tracking. So there are like, you can google like server side tracking. So they have companies that are not Google, I would just recommend going with Google since they own the data.

Martin: Yeah.

Robert: And you don’t want that connection to break. That’s like the connection you need to work 100% of the time, is because that passes all your Google Analytics data to Google Analytics.

Martin: More data they have better they can go. So how can marketers build trust with prospective residents in this new era of enhanced privacy?

Robert: Yeah, I think this is going back to basics. I think we might be overthinking a lot. I think it’s good to build trust. It’s all about being open. You know, like those bars you talked about Ronn, on the bottom and say, hey, here’s all the cookies we have. Here’s the data we’re collecting. Here’s who we share the data with. I think is about being open and also being authentic. I know everybody says this, and it’s kind of like a buzzword authentic, but it’s really just posting real life photos of your property. People having, you know, sharing the experience that people are having and what you want people to have at your property. Not overhyping it, right? Not displaying it as a luxury community. And then you go there and it’s not a luxury community, and we want to build that trust and then it’s about making sure from the first click to decide, leaves everybody feels taken care of and informed. I know basis was on the pricing, no concessions that are active, but that one’s actually not active anymore. So it’s about being authentic, being open, being honest, and giving people a reason to care. Right? That honestly is the key to marketing. People just need, you have to give people a reason to care about you, your brand. And that will help with the trust with the rest of it.

Ronn: I think you mentioned about the reputation is going to have a strong point here. And I think that that’s by being authentic and engaging. I think that that’s how you’re gonna convey that element of trust that you have to, it’s earned. Right? While giving an insight into like, how you operate and how, you know, pretty you are, all sort of things. Very cool. So with that being said obviously about enhanced privacy. I want to see how the digital marketers, how can they personalize their experience of a user experience without infringing on their privacy? That’s huge.

Robert: Yeah. It is interesting because we were going from a time where it was essentially a default to know who people were to, okay, and now what do we do now that we don’t know who people are? And we’re again going back to what we used to do, you know, in 2012, 2013, when display got very popular, and what we need to do is not think about personalizing your journey, as like being nosy but we want to think about as being observant. And again, that comes down to understanding what the prospects really care about. Like if we can, if we understand 70% of the people who rent in this community or within this demographic. What we like to do is create personas, here’s the persona of our community, and we write our ad copies to those personas. So we’re essentially doing is creating variations based on who the target lessor is, or who their current lessor is that we want more of. And that’s really how you’re going to grow it, is by understanding who your current residents are, who you actually want to attract. And then how do we get the messaging around bringing them in.

Martin: So, how should marketers prepare for future changes in digital privacy and technology and kind of moving into this new age of generative AI?

Robert: Yeah, I think they stay ahead of privacy, we need to make sure we’re thinking about it as a partner and not as a hurdle. And that gets a little tricky, because data for marketing. You know, when we first started marketing, Martin and I, there was no such thing as a data scientist. That career didn’t exist. I think only since then. Yeah, only since then, you know, has that concept of having a, looking deeply into the demographics and extracting data and then parsing people into specific groups and then getting them into very niche subgroups. That became very popular with the launch of mobile because we just started getting so much data. Your device told you everything about you, you know, you know, where you were on earth at the time, what your T Mobile plan costs. They were given everything. Who your contacts were, all your photos, everything. As soon as you installed an app, they got everything from your phone was pushed over. So they had so much data that we just star, we started thinking about it from a data point of view. So everything came down to conversions, and less about the copy, the contents, the storytelling, and much more about return on ad spend. As Martin, Martin, Martin makes use of that phrase.

Martin: Ronn, do you have any final thoughts or questions for Robert before we wrap it up?

Ronn: This is definitely short and sweet. I think that it was my main takeaway. I think that it screams to me, and again, this is no by, no way shameless plug. But I think that it is definitely, we’re in environments where its’s going to separate the good from the best of breed, even partners. And I think that you even though it sounds like we’re making our jobs easier by way of generating AI. I think that you still need that strategy. I think that’s what resonates with me. And I think that that’s where I was referring to about that whole digital partner elements in it. To understand your strategy, I think that for as you mentioned, Rob about the personas, and huge, really understanding your audience. The game’s changing, is changing, obviously, to make this faster and smarter marketers but also in a cookie environment. It’s limiting us. So really understanding how you’re gonna get, see your performance thrive and not get stale is important. Thank you for sharing some of these insights. I know we could go away longer and I’m a total jam session. But we really wanted to get the basics out there today. You know, in light of the cookieless world in particular.

Martin: I think as we move into a world of more complexities, I think there definitely could be more, you know, there’s so many things that you have to do. There’s plenty of things you could mess up during the process. So, you know, even if you don’t.

Robert: Oh yeah…

Martin: You know what I mean?

Robert: We just did something. We did something, I think we were doing some automation test and we sent ourselves like 10,000 emails. So you gotta, you gotta you know, automation is…

Martin: It comes with rigidity as well. There can just seems like it happens, so just be mindful that, you know, take your time, learn it, educate yourself as much as you can. And, you know, of course, experiment with it and try it out and see what works, what doesn’t and just kind of go from there. Rob, any final words before we close it up?

Robert: No, I’m just kind of excited. You know, I’ve been excited for a while now. But, you know, every, you know, it’s, you know, once a decade we get a good market shift. And then you know, we also get one negative one, but this is a good one for us. It’s gonna, it’s gonna open up the bandwidth for a lot of really good, smaller companies to be able to handle a lot more volume. But it’s really going to allow the good marketers to scale and that’s been the problem. The problem right now. Has always been good marketing is very resource intensive. Because you have the chain of content, the chain of creative, you have to have just to get everything put together. And I think you know, this AI is going to kind of allow us to go from, it’s going to allow us to go from like, I’m trying to think of a good analogy that’s not too offensive. It’s not going to allow us to go from like a fine Italian restaurant, to an olive garden, in terms of being able to get the stuff out the door. That’s what he’s gonna do.

Martin: Thank you so much, Robert, for taking time to connect with us. We always have such a fun time conversating with you and just love the insights that you bring to the podcast. For everyone who is, maybe you run a general business or maybe you’re a vendor in the multifamily industry and not actually an apartment marketing. I highly suggest you check out izonemarketing.com and get a free marketing analysis and see what Robert and his team can do for you. Also, on the ApartmentSEO.com side, feel free to check us out and get your Free Marketing Analysis, Reputation Report Card, and/or check out Adz Manager, that’s AdzManager.com. And if you’re trying to bring it in house and that’s the product for you. Until next time, bye everybody.

Ronn: Bye guys.