Zillow’s going coast-to-coast shining the spotlight on some of the best multifamily marketers in cities across the country. These rental industry pros have used the Zillow Rental Network to help grow their business.

Meet Ryan Perez, the Vice President of Marketing at Landmark Apartment Trust in Tampa, Florida. She started her career in multifamily as a leasing associate and has held a variety of positions over the years in the call center, collections department, and credit department before transitioning into marketing and training. Ryan’s experience in the multifamily industry spans from small and large owner-managers to REITs. We asked her a few questions to learn more about her success strategies when it comes to marketing and tracking.

Zillow: Which factors do you consider when deciding where to allocate your online marketing budget?
Ryan: Generally I’ll do an analysis of that market and look at our comp set. Our comp set is whom we’ve deemed a true competitor in LRO (a revenue management solution). I take a look at the marketing mix and see what they’re doing, and then I search and see what our strengths and weaknesses are. Do we need to put a bigger spend on SEO on top of ILS? It depends on the goal of the asset: are we taking over the acquisition or rebranding? It’s a little different every time. Part of it’s a mixture of what the company was doing mixed with our base model: paid performance model, standard mix of ILS, tailored SEO for each asset, and working directly with Google on PPC campaigns.

Zillow: Why is being metrics-driven important to your team? 
Ryan: I think it really allows us to be strategic about the way we spend our dollars. Just looking at the raw data you can tell what sources are effective in generating quality traffic and what sources are not. We can manipulate what dollars we put in what bucket. Tracking ROI and marketing spend help determine if the spend is working and allows us to be nimble and achieve what we’re looking to do. If you just leave your marketing strategy the way it is you get stale results — you need to re-evaluate and look at data every single month.

Zillow: What advice would you give to a company trying to revamp their tracking efforts?
Ryan: Increased communication with your internal team is key. It’s important to identify the goal along with wants and needs of all team members. Understand what data is the determining factor for making operational decisions: leads, leases, conversion ratio, net move-ins? Understand what it is you’re trying to track before you track it. That’s where it starts.

Zillow: How are you preparing your department for the next wave of renters — what’s your take on what they’ll be looking for, how they search, and how your marketing department can reach them?
Ryan: It evolves daily, but it starts with our strategy: staying on the forefront of what the industry is doing, what customers want today, and what they want next year. We are transitioning to a responsive Web design, and changing the look and feel to go to a more modern color scheme. We’ve rebranded our organization to really try and make our brand friendlier and easily recognizable. We try to have total transparency in our advertising — we may not always have the best product in every market, but the Landmark experience and what that means to our customers differentiates us in the marketplace. Training is a big part of it too; the team needs to know who their customers are.

Zillow: Can you shed some light on why you chose Zillow to be in your budget, and what aspect makes Zillow an appealing marketing partner?
Ryan: When Zillow originally went from a general listing service to a paid listing service, in the first six months it was very easy to see that your offering had changed. It was a lot more open to the end user, and people were using it more than they had before. It was an easy switch for us. We saw a jump in month-over-month traffic for some of our properties. Atlanta, Jacksonville, and Dallas markets are doing well for us with Zillow. Zillow is the buzz right now, and people will come in and say they found us on Zillow using the website or mobile app. It’s great how user friendly the applications are. You can search several different ways on varying platforms and still find the data you’re after.