Marketing Technology: Gary Angel
Faced with a leasing situation, most property owners wish they knew what was going on in the renter’s mind. At the 14th Annual Apartment Innovation and Marketing Conference (AIM 2019), which took place at the Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach on May 5-8, retail tech guru Gary Angel provided a possible solution to that issue. In a Q&A session with Marcella Eppsteiner, Vice President, Marketing, Mission Rock Residential, Digital Mortar’s CEO explains how retail, an environment where space is at a premium, uses wifi beacons, cameras, infrared, facial recognition and other technologies to
- view its real estate
- divide physical location according to value
- secure and protect its investment
- make new discoveries about customer behavior
These are valuable insights for property owners considering investments in smart home tech and self-guided touring.
Introducing himself, Angel said, “I’ve been doing digital analytics for two decades. But three years ago, we had a project that we were not just tracking websites but tracking people in a store.” Angel’s SaaS company helps retail build a rich understanding of how to profitably optimize what customers want. “I thought it was incredibly cool,” he enthused, “to view what was happening in a physical property.” Angel demonstrated how two cameras tracking the movements of customers can be converted into a heat map of “a day in the life of the store.” Heat maps can also be converted into funnels and other analytics to uncover trends. Retail uses for analytics include labor optimization and strategic design. “When you understand how people navigate a space, it always helps you make better decisions about what you should do in the future about laying space out.” And it’s not just retail anymore: “Arenas are interested in this, resorts and casinos are interested in this.”
When Eppsteiner posited that such analytics would work for property management, Angel replied, “Absolutely. Think of the blind spots in your operation. If you could fill in those blind spots, there’s almost certain to be profound discoveries about how things are working.”
What’s more, the price of the data-gathering devices (beacons, cameras, etc.) tends to be minimal; it’s the interpretation of data that gets more complex. One CTA, however, may include sending personalized emails to prospects who spent more time at a particular property amenity. “The places where people spend the most time are the places they really care about.”
But if people are “showing” you what’s important to them, what does that do for customer surveys? Should we eliminate them? Not really, said Angel. “Voice of Customer surveys often give you really interesting different kinds of information. What people tell you in a survey is kind of aspirational.” He concluded, “That tie between aspirational and what they’re actually doing is super-interesting.”
When it comes to self-guided tours, Angel likes them because, from an analytic POV, “they’re so easy to measure! And the measuring will be so precise.” Angel adds the easiest way to get data is to build geolocation into the app that’s being used; it can also help the prospect with navigating the tour. Better still: “There’s no hardware cost.”
For any technology outlay, Angel suggested using a technology decision tree. “It’s a series of decisions who might walk through, to get to the technology you need.”
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