The CAM Campaign: A B2B Digital Marketing Success Story
CAM reconciliation season is a very important time of year for CRE operators, owners, and tenants. Property managers and third-party management teams have a vested interest in accurate CAM expense calculations, even if they may seem indirectly involved. Firstly, the CAM reconciliation period serves as a crucial audit for property managers and VPs. It allows them to assess the landlord's performance by evaluating the accuracy of their CAM estimates and identifying any unexpected expenses that may have impacted the property's income.
However, beyond expense recovery, ensuring adherence to lease obligations is paramount. CAM reconciliation periods demand a meticulous review and interpretation of tenant contracts. This process provides a valuable opportunity for those managing lease agreements to fulfill their critical obligations to their tenants.
As one of the leading AI solutions for automating Commercial Real Estate property data, Prophia recognized that the CAM reconciliation season posed a lot of challenges for its users and prospects. Prohia’s marketing team collaborated with sales, product developers, and a CRE executive and Prophia client to host a webinar highlighting the benefits of Prophia for CAM reconciliation tasks and promoted the event with a multi-channel, digital marketing strategy.
Identifying the Challenges of CAM Reconciliation for Our Target Audience
In January of 2024, Prophia’s marketing and sales teams started meeting to brainstorm about the challenges CRE operators and executives face during this financial period of the year. We uncovered these major roadblocks and setbacks that frequently occur during CAM:
Many moving parts: Multiple parties are involved in reconciliation, including internal and external teams.
No standardization: Every lease is written and handled differently and when shared across VPs, property managers, third-party accountants, etc. it can cause misinterpretations.
Process inefficiencies: Property managers and accountants are often working out of their own spreadsheets and workbooks.
Legal exposure & cost: The sum of these challenges (complex legalese, process inefficiencies, disparate workbooks, etc.) is potential legal exposure, damaged tenants relationships, and even diminished property income.
Educating and Nurturing Prospects About the Benefits of Prophia for CAM Reconciliation
To market the webinar, the marketing team came up with a multi-channel approach with messaging tailored to executives, such as VPs, associates, like property managers, and accountants. All of these individuals face different challenges during CAM season and we needed to prove that Prophia could provide a comprehensive solution for all of them. This multi-channel strategy included creating content for email, LinkedIn, as well as Prophia’s blog.
Email Marketing
The webinar email marketing campaign included seven emails. We sent three over the course of three weeks, Tuesday or Thursday mornings, leading up to the webinar. Two were sent after the webinar to both attendees and non-attendees. Pre-webinar emails focused on the gruelingness of CAM rec season, leveraging language that spoke directly to property managers:
“Our AI is so specialized, it’s like it was designed by a tech-savvy property manager”
“The future of CAM reconciliation doesn’t include workbooks or hours of manual validation.”
“We’ll answer your burning questions about using AI to instantly validate OpEx terms and adjust provisions…”
And the third email introduced Prophia’s collaboration with a customer to host the webinar, the VP of Property Management at Radom Capital, Lauren Crenshaw. This offered possible attendees proof that property managers at leading firms actually use Prophia for CAM reconciliation automation.
Post-webinar, both attendees and non-attendees were sent a recording of the webinar. The recipients who clicked the link were then contacted directly by a member of the sales team as they showed the most interest. Those who did not click the webinar link were added to Prophia’s nurture email lists and started receiving marketing emails to educate them more about the product and introduce them to different use cases.
Social media marketing
The CAM digital marketing campaign also included social media posts that echoed the language and cadence of the CAM webinar email campaign. Prophia tagged and referenced Lauren Crenshaw and Radom Capital to create interaction between the two teams leading up to the webinar. We also published a LinkedIn article, leveraging keywords like #CAM #CAMreconciliation #propertymanagement to increase organic impressions.
Longform Content & thought leadership
Working again in collaboration with Lauren, we also created a case study showcasing how Radom Capital uses Prophia for property management tasks in addition to CAM reconciliation. We interviewed Lauren and members of her team at-length about the different ways they use Prophia to make their work more efficient and strengthen relationships with their tenants.
Additionally, we created high-quality, informative thought leadership pieces about using Prophia for CAM reconciliation, highlighting the benefits of CAM automation for everyone in property operations such as associates, third-party team members, and even the C-suite and executives. These longform pieces also used keywords to garner organic traffic on search results pages and posts Prophia’s brand awareness.
The Results of the CAM Digital Marketing Campaign
The CAM webinar was very successfully thanks to the coordinated efforts of both teams and the targeted messaging and content strategy. Open rates of our webinar emails reached 29%, proving the messaging, timing, and value proposition was effective for our target audience. 74 property managers signed up for the webinar and 53 total attended. This was a 43% increase in engagement over our previous webinar.