The 10-Minute Marketing Audit Every Property Should Do Every Monday

What if you could catch marketing problems before they cost you leases—all in just 10 minutes a week?

In this episode of The Multifamily Marketers Podcast, hosts Josh Grillo and Caroline Mills share a simple weekly marketing audit that every multifamily owner, marketer, and regional manager should be doing.

From your Google Business Profile and reviews to website functionality, Google Ads, social media, and lead quality, this episode walks through the eight key areas that can quickly uncover issues before they become expensive problems. Plus, you’ll learn how AI can help automate much of the process.

You’ll learn:

• The 8 key areas every property should review in a weekly marketing audit
• How to quickly evaluate your Google Business Profile, reviews, and website
• Why checking lead quality is more important than simply counting leads
• How to identify issues with Google Ads before performance drops
• Why listening to leasing calls can uncover hidden conversion problems
• How AI can speed up your weekly audit and identify opportunities faster
• Why small weekly improvements outperform large quarterly fixes

To suggest a topic, get in touch!

For more multifamily marketing help, connect with us at Resident360.

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TRANSCRIPT

Episode 50: The 10-Minute Marketing Audit Every Property Should Do Every Monday

Podcast Co-Hosts: Josh Grillo and Caroline Mills, Resident360

Josh: Welcome back to the Multifamily Marketers Podcast. I’m your host, Josh Grillo, co-founder here at Resident360, and I’ve also got my Florida connection on the line, Caroline Mills, our director of digital marketing. Caroline, happy afternoon in Florida.

Caroline: Hello, hello! We’re sitting in our typical Florida afternoon showers. How are you guys out in San Diego?

Josh: Hot and muggy, which is weird, because it’s never muggy here. We had a little rain yesterday morning, and it’s been humid and hot. Our summer doesn’t really start in San Diego until mid-August, when it really cranks up. It’s usually pretty cool until then. So it’s early for us, but I’ll take advantage of it. The ocean water is in the low 70s, I believe, and it feels amazing.

Caroline: I was going to say, that’s pretty warm for you.

Josh: Very warm. The kids are loving it. Unfortunately, they go back to school on August 10th, so they’ve got this week and next week, and that’s it.

Caroline: Oh, man. That went so fast. I feel like we were just talking about them getting out of school.

Josh: It did go fast. Two months, and then boom, it’s over. Anyway, let’s jump into today’s episode. It’s about something every owner, regional manager, and marketer should be doing every week, though we know most people probably aren’t. We’re calling it the 10-Minute Marketing Audit. It’s not a full marketing audit, which obviously takes hours. It’s a quick weekly health check you and your team can do every Monday morning to identify issues before they become major problems.

So before we dive in, Caroline, let me ask: Why should properties do a quick audit every single week? Isn’t once a month enough, or once a quarter, or once every six months? Why every week?

Caroline: That’s a common question. I was talking with Elisa recently about why we’d want to do this so consistently. One of the big mistakes I commonly see is properties only looking at their marketing when occupancy starts to drop. You never want marketing to be reactive. If you check in every week, you’ll catch small things like a broken form, something wrong in your Google Ads, negative reviews, or website issues. Maybe something on your Google Business Profile has become inaccurate since you last looked. Maybe there’s a tracking problem, or your Apartments.com link is broken. You can catch these before they cost you leases. Most of what we’ll cover today can be reviewed in about 10 minutes, and taking those 10 minutes can save you thousands of marketing dollars.

Josh: All right, let’s start at the top with arguably one of the most important tools: your property’s Google Business Profile. Every Monday, if you’re doing this audit, ask yourself: Are our hours correct? Is our phone number correct? Is our website link working? Are we showing recent photos? Did anyone ask a question we haven’t answered?

Caroline: Exactly, those are great ones. And this is a great place to use AI tools. A few episodes ago, we talked about how teams are using AI in their workflows, and this is a great one to start with. Take screenshots of your Google Business Profile, upload them to Claude or ChatGPT, and ask something like, “Act as a local SEO expert. Review my Google Business Profile and tell me five improvements that could increase visibility and conversions,” or “Tell me whether this matches my website.” Within seconds, you’ll have a great checklist that took you no time to create, cross-checked against your marketing materials, and it will give you something that really helps.

Josh: I just love that these AI tools, Claude and ChatGPT, can read screenshots. It’s the coolest thing ever, and it’s so accurate, right?

Caroline: Oh my gosh, for it to save you that time and do it accurately. Think of all the time you’d otherwise spend finding links and copying and pasting. It’s incredibly helpful.

Josh: That’s right. Second, check your reviews. Everybody knows roughly where their reviews stand, but don’t just look at your star rating. Actually read the reviews and look for trends. Are multiple people mentioning maintenance, communication, noise, or staff? That’s the real marketing data you want to pay attention to.

Caroline: Completely agree. You can use AI tools for this one, too. Copy your last 20 reviews into Claude and ask it to identify the top recurring themes and summarize resident sentiment. It only takes a minute, and instead of reading 20 reviews individually, AI will tell you exactly what residents are talking about, the positives and the negatives. That can shape your marketing message, your social content, and even your conversations with your on-site teams.

Josh: Good one. So number one is your Google Business Profile, and number two is reviews. Number three in this 10-minute audit is your website, and it takes probably 60 seconds or less. Go to your homepage and click around like a prospect. Can you easily schedule a tour? Can you easily submit a contact form? Can you view the floor plans? Do they look okay, or are they blurry? Call the property. What happens? What’s the experience? You’d be amazed by how many websites have broken buttons nobody notices. We see it all the time here at Resident360.

Caroline: I like that you mentioned calling the property. As a marketer, you can easily think, “Oh, yeah, I know that’s their phone number; it’s accurate.” But actually click it and call it. And I’d recommend checking on your phone. We say over 70%, and in some markets even 80%, of your traffic comes from mobile devices. If the mobile experience isn’t smooth, or people can’t submit a form on mobile, you’re probably losing prospects before they ever get the chance to contact you.

Josh: Oh, yeah. I bet that click-to-call button is broken on a lot of mobile property websites.

Caroline: As marketers, owners, and operators, we so often look at websites on desktop, where you can’t call from the site. So I highly, highly recommend checking on your phone.

Josh: All right, number four of the 10-minute audit: Google Ads. You don’t have to be a paid ads expert. You just need to answer a few questions. Are campaigns running? Any disapprovals? Did impressions suddenly disappear? Did spend suddenly spike? If something looks dramatically different from last week, make a note to dig deeper.

Caroline: Absolutely. One thing I love doing: Take your Google Ads dashboard, whether it’s from your vendor or your internal team, wherever you get your Google Ads reporting, screenshot it, and ask AI, “Explain any unusual changes or trends in this account as if you’re talking to a property manager.” It’ll translate complicated data into plain English. Again, you don’t need to spend a bunch of time on it. It only takes a minute to take a screenshot and ask the question, and now you understand what’s going on.

Josh: All right, number five: organic search. Very simply, search for your own property. Do you appear? Who’s above you? Are competitors outranking you? Are they running ads on top of you? Is your Google Business Profile showing correctly?

Caroline: That’s such an easy one, because that’s often how people start their search. Search things like “apartments near me,” “luxury apartments in [your city],” or your city plus “apartments.” Remember, your competitors are showing up in those same search results, so make sure you understand where you’re showing up.

Josh: Moving right along. Number six: social media. This isn’t about posting every day; we say that all the time in past episodes about social media. It’s about making sure your page looks active. Ask yourself, “Would I lease here based on the last nine posts?” That’s a pretty good question, Caroline.

Caroline: That’s a good one. I like it, because that’s what you see as soon as you land on someone’s page. So check your recent posts. Do you have a good mix of resident events, amenities, and lifestyle content? Are there unanswered comments? And if you’re stuck, turn to the tools that can help. AI can generate a whole month’s worth of content ideas in just a few minutes.

Josh: All right, number seven: call tracking. This is one of the most overlooked items: reviewing your calls. Not just how many calls you got. Listen to one or two recordings. Think about it: If you do this audit every Monday and listen to one or two calls each time, you’ll really pick up on what’s happening at the property.

Caroline: I think that’s a really good call-out, and this is where quality matters. Were the calls you listened to from actual prospects? Were they wrong numbers or vendors? How was the leasing consultant on the phone? Sometimes marketing gets blamed when the issue is really happening after the phone rings. As marketers and owners, we want to look not only at the digital side, but also at what happens on the leasing side once we’ve gotten people there.

Josh: And number eight: lead quality. A big one, and definitely one of my favorites. Don’t ask, “How many leads did we get?” Ask, “How many qualified leads did we get?”

Caroline: That’s huge, and it makes a big difference. Look at your tour rate, your application rate, your lease conversions, your cost per lease, and source quality. How is the quality from each source, not just overall? It’s not always about generating the most leads; it’s about generating the right leads. And like you said, if you do this every week, you’ll have a good sense of what’s going on at the property, and you’ll notice when something changes drastically from one week to the next. After a few weeks, you’ll really get into the flow and know what’s happening with each source every week.

Josh: Awesome. So that’s essentially it: eight items in a 10-minute marketing audit, done every Monday, hopefully. Now, something else we want to talk about is a fun little challenge. You could actually build yourself a Monday morning marketing assistant inside Claude. Who would have thunk it, Caroline?

Caroline: It’s moving so fast. It’s getting crazy out here.

Josh: So tell me about this. How would someone build a Monday morning marketing assistant inside Claude?

Caroline: Throughout this episode, we’ve said, “Feed this to your AI tools and let them tell you.” You can actually set it up so it does all of it for you, which would be incredibly helpful. We say 10 minutes, but what if you had a skill built to automate it? You can literally tell Claude: “Every Monday, act as my multifamily marketing director. Walk me through a weekly marketing audit. Ask me questions one at a time. After I answer, give recommendations, identify risks, and tell me my top three priorities for the week.” Now you have your own marketing consultant every Monday, reviewing everything we talked about: your Google Business Profile, reviews, website, Google Ads, organic rankings, social media, call tracking, and lead quality.

So it’s still 10 minutes every week, but now it walks you through it. You don’t have to remember to check everything or go back to your list. It tells you exactly what to check and what your priorities for the week should be, all automated.

Josh: Love it, Caroline. Just remember, guys: Marketing success isn’t about making one huge change every six months, which we do see happen. It’s about making dozens of small improvements every single week. If you’ve got eyes on it once a week, you’ll set yourself up for future success.

Caroline: Absolutely. The properties that consistently perform well aren’t necessarily spending more money. They’re just paying attention more often.

Josh: All right, I think we’ll wrap it up there, Caroline. Thanks, everybody, for tuning in to another episode of the Multifamily Marketers Podcast. If you found this episode helpful, please like, subscribe, leave us a review, and share it with others in the industry. We’ll be back next week with another episode. Take care. Take care, Caroline. See you next week.

Caroline: Thank you, guys. Bye!