Jocelyn Quall, VP of Marketing, REBA
Tell us about your company, your role, and top priority or initiative over the next six months.
Real Estate Business Analytics (REBA) is a data analytics company on a mission to change how the multifamily industry uses data. REBA helps leaders turn data into decisions with a suite of business intelligence, budgeting, and revenue management solutions.
I am the VP of Marketing in charge of raising brand awareness, building trust, and driving demand for REBA within our industry. My top priority over the next six months is to infuse product marketing into our messaging across all channels to help our prospects access our solutions faster and highlight the incredible products our team of experts has built. My team’s main strategies to accomplish this goal are a website overhaul, and deploying video content.
Given the current and/or projected state of the economy, what has been the greatest challenge(s) you’ve faced so far or anticipate in 2023?
The greatest challenge we’ve faced so far is watching companies let short-term headwinds impact their long-term trajectory. We’re anticipating longer sales cycles and larger decision-making committees. Companies are being very intentional with their dollars and are expecting to reap the efficiencies and rewards from their tech stack investments.
We’re firm believers that the best companies reinvest in down times and that an investment in your data is key to navigating a fluctuating marketplace and finding NOI opportunities inside of your current business.
Are current market conditions or concerns about the economy later this year impacting your marketing plans, if so, how?
Building on my previous answer, REBA’s value proposition holds true regardless of the state of the economy and becomes even more relevant during challenging times.
In alignment with our mission of changing how the industry uses data, I built a marketing strategy that puts a premium on thought leadership content. We’re not big on slapping a logo on things and hoping it works; we activate our marketing and take a lot of pride in sharing our team’s expertise and experience with the industry to help shift how they do business.
So my marketing plan stays the same, we’ll just lean further into content that highlights how our solutions help teams make smarter decisions, faster, do more with less, maximize NOI without compromising the resident experience, and continue serving as a trusted advisor in the industry.
Does PR play a role in your overall marketing strategy and if so where does it provide the most value OR where does it fall short?
I evaluated a couple of PR firms late last year because I knew we had aggressive growth goals for 2023 and as a one-person team at the time, recognized I needed additional resources to get us there.
I saw a lot of value in the broader role PR could play within our marketing strategy beyond media relations & press releases, moving into earned media opportunities such as quotes, bylines, editorial content, and award submissions and premium content opportunities such as conference speaking roles, hosted webinars, and case studies.
Ultimately, we chose to grow the marketing team rather than partner with an outside firm for the year. Handling this side of our strategy in-house has allowed us to be nimbler as we grow (refining our marketing message and testing different campaigns) while admittedly requiring that we focus our time on the areas that drive a higher return for us rather than achieve everything an agency would have in scope.
Do you or your team currently leverage ChatGPT or another AI tool? How so?
As a 2 (almost 3)-person marketing team with a tight budget but lofty content needs, I use it to brainstorm & generate different ideas, titles, topics etc. It has helped me make sure I’m not missing something I might have gained from bouncing the idea around with others.
ChatGPT has also helped me translate tech features into more approachable terms that appeal to a wider target market. But building a tech brand in a niche industry, I’m also mindful of the fact that nothing beats the internal knowledge of the multifamily experts I work with at REBA. So for everything that I gain from using this tool, there’s a layer of rewriting for tone, facts, and clear messaging that occurs on the backend.
There are so many ways that I want to be using ChatGPT though. If I had a dollar for every time LinkedIn told me I was doing it wrong, I’d be on a beach somewhere. But jokes aside, I would like to deploy it to transcribe videos, investigate its integration with our CRM, train my team on best practices to help us look like a large marketing organization from the outside, etc.
What was the last book you read?
I recently finished The Mountain is You by Brianna Wiest. Turns out solo time on a plane is all I needed to get a book read in a sitting.
Learn more about and connect with Jocelyn on LinkedIn.
