If your communities aren’t seeing leads converting into leases within a 30-day turnaround this spring it doesn’t mean that COVID-19 has taken hold and ruined your chances of signing leases. It’s not uncommon for the apartment seekers beginning their search in March to lease later on. Here’s what we know about the typical leasing journey in spring and how your communities can improve their chances of signing leases this season.
Continue reading…Category: Consumer Behavior
Insights into consumer behavior.
5 Things Apartment Communities Need to Know About Stories Ads
Instagram Stories was introduced back in 2016 and since then it has taken off to become one of the most used features on Instagram. The Facebook-owned, 15-second format has allowed businesses to create engrossing and powerful advertising for a wide audience. Before jumping straight into brainstorming your quarter-minute masterpiece, let’s go over the 5 things you need to know about creating Stories ads for your apartment community.
Continue reading…Winter Apartment Marketing Outlook
Winter is a dreary time of year for apartment communities. The days are shorter, the weather is colder, and with the holidays taking center stage during the month of December, searching for an apartment isn’t top of mind for many apartment seekers across the country. While many leasing teams try to weather through the storm with the same strategies that brought them leads and leases in the summer, you came here because you know deep down you need to change your strategy.
Uncovering Your Prospects’ Website Journey: Part 2 Lead Flow
In the first part of this two-part series, we showed you how to track the path that website visitors take when they visit your site in Google Analytics. In part two, we will show you how to track the path prospects take before taking lead generating actions on your website. We will explore the “Conversions” section in Google Analytics, cover the most relevant reports for understanding your lead flow, and help you interpret your results.
Continue reading…Are Marketers Getting Too Personal?
Personalization is becoming a buzzword in the marketing industry. As organizations gain greater access to data collection and marketing automation tools, they naturally turn towards hyper-targeted marketing strategies in an attempt to better connect with their customers.
For many marketers, this unparalleled access to customer information and targeting tools feels like the dawn of the golden age of marketing, but there are consumers on the other side of the exchange who are left feeling differently. Facebook’s move towards a “clear history” feature and encrypted messaging are a sign of the recent pushback the general public has shown towards personalized marketing.
Smarter HQ (a marketing automation platform that works with large national retail and travel brands) found that while 72% of consumers only engage with marketing messages tailored to their interests, 63% of consumers stop buying from brands whose personalization experiences appear to be creepy.
The Driving Forces Behind Today’s Rental Market
Supply levels are surging in the rental housing industry. Will rental demand keep pace with sky-high supply? What can your community do to stay competitive in this evolving market? We explore the answers to these questions and more in our latest industry analysis.
Continue reading…Uncovering Your Prospects’ Website Journey: Part 1
In a world full of multiple online and offline touchpoints, it’s become increasingly important for communities to understand the journey their prospects engage in before they become a lead.
Where do potential renters go to find trustworthy sources of information about your community? Which marketing touchpoints do they engage with first? Are the channels prospects go through to find your community online and in person working for or against you? Amidst this growth in complexity, marketing channels and platforms are making a greater effort to give companies more transparency and better tools to answer these questions.
One of the channels communities have the most control over in the customer journey is their website. Most communities already have the tools they need to understand how prospects are interacting with it but don’t know how to use them.
In this two-part series, we’ll help you retrace your prospects’ digital footprints so you can find out which pages on your website lead to engagement, and which lead to abandonment. In part one, we’ll show you the pages website visitors are visiting as they navigate through your website. In part two, we’ll explore the website journey that highly interested prospects took before they became a lead.
Are you ready to start your investigation?
This Marketing Strategy Converts Over 80% of Multifamily Prospects into Leads
We know that an 80% conversion rate sounds a little far-fetched, but that is the average conversion rate we see across all of our multifamily chat clients. On average, 81% of prospects who engage with our chat team opt into giving our agents their name, phone number, and email.
This shocking conversion rate is actually a 5 percentage point increase from our lead conversion rate from last year (76%). Our team has been generating industry-leading chat conversion rates for years.
While many businesses view chat as a nice extra or a commodity, we know that not all chat is created equal. Read on to find out why live chat is such a powerful platform for lead development and how our team successfully nurtures prospects throughout the leasing process.
Continue reading…Social Video Marketing Strategies for Student Housing
College-aged students live on their mobile devices. Most spend their time watching videos and using social networking sites. Student housing communities have a variety of choices when it comes to marketing on social media video sharing platforms. YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat all have a share of this market’s attention.
Each of these platforms has its own purpose and communication style. In this blog post, we show you where your target market is engaging with video content, the opportunities, and limitations that these platforms provide student housing marketers, and strategies for getting the most out of these communication channels.
Continue reading…Search Marketing Strategies for Student Housing
Do you know what students type into Google when they search for an apartment? Do you know why some student housing ads get more clicks and impressions than others?
Most multifamily professionals know search marketing is an important component of a student housing marketing campaign, but they don’t know how student housing search marketing campaigns differ from general apartment search marketing campaigns, or what communities can do to stand out from others in the search engine.
By the end of this article, you won’t be like most multifamily housing professionals. You will have a better idea of how students search for apartments and what types of search ads they click on. You will know why some student housing search campaigns perform better than others and how your student housing community can use paid search campaigns to generate more traffic.
Continue reading…