Does your community rely on internet listing sites as your primary source of marketing? Communities are often fed the line that they can’t compete against ILSs for apartment seeker’s attention so they shouldn’t bother trying to go after their own first-party leads.
While it is true that ILSs provide communities with a chance to get discovered by apartment seekers, there are drawbacks to exclusively using ILSs for lead generation.
Here are a few of the reasons why communities are better off investing in their own lead-generation strategy.
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.
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.
Gone are the days of reaching everyone in your social network on Facebook and Instagram. It’s not uncommon for businesses to reach only 2-4% of their fans on Facebook with each organic post. Businesses looking to extend their reach on the world’s most popular social networks have two choices to get their message in front of potential customers: boost posts or run Facebook Ads campaigns. While boosting posts might be a great solution for social media influencers and bloggers looking to build up engagement rates or get more blog post views, most businesses are looking for a greater return on investment from these networks. If you’re a business looking to use social media to generate sales, you should be running Facebook Ads, here’s why.
Is your brand working against you in the search engine? When your prospects search for you by name, are you the first brand they see? If you aren’t the number one listing for your community’s brand you might just have a brandjacking problem. You wouldn’t be the first community to experience this, even marketing agencies like us experience brandjacking attempts. We know being brand jacked can be a frustrating experience, but rest assured, it’s a battle you can win. By the end of this article, you’ll know how to overcome brand jackers and reclaim your rightful place in the search engine.
Facebook and Instagram steal a lot of the spotlight in the advertising world. But they aren’t the only powerful players in the advertising game. Google’s social media frontrunner, YouTube is now the most used social media platform in the country. More U.S. adults use YouTube than Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat or Twitter.
They aren’t just watching cat videos all day either. American adults are watching thousands of years of apartment video content. In the past few years, YouTube viewers spent over 7,300 years of watch time on apartment and home tour videos (YouTube Advertising).
We know most U.S adults watch YouTube, and we know that they are watching apartment content, but are they watching ads?
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.
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.
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.
As technology evolves, behavior evolves with it. The multifamily industry has been keeping tabs on the millennial generation in recent years as they enter the workforce, rent homes, and build families. While most of the multifamily housing industry has limited exposure to the upcoming Gen Z generation, student housing properties are staring at a new target market. Are the behavior patterns really that different between teenagers born in Gen Z and Gen Z/Millennials in their early 20s?
