What if you missed out on the greatest digital ad performance in the last 5 years? Seasonal trends dictate how well your marketing channels perform throughout the year, but 2020 is different. COVID-19 shocked the ad ecosystem and sent seasonal trends off track. Learn how digital ad performance changed during 2020 and how you can capitalize on the declining cost of ads.

Typical Seasonality

Before we talk about how 2020 rocked the boat, a quick step back reveals how the seasonality of ad prices typically works and why it is important to you. Seasonality in ad prices simply means that the cost to advertise fluctuates throughout the year. The price fluctuations are tied to how competitive an ad placement is. Let’s use Instagram as an example. When less users are on Instagram or there are more brands trying to advertise on Instagram, competition for each ad placement increases and so do prices. If more users are on Instagram or less brands are vying to advertise on Instagram, competition goes down and prices go down as well. The seasonality of ad prices, brought on by competition, follows a similar trend year in and year out for each ad platform. This allows you to determine which ad platforms are the most cost effective during each season so you can spend your marketing budget wisely. 

Here is a quick look at the typical seasonality for popular advertising platforms:

Search Seasonality

The typical seasonality of search leads to a higher Cost Per Click (CPC) in the winter and fall months and a lesser CPC leading into spring and summer months. This is due to the large influx of apartment searches that occur in spring and summer, which drive down the competition and prices amongst brands bidding on search ads.

Social Seasonality

Social seasonality follows a different trend from Search. The cost per thousand social impressions (CPM) tracks with peak advertising seasons, becoming more expensive as major consumer holidays approach and competition for ad space increases. You can see the increase in costs as back to school shopping ramps up and again as the winter holiday season approaches.

The Curveball in 2020

The health crisis in 2020 severely affected the seasonality of ad prices, leaving brands with a immense opportunity to buy digital ad space at a fraction of the typical cost. The cost of Search and Social ads dipped to very favorable levels amidst the crisis and are great strategies to invest in while prices remain low. Take a look at the 2020 cost trends for Search and Social ads below:

2020 Search Costs

Search CPCs closely tracked seasonal trends to start the year, then spiked as COVID-19 worsened and the number of searches for apartments dramatically decreased. What we see next is unprecedented. As COVID continued, more and more communities pulled advertising spend out of Google Ads. Despite communities pulling back ad spend in fear that apartment seekers were not taking action, apartment seekers re-entered the market and started searching once again. Apartment searches were on the rise but communities were still holding back Search spend. This led to a dramatic decrease in competition for each apartment search, dropping CPCs extremely low. CPCs now remain below the seasonal trend.

2020 Social Costs

Like Search, Social costs tracked with normal seasonality until March rolled around. Advertisers across the country shrunk their social ad spend or pulled the plug on social ad spend altogether. This caused a roughly 40% drop in CPM’s for apartment communities over the course of ~1 month. The 2020 Social cost trend-line now follows the shape of the 2019 trend-line, but at a much less expensive CPM.

How You Should React

Search and Social trends are behaving abnormally, but what implication does that have on your marketing strategy? Search and Social aren’t just acting strange, the cost to advertise on these platforms has dramatically decreased for apartment communities. This is an opportunity you should take advantage of while you have the chance. If your community needs to promote its brand or drive website traffic that is likely to convert, we suggest you bolster your Search or Social advertising campaigns.

If you need help creating a digital advertising strategy or recommendations on how to allocate your marketing spend, reach out to one of our digital marketing professionals for a free consultation.

The post Seasonal Ad Performance During COVID-19 appeared first on Conversion Logix.

A great website and marketing team will only take your community so far—it’s absolutely essential that your site is set up to drive conversion. Yet many communities’ sites present hurdles and barriers to conversion that can cost you leads, tours, and leases. To help you assess your site, we have identified six of the most common mistakes apartment communities make and explained why they can hamper your best lead-gen efforts. 

1: Low-quality images

Humans are visual beings—more than 50% of our brains are devoted to processing visual information. Because we are so visual, images are the key to great customer-brand connections. 

Most apartment seekers start on your home page, move quickly to floor plans, and then visit your gallery pages to understand what your community looks like. 

Many communities’ images could benefit from regular updates. If your images are of poor quality or are outdated, your prospects might not convert. Ensure your images are up to date, are good quality, and show all your community has to offer. Optimizing your images for web will help keep your website safe from slow load times—another costly mistake we will attack in a few points.

2: Lack of key information

Most apartment seekers have similar questions. They want to know your pricing and floor plan availability. They want to know if your community is pet-friendly. They may have questions about amenities. 

Make sure to display your community’s phone number and address at the top of your website so it is easy to find. Be sure both are clickable, so prospective tenants can call your community or map your address easily. 

Accurately portray your current pricing and availability on your floor plan pages so active apartment seekers know what they have to choose from. In addition, make it easier for prospects to ask questions when they browse your site. Our Live Chat is particularly effective in giving your prospective tenants the answers they want. Nearly 80% of conversations convert into leads, and one in three chat leads schedule tours. 

3: Not enough area info

Your tenants are interested in more than floor plans and amenities. They also want to know what the surrounding community offers, and they may not be as familiar with the neighborhood as you are. Be sure to include information on nearby activities, amenities, restaurants, landmarks, and attractions on your site. In your ad copy, be sure to include the location name and neighborhood. Don’t assume that your prospective tenants are as familiar as you are. 

Some communities incorporate maps that show their location as well as nearby shops, restaurants, bars, and other attractions. If you have this feature, you have to ensure that if users choose to filter for restaurants, for example, results will populate. Otherwise, frustration can mount. 

4: Weak CTAs

Once your visitors are on your site, you want to engage them in taking the next step with clear calls to action (CTAs). A contact form doesn’t cover it—and in fact can act as a barrier to conversion. You want to compel conversion when interest is highest. 

Show your tour availability and make it easy for people to take the next step with an easy-to-use automated scheduling tool like ScheduleGenie. Make it easy to find your phone number and enable Call Us Now when your on-site team is available. As above, engage with Live Chat to increase conversions. In addition, our tools work on mobile, so your site won’t lose its CTAs when visitors are using smartphones or tablets. 

5: Slow load time

It’s true: slow load times hurt your conversions and your bottom line. And load time is really a numbers game: 53% of users will bounce if your page takes longer than three seconds to load. And almost everyone bounces if load time exceeds 10 seconds. That sounds like a long time, but the average mobile site load time in 2019 was 22 seconds. 

While load time can affect your conversions, it is also critical to good user experience, and it affects your ad results. In fact, Google will not prioritize your ad over another if the load time on your landing page is slow. 

Load time is slowed by larger images or images that haven’t been optimized for the web, so this is a place to start if your load time is slow. In addition, the way your website is coded and where you host your videos can also affect load time (hint: be sure you’re hosting your videos via other sources than your site). 

Start fixing your load time by diagnosing your web speed across all devices with PageSpeed Insights. You can also analyze your mobile speed and access insights on the load speed for your competitors with a tool called Test My Site.

6: Not mobile-friendly 

There are 100 million renters in the US, and the majority—nearly 60% of them—start the search using a mobile device. In addition, according to Google, 61% of users are unlikely to return to a site if they had difficulty accessing it on mobile—and 40% visit a competitor’s site instead. Put simply, if your website isn’t mobile-friendly, your community is missing out. 

The mobile version of your site can have formatting errors, or the calls to action—like your Apply Now and Call Us buttons—can be lost. Use Test My Site for specific insights for your mobile site and how it performs in relation to your competitors.

Interested in learning more about how we can boost your website traffic and conversion rates?

Reach out to talk with one of our experts! 

Conversion Logix supercharges your multifamily marketing with lease-driven campaigns, powerful conversion tools, and industry-leading customer service. Since our founding in 2010, we have assembled a team with decades of industry experience and provided leases for hundreds of communities across the country.

The post Six Website Mistakes Apartment Communities Make appeared first on Conversion Logix.

Online chat teams are a fundamental way to boost leads at your community. Chat teams not only work, they outperform chatbots, phone calls, and emails in a landslide fashion. Now let’s unpack why live chat is so vital to your community’s success.

Instant response, increased leads.

We won’t get into the nitty-gritty, but let me paint a little picture for you: prospects want information instantly. They can either call you, email you, or chat with a team member online. Calls typically involve pushing buttons and sitting through hold-music to get the right person. Email is lethargic and can take hours or days to get a response back. Online chat is instant. That’s pretty key considering nearly two-thirds of customers will no longer wait more than 2 minutes to receive assistance (Arise). With an experienced team that responds in a few seconds, our US-based Live Chat team has created tens of thousands of leads for happy clients.

What does instant get you?

I applaud your inquisition. The answer: satisfaction, prospect retention, and more leads. 

1. Satisfaction: Live chat has a 73% satisfaction rate as a customer touchpoint, compared to phone calls (44%), and emails (61%). Per Econsultancy

2. Prospect retention: Your prospects are not waiting on pins and needles for a callback or an email from your team, they are actively shopping around for other communities in the meantime. Instant responses mean you can engage, qualify, and convert them right away before they sign with that other community on the block.

3. Way more leads: A study by ApexChat shows a 40 percent average increase in online leads when a live chat service was implemented. Our US-based Live Chat team can heavily contribute to those lead increases given a conversation-to-lead rate of nearly 60%!

Live chat team or chatbot?

I mentioned a live chat team is much better than a chatbot. Let’s clear that up a little bit. To put things simply, people aren’t keen on interacting with a bot over a real person. Users associate a good customer experience (vital for your brand!) with a live chat team 23% more frequently than a chatbot (Marketing Charts). Here’s why:

1. Interaction: Interacting with a live chat team feels natural because it is natural. Real humans are addressing your specific needs as opposed to responses from bots that are, well, robotic. When 68% of customers leave businesses due to poor customer service, putting a bot at your front desk is not your best move (Acquire).

2. Precision: Live chat teams answer complex prospect questions that contain intricate nuances. Chat teams are trained to do this precisely and comprehensively. Chatbots, on the other hand, respond with canned responses based on the keywords that website visitors use in their queries. This leaves your prospects frustrated, feeling like they didn’t get the answers they needed.

3. Lead-gen: You wouldn’t replace your sales team with a robot and you shouldn’t replace your chat staff with robots either. Live chat teams have the end goal of transforming visitors with inquiries into a quality lead. Converting an inquiry to a lead takes a complex understanding of the inquiry in order to move the prospect towards conversion. This is an advanced behavior suited for a live team rather than a bot. Our chat team excels at moving prospects toward conversion, proven by the fact that we drive thousands of leads to our customers each year!

Sure, chatbots have some upsides. They are available around the clock, quick to respond, and they might even save you a dollar or two. Our chat team has the speed and 8 years of experience. We have fielded hundreds of thousands of inquiries and we do so in mere seconds. Saving a few extra bucks but risking a poor customer experience and fewer leads really isn’t worth it at that point.

What to do, what to do.

Get a live chat team to field questions on your site, you won’t regret it. We didn’t even have time to cover all the benefits of a live chat team, but this solution is also going to take some pressure off your onsite leasing team. 

Heck, we’re biased, but I am pretty sure we’ve got the best Multifamily and Senior Living chat team this side of the Mississippi. Here are some great results our customers get with our chat team! Start boosting leads and improving customer experience today.

The post Number One for Lead-Lift: Live Chat! appeared first on Conversion Logix.