As digital marketers, the number one question clients and stakeholders ask us is, “How many leads can we expect?” A question asked less often, but usually by the most important stakeholders, is, “How much will it cost to acquire said leads?” Understanding acquisition costs and what drives them up or down is the most important knowledge you can uncover as a digital marketer. 

We analyzed a year of client data from over 400 multichannel campaigns to assess how different marketing strategies impacted acquisition costs. The result? We discovered that these two strategies had a significant impact on acquisition costs: Google Business Profile optimization and lead applications.

These two levers enabled media clients running Paid Social, Paid Search, and Display Advertising to maximize the traffic and conversions they received from each ad dollar spent, resulting in lower acquisition costs and higher lead volumes.

Google Business Profile Optimization is the Key to Increasing Organic Search Traffic

At Conversion Logix, one of the services we recommend to clients interested in optimizing their organic search traffic is our Google Business Profile posting service, Google Business Profile Accelerator (GBPA). When GBPA posts were introduced to a client’s campaign, the strategy resulted in the following traffic increases:

Why It Works

When it comes to selecting an apartment, location plays a leading role in the decision-making process. Prospective residents often turn to Google and are presented with opinions to browse Google Business profiles and Google Maps. These listings tend to be more visual and informative, driving the most engagement. By posting regularly to your Google Business Profile, you can increase your visibility in local search results, boosting website traffic for your community.

Lead Generation Applications Can Significantly Reduce Lead Acquisition Costs

In 2018, we launched The Conversion Cloud® to help marketing teams generate website leads and identify top-performing campaigns. Years later, we’ve helped over 800 properties generate over 1M leads through our suite of lead generation and communication applications.

When analyzing the impact these website applications had on acquisition costs we found that clients who added Conversion Cloud applications to their website saw a remarkable lift in lead conversions, resulting in more leads for every ad dollar spent.

Why It Works

Once prospects land on your site, they stay anonymous until you give them a reason to provide you with their contact information or encourage them to take the next step in the prospect journey. Lead applications like Schedule a Tour, Claim an Offer, RSVP for an Event, or Pre-Qualify Your Income increase lead conversion rates on your site, ensuring you capture the qualified traffic you drove to your site as leads.

Key Takeaway

When increasing monthly ad spend isn’t a viable solution for growing your pipeline, strategies that improve ad campaign effectiveness are a great way to increase conversion rates while lowering your acquisition costs. 

Addressing rising acquisition costs will continue to be a core challenge for digital marketers as attention becomes increasingly more difficult to acquire and advertising platforms become more crowded. 

By adopting strategies that increase visibility in organic local search results and engage website visitors, you can maximize the impact of your ad dollars, enabling you to grow digital lead volume while reducing your cost per lead.

About Conversion Logix Insights

Level up your marketing knowledge each month with research and strategies from multifamily and senior living advertising experts. In this blog series, we’ll reveal our team’s latest findings to give you a competitive advantage in the residential marketing industry.

The post Unlocking the Key to Lower Acquisition Costs appeared first on Conversion Logix.

During our webinar with Student Housing Business, “You Have Eight Seconds: How to Market Student Housing in 2023,” we received insightful questions from the audience about ad targeting, TikTok, chat services, and marketing attribution. (If you haven’t had a chance to watch that webinar, click here to watch the recording.) 

In this blog, two of our speakers, Kat Callender, Conversion Logix’s resident student housing marketing expert, and Andrew Cederlind, our President and COO, answered all of your pressing student housing marketing questions. Let’s dive into the Q&A to discover their tips and strategies. 

Digital Advertising

Question: What is the best practice for creating video content for TikTok?

Andrew: Take high-quality photos and videos and then use an agency that can turn that into an engaging ad that speaks to your community. Keep it simple, and don’t try to overcomplicate it with influencers.

Question: Our off-campus student housing is trying to do paid ads through Facebook/Instagram. We want to capture the audience in our area, but Facebook/Instagram rejects us when doing so, and it wants us to promote to the entire United States. Do you have any insight on paid ads and how we can target our area?

Andrew: When you properly categorize the ads and follow ad targeting rules, you should be able to run the ads with more location targeting options. If your ads are getting rejected, it could be because you are selecting targeting options that aren’t recommended or allowed. I recommend working with an agency that specializes in EHO and student housing paid social to ensure you are doing this correctly. 

Question: What is the best way to submit an ad for targeted student population housing ads on Instagram and have it not get rejected? And, under what category? 

Andrew: They should be categorized under housing ads and follow the EHO rules.

Question: How do you deal with the targeting limitations for housing ads, specifically in the special ads category on social media platforms (Instagram/Snapchat) and the limited targeting of TikTok? 

Andrew: We do this in several ways. One of the primary strategies we use is to focus on targeting prospects with intent to purchase or an interest in student housing. We use a variety of interest and behavior targeting strategies to do this. TikTok is great for this because it is more granular than most other forms of advertising and has a large college-aged audience. In addition to interests, we get strategic with location targeting, and with the platforms and placements we choose to advertise on. We run ads on TikTok and Instagram Stories when we want to be discovered by students and Facebook to make sure our ads also reach their parents.

Question: How much do you use GeoFencing to capture who has been at your property? Is it worthwhile?

Kat: During the height of the pandemic, we didn’t use it much as it was harder to pinpoint prime locations for its use, and most touring was virtual. Now that schools are fully back in class and on campus, the school’s location can be a great choice for geofencing to capture students looking to move off campus for the first time or to encourage previous off-campus dwellers to visit your property. We’ve been adding Precision Mobile Targeting Plus more frequently to properties we work with.

Prospect Communication

Question: What do you recommend for our on-site leasing teams to implement to be authentic in replying to Messenger inquiries, texting, phone calls, and emails? We have leasing team members responding to Messenger messages by asking them to call the leasing office when they reached out by digital text/form. A lost opportunity to reach people on the platform they started the convo. What do you recommend for better conversations with students who have reached out primarily via text/forms?

Kat: I recommend having someone dedicated to SMS conversations. Part of what makes live chat so attractive is the quickness of response. They do not want to be told to call the leasing office. Gen Z has grown up entirely in the digital/social age and spent most of their high school and early college life on Zoom due to Covid, this is how they feel comfortable. Being able to accommodate this is critical to winning their buy-in.

Question: Is there a live chat that you recommend? I’ve tried out a few that seem more geared towards multi-family instead of student housing.

Andrew: We have a 24/7 managed live chat service that performs well with a 75% chat-to-lead conversion ratio. It also includes real-time translation into 40+ languages which is great for international students.

Marketing Attribution

Question: How do you attribute leads to digital advertising?

Kat: Through MatchBack reporting with The Conversion Cloud® and Live Chat, we were able to cross-reference leases in a year vs. the leads that engaged with the applications on the client’s website. This resulted in an 11% to 22% conversion rate per property.

Question: Can the panelist share something they did (TikTok, ad, etc.) that had a measurable ROI? 

Kat: We designed a video ad for a student housing property showcasing imagery of their apartment interiors and copy about the types of apartments they have available. These were their results over four months:

• 1,176,434 ad impressions
• 14,718 watched the video 100%
• 1,870 ad clicks
• 13 leases attributed at this time

This is how we were able to identify the ad’s impact on leasing:

1. We identified a lift in organic website traffic correlated with the ad campaign.
2. We launched our lead generation application, The Conversion Cloud®, on the client’s website. This allowed the team to collect the names, emails, and phone numbers of students who scheduled a tour or signed up to join the waitlist. 
3. In our Conversion Cloud® platform, we have attribution reporting that lets you see if they clicked an ad or searched organically to get to the website before converting. We were able to upload a resident list for this community and identify matches between the lead list and the leases through MatchBack, our lease attribution feature.

Question: What is a typical/average new tenant acquisition cost in the student housing industry, as far as marketing/advertising cost per new tenant who signs a lease? $300 to $500 per new tenant? 

Kat: Based on the MatchBack report we ran vs. the monthly cost of a search engine marketing (SEM) campaign, the spend per lease hovered between $78 and $135. You can get away with slimmer budgets on student campaigns if you target effectively and make quarterly optimizations to adjust to the constantly changing audience, which includes parents and students.

Wait! There’s More…

If you benefitted from Kat and Andrew’s student housing marketing expertise, you’ll want to watch the recording of their previous LinkedIn Live event, “TikTok Ads For Student Housing Q&A”.

Want more tips about communicating with Gen Z? Check out How to Get Gen Z Renters to Talk to You. 

Interested in learning more about our student housing marketing services? Visit our Student Housing page.

About Conversion Logix

Conversion Logix®, LLC provides digital marketing services, and licenses lead generation software to industry leaders in the student housing, multifamily housing, senior living, automotive, and small business markets. Conversion Logix has been ranked on the Inc. 5000 seven years in a row and listed in Austin Business Journal’s Fast 50 Growing Companies. Conversion Logix is a Premier Google Partner, a Facebook Business Partner, and developed The Conversion Cloud®, a lead generation software suite designed to help businesses generate more leads, appointments, and sales.

The post How to Market Student Housing in 2023: Q&A With Industry Experts appeared first on Conversion Logix.

Unlock the Power of Live Chat With Gen Z Renters

Gen Z is the first truly digital generation. They’ve grown up with technology at their fingertips, giving them instant, convenient, and accessible ways to communicate. They don’t like calling you on the phone and don’t want to wait days to hear back from you in their inbox. So what’s the best way to connect with this new generation as they search for their next apartment? It’s immediate communication and engagement with live chat and virtual assistants. Here are a few reasons why Gen Z prefers online chat conversations and why apartment marketers need to incorporate these communication options in their marketing plans. 

Prioritize Convenience With Live Chat

Chatting online allows Gen Z to communicate with businesses at their own pace and convenience without having to wait on hold or be available during specific business hours. Like the Millennials before them, this generation is not used to phone calls and prefers to talk to people and businesses on their terms and online. Having spent most of their lives using text messaging and instant messaging through social media to communicate with friends and family, they find it more comfortable and natural to message a business versus picking up a phone. 

Deliver Instant Gratification With Lightning-Fast Response Times

We’ve all heard the rumors that Gen Z has the lowest attention span, willing to wait only seconds before they scroll onto the next video or jump off a website. eMarketer recently reported that Gen Z’s TikTok attention span is eight seconds, so think about how that translates into other aspects of their online lives. Gen Z values quick and real-time communication, and online chat allows for immediate responses, reducing the likelihood that they move on to a competitor and end a conversation with your community before it begins.

Account for Multi-Tasking 

Gen Z is highly adept at multi-tasking. Virtual assistants and live chat agents allow them to communicate with businesses while also engaging in other activities, such as browsing the web, working remotely, or watching videos on social media. 

Give a Safe Space to Ask Questions

Chatting online offers a more personal and less formal communication style than a phone call, which can be particularly appealing for Gen Z. They may feel more comfortable asking questions about topics like roommates, pricing, income qualification, and pet policies anonymously. The low-stakes nature of chat allows these renters to get the information they need to make a leasing decision without the social pressure of a face-to-face conversation.

Connecting With Gen Z

Incorporating live chat functionality on your website can go a long way in increasing engagement with Gen Z renters and setting your apartment community up for long-term success. However, improving communication with onsite teams isn’t the only way apartment marketers can need to level up their marketing efforts to appeal to Gen Z. This new crop of renters is spending more time on short-form video platforms like TikTok than any other generation.

To help you get up to speed on the advantages of TikTok, we have a quick 24-minute LinkedIn Live recording that answers marketers’ most popular TikTok questions. You can also explore the 5 advantages of TikTok advertising for more tips on reaching the next generation of apartment renters.

The post How to Get Gen Z Renters to Talk to You appeared first on Conversion Logix.

At Conversion Logix, we understand that a continuous marketing approach brings benefits to everyone. Driving traffic to your site, generating conversions, and analyzing where that traffic comes from lets you make immediate changes to your campaign for a better customer experience. Today, we introduce two new features to deliver successful campaigns.

Continuous Marketing Approach: 

These new solutions enhance the capabilities of our three-step approach to digital marketing, “Capture, Connect, and Convert.” The 3Cs represent the process of driving traffic, generating leads, and nurturing prospects until they convert. 

Analyzing attribution in the last conversion step shows us the customer journey and enables insights that we leverage for performance-enhancing optimizations.

Reach Your Target
Market On TikTok

TikTok rose to social media juggernaut status during the beginning of the pandemic when video consumption and social media usage were on the rise. It’s now a preeminent social network with over one billion monthly users worldwide (TikTok).

With the addition of TikTok advertising, we expand your reach across social media channels, delivering another powerful “capture strategy” for our clients. 

We’ve tested the effectiveness of TikTok advertising among a sample of student housing and multi-family housing clients and found promising results.

Our Findings:

• Expanded reach. TikTok ads delivered high volumes of impressions and quality traffic.
• Increased brand recall. We identified a lift in organic search traffic, paid search, and direct traffic for clients running TikTok advertising, indicating the effectiveness of our ads in building brand awareness.
• Higher ad engagement. TikTok ads received high volumes of clicks, video views, and video completion rates. 
• Lead generation. In our study, TikTok ads drove traffic that completed lead-generating actions in our Conversion Cloud software platform. These actions included: scheduling a tour, claiming an offer, or contacting the community.

Expand Your Marketing Mix With TikTok

Reach out to your Conversion Logix account manager to include TikTok in your campaign strategy.  If you’re new to Conversion Logix, schedule a call today, and we’ll help get you started!

Our New Virtual Assistant, Say Hello To Claire

To enhance the customer experience, engage prospects with immediate information, and reduce stress on your staff, we are introducing a new virtual assistant, Claire. Claire is a complementary addition to The Conversion Cloud and can answer frequently asked questions anytime, day or night. Pairing Claire with Live Chat further enhances the customer experience allowing a live team to answer those tough or detailed questions.  

This will be a game-changer for clients that haven’t yet made the leap to adding live chat services to their site. This chat product will enable our clients to respond to inquiries instantly during times when onsite teams may not be available to answer a call or respond to a web inquiry.

Claire can:

• Prompt engagement. The vast majority of queries are related to pricing and availability. Claire can prompt customers with frequently asked questions, increasing the likelihood of engagement. 
• Deliver instant responses. The automated nature of a virtual assistant provides immediate information to website visitors. This ensures your website visitors have instant access to support 24/7.  Many common questions, including pricing and availability, arise outside of business hours and can be immediately addressed.
• Increase lead conversions. Claire encourages prospects to schedule a tour or claim an offer after their initial chat conversation, increasing lead generation from your site.
• Gain customer insights. Identify the topics most frequently asked by your target market with real-time reporting in The Conversion Cloud.
• Fully integrate with Live Chat. Seamlessly incorporate Live Chat with your virtual assistant experience to deliver personalized responses from highly trained chat professionals.

Bring Claire to Your Website

Reach out to your Conversion Logix account manager to enable Claire as a part of your Conversion Cloud subscription. If you’re new to Conversion Logix, schedule a call today and we’ll help get you started!

The post Conversion Logix® Introduces TikTok Ads and Virtual Assistant appeared first on Conversion Logix.

The article is based on an interview that took place during a virtual panel discussion with Jen Lovely, executive vice president of sales at Conversion Logix and John Greaves, owner, and president of DEI Sales Management Central [Next Step Sales Management]. The panel took place virtually on January 19, 2022. This is an excerpt from the Senior Housing News Sales and Marketing Summit session, which has been edited for length and clarity. 

SHN: Today we’re going to be talking about capturing and unlocking lead data to maximize return on investment. I think if you know anything about senior living sales, it is no secret that residents and their families are using the internet more than probably ever before to search for senior living communities, especially at the start of their journey.

I think one challenge for operators is capturing that anonymous web traffic and turning it into pre-qualified leads. Today we’re going to go over some of the ways that senior living companies can maximize marketing their investment and filling their community again by capturing and unlocking that lead data. I want to introduce our panelists. Joining us we have Jen Lovely of Conversion Logix, where she has built a senior living group that delivers qualified traffic to clients’ websites to accelerate their leads, tours, and move-ins.

A little bit about Jen before joining the company, she spent about 20 years in the hospitality sector as an executive in sales and marketing. Welcome, Jen. We also have John Greaves of DEI Sales Management Central. John is a seasoned senior living sales and marketing coach. He’s also an advocate for integrating operations with sales, and he’s got experience working with companies in multiple industries to optimize performance in I think what you would consider a difficult selling environment.

SHN: Before we begin, I want to thank our thought leadership sponsors: Sherpa, Conversion Logix, and PointClickCare. Our awareness sponsors: caring.com, the Vector, and Gemini: Advanced Marketing Solutions. I guess to start with, Jen, what sparked the idea for Conversion Logix to develop a lead generation software in the first place?

Jen Lovely: Well, probably about seven years ago, we were kind of fumbling around a little bit and clients were saying, “Hey, gosh, we’ve got lots of people coming to the website, but people just aren’t converting.” Nine years ago, we started a live chat, which captured some of those prospects but there were still folks out there who weren’t filling out those long-winded forms. If you think about it, there can be upwards of close to 50% of website traffic that’s coming from digital devices or from mobile devices, like your phone and your iPad.

If you go to websites, a lot of those forms are really long. People want that one-click experience. We needed something that was easy, quick, and accessible. For all the adult children, as well, they don’t have time to enter information and then have somebody call them back, it’s just a long process of even getting in touch with someone in the first place.

I enter my information and I wait for a phone call to confirm a tour. We knew that we needed to come up with something that was quick, easy, that one-touch process, and it would confirm an appointment or confirm some sort of information immediately. That’s what spurred it.

SHN: Tell us more about how senior living companies have difficulty identifying anonymous website visitors and why they have difficulty converting those into customers?

Lovely: When people come to the website, we give them several different options: they can chat live, schedule an appointment, take advantage of a concession, look at a live video, attend an event. What happens is in order to convert through any of these modules or apps, we then receive their name, their phone number, or their email address, even if they’re just requesting a brochure.

Something else that’s kind of neat, is that by identifying these people when they actually complete one of these forms, we’re able to look at their journey visualizer as well.

If all these people are coming to your website, you wouldn’t leave your front desk unattended or your phones unattended, why would you leave your website unattended?

SHN: Great. I’m also curious, do you have any examples of maybe where there was a problem and The Conversion Cloud® helped with that?

Lovely: Yes. We had a community, and it was in a very established neighborhood. A lot of people take a lot of time making decisions and they weren’t ready to schedule a tour. For example, they weren’t ready to pick up the phone. They were just doing a lot of investigative work, just doing their homework.

By using the cloud and by using things like events, or just request a brochure, or join this speaker series group, or listen to this speaker series. We were able to convert people who were just slowly going through the process or just tiptoeing into the process. It took them a long time. Prior to that, this particular community had a really tough time. People just were not converting until they were absolutely ready to take a tour or to talk to somebody.

They felt like if they scheduled the tour, that it would be a hard sell, somebody would want them to move in tomorrow. Again, these people were established. They stay in their homes for years on end and they’re not ready to convert right away. That was a huge success being able to use that.

SHN: Great. Do you have any stats about how many leads The Conversion Cloud has generated or just, generally, what impacts this has all had?

Lovely: After three years, The Conversion Cloud has generated almost 600,000 leads across 800 companies, which is a lot. The thing to know about these types of leads, is people are offering up their information themselves. They’re intentional. Somebody isn’t pulling this information out of them. The clients have really good success. These are good, hot, solid leads, and very intentional.

In fact, I talked to one owner the other day, and his conversion was 27.1% of these folks coming from The Conversion Cloud were depositing or moving in, which is huge. Also, in the first few months after TCC or The Conversion Cloud software launch, we saw clients converting 65% more leads than when they weren’t using it. Just quick, and it’s easy and helpful.

SHN: John, I know you’ve got some thoughts about lead generation and how you do that online. I guess tell us more about that and I guess open the floor for us.

Greaves: It’s interesting because I’m coming from the sales and the sales management side. The idea of getting traffic is certainly valuable when it comes to lead generation, but it’s the ratio that matters most. How many of the clicks into your site, and then how many of the engagement opportunities that you’re presenting actually yield someone who activates as a prospect. It’s that activation that I’m paying a lot of attention to just driving raw traffic or just driving click-throughs is not sufficient to determine whether it’s a good use of your time and money.

What I like about The Conversion Cloud tools is that you’re seeing more of those visitors to the site. You’re not going to get all of them. Certainly, you’re not going to get a sale for each one of them immediately, but you’re getting some engagement, you’re getting a little more information than you might have otherwise. Sometimes that helps you understand what you’re doing well. Sometimes it helps you understand what you’re not doing as well as you could. It’s the opportunities that it drives to that I think it’s just so important.

SHN: Great. I want to talk about some of the strategies that companies are using to actually generate leads. Across the companies that are using The Conversion Cloud, and maybe, Jen, we’ll go back to you to start with, what strategies are they using right now to generate leads? Tell us more about that.

Lovely: There are tons of strategies. Something I wanted to mention too is keep in mind everybody’s in a whole new mindset, a whole new frame of mind. For example, personally, I shopped online a lot prior to the pandemic. I noticed myself saying “I’m being lazy. I’m not going to go pick that up. I’m just going to go online and do it.” There are so many people that are online, the multitude of people shopping online and looking at senior living communities has escalated.

It’s even more than usual. Again, we want to have as many opportunities as possible for as many people in different phases of the selection process or decision-making process. Some really great ideas, for example, just scheduling a tour, that’s great. Or maybe they don’t want to schedule a tour, they just want to schedule a conversation with someone. They just want to schedule an initial conversation. Another thing that’s worked out is doing some fun-themed ideas like taco Tuesdays.

If somebody wants to come in for a tour personally, they can come in for a tour. The chef can make tacos, or they purchase them ahead of time however they want to go about that. They can come in for a tour, or take that home as a dinner or lunch, or even if they do a Zoom tour or a FaceTime tour, the great thing is they can do that if they don’t feel comfortable coming in, but then they can drive up and someone from the community can hand them the meal and they get to have that interaction and say, hi, and see people in person.

It’s so interesting the perception that people have. We actually created an income calculator. It’s like a mini complimentary class analysis about four years ago. Literally, this evolved from sitting around having lunch with a client. We were literally just outside of her office in Napa sitting out on a patio, and she said, “I can’t get people to fill out this complimentary cost analysis. There’s so many questions. That’s a lot of information to fill out on a form online.”

I said, “Why don’t we do a mini version of it?” Just enough to give you something to chew on before you call them, you can’t ask them everything, but what are some of those key questions you want to ask? For example, do you own a home or rent a home? How much do you spend on activities and maybe care outside the home every month? Do you work with an investment broker? Just knowing if they have investments. Maybe just a few top-line questions and you’ll know right away. Even if you assume incorrectly, at least you’ve got something to go off of when you call them. People really are willing to give a shortened version of that.

Live chat is amazing. It just befuddles me, really, how many people like to chat live. They’ll give us their whole life story and it builds trust. There’s maybe a lot of adult children who are sitting in an office or they could be on a call, but they just think of something, and they want to ask a quick question. It’s nice because they can ask a question to get an answer without having to call, and then someone’s looping them into a long-winded conversation.

SHN: I know that some of this software can be used for other departments as well. Can you tell us more about that, and how that works, and what you can also use The Conversion Cloud for?

Lovely: Obviously, we’ve all identified a huge problem in staffing over the last year and a half. We started working with a lot of our clients on recruiting campaigns. Again, you’re bringing people to your website, you’ve got that careers page. What does that career page look like? Are they able to easily access what they need to access? Do they fill out an application form? What do they do?

We’ve used those Conversion Cloud modules for either scheduling an interview, finding out more about current job openings, and viewing our current job openings now. For example, some people have a video showing their property, maybe they have a video of just some of their employees saying, “Hey, we love working here. Hi, I’m Jen and I love working for Senior Housing News.”

It’s neat to be able to do that. Yes, we’ve used those for recruiting purposes. It has worked. I was actually really surprised one of my clients said, for an ED position, they had a $25,000 signing bonus and they were putting it out there with different venues. Got absolutely no traction. Started doing some recruiting advertising with the modules. Literally, within three days, they had four solid recruits and they hired somebody.

Again, people just want to be able to request something immediately, one-click, one-touch, it’s very visible. It’s worked tremendously. You can use it in so many ways and we’ll work with people to do that as well.

The post Capture and Unlock Lead Data to Maximize Your ROI appeared first on Conversion Logix.

Signing a contract to move into a senior living community is an emotional decision for seniors and their loved ones. Everyone involved in making a decision has questions and concerns during the sales cycle. Seniors and their families aren’t relying on one in-person visit to make decisions about care. They often turn to online channels to gather information before making a commitment.

Communication resources like Live Chat can help your community navigate these online conversations any time of the day, freeing up your team to deliver an incredible tour experience and personalized follow-ups. Read on to find out the seven reasons why our clients find Live Chat to be such a valuable addition to their sales and marketing efforts. 

1. Live Chat Offers 24/7 Communication

Not every senior living inquiry is happening within business hours. A 24/7 live chat team can help address questions for your community day and night. The team can act as an extension of your sales team, ensuring you respond to customers when your team isn’t available. As more research occurs after hours, live chat can help your community capture prospect opportunities outside of business hours and encourage prospects to further engage with your team via a tour or phone call.

2. Live Chat Improves Response Time

Our Live Chat team’s average response time is five seconds. Even when sales teams are onsite during business hours, their response times to website inquiries aren’t likely to be as fast as a Live Chat team. On-site teams’ first priority is responding to in-person requests. They are often away from their desk, giving live tours, busy hosting prospect events or focused on processing contracts and following up with prospects. Most staff don’t respond immediately to requests that come through websites via contact forms or email, which can lead to a missed opportunity. A dedicated live chat team can provide instant feedback and capture a prospect’s interest before they move on to contacting another community. 

3. Engage Prospects Earlier in the Customer Journey

Unlike scheduling a tour, placing a phone call, or walking into a building, Live Chat offers prospects an engaging and lower commitment opportunity to speak to someone about your community. This anonymous and convenient communication channel can make prospects in the information-gathering process, who may not be ready to set an appointment with a salesperson, more comfortable asking questions, increasing prospect engagement at the top of the funnel. After speaking with a live chat representative, this type of prospect may be more likely to move on to the next stage in the customer journey.

4. Live Chat Teams Deliver More Empathetic Experiences

Intelligent bots can be great for answering super-simple questions. In the senior living space, most prospects are looking for solutions to difficult and emotional situations. They are seeking advice and information about a decision that will have a big impact on their loved ones. Unlike the robotic nature of bots, real people can answer questions empathetically, read between the lines when prospects are asking sensitive questions, and offer caring and reassuring answers to difficult questions. This helps humanize your senior living community and enables you to develop deeper relationships with prospects.

5. Higher Lead Conversion Rate

Our team’s average prospect-to-lead conversion rate is over 75%. Website visitors who engage in a Live Chat conversation are more likely to give their contact information than any other engagement. By securing contact information before the conversation ends and asking if the prospect would like to be followed up with, Live Chat teams warm up prospects for the onsite sales team. 

6. Better Lead Qualification 

Live chat conversations can be recorded and easily passed along to onsite sales teams. The back-and-forth conversational nature of Live Chat allows teams to gather relevant information quickly. A trained live chat team can incorporate lead qualification questions more naturally in a conversation than a bot or prompt by timing the questions to align with the stage of interest of the prospect. This can increase your sales team’s chances of having more valuable conversations with prospects, increasing your chances of converting a lead to a move-in.

7. Brings Value Beyond Lead Generation and Sales

While Live Chat offers an incredible opportunity to convert prospects into leads, appointments, and sales, its full value is larger than these offerings alone. Live chat can act as a customer service tool, helping residents’ families find information, an HR tool, connecting prospective employees with staff members and addressing job inquiries, and a translation tool by translating prospect and customer inquiries communicated in foreign languages. It truly acts as another resource for your team, freeing staff to focus on day-to-day operations while building your brand reputation as a responsive and customer-service-oriented company.

Learn More About Live Chat with Conversion Logix

Conversion Logix®, LLC provides senior living leaders with a comprehensive suite of marketing software and services that enable communities to capture, connect, and convert prospects throughout their customer journey. We advise, plan, and execute digital marketing strategies to help communities maximize ROI. Our suite of software and services allows teams to easily integrate with common CRM applications and scale lead generation across multiple properties. 

Our team of Live Chat specialists has years of experience serving the senior living industry and offers 24/7 sales and customer support. To learn more about how our live chat team helps communities reach their occupancy goals, schedule a call with us today.

The post 7 Reasons to Add Live Chat Technology to Your Senior Living Website appeared first on Conversion Logix.

At one point, ideas like conversion software, analytics-driven marketing, and dynamic video advertisements were innovations that apartment marketers saw coming on the horizon. Headed into 2020, these ideas and others have established themselves as necessities for those in the apartment marketing space. So which trends do you need to know about in 2020?

1. Live Chat as the Gold Standard of Communication

One key trait that your prospects share with other consumers in the digital age is their desire for instant gratification. They’re browsing through your website quickly, and as questions pop up, they’d like answers as quickly as possible regardless of the time of day.

According to a study by EConsulting, 50% of customers are expecting businesses to be open 24/7. This means that incorporating live chat becomes critical to generating those all-important leads, and not allowing all those visitors to slip through the cracks as they visit your site outside of regular business hours. Moreover, live chat has a 73% satisfaction rate, compared to phone calls (44%) and emails (61%).

For a more in-depth analysis regarding the benefits of live chat juxtaposed with chatbots, see this post.

2. Video Ads Go from Important to Critical

It’s no secret for marketers that using video advertisements positively contributes to KPI’s. Interweaving your services within an aesthetically pleasing visual representation of your brand makes a big difference between communities that are able to convert, and those who are not.

Video usage in conversions have increased from 25% to 37% in 2019, per Rocketium. This clearly displays the importance of both incorporating videos into your funnel as well as the direction that the market is headed towards.

With the slow death of cable television, American adults are spending more time than ever on video content online with the increased popularity of platforms like YouTube. In 2019, users spent a weekly average of nearly seven hours watching online videos, which represents a 59% increase from just three years prior in 2016 (Limelight, 2019).

On YouTube alone in the past couple years, viewers are spending over 7,300 hours on apartment related video content, so incorporating videos into your advertising budget becomes all the more important. To learn more about the most effective and practical ways to put video ads into practice on YouTube, check out this blog post.

3. Conversion Software for Qualifying Leads

Another key trend in the apartment marketing space is the utilization of conversion software. With only 22% of businesses being satisfied with their conversion rates (EConsultancy), it’s clear that everyone wants to convert leads at a higher rate. Emerging as a solution to this problem, communities are now implementing conversion software to automate tour scheduling, deliver compelling offers, and filter for qualified leads.

Tour Scheduling

In the area of tour scheduling, the usual process involves filling out an application or contacting the community via phone, email, or an in-person visit. This process causes delays in the scheduling procedure, leading to unwanted drop-offs.

Conversion software cuts through those extra steps by being present on every page, allowing prospects to view available tour dates, and self-schedule tours at their own convenience.

Compelling Offers

Many communities that are promoting offers on their sites are following a sub-optimal, outdated strategy. A potential lead visits your website, a pop-up offer comes up, and before having any interaction with the site’s content are given an incentive to close the offer because the only way to view the information they’re seeking is to close the offer entirely, never to see it again.

Using the right conversion software allows your site to deliver prospects value and relevant information, while keeping compelling offers on each page in a non-intrusive manner. These offers can be conveniently minimized without removing them from sight completely, as well as quickly swapped out with other offers without any development expertise.

Qualifying Leads

Filtering out unqualified prospects was once an arduous task that leasing teams spent hours upon hours on. But now, by using markers like income, desired floor plan, and number of residents, leads can automatically receive an email informing them of their qualification status, resulting in a tremendous amount of saved time.

With potential leads being pulled in a myriad of directions, the need to filter them and quickly progress them down the sales funnel becomes of great importance.

The Conversion Cloud specializes in qualifying and converting multifamily housing leads, offering these innovations and others. Check it out here.

4. Refining Social UX

One of the timeless elements of marketing has always been user experience. At it’s core, UX measures the quality of interactions between users and a given brand. An improvement in UX will make for a higher quantity of conversions and overall customer satisfaction.

Within social audience targeting on Facebook, UX has become of increased importance recently. The social media giant reports that there are presently 7 million advertisers on the platform, up from 4 million in 2016. With this uptick in competition, standing out through optimized and personalized ads has become all the more important to generate leads.

Facebook has stated that there are three primary dimensions for evaluating the performance of ads including visual quality, engagement, and conversion which need to be optimized to refine UX.

Visual Quality

Practical steps to improve visual quality in your ads include avoiding things like putting too much text, using sensationalized language, and withholding key information.

Engagement

For improving engagement, there are a number of heuristic methods that are available. Using vertical videos, adding multiple images using the carousel format (if you have an abundance of quality images), and adding movement through animation are all options to consider.

Conversion

A pragmatic approach to increasing your conversion rates on your ads is to make them more engaging through the avenue of an improved call to action and post-click experience.

Navigating through the ins and outs of creative software for creating eye-catching visuals and high quality ads can be a tall-task for many communities. For assistance in maximizing ad quality, schedule a call today.

Conclusion

Headed into 2020, ideas like conversion software, analytics-driven marketing, and dynamic video advertisements and others have now firmly established themselves as necessities for those in the apartment marketing space. Looking for help getting started? Schedule a call today.

The post Four Apartment Marketing Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2020 appeared first on Conversion Logix.

It’s 2020, and with the fresh start of a new year, marketers in all verticals are paying attention to what’s shiny, new, and trending. What’s truly effective, though, when it comes to the competitive multifamily residential marketing space? Dive in and take a closer look at five of the top 2020 marketing trends—and how some of the hottest fall short for the multifamily market. 

Voice Search

As search itself has become more intelligent, voice-activated searches have surged in popularity. In fact, Google has estimated that in 2020 50% of searches will come from voice and images. While this is a trend that is shaping Amazon, e-commerce, and local business marketing, it shouldn’t consume your energy. Apartment search is still a highly visual process and seekers are using traditional search methods on desktop and mobile to find what they want. Optimizing your current paid search campaigns and keywords will help you capture more searches, both traditional searches and voice searches. But for 2020, avoid spending precious resources to create long-tail keyword phrases for apartment seekers using voice-search.A

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

AI tools in content creation and marketing are becoming more common. While AI and automated tools offer a great deal of promise for the future and may shape apartment searches, human touch still plays a big role in the work done by copywriters, designers, and digital advertising experts to create and optimize effective campaigns for residential communities.

Chatbots

Automation offers many ways to improve the way apartment seekers experience your website, the first place they may truly connect with your community. Many consumers are seeking ways to easily and quickly handle the steps in the leasing journey. Automated tools like tour schedulers and application portals can help accelerate the process. 

Yet there are places in the leasing journey where automation doesn’t offer improvement. Unlike tour scheduling and application portals, online chat experiences provide website visitors with a way to engage in a quick conversation when they have questions or need help.

And as use of chatbots increases, we’re seeing some areas where they fall short. 

Chatbots provide an automatic response triggered by a keyword or phrase. These programmed responses often don’t give apartment seekers the information they want, and they don’t bring a prospect closer to taking a tour or signing a lease. 

Human chat conversations, on the other hand, can address nuanced questions and provide a level of personalization that chatbots simply cannot. That’s why we offer Live Chat, a tool powered by a live team that can engage prospects in conversations that convert.

Self-guided Tours

Busy work schedules often mean that apartment seekers struggle to book tours during business hours when leasing staff are on site. As a result, self-guided tour offerings have increased in popularity. This trend has proved popular in the single-family space, where over 75% of prospects who book a tour chose the self-guided option (according to a recent analysis by Anyone Home). 

Is the multifamily market next? Self-guided tours do introduce new risks, including lower close rates when prospective tenants don’t truly connect with communities and new people on community premises without help from a leasing agent. There are downsides for both parties—the leasing agent and the apartment seeker—when no community expert is on hand to highlight key features and amenities. Without help from a leasing agent, apartment seekers are unable to receive answers about the residence or community and may leave questioning if the apartment is truly a good fit. When your leasing team is removed from the tour process they are unable to field prospect questions and turn inquiries into opportunities that highlight great aspects of the community.

Influencer Marketing

For certain audiences and brands, influencer or affiliate marketing is the most effective way to reach (and compel and convert) thousands. It doesn’t work the same way for the rental market. Social proof—rave reviews from your residents rather than outside affiliates—will always be important. Investing in influencers to drive interest in your community is budget that could be spent—and measured—more effectively elsewhere.

Conclusion

In 2020, effective digital marketing for multifamily communities should continue to focus on precise targeting, lease-driven strategies, and performance you can measure for optimization and higher ROI. Interested in learning more about how our expertise and powerful conversion tools can help you fill your community? Reach out to talk with one of our experts or to schedule a demo.

The post Five 2020 Marketing Trends That Don’t Work for Apartments 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.