Multifamily Housing Blogs | Conversion Logix

How to Speed Up Leasing Velocity

Rebecca Reichert — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 23:54:43 +0000

The lease-up clock is ticking to reach stabilization—fast. Yet factors such as supply and demand, competitor pricing, and a property’s location can disrupt reaching this mission-critical milestone.

One element that investors and operators can control is marketing. A strategic marketing plan executed by an agile team can increase the speed units are leased, enabling investors and operators to reach their leasing goals on schedule.

We analyzed over nine months of occupancy and campaign data across a sample of apartments in the lease-up stage to determine which campaign decisions were the most effective at speeding up the leasing velocity. Read on to discover our findings.

The Research

To better understand the marketing approaches that impact lease-up timelines, we executed two studies based on client data to identify marketing campaign factors that impact leasing velocity.

In study one, we analyzed occupancy and campaign performance across eight lease-ups located across Washington, Oregon, and Arizona from March 2023 to December 2023. We studied the time it took for these communities to reach 80% occupancy and the marketing mixes that contributed to fast turnaround times.

In study two, we looked at ten lease-ups from the same period located across Washington, Oregon, Arizona, and Maryland to assess the impact of syncing property-level CRM data with ad operations to enable proactive ad updates. These updates included price-related ad updates, and the addition of floorplan focuses in Google Ads.

The Result

In the initial study of eight lease-up properties, the average starting occupancy rate was 17% in March 2023. By December 23, 2023, six of the eight lease-ups had reached 80% occupancy, taking an average of 192 days. Of these six, four reached between 93-98% occupancy.

Top performing campaigns within this research sample had the following marketing mix in 90% of the months analyzed in the study: Paid Search, Display Retargeting, Paid Social, and The Conversion Cloud®.

Furthermore, top performers with this marketing mix experienced better conversion rates and lower acquisition costs from the traffic these campaigns generated.

2.5x higher website traffic conversion rates
78% lower costs per website conversion
23% lower marketing acquisition costs per unit

In the second study, we assessed the impact that campaign optimization had on reducing the time it took to fill vacancies. We theorized that the more proactively a campaign was managed and the more targeted the advertising was towards filling vacant floorplans, the faster a property would achieve stabilization.

During the study period, we compared campaigns where one of the following optimization events occurred:

pricing extensions were added
floorplan focuses were implemented
neither price extensions nor floorplan focuses were added (this was our control group)

Our findings revealed that floorplan focuses have a multiplier effect on leasing. Clients in the study that included these in campaigns saw increases in leasing activity, faster rolling unit velocity (calculated as total units occupied at the end of each month divided by the total available units at the end of each month), and higher returns on their ad investments.

The Takeaways

Multichannel Marketing Moves Prospects Through the Customer Journey Faster

The best-performing campaigns to reach stabilization applied a multichannel approach to marketing that connects with prospects throughout their customer journey. These campaigns include a mix of the following to drive awareness and leads:

top-of-the-funnel strategies (Paid Social)
mid-funnel strategies (Paid Search and Display Retargeting)
lower-funnel lead generation strategies (The Conversion Cloud®)

This holistic strategy ensures consistent engagement across different touchpoints, efficiently guiding prospects from awareness to conversion.

Integrated Efforts Yield Better Results

Syncing property-level CRM data with your ad operations gives advertisers a line of sight into critical property-level changes to make strategic campaign optimizations faster. This integrated approach ensures that marketing efforts align with the leasing goals, adapt to market dynamics in real time, and deliver qualified leads.

Maximize Your Ad Investment With Strategic Targeting

While high-level brand awareness is key to filling the top of your marketing funnel, a more targeted approach to keyword targeting and ad copy will help fill your remaining units as you reach stabilization.

Optimization strategies such as floorplan focuses can direct your ad dollars toward the prospects most likely to lease your remaining units, filling your pipeline with the most relevant rental candidates while providing you with a higher return on your ad investment.

Fill Vacancies Faster with Conversion Logix

Ready to supercharge your leasing velocity and optimize your ad investment? Create your next campaign with Conversion Logix. Schedule a call with a Conversion Logix team member to discover how we can help you fast-track your leasing goals.

The post How to Speed Up Leasing Velocity appeared first on Conversion Logix.

Ahead of the Curve: The Power of Predictive Leasing

Karen Regala — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 20:56:32 +0000

As Conversion Logix set on a new course toward revolutionizing predictive leasing in the multifamily housing industry with its acquisition of Bend.ai, we sat down with our new Chief Analytics Officer and Bend.ai co-founder, Martin Stein, to discuss the state of predictive analytics in the industry and how new technology and data science methods will transform the industry for the better.

Tell us about your analytics background and the story behind Bend.ai.

I’ve had a career in tech and multifamily marketing, working at organizations such as IDG, Apple, and G5. Over the course of my career, I’ve focused on the intersection of data science, marketing technology, and automation and built solutions for Marketing Attribution Modeling, Call Scoring, and Budget Optimization, among other initiatives.

In the past four years, I’ve applied those experiences to build my own data science consultancy, Bend.ai, which focused on attribution solutions and mastering today’s cookie challenges.

You mentioned applying data science to improve attribution. Can you speak to the current state of attribution in the industry and where you’ve seen the greatest room for improvement?

Marketers in the multifamily housing industry are used to reviewing monthly move-in reports along with statistics like marketing spend, conversion rates, tours, and more. These figures are interrelated, yet the nature of their relationship often remains unclear.

Today’s marketers often find themselves relying on heuristics — mental shortcuts and rules we’ve developed, beliefs that outline the assumed relationship between our marketing activities and business outcomes. We assume how first-touch, last-touch, or even multi-touch affect move-in. But these models don’t directly dictate the probabilities of a move-in. Furthermore, the digital landscape is evolving where reliance on cookies for tracking user behavior is diminishing.

This is where data science can come into play.

With cutting-edge data science techniques, we can build predictive analytics tools like predictive leasing to understand the relationships between marketing activities in the customer journey.

This provides a holistic view of the customer acquisition processes, allowing marketers to measure the impact of each channel and campaign, facilitate an assessment of potential conversion rates, and clarify the contribution of specific initiatives within the overall marketing mix.

Tell us more about how predictive leasing works.

The purpose of predictive leasing is to determine the probability of move-ins based on past customer journey patterns. By tracking individual customer journeys at scale, we can identify patterns and relationships that will help us understand what has the greatest impact on leasing results at a specific property.

To do this, we take a path from one lead — which sites they visited and what campaign links they clicked — and compare it with other lead paths to draw conclusions about campaign effectiveness and buyer behavior. We observe which touchpoints are common among those who converted and those who did not, which types of campaigns led to tours, and which patterns result in move-ins at specific property types. Part of the process involves simulations and tests to see what happens when we remove aspects of a campaign to determine their impact. Armed with this information, we can then identify campaigns that don’t work, add ones that may, and optimize those that are already yielding results.

Who benefits the most from predictive leasing, and what is its biggest advantage?

Predictive leasing benefits apartment marketers, operators, and owners by providing them with access to better campaign insights and data management. With a good data infrastructure, everyone is freed hours and hours of laboring over reports to get information that may or may not affect a lead’s probability of booking a tour or moving in. Instead, marketers, operators, and owners are given actionable data that leads to better decisions and optimizations when it comes to marketing a property. There’s less guessing, more accuracy, and better strategy insights.

How do you envision the industry changing once this technology becomes mainstream?

Predictive leasing built on first-party data will be instrumental in helping organizations maintain and improve marketing performance in a cookie-less world. The attribution aspect of the technology will help marketers measure and communicate the value of their campaign recommendations and guide operators and owners toward the most cost-effective solutions, which will put markers in a great position going forward.

The key to using this technology to its greatest potential will rely on striking the right balance between leveraging data science and AI and having human experts in the loop. The technology won’t do all the work, and human expertise will be needed in the mix. As marketers, we will need to spend more time becoming strategic and less tactical.

Coming Soon: Conversion Logix and Predictive Leasing to Keep You Ahead of the Curve

Now armed with Bend.ai’s cutting-edge artificial intelligence capabilities, Conversion Logix is in the process of developing a predictive leasing platform that will provide our clients with advanced solutions that identify optimal marketing mixes and advertising budgets at scale. We look forward to sharing more news about the platform in the coming months so don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter for updates.

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER

The post Ahead of the Curve: The Power of Predictive Leasing appeared first on Conversion Logix.

Conversion Logix Introduces New Ad Automation Updates

Rebecca Reichert — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 00:26:43 +0000

Busy marketing leaders need help keeping up with constantly changing pricing, promotions, and ad optimization. With tight budgets and staffing shortages, marketers must leverage the power of strategic automation to stay ahead of the competition.

Today, we are excited to announce the launch of several enhancements to our Ad Automation platform. These new features leverage automation to improve our client’s ability to make campaign changes faster and scale ad management, unlocking new opportunities to increase performance and deliver personalized messaging to prospects.

Dynamic Pricing Gets an Upgrade

The ability to incorporate up-to-date pricing in Google Ads can have a profound impact on your campaign results. By including pricing in ads, you can pre-qualify prospects and ensure your ad dollars are spent on clicks from informed, self-qualified renters.

Previously, ad extensions were the most reliable way to scale the incorporation of pricing across a comprehensive ad campaign. However, communities with less than three floor plans to highlight and limited budgets were unable to take advantage of these benefits.

With our new automated Dynamic Pricing, our team can sync pricing data daily from the top multifamily CRM providers regardless of floor plan options or budgets to ensure ad headlines include up-to-date pricing.

Concession Automation Expands to New Channels

It’s now easier than ever to manage changes to promotions across your portfolio. With Concession Automation, our team is automatically notified to update your ads when offers change within your Apartments.com listings. In the past, these updates were only used to revise offers across Paid Search campaigns.

Our Concession Automation service has extended beyond Paid Search to include ad updates across Display, Meta, Instagram, Google Business Profile Accelerator, and Spotlight users in The Conversion Cloud®. This means once a concession update occurs, it automatically updates all ads, ensuring promotions enter the market faster and with greater visibility.

Clients who’ve enabled instant updates (no proofing) have experienced accelerated concession updates from a three-business-day turnaround to less than one business day across more channels. For clients with requested proofing, changes happen within one business day of approval.

RentCafe, Welcome Home, and REBA Users Can Now Access Ad Automation

We’ve recently made our ad automation service available to users across three additional CRM and Business Intelligence providers. Now, RentCafe, Welcome Home, REBA, Entrata, Yardi, and RealPage users can fill vacancies faster without constantly monitoring offers, pricing, and availability changes across their properties.

Get Started With Automation

Visit our Ad Automation page or schedule a call to learn how we can scale your marketing while saving you time.

Ready to integrate your CRM with Conversion Logix and opt-in to Ad Automation? Contact your account manager today to get started.

The post Conversion Logix Introduces New Ad Automation Updates appeared first on Conversion Logix.

Best Practices for Implementing AI in Your Marketing

Karen Regala — Fri, 15 Mar 2024 22:45:33 +0000

Artificial Intelligence is here to stay. With more and more companies adopting the technology, you will be left behind if you don’t incorporate (or at least plan to incorporate) AI into your marketing strategy. But you also don’t want to implement AI just for the sake of doing it. You need to ensure it works to your benefit and delivers the desired results.

But we’ve always known new technology can be overwhelming. So before we dive into best practices for your AI implementation, let’s break down what it means to use AI in marketing.

Defining AI in Marketing

There’s a wealth of possibilities with AI in marketing so it’s easy to get lost when you’re just getting started. Here are the two most important applications of this new technology for marketers:

Predictive AI. This analyzes patterns in your data to predict possible outcomes. For example, it can look at your contact list and let you know which behaviors and attributes make a lead more likely to convert.

Generative AI. This type of AI helps create text and images based on known patterns from previous data. A good example of this is ChatGPT, which is now being used to generate text answers to questions and prompts. In the design world, even established editing software like Adobe and Canva are now leveraging Generative AI to edit and produce imagery.

Implemented together, these two forms of AI can enable you to automate repetitive tasks, segment your audience, and reach out to these segments with personalized messages and offers.

Implementing AI: Best Practices

AI systems are one of the most powerful tools marketers can leverage to increase marketing performance with limited resources. Here are some best practices for implementing AI to ensure you get the most out of this amazing technology.

Plan your approach by setting clear goals.

Hopefully, your marketing goals are already in place even before implementing AI. This will help in identifying how AI aligns with your overall marketing strategy and which specific areas it can work to support your goals.

Here are some common AI use cases in marketing to help you identify how it fits into your strategy:

Audience segmentation. For businesses managing hundreds and thousands (or more!) of leads, AI can help segment audiences based on their interests, traits, and behaviors. For marketing teams, this is important in creating more informed decisions and effective campaigns.
Chatbots. AI chatbots deliver a more personalized and seamless customer service experience, even during times of day when no live agent is available. Once trained, AI chatbots can quickly close tickets with answers that are more relevant and personalized to your prospects.
Content generation. As AI can pull information from multiple sites quickly and easily, it can guide content creation teams during the research phase. With the right prompt, AI can also generate working outlines that writers can easily follow and edit to churn out blogs, social media copy, and other written content.

Ready your data.

In this age of big data, managing customer information can be very tricky. While AI can help you harness data into something usable for your team, it is important to have clean, high-quality data before doing a full AI implementation. AI systems can only be successful if the data it is fed to analyze is accurate and relevant.

Identify which workflows you can automate.

One of the benefits of implementing AI into your marketing strategy is that it allows you to save time and money by eliminating redundant and monotonous tasks. Identify these tasks, such as data entry, email or social media scheduling, and report generation, to speed up workflows and focus on more important tasks, such as campaign ideation and strategic initiatives.

Enable your people.

As amazing as AI is, it still cannot replace human expertise, so treat AI as a companion and not a replacement for what you and your team can do. Train your team on how AI fits into their daily work routine and allow for continuous learning of the new tools and processes. This also eliminates people’s fear of the new technology, easing their worries about being replaced and instead assuring them that AI is only here to enhance the way things are done.

Stay ethical and adhere to data privacy laws.

With data collection becoming more intrusive and with data being used for personalized marketing implementations, it’s important to build a strong ethical, technological foundation. Be transparent to your prospects about the kind of data you are collecting and how the data will be used. Ensure your AI implementation is data privacy compliant, and take time to review laws periodically so you can make adjustments when necessary. As required by most countries, give a clear opt-out option for your leads.

Level-Up Your Marketing Strategy: Start Using AI

Integrating Artificial Intelligence into your marketing strategy is no longer a trend but rather a necessity to stay competitive in today’s digital landscape. By embracing AI as a complementary tool to human expertise, you can harness its power to drive meaningful results and enhance the overall customer experience.

Interested in learning more about AI marketing? Subscribe to our newsletter and stay up-to-date on the latest AI marketing trends.

SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER

The post Best Practices for Implementing AI in Your Marketing appeared first on Conversion Logix.

The Future of Property Marketing: AI and Automation

Rebecca Reichert — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 22:38:19 +0000

As supply drives greater competition in the multifamily market and rents soften, multifamily marketing leaders are turning to new technology to create efficiencies and greater performance when faced with limited budgets.

Nearly half (43%) of multifamily marketing leaders surveyed found Delivering the Same Marketing Performance With a Smaller Budget to be one of the most challenging aspects of their job. When asked where they saw the biggest room for improvement, this group mentioned embracing automation and AI as a top priority.

While this new tech is transforming property management processes at a rapid rate, it’s still in its infancy. In this blog post, we explore five ways marketing automation and AI is poised to disrupt the industry.

Automated Lead Generation and Nurturing

Automation is revolutionizing the lead generation and nurturing process, enabling marketers to build their lead pipeline faster and more cost-effectively. Instead of manual and time-consuming processes, marketing leaders can utilize automated systems to identify and qualify leads efficiently. Self-scheduling applications, gated virtual tours, and chatbots integrate seamlessly into your website, can engage with potential residents, answer queries, and guide them through the application process. This not only streamlines operations but ensures a prompt and personalized experience for prospects.

Personalization at Scale

One of the challenges facing multifamily marketing leaders is delivering personalized experiences to a diverse audience at scale. Technology, like AI chat experiences, gives property management teams the ability to provide customized answers to inquiries faster, more consistently, and with greater detail than before. As marketing leaders lean into marketing automation within their lead management platforms, new doors open up to streamline the email and text follow-up process with Lead Nurturing.

With machine learning algorithms, property management companies can develop the ability to analyze vast amounts of data to understand resident preferences, enabling them to tailor marketing messages, promotions, and even property offerings on a granular level. These insights could be applied to increase the performance of marketing activities while moving prospects through the leasing journey faster.

Predictive Analytics for Strategic Decision-Making

The future of property marketing demands a data-driven approach. Predictive analytics powered by AI can provide invaluable insights into market trends, resident behavior, and the effectiveness of your marketing strategies. By analyzing historical data, AI algorithms can forecast future trends, enabling marketing leaders to make informed decisions and allocate resources strategically. This proactive approach ensures that your marketing efforts stay ahead of the curve.

Streamlined Ad and Content Creation

New generative AI technology is making the content creation process easier and faster by automating the ideation phase of content creation. From generating catchy headlines to suggesting optimal posting times based on user behavior patterns, AI can significantly reduce the time and effort required for content creation. Tools like these can help onsite teams tackle tasks that require content at scale, like maintaining social media profiles, posting to a Google Business Profile consistently, producing content for websites, email messaging, and more. This not only enhances efficiency but also ensures that your marketing materials remain fresh, relevant, and aligned with the preferences of your target audience.

Ad Optimization for High-Performance KPIs

As giants in the marketing technology space, ad platforms like Google, Meta, and TikTok, among others, are leading the charge in adopting AI and Automation into their platforms. With the advancement of new features like Smart Bidding and Responsive Ads in Google Ads, automated event tracking in GA4, and conversion-focused ad objectives in Meta and TikTok, there are now more tools to optimize ad performance with AI. These tools provide savvy advertisers with the opportunity to create more targeted and high-performing campaigns within the same budget by leveraging their immense user data and tried and true machine learning algorithms.

Embrace the Future

As we stand at the forefront of a tech-driven revolution in multifamily marketing, the opportunities presented by AI and automation are too compelling to ignore. The landscape is evolving, and embracing these innovations isn’t just about staying relevant; it’s about making profound improvements to processes to set marketing teams up to meet the growing demands of the industry. Adopting AI and automation will position your property management company for success in a competitive market where speed to lead, a personalized prospect experience, and insights into the customer journey are critical.

Read These Blogs Next

Embracing Hybrid Intelligence: The Role of Human Expertise in an AI World

How AI is Revolutionizing Ad Campaign Management

Conversion Logix Introduces New AI Chat Service

The post The Future of Property Marketing: AI and Automation appeared first on Conversion Logix.

Conversion Logix Introduces New AI Chat Service

Rebecca Reichert — Mon, 08 Jan 2024 19:32:23 +0000

Getting answers from a chat service shouldn’t be a frustrating experience, but all too often, it is. Prospects frequently encounter chatbots that offer only generic responses, leaving them dissatisfied and without a clear next step. These prospects often fall out of the funnel as busy multifamily and senior living onsite teams are unable to deliver the immediate response prospects expect.

Today, we proudly announce the launch of Claire AI+, our innovative AI-powered chat experience, coupled with significant upgrades to our managed Live Chat service. This integration marks a new era in chat solutions, offering the most seamless and efficient chat experience in the multifamily and senior living industry.

Meet Claire AI+

Claire AI+ is a sophisticated AI-powered website application designed to answer frequently asked questions about your community, respond to personalized inquiries, and encourage website visitors to engage in lead-generating actions during a chat conversation. Our cutting-edge conversational AI technology is trained on your unique property information and combined with insights from thousands of real-life, industry-specific conversations to deliver timely and relevant responses.

How Claire AI+ Transforms the Experience for Marketers and Property Managers

Delivers Personalized AI Responses: The stakes for lead response times are higher than ever before. Research from McKinsey revealed that 75% of customers expect help within five minutes or less. Claire AI+ is trained to answer freeform property-related questions with immediate, AI-driven responses. Now you can meet the demands of your prospects’ specific questions about floorplan availability “Do you have one bedrooms available?”, price “How much is a one bedroom?”, or amenities, “Do you have in-unit washers and dryers?”, faster than ever before.

Lessens the Burden of Onsite Teams: 55% of multifamily marketing leaders find following up with leads to be the most time-consuming part of their job. Claire AI+ provides instant, relevant responses day or night to common queries, saving busy property marketing teams hours of repetitive tasks a day.

Integrates with Human Agents: Uniquely designed to switch seamlessly between AI and real human agents, Claire AI+ ensures prospects remain engaged, preventing them from falling out of the funnel.

Automates Lead Conversion: Integrated within The Conversion Cloud® platform, Claire AI+ prompts prospects to take actions like scheduling an appointment in Schedule Genie® or claiming a promotion in SpotlightTM, increasing lead collection and engagement.

Uncover Actionable Insights: Gain insights into commonly requested information through real-time Clarity attribution reports, uncovering valuable knowledge to make data-driven decisions.

Enhancing Our Live Chat Service

Conversion Logix’s managed human chat service, Live Chat, which can be purchased individually or with a Conversion Cloud subscription, seamlessly integrates with Claire AI+. Renowned for an impressive 70% chat-to-lead conversion rate, our Live Chat service is the perfect solution for management companies that seek to implement AI with a human in the loop. Our trained professionals, acting as an extension of your onsite team, now have access to prospects’ past conversations with Claire AI+, enabling a more informed, continuous, and personalized customer experience.

Why Claire AI+ Outperforms the Competition

In today’s market, the need for integrated solutions is more crucial now than ever. Claire AI+ and Live Chat are not just add-ons; they are integral parts of a comprehensive lead management ecosystem, The Conversion Cloud.

The Conversion Cloud® Integration

The Conversion Cloud offers a powerful combination of lead management and nurturing, real-time attribution reporting, and compatibility with industry-leading CRMs. This means no more juggling between multiple tools or missing out on valuable prospects.

Prospective residents will be guided on a continuous lead nurturing journey designed to keep your community top-of-mind from the first interaction to the final lease.

Level Up Your Chat Experience With Claire AI+

Don’t let your chat service be a point of frustration for your prospects. Reach out to your Conversion Logix account manager to enable Claire AI+ as part of your Conversion Cloud subscription. New to Conversion Logix? Schedule a call with us today, and let’s revolutionize your chat experience!

The post Conversion Logix Introduces New AI Chat Service appeared first on Conversion Logix.

Creative Apartment Advertising Ideas

Karen Regala — Fri, 29 Dec 2023 22:03:51 +0000

First impressions last — and in the dynamic world of multifamily housing, a creative apartment advertising strategy is what ensures you make a great first impression. A fresh and imaginative approach is what puts your property in front of your target audience as they scroll through their feed.

In this blog post, we explore five creative advertising ideas that will spark curiosity for your property and leave a lasting impact on prospective residents.

Tap Into TikTok Ads

TikTok videos are short, authentic, and informative, making them a powerful marketing asset to introduce a lease-up or expand the reach of an existing brand. Post-pandemic, TikTok has become one of the most popular social media platforms. At the beginning of 2023, eMarketer reported that users aged 25 to 54 spent more time on TikTok than any other social media platform. While creating organic content is great for building your brand on the platform, paid ads offer a more reliable way to reach in-market renters.

Here are two quick tips to take your TikTok ads to the next level:

Experiment with different video approaches. With TikTok expanding its video lengths from 15 seconds to 10 minutes, video marketers now have more freedom in showcasing their properties. While featuring the property itself has proven to be effective, try featuring faces and sharing helpful tips. Study metrics like video watch time, ad click-through rates, and website conversion rates to determine which video creative resonates the most and double down on top-performing strategies.
Maximize available ad targeting dimensions. Every penny spent on advertising should reach your target audience. Thankfully, the TikTok ad platform gives you plenty of ad-targeting dimensions to help you achieve this. Behavior targeting, interest targeting, and hashtag targeting capture audiences interested in multifamily housing in your local area. As with other social media platforms, you can also harness the power of custom audiences to build segments off your website traffic and engagement.

Target with Keywords in YouTube Ads Campaigns

Promoting video ads on YouTube enables you to reach a high-intent audience through keyword targeting. In addition to targeting strategies like data segments and demographics, YouTube offers advertisers the ability to build audiences based on users’ Google search activity. By using words or phrases for targeting, you can show your ad to people proven to be already interested in apartments in your local area.

Here are some best practices for YouTube advertising:

Leverage learnings from Google Ads. Assess what keywords and ad campaigns are the most successful in Google Ads and leverage these same targeting strategies when creating YouTube Ads. Are neighborhood keywords driving the most high-quality traffic? Incorporate them in your YouTube ads targeting strategy to reach renters across a variety of channels and mediums.
Leverage brand names as keywords. Using your company or property name can be effective as well, especially when there’s prior interest already. This may also be useful for those large brand awareness campaigns where you’re directing your audience to specific pages on your site. Lastly, if your company or property name is a common term, doing brand keyword targeting coupled with your industry keywords helps you reach your specific audience.

Get Ahead of the Competition and Advertise on Connected TV

Traditional TV viewership might be on the decline, but Connected TV media time is on the rise. Overlooked by many in the multifamily marketing industry, Connected TV advertising can be a great opportunity to reach your audience on a less competitive playing field. With an expected daily 2 hours spent with CTV this 2024, you’ll be ahead of the competition if you start advertising on this channel in the coming years.

Here are a few more reasons why you should add CTV to your marketing strategy:

Advertising on a bigger screen allows for more room for creativity. Advertising on CTV lets you explore formats that may not be possible on smaller screens or static ad platforms. This also means you’re able to highlight your property’s features and floorplans without being restricted to smaller video dimensions.
It prepares you for a cookie-less future. Cookies are going away but hard data such as IP address and device IDs are not. With CTV, you won’t be as reliant on cookies, but you still have data to ensure you’re still spending ad money on the correct audience.
Reach a more detailed target audience who are more likely to finish watching your video ads. One of the metrics most video marketers are worried about is the completion rate. Sometimes, even the most creative videos only get viewed for a few seconds. CTV ads are non-skippable, so completion rates tend to be higher than other video platforms. The bigger screen also results in 62% ad recall, which is around 15% higher than ads seen on smartphones or computers.

Promote “Tour Your Way” Options in Ads

People love having options, especially when shopping for a big purchase. This is especially true when it comes to touring your community.

Incorporating an option to “Tour Your Way” in ads puts your property top-of-mind for renters who want to tour your property but live out-of-state or are too busy to tour during business hours.

Here are two creative ways to promote flexible tour options in your ads:

Use guided tours as video ad creative. There’s no better way to showcase what your property can offer than with a guided tour video ad. If your community has a pre-recorded tour that they have sent to prospective renters, this could be a good resource to source video clips that can be used in ads. This kind of ad can be used as a teaser to get a prospect to watch a full pre-recorded guided tour video or schedule an in-person tour. Include features unique to your property and features that have proven to have the highest conversion rates for your current residents for the best results.
Create floorplan-specific video ads. Unless you are marketing a lease-up, you likely have specific floorplans that you are trying to fill vacancies for at any given time. One way to ensure you reach the prospects you need is to create floorplan-specific video ads and target renters searching for these floorplans with keyword targeting on YouTube or Display Retargeting campaigns that leverage website data to target prospects who’ve visited floorplan pages on your site.

Make Your Ads Interactive

With the Internet exposing your potential residents to a multitude of distractions, from competitor listings to other interesting stuff online, it’s important that you capture their attention by preparing ads that give them a reason to engage. One great way to do that is through interactive ads.

With HTML5 display ads, you’re now able to create interactive ads that deliver a unique experience to your target audience, giving them more incentive to stay on an ad and engage with your brand.

Adding to the previous suggestion of creating floorplan-specific ads, interactive ads can also be utilized to deliver a clickable ad that lets them explore your floorplan or other unique features. You can also create animated display ads that showcase your property “in action.” The possibilities are endless!

Check out how interactive ads can work for your property with our Premium Ad Design service.

Develop A More Imaginative Approach to Your Advertising Strategy

In the fast-paced world of real estate, where first impressions linger, and competition is fierce, a creative apartment advertising strategy lets you stand out from the sea of generic ads on multiple platforms. Your creative idea is what turns a potential resident’s casual scroll into an engagement and, hopefully, a new lead.

We’ve explored five creative apartment advertising ideas designed to leave a lasting impact on your potential renters. Partnered with other tried-and-true digital marketing strategies, these ideas can help ensure you have a winning strategy for the new year.

Read these blogs next for more multifamily marketing inspiration.

Top 5 Apartment Marketing Strategies for 2024

Captivating Apartment Photo Ideas

Exciting New Lead Nurturing Features to Reach More Leads

The post Creative Apartment Advertising Ideas appeared first on Conversion Logix.

Captivating Apartment Photo Ideas

Karen Regala — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 19:02:50 +0000

The old adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” has become more relevant in this age of online property hunting, where you’re no longer just competing with similar listings but also with a million other things on the Internet. In a crowded rental market, creating captivating apartment photos can be one of your strongest weapons to stop the scroll.

In this blog post, we’ll explore attention-grabbing apartment photo ideas that will compel your audience to envision life within the walls of your communities.

From strategic angles that highlight the unique features of each space to telling a story about lifestyle and convenience, this article is a comprehensive toolkit for savvy property managers and marketers ready to master the art of apartment photography.

Use Natural Lighting but Also Shoot at Different Times of the Day

Natural lighting is not only more cost-efficient, it captures the property with more clarity and depth. The Golden Hour after sunrise and before sunset is one of the best times to take exterior photos because it gives you the clarity of daylight with the softness and romanticism of a warm, waning sun. The Golden Hour may also be great for interior shots: cast from the windows, light from the setting sun creates mystic photo listings. But you’ll also need more versatile shots to choose from, so it’s good to switch things up and take photos of the property at different times of the day.

Here are some creative ways different times of day may be leveraged to create captivating apartment photos:

Use daylight to highlight how the apartment looks with natural lighting. As daytime casts fewer shadows, it lets you showcase the house’s spaciousness.
Natural twilight creates beautiful ambiance shots and is especially great for illuminating windows and landscapes of the property.

Take lots of ambiance shots of different parts of the house, playing with sunrise, midday, or sunset lighting to highlight specific features that may appeal emotionally to potential buyers.

Experiment and Take Photos of Rooms From Multiple Angles

Much like shooting during different times of day, shooting from different angles will give you a range of shots to choose from. These two types of shots are the most popular among real estate photographers: (1) corner shots that present a room from the corner (usually at a 45-degree angle) to show an idea of how much space the room has and (2) straight-on shots that frame the entirety of a room from the front, ideal for showcasing staged rooms, stairways, and other unique installments. These are still great to use; however, to stand out from other listings, it is important to be creative: try rotating perspectives, crouching on the floor, or stepping up on a ladder to get unique shots from multiple angles.

Take Advantage of Reflections to Capture the Property’s Unique Selling Points

An apartment’s unique features — such as that vintage fireplace or those custom room installments — may get lost in usual listing photos. Give them the attention they deserve by surfacing them on mirrors’ reflections. This produces a creative, unexpected element that adds depth and dimension to the image. Mirror reflections are also great in emphasizing architectural features and the room’s functionality.

When utilizing this tip, be mindful of unwanted reflections. Double-even triple-check that final photos don’t have sneak peeks of the photographer or even unpleasant corners.

Highlight the Neighborhood

Location is one of the most important factors renters consider when searching for an apartment. When conveying this with photography, the best photographers go beyond a curbside photo to capture the full value of an area. These days, apartment marketers need to remember that they are not just selling a real estate property; they are also selling a way of life that includes the neighborhood the property is surrounded by. This means including snapshots of nearby parks, cafes, landmarks, and maybe even schools or shopping centers. The goal is to give future residents an idea of what it’s like to live within that neighborhood while providing them with a window into a future lifestyle they can fall in love with.

Conclusion

Remember that while the Internet has made it easier for prospects and leads to find your listing, it has also made it easier for them to get distracted by all other things available online. Posting listings that are accompanied by unique and captivating photos ensures that you are able to rise above all the distractions and get potential buyers to engage with you.

Once you’ve captured the perfect apartment photos, you’ll need a strategy to get these eye-catching images in front of your ideal audience.

Read these blog posts next for advice on reaching your ideal renter with cutting-edge marketing strategies.

Five Apartment Marketing Strategies for 2024

Unlocking the Key to Lower Acquisition Costs

A Dynamic Duo: The Long-Term Impact of a Combined Display Strategy

The post Captivating Apartment Photo Ideas appeared first on Conversion Logix.

Top 5 Apartment Marketing Strategies for 2024

Rebecca Reichert — Thu, 30 Nov 2023 18:33:21 +0000

The marketing and technology landscape is moving faster than ever as we approach 2024. While modern marketers are no strangers to change, the rapid and transformative power of AI (Artificial Intelligence) has skyrocketed the pace, setting the stage for a fast-paced year ahead.

Amidst major technological evolutions, the apartment market is facing a medley of challenges and opportunities, from burgeoning supply trends (over 600,000 market-rate units are likely to enter the market by year-end) to steady demand driven by wage growth and modest inflationary expectations. With downward pressure on rental rates due to the growth in supply across the top 50 metros, the focus of the year is anticipated to be on maintaining occupancy vs. rent growth as renters are presented with more options in top markets.

In 2024, multifamily marketers will need to be forward-thinking and laser-focused on developing competitive marketing strategies that leverage cutting-edge technology without losing focus on the fundamentals. With this in mind, we’ve compiled five apartment marketing strategy recommendations to guide your planning in the new year.

BUT FIRST…A QUICK WORD ON THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MARKETING STRATEGY VS. TACTICS

The word strategy is thrown around a lot as a way to describe plans for achieving goals or testing out new technology. These are often tactics rather than strategies, and in many cases, these lists of ideas exist in isolation from the overall landscape impacting marketing teams.

When planning for 2024, think about the challenges your company and the industry is facing. Consider your unique strengths and weaknesses. Then, think about an approach you can take to overcome these challenges using the opportunities available that can set your company apart and provide you with a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

These strategies should be high-level enough that multiple tactics can be devised beneath them that can be executed to achieve your goal but specific enough to make the approach unique, actionable, and relevant to today’s marketing landscape.

As we walk through the five strategy recommendations below, consider the challenges we outlined at the beginning of this blog post and how these strategy recommendations can help you address these challenges while capitalizing on new opportunities and resources.

1. A Hybrid Intelligence Approach to AI

It should come as no surprise that one of the biggest trends for 2024 is anticipated to be the adoption of AI, specifically the adoption of AI-based chat technology. Prospective residents have come to expect immediacy from all industries, and the rental sector is no exception.

AI and automation, in general, excel in their ability to deliver scale and immediacy. In a chat environment, this technology enables property managers to overcome a long-standing struggle: providing faster response times to leads.

Solely relying on AI doesn’t come without its drawbacks. There is a subset of prospects who want a human response to their questions and concerns, and nuanced and unique questions can’t be easily answered by AI.

This is why we recommend you take a Hybrid Intelligence approach to adopting AI in your organization. This means pairing the skills and experience of humans with AI to deliver superior customer experiences and more intelligent business decision-making.

Within the scope of customer experience, this could be implementing an AI chat solution that gives prospects the ability to switch to a live human agent in real-time to prevent leads from falling out of the funnel while maintaining superior customer service (a unique solution we offer you can learn more about here).

2. Building Better Business Intelligence

In a recent LinkedIn Live, “2024 Multifamily Marketing Predictions,” we hosted with the VP of Marketing at Brookfield Properties, Jannah Hobday, and Chief Insider at Multifamily Insiders Brent Williams, one trend that kept coming up in the conversation was the need for centralization between vendors and platforms in the industry.

As marketing becomes more complex and technology becomes more sophisticated, property management teams are reliant on specialized labor and tools to remain competitive in an evolving field. While this makes it possible for property management companies to implement innovative marketing tactics and offer cutting-edge customer experiences with less investment, it also means data and information about marketing campaigns, leads, and residents’ lives in many places, making it difficult for marketing managers to make informed decisions and implement strategy changes quickly.

One way to go about this is to develop a source of truth for resident information and work with vendors that offer integrated marketing solutions.

At Conversion Logix, we partner with the top CRM vendors in the industry to sync the lead and tour data we capture from our lead management system with our clients’ CRMs. We also pull data from platforms like Yardi, RealPage, Entrata, RentCafe, and Apartments.com to provide an Ad Automation service that makes lightning-fast ad updates when pricing, offers, and availability changes in a client’s CRM.

This integrated approach gives marketing managers a line of sight into the information they need to be better-informed decision-makers while providing vendors with the information they need to be more effective partners.

3. Advertising on Channels Competitors Aren’t

eMarketer released a study claiming 25-54-year-olds spend more time on TikTok than any other social platform. In 2022, TikTok surpassed Instagram in total daily minutes spent and is expected to surpass Facebook by 2025. Despite this, many property management companies are reticent to get started on the platform.

Property management teams get stuck on this idea that in order to be on TikTok, they have to build up a library of organic video posts and invest in follower-building and virality tactics. This prevents a lot of management companies from taking advantage of this platform.

While it takes a higher monthly minimum in ad spend to get started on TikTok, we’ve seen clients experience success leveraging repurposed video content for Instagram Reels as TikTok ads. Unlike organic posts, TikTok advertising enables you to reach a larger audience consistently with the same piece of content and gives you the ability to target and track your ideal audience.

Another breakout in the media industry is streaming networks. Streaming outperformed both cable and broadcast TV for the first time in history in July 2022, according to a Nielsen report. Connected TV advertising is one of the most overlooked advertising opportunities in the multifamily industry. Connected TV ads can be displayed on a range of devices, from Smart TVs to computers and mobile phones. They have some of the highest ad recall rates in the industry and offer a unique opportunity to build brand awareness where others in the industry aren’t competing.

By opening up your marketing strategy to include popular channels your prospects are on that your competitors aren’t, you’ll be in a better position to establish your brand among prospects and prevent new developments from stealing your market share.

4. Leveraging First-Party Data to Develop More Targeted Campaigns

Struggling to find qualified leads is a common challenge that has driven many marketing managers to our door. Targeting in the multifamily industry has always been challenging as marketers seek to reach the most qualified renters while maintaining fair housing-friendly campaigns. This challenge is also likely to become exacerbated as privacy restrictions rise and cookies become deprecated.

New advancements in audience cohort tracking in Google Analytics 4, AI bidding strategies, and conversion tracking are making it possible for marketers to develop targeted campaigns despite these challenges.

The key to unlocking these strategies in 2024 will be collecting first-party data and working with partners on the cutting edge of these targeting techniques to ensure you can find and convert qualified leads at scale.

5. Focusing on the Follow-Up

In a market where new developments have the potential to overstep demand, follow-through becomes even more important. Prospective residents who come in to tour or engage on the website may be considering several properties at one time. By giving attention to prospective renters throughout the entirety of their apartment search, you stand a greater chance of converting leads into leases.

If you aren’t already using automation to develop lead nurturing sequences via text and email, 2024 is a great time to start. Keep in mind that the better your company is at collecting and storing lead information, the more powerful and personalized your automation sequences can be. Consider creating specific sequences for floorplan-specific campaigns, pet owners, or renters with longer move-in timelines to remain top-of-mind and increase lead-to-lease conversions.

TAKE YOUR MARKETING STRATEGY TO THE NEXT LEVEL

Need help creating a personalized strategy for your community? Contact us today for a personalized consultation with a multifamily marketing expert. We’ll assess your strengths and areas of improvement while exploring opportunities to incorporate cutting-edge ad campaigns, automation, and AI into your 2024 marketing strategy.

The post Top 5 Apartment Marketing Strategies for 2024 appeared first on Conversion Logix.

Unlocking the Key to Lower Acquisition Costs

Rebecca Reichert — Fri, 17 Nov 2023 19:10:41 +0000

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.