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.

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.

In the era of doing more with less, AI is a powerful ally for marketers and operators seeking out new ways of doing business. As an ad agency in the multifamily and senior living industries, we’ve leveraged the latest innovations in the ad industry for years to keep our clients on the cutting edge. From ad creation to performance enhancement and measurement, AI is quickly becoming an added ingredient in every area of campaign management. In this blog post, we’ll explore how AI is transforming the advertising landscape and what that means for companies looking to maximize media budgets.

Overview of AI-Powered Ad Management Tools

AI’s superpower lies in its ability to scale the unscalable and make complex calculations based on massive amounts of data in real-time speed.

At Conversion Logix, we create, launch, and manage ad campaigns for property management companies across a variety of channels, including Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Display Networks, and Connected TV. Within these platforms, we’ve AI-built tools to streamline, enhance, and scale the process while keeping a human in the loop. Here are a few of the ways we leverage AI in ad management today. 

Ad Creation 

One of the most exciting and new use cases for AI is designing ads with the help of Generative AI. Generative AI, a form of AI that can generate original content in the form of text, images, or audio, is helping marketers reduce the initial stage of copywriting and creative ideation. From asking AI to write a headline under a certain character count that captures a key message to feeding AI images and asking it to generate relevant copy, Generative AI is dramatically speeding up the time it takes for advertisers to develop ads. 

We’ve built EHO-friendly Generative AI tools into our own ad creation process and found these capabilities especially helpful when designing ads for Facebook, Instagram, and Google. Leveraging these tools, Google’s generative AI suggestions, and ChatGPT have helped our campaign managers reduce time spent on ad copywriting by 30 – 40%, while maintaining ad rankings of excellent. This has enabled us to bring campaigns to life across large client portfolios faster than ever before.

Bid Optimization

Advertising platforms have become increasingly more sophisticated over the past few years in their targeting capabilities to help advertisers reach the most relevant audience for their products and services. But in an auction environment, marketers not only need to reach the right audience at the right time, but they also need to outbid competitors trying to do the same.

Google, in particular, has led the charge in this with Smart Bidding, which is now used by over 80% of Google Ad users. Smart Bidding strategies, which are trained from your campaign and website conversion data, leverage AI to identify and increase bids for higher-quality leads. These tools enable marketers to maximize limited budgets by ensuring ad dollars are being spent on the impressions and clicks that are the most likely to lead to high-value conversions. Advertisers leveraging AI for optimization have seen a 15-20% increase in conversion rates.

Each of these bidding strategies has different advantages based on your overall marketing strategy. As a general rule, the more data you can provide AI, the better your results. If you want to optimize your campaign for higher-level actions like leads and tours, you’ll need enough data to feed ad platforms so they can help you optimize toward your desired goals. In one study of over 100 Conversion Logix client accounts, our ad managers found that campaigns that could support and leverage Max Conversion Bidding strategies yielded 20% more conversions than those that used Max Click Bidding, illustrating the value of tracking and producing website leads to enhance AI’s effectiveness.

Dynamic Personalization 

In addition to adjusting bids on the fly to win ad auctions, AI is also being used to help advertisers increase ad engagement. The key to this lies in data gathering and analysis to understand a target audience and then provide a customized ad in real time to generate higher engagement with this audience. 

Google Responsive Ads, driven by machine learning, can pull from a list of prepopulated headlines and descriptions to adapt and personalize ad copy to each searcher. Leveraging a wide variety of high-quality headlines and descriptions allows Google’s machine learning to mix and match ads that will yield the best engagement. 

On average, Conversion Logix has seen Responsive Ads improve click-through rates by 5-6%.

Reporting & Insights

To make better marketing decisions, marketers need better information and help to analyze the daily flood of cross-channel data streams. This is one area where AI can be especially useful. 

With tools like GA4, marketers now have access to AI insights directly in their website analytics platform. These automated insights leverage machine learning to identify trends in your website traffic to help you identify your best and worst-performing strategies and provide suggestions for improvement.

With access to even more data, advertisers can gain access to even greater insights. As an advertising and technology provider with thousands of campaigns and over a million leads generated in the multifamily and senior living space, we’ve been developing a proprietary AI recommendation engine that can analyze ad and lead performance across various marketing channels. 

Tools like these enable us to benchmark performance across our multifamily and senior living portfolio and train AI to offer strategic recommendations for campaign optimization. Our account managers leverage these insights to provide data-driven guidance and when assessing and optimizing campaigns.

The Role of Human Oversight

Contrary to popular misconception, the age of AI in advertising doesn’t mean human advertisers can or should be automated out of the process.

Even the most powerful AI systems today are still very task-driven and specialized. These systems are designed to produce specific outcomes based on parameters and the data they have been trained on. While these tools can be great assistors to the ad management process, they lack the big-picture understanding that human ad managers possess. Think of ad management AI as tools in a toolbox; someone still has to decide whether a hammer or a drill is needed to solve the problem. 

Humans are more creative, strategic, and adaptable than AI. They also have a social and emotional intelligence that is critical to success in advertising. Even as AI advances, human marketers will be needed to decide which direction they want to take in ad creation, what audience they think the AI should help target, and what bidding strategy to use. This combined approach to AI is known as Hybrid Intelligence, a concept that illustrates why the best future outcomes of AI technology will involve humans working in tandem with AI.

Stay Ahead of the AI Revolution With Conversion Logix

Advertisers leveraging AI are moving faster, saving time, generating more leads, and achieving more with limited budgets, giving them a clear competitive edge in the market. 

At Conversion Logix, we’re at the forefront of marketing innovation, leveraging cutting-edge AI solutions to redefine success for our clients in the multifamily and senior living industry. With over a decade-long commitment to understanding the unique challenges of this sector, we’ve developed and leveraged a suite of proprietary AI tools that address industry-specific pain points and provide our clients with a competitive edge. 

Check out these blog posts next to learn more about how we use AI in marketing and our take on the future of the industry.

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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.

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

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.

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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.

Ready to be the most informed multifamily marketer in the room? Read our hot takes as we rate our level of excitement over this year’s industry trends.

Artificial Intelligence

Chat GPT is one of the hottest topics technology topics this year. The platform has garnered millions of users overnight and is changed the way all industries are looking at AI. If you have used the platform, it is impressive in its ability to adapt its speaking style and information to a user query, going beyond what we are used to seeing from Google search. While moving faster than ever, we still have a ways to go before AI is super effective in the apartment marketing space. 

We have seen platforms like Google and Meta use AI for years to target online users, place bids on behalf of advertisers, and optimize campaigns. However, we are still seeing the need for human oversight of AI and human intervention when new information is presented.

What you need to know:

• Chat GPT is making AI a more high-profile initiative for tech companies.
• AI is rapidly improving and becoming more helpful but still requires human intervention to course correct and provide timely information. 

Short-Form Video​​​​

New research from HubSpot reveals short-form video to be the most popular trend among marketers, with 90% of marketers planning to increase or maintain their investment in the content format in 2023.

The popularity of TikTok played a large role in the growth of short-term video consumption and still continues to offer a big opportunity for marketers in the years to come.

New in 2023, is the growth in short-form video outside of TikTok. YouTube, owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, reported a huge rise in the adoption of YouTube Shorts. In a recent earnings call, the CEO of Alphabet announced that YouTube Shorts has surpassed 50 billion daily views, up from 30 billion one year ago. The company also announced ad funding for creators developing YouTube Shorts on the platform at the start of the year. 

What you need to know:

• Test TikTok if you want to scale brand awareness in 2023. Apartment brands, particularly properties geared towards college students, are seeing impressive brand reach statistics and search engine traffic gains from TikTok Ads.
• YouTube Shorts is gaining massive popularity and will provide ad revenue to creators in 2023.

Local Search Marketing

Google Business Profile is still the most common way for renters to discover you in the search engine, making this a continual focus for property marketers. In addition to updating your profile regularly and filling in all the fields you are allotted, what else are multifamily marketers doing to dominate local search results? Focusing on the basics of authority-building SEO strategies that support all aspects of search engine marketing and making strategic investments in Google Ads. While it’s certainly not a new strategy for 2023, it’s a foundational strategy that comes up every year and supports your overall marketing efforts. 

What you need to know:

• Google Profile losing optimization is crucial to your local search strategy.
• Communities investing in awareness campaigns like social advertising should maintain a strong local search presence so prospective renters can find them in the search engine when they come back to search for the brand.

Floorplan Specific Ad Campaigns ​​

We’re seeing communities shift from focusing solely on brand campaigns and overall community attributes to developing segmented and targeted strategies around promoting specific floorplans. With ad automation in the mix, this is now happening in real time. Another way marketers are doing new things with this strategy is virtual tour video content by floorplan and incorporating that in ad campaigns and linking ads to special floorplan offers that appear on the site. 

What you need to know:

• Floorplan marketing is more agile than ever with ad automation. 
• Communities are creating more floorplan-specific videos and incorporating them in ads and follow-up links in emails.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing, while popular in many B2C industries, has always been seen as hit or miss for the multifamily industry. We’re seeing a shift in focus from influencer marketing to UGC across all industries. While influencer marketing isn’t a top strategy we recommend, developing UGC content for video ads is something we are curious to explore with clients in 2023. We know prospective residents value authenticity, trust, and social proof in marketing. We just don’t see influencers as essential as a distribution channel. If you want to tap into the video creation side of outsourcing social media, we suggest looking for everyday people who can help you create new content while retaining control of the distribution through your own brand’s advertising channels.

What you need to know:

• Influencer marketing in multifamily is overrated.
• User-generated content that you can distribute across your own brand campaigns is trending.

Connected TV

Connected TV is a trend that all advertisers have been sleeping on. While traditional TV advertising has historically received a bad rap for being too expensive and vague in the way it targets and reports viewers, Connected TV advertising breaks these assumptions. These ad campaigns work more like Display ad campaigns than traditional TV and can enable you to target based on actual behavior and intent to rent. This channel tracks post-visits from people who saw an ad and then later searched and expands multifamily marketing beyond mobile, and provides cross-device opportunities to scale awareness. 

What you need to know:

• Young adults are streaming TV in addition to social media video consumption, and Connected TV advertising offers a path to reach them at scale.
• Increasing spend on Connected TV advertising has proven to have a significant impact on overall campaign performance.

Website Analytics Evolves ​​

All Google Analytics users will be forced to make the shift to Google Analytics 4 this year. With this new shift, we’ll see an increasing reliance on engagement metrics that look past bounce rate to judge the level of intent prospects have on your website. The new platform promises to deliver more mobile-focused website analytics and improves cross-device and platform tracking capabilities. They’ve also made new additions to multitouch attribution, filling in gaps with machine learning.

What You Need to Know:

• Website analytics will be more engagement-focused in 2023.
• Multitouch attribution is becoming a bigger topic as marketers seek to understand the impact of social media and video ad investments.

The post How We Rated 2023’s Multifamily Marketing Trends appeared first on Conversion Logix.

Casting a “wide net” when marketing a lease-up may seem like the quickest way to reach your occupancy goals, but sometimes, narrowing the focus of your marketing efforts can yield better results. Recently, we partnered with a new development in Portland, Oregon, that had a below-average lease-up marketing budget but successfully hit full occupancy within twelve months. 

The secret to their success: investing in high-intent local traffic to maximize their budget and deliver qualified leads.

In this case study, we’ll walk you through the strategies our team activated to target local renters, build awareness, and generate enough leads to secure 100 leases within one year.

A Multichannel Local Marketing Strategy to Generate Leads

This community needed a strategic marketing campaign to fill a 286-unit lease-up with a moderate-sized media budget in Southeast Portland. Without a strong online presence in search engines or social channels, digital advertising offered the best way to scale the community’s reach within a short period. 

As with any lease-up, discoverability and brand awareness were critical to their success. To maximize their ability to be found and remembered, our team focused the client’s budget on local targeting strategies within a variety of channels to deliver multiple impressions to high-potential prospects.  

The Conversion Logix team drove brand awareness among apartment seekers through social and display advertising networks while capturing local search traffic through our Paid Search and Google Business Profile Accelerator services. 

The campaign generated 20,074 direct and post-view website sessions, proving the impact of a multichannel strategy. 

To ensure prospects remain engaged after visiting the site, we launched two applications (Spotlight and Schedule Genie) from our software suite, The Conversion Cloud® to promote concessions and automate tour scheduling. This approach resulted in 567 leads. With access to the community’s lead list and rent rolls, we were able to attribute 100 leases to the leads generated through The Conversion Cloud. 

The Advertising Strategy: A Detailed Look

Search Strategy

Our search experts developed a Paid Search campaign focused on local radius targeting and neighborhood keywords. The team also published weekly posts to the community’s Google Business Profile to increase the listing’s visibility in local map searches. 

Display Strategy

The Conversion Logix media team drove brand awareness through Display banner ads featuring the community location and images of the property. They paired this with a Display retargeting strategy that re-engaged previous website visitors to market to prospects throughout their leasing journey.

Social Strategy

Our social team launched a Facebook and Instagram ad campaign targeting local renters while promoting property photos, the community’s location, and unique selling points.

Converting Website Visitors into Leads: A Detailed Look 

To convert high-intent prospects into leads and tours, we launched two lead generation applications through the Conversion Cloud on the community’s website: Schedule Genie and Spotlight.

• Schedule Genie, a self-scheduling application to generate 305 tours
• Spotlight, a promotional application to highlight concessions adding, yielding 262 claimed offers

Key Takeaways

1. When facing a limited budget for a lease-up, search, social, display, and lead capture tools offer the best marketing mix. 
2. Campaigns targeting a local area drive conversions at a higher rate compared to regional or national targeting strategies.

Capitalizing on a multichannel strategy and incorporating lead-generating applications on your site can significantly increase your engagement and leads generated.

If you’re ready to adapt these strategies to your particular situation and accelerate your marketing, schedule a call with a campaign advisor today!

The post Portland Lease-Up Attributes 100 Leases to Local Targeting Strategy appeared first on Conversion Logix.

Today, we’re going to tell you how a San Jose lease-up community signed 48 leases in three months using an integrated digital advertising and lead generation strategy.

Over the past ten years, Conversion Logix has partnered with the nation’s biggest property management companies to generate leads, tours, and leases online. During this time, we’ve seen communities face the same challenges:

• Capturing the attention of apartment seekers in a competitive digital landscape
• Converting anonymous website visitors into high-intent leads 
• Nurturing prospects lower in the funnel
• Attributing leads to leases

In this case study, we’ll walk you through the steps we took to help a new property exceed their lead-to-lease targets and generate enough high-intent leads to sign 48 leases in three months.

An Integrated Strategy to Generate High-Intent Leads

Building awareness of a new community is the first step to helping a lease-up reach their occupancy goals. However, relying entirely on top-of-the-funnel marketing strategies can leave communities with a top-heavy approach that doesn’t translate to generating fast leasing results for onsite teams. Instead, the best lease-up strategies combine awareness-focused media campaigns with lower-of-the-funnel retargeting and leverage lead generation technology to engage leads throughout their leasing journey. This is exactly what we did to help the community in this case study.

To build awareness of the community and drive website traffic to the site, our media team ran a comprehensive advertising campaign across Google, Facebook, Instagram, Display, and YouTube.

The campaigns successfully captured attention driving 17,088 prospects to the community’s website.

We added three modules from our lead generation and attribution platform, The Conversion Cloud®, to the community’s website to engage prospects and collect their lead information. 

Our team diligently monitored and optimized the campaigns to achieve these results within three months:

• 3,895 website conversions 
• 383 high-intent leads
• Using the MatchBack feature in The Conversion Cloud, the community matched 48 of the leads to leases
• A 12.53% lead-to-lease conversion rate

The Advertising Strategy: A Detailed Look

Search Strategy

Out of all of the community’s marketing channels, search marketing drove the most website visitors to their site and converted the greatest number of prospects into leads. Our team of Google Ads specialists targeted non-brand, location-specific search terms, and brand search terms to ensure the community displayed at the top of the search engine results for relevant searches.

Display Awareness Strategy 

We designed a customized set of banner ads for the community’s Display campaign promoting their convenient location in San Jose and encouraging in-market prospects to visit the community’s website to schedule a tour.

Social Awareness Strategy

Our Paid Social team launched a Facebook Ads campaign targeting local apartment dwellers with a Facebook and Instagram feed ad and an Instagram Stories video ad. Throughout the social ad campaigns, the community promoted their specials, location, and a virtual tour video ad to help the community fill vacancies for a specific floor plan. 

Our video advertising team enhanced the community’s social awareness strategy through a YouTube ad campaign targeting apartment seekers who searched Google for apartments in the San Jose area. We weaved together a virtual tour video of the community with image assets of the property to bring the community to life at a time when apartment seekers were cautious about visiting in person, making viewers feel as if they are walking through the property.

Retargeting Strategy

To re-engage prospects who visited the community’s site early in their leasing journey, our advertising team nurtured interested prospects with retargeting ads across Display networks, Facebook, and Instagram. This ensured the community stayed top-of-mind throughout their prospects’ leasing journey, ultimately increasing the number of leads that converted into leases.

Converting Website Visitors into Leads: A Detailed Look 

The community’s lead generation strategy was critical to attributing marketing activities to leases. The Conversion Cloud modules made it easy for prospects to engage with the community and take action.

• Schedule Genie®: Real-time availability to schedule tours on the community’s website resulted in 227 tours.  37 of those tours went on to lease at the community. 
• Concession Manager: By promoting “Up to 8 Weeks Free” and “Take a 1-Bd Tour Now” in our promotion module, our team was able to capture lead information for 147 additional prospects, driving 18 leases. 
• Live Chat: Our 24/7 live chat agents converted 60 chat conversations into leads ultimately resulting in eight new leases. 

Three Key Takeaways

We hope you found value in learning how this lease-up leveraged digital advertising and lead generation technology to create a successful marketing strategy.

The post San Jose Lease-Up Attributes 48 Leases in Three Months to Integrated Lead Strategy appeared first on Conversion Logix.

“You have to make video content!”. You’ve been hearing this phrase and others like it for years now. They even have crazy statistics such as “50% of people watch a video about a product before they make a purchase” (Google). You already know you have to create video content to help showcase your community. That part goes without saying, the hard part is knowing where to begin, what type of videos to create, how much to budget for video content, and where to post it once you’ve made your masterpiece. Luckily, you made the wise choice of reading this article and in just a few minutes, you’ll be a video marketing whiz.

Where to Begin/Budgeting

Before we can even begin making videos, we need to determine what portion of your budget you want to allocate to video. Most videographers can cost anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand dollars to create a video. So finding the right one is key. Some will only film and give you raw footage leaving you to edit which can take several days assuming you know what you’re doing. Many marketers prefer to produce through a marketing agency as they will do everything including writing, filming, and editing. Once the editing is complete they will even optimize your video for different channels and in different formats (we will get to that later). The benefit of using an agency is that they are all-inclusive, offering one price upfront so you know how much you’re going to need to budget without worrying about hidden fees and paying extra for someone to edit your content. After you find someone who is going to create your project, the next step is figuring out what types of videos you want to for your apartment community.

Types of Videos

There are several types of videos you can make to engage your leads and residents. This is not an exhaustive list, but it should give you some ideas on how to get started.

Tour Videos

Photos are a great way to show off your community’s best features. However, photos are only a piece of the puzzle, creating video tours can create further interest and allow you to stylize your content more than with photography. Just make sure it’s an accurate representation of your community.

Event Videos

Have an event that you want people to know about? Creating a video about it is one of the best ways to get the word out. This can be for either a special leasing event to get new leads or for current residents to engage more with the community.  Make sure the video is clear about what the event is, has an enticing offer to bring people in (free food, sweepstakes, etc.) and makes the event look fun. These videos shouldn’t be more than a minute or two in length otherwise viewers will fall off before making it to the end.

Promotional Videos

Similar to event videos, promotional videos are a great way to add a sense of urgency and get prospects to engage with your community. By rewarding interested prospects with an offer, you can speed up the time it takes for them to convert into a lead, and ultimately a lease. Pair this strategy with an offer claiming tool like Concession Manager so you can drive interested prospects to a landing page experience that allows them to take action right away. This will increase the follow-through you see from prospects and help your community build a healthy list of leads. The best part is these kinds of videos can work for multiple types of promotions. Want your leads to know you are offering a $0 deposit if they sign up this month? Make a promo video. Current tenants get a reduced rate if they renew early? Make a promo video. These videos will make it easier for your community to get more impressions and engagement as opposed to static content. Here’s an example of a promotional video we created for a luxury apartment client in Seattle for a YouTube ad campaign. The community used this video to attract potential residents with their “One Month Free” offer.

About Us Videos

About Us videos can give prospects a greater sense of connection to your community.  The difference between About Us and Tour videos is that About Us content focuses more on the history of the complex, the people that work there, and the values the community has. In contrast, those that want to see what the complex looks like and amenities that are offered would prefer a Tour video. About Us content is meant to be more of a storytelling video and makes for great content to add to your website.

Where to Place Videos

Okay, so you made your videos, congratulations! Now, where are you supposed to put them? Certain videos perform better on different channels, so let’s break it down.

Your Website’s Homepage

As mentioned before, About Us videos are some of the best types of video content to put on your website. Any video that showcases your community and has visual appeal can be placed here. You can typically put your longer videos here as well. An added bonus? Having a relevant video embedded on your site helps increase your SEO. It’s a win-win.

Social Media

As of 2019, Facebook and Instagram push video content in their algorithms. These are great places to post your content and reach your audience. Unfortunately, thanks to Facebook’s constantly changing algorithm, posting your videos organically won’t often give you the best results. If you want to really maximize impressions on your video content, creating paid social media campaigns is the way to go. Each platform has different requirements for aspect ratios and file size. Keep this in mind when receiving your videos from your videographer. Using the right psychographic and geographic targeting to maximize ROI is also required to have a successful social media video campaign. All this can get pretty overwhelming to create and monitor so many communities outsource ad creation and management to agencies that specialize in the multifamily industry.

YouTube

Although some would group YouTube with social media, YouTube is its own beast. If you plan on creating multiple videos, it is best to create a channel where prospects can have access to all your video content. Similar to social media, you can also pay to have your videos appear as advertisements to reach a larger audience. Through YouTube, you can take advantage of keyword targeting to reach people in your area who searching for apartments. Youtube Ads can be various lengths from 5 to 60 seconds and even longer. Check with your videographer if their package includes different lengths of your video to make sure you are getting the most out of YouTube. Read our article about the “5 Best Practices for YouTube Apartment Ads”  to learn more about how you can optimize your video ad campaign on YouTube.

Conclusion

There you have it! Now you know what video content you need to market your community and which platforms to advertise on. That wasn’t so bad, was it? There is one last step and that is making sure you keep that great content coming!

The post How to Create and Market Video Content for Apartments appeared first on Conversion Logix.