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.

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

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.

In this blog post, we shared a recap of the video trends these marketing leaders presented to help guide your video marketing strategy in the coming year.

#1 Show Don’t Tell

Video has become a popular entertainment, and educational tool for personal and professional uses as the format engages multiple senses and increases information retention among customers and employees.

In this discussion, Kristi shared the following eye-opening stat, “People retain 90-95% what comes from video vs. 10% from written content”. She went on to say, “if you are tired of prospective residents asking the same questions over and over again, show a video they will retain it better”. 

Andrew elaborated on this point by sharing that at Conversion Logix, video has become a go-to media format for clients to showcase their property and within the company between employees. He shared the effectiveness of sending videos within the organization to quickly communicate a point or demo instructions for a task, providing a reference that employees can go back to. 

#2 Authentic Video Engaging Prospects

With the popularity of video formats like TikTok and Instagram Stories, the demand for authentic video content is growing. When it comes to apartments, this means that apartment seekers are expecting real-life reflections of what a community is actually like.

Kristi advises property managers to gather behind-the-scenes content. While the everyday renter may not think about some of the things that go into getting an apartment ready to rent during their search, things like watching the carpets being cleaned, new paint, and unit upgrades could increase affinity for the community through video.

It’s also important to note that just because authenticity is on the rise, doesn’t mean low-quality visual content is. Andrew mentioned that it’s still important to create visually appealing video assets but to focus on the message, delivery, and content over high-production styling.

#3 Repurposing Video Marketing Assets to Extend Your Budget

Brands are extending the life of their video content by repurposing it. Prospects are demanding video in various formats and across many different channels. To keep up with this demand, communities can take video assets they are already developing, like virtual tour content, and reuse them across assets like their ads, emails, and social media channels, or as a lead generation opportunity. 

During the live event, Kristi shared a story of a community that pre-recorded video tours and pre-recorded videos of post-tour follow-up messages from the property manager. The community leveraged these authentic videos on multiple platforms and even tried testing the videos in ads. The result was a 300% ROI! Their team built awareness and trust by using the community’s staff and a personable approach to talking about the community.

#4 Accelerate the Sales Process

Using video in the tour process can save communities three times as much time. “The average tour lasts 14 minutes while the average in-person tour lasts 45-50 minutes”, says Kristi. Considering the staffing crisis the industry is experiencing, leveraging virtual tours to sell your community while in-person staff focuses on prospects further down the sales funnel is key. 

Andrew illustrated the importance of video in the prospect journey by sharing a recent Zillow study that found people used to tour five communities in person and are now only going to two. “The more we can meet people how they want, the better the experience. That way, the people on site are there because they want to be there versus they have to be there.”, says Andrew.

#5 Experimenting With Video Marketing

Creating video marketing content can feel intimidating for many operators which is why they don’t get started. In the live event, Kristi encouraged operators to get more comfortable on camera by doing it more often and putting themselves out there. “It’s ok to be vulnerable,” says Kristi. We are all learning and trying new things when it comes to video. The more you do it, the better you will be at it.

The speakers both shared the importance of testing new things with video to find out what resonates.

Andrew remarked, “what I think is going to work isn’t always right.” You don’t always know for sure what video content will grab people, especially with ads which is why A/B testing is so valuable. He went on to share a recent experience when he was analyzing the results of a multifamily video ad campaign. Everyone thought the video that was less polished and more off the cuff wouldn’t perform as well as the polished video. On the contrary, the less polished video outperformed the traditional style video ad two to one in conversions on the website. 

With the new technology built into ad platforms, video testing is more accessible than ever and is something everyone should try.

Bonus: AI-Generated Video Marketing Tips

At the end of their discussion, Andrew and Kristi tested out the trending AI platform ChatGPT to see if AI software had additional video marketing tips to share. The AI shared the following advice for operators and marketers working with video that was spot on.

Don’t Miss Our Next LinkedIn Live

Wish you had the chance to watch this discussion live? Follow Conversion Logix on LinkedIn to make sure you are the first to know when we have our next LinkedIn Live event.

The post 5 Video Marketing Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2023 appeared first on Conversion Logix.

As we say goodbye to 2021 and welcome in a new year, marketers everywhere are trying to make sense of the lessons we learned as we plan for 2022. The marketing world continues to experience rapid change with an emphasis on reaching more consumers online. Companies invested heavily in digital strategies in 2021 and will continue to in 2022. Here are some of the digital marketing trends we’re tracking for 2022 and you should too. 

Investment in Paid Media Channels

Nothing beats a marketer’s reach and speed to market than paid media channels. In 2021, marketers planned to invest a greater share of their marketing budget in paid media above every other category including headcount, software, or content creation¹. 

By the end of 2021, global ad spending rebounded faster than anticipated. A recent report from eMarketer revealed that companies spent $33 billion more in ad spend than forecasted, with a majority of the growth happening in digital advertising channels². Most of the investment in digital ad spending went to the top three ad networks, Amazon, Google, and Facebook². Looking ahead at 2022, U.S. ad spending in 2022 is projected to increase 13% surpassing $300 billion ($320 billion) for the first time².

Connected TV Advertising 

While most marketers plan to invest media dollars in paid social, search ads, and display ads, a new category is emerging in the ad space. eMarketer estimated that by the end of last year, CTV ad spending will have increased by 59.9% to $14.44 billion³.

As households turn to online media channels to stay entertained, connected TV is replacing traditional TV viewership across the U.S. In 2021, US residents spent 80 minutes per day with subscription over-the-top (OTT) video, an 8.7% increase from 2020³. 

Connected TV ads provide apartment marketers with new opportunities to expand their reach and target apartment seekers with a non-skippable video ad format across mobile, desktop, and TV. Unlike traditional TV, Connected TV offers the same level of advanced targeting and data collection that marketers are getting with display advertising. Marketers looking to expand their reach with precision targeting can capitalize on the growing popularity of streaming platforms.

Longer Lifespans For Short-Form Video Content

The growing popularity of Tik Tok has shaken up the social media landscape, leading to a rise in the creation and consumption of short-form video. Over 4.8 million 0- to 30-second long videos were uploaded in 2020, a 62% increase over 2019⁴. In 2022, 89% of global marketers plan to continue investing in or increase their investment in short-form video⁵. 

In 2016 the popularity of Snapchat influenced the predominant social media platforms to create an ephemeral short-form video format known as Stories. Similarly, Tik Tok’s version of short-form video has influenced media giants Instagram and YouTube to develop a competing video format. ​​Unlike Stories content, videos in Tik Tok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts live beyond 24 hours, allowing these videos to reach new audiences as the content gains popularity. This is great for businesses and creators, looking to grow the reach of their top-performing content. 

Both Tik Tok and Instagram have built new ad placements among these channels opening the door for advertisers to capitalize on this growing traffic source. Creating short-form video ads in Tik Tok and Instagram Reels are two ad placements apartment marketers should keep their eye on in 2022.

Email Campaigning Remains A Key Strategy

In 2021, 77% of marketers saw an increase in engagement with email over the past year¹. Email marketing has remained a top digital marketing activity in 2021 and will continue to be a valuable way to reach consumers in 2022 as businesses shift from third-party to first-party marketing strategies. 

Almost 9 in 10 marketers either strongly agree (39%) or somewhat agree (49%) that newsletters will become a valuable way to reach and target consumers in the absence of third-party data⁶. Marketers also agree that newsletters allow for the collection of first-party data while providing the user value in the delivery of personalized, relevant content (89%), that newsletters provide a vital connection point with customers (86%), and that it’s easy to translate newsletter performance to actual sales and revenue impact (71%)⁶.

Email offers the highest return on investment among modern marketing channels. Litmus’ State of Email report found that email marketing delivers an impressive $36 for every $1 spent⁷. 

More than half of the marketers who leverage email are focused on improving mobile email experiences for subscribers in the coming year. Other areas of focus include sending fewer weekly emails while prioritizing segmentation, personalization, and automation.

Prioritizing The Customer Experience

2020 forever changed the way consumers approach apartment shopping. From virtual and self-scheduled tours to live chat, apartment seekers have become accustomed to instantaneous online experiences and these behavior changes aren’t going away in 2022. Today’s apartment seekers prefer to gather as much information online as possible before speaking to someone face-to-face and are using channels like live chat and text messaging to communicate with communities in real-time.

To adapt to these changes leasing teams are turning to technology to engage prospects earlier in the leasing journey and deliver the instant responses apartment seekers expect.

Website engagement tools that make it easy for prospects to schedule tours, claim offers, watch a video walkthrough, or chat with a community provide prospects with better experiences while enabling marketing teams to gather more lead information for onsite teams.

As marketing teams embrace multiple solutions to meet consumers’ needs online, new challenges will emerge to piece prospect data together across disparate communication channels and lead engagement tools. In 2022, marketers will need to find solutions that help them aggregate data in the leasing journey so they can better assess the marketing strategies and engagement tools driving leasing activity and improve the prospect experience.

Once marketers tap into customer journey data, we’ll likely see a greater emphasis on leveraging automation to scale personalized experiences and improve lead-to-lease attribution in the year ahead.

Conclusion

We hope you found these five trends helpful as you develop your multifamily marketing strategy in 2022. We’ll continue to share insights into how apartment marketers can capitalize on these growing trends as the year unfolds.

About Conversion Logix

Conversion Logix®, LLC provides a comprehensive suite of marketing software and services that enable communities to capture, connect, and convert prospects throughout their leasing journey. We advise, plan, and execute digital marketing strategies to help you maximize your ROI.  Our suite of software and services allow you to easily integrate with common CRM applications and scale lead generation across multiple properties. Conversion Logix has been ranked on the Inc. 5000 and Austin Business Journal’s Fast 50 Growing Companies and is a Premier Google Partner and Facebook Business Partner. 

Sources:

The post Digital Marketing Trends in 2022 appeared first on Conversion Logix.

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

1. Live Chat as the Gold Standard of Communication

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

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

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

2. Video Ads Go from Important to Critical

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

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

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

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

3. Conversion Software for Qualifying Leads

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

Tour Scheduling

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

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

Compelling Offers

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

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

Qualifying Leads

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

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

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

4. Refining Social UX

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

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

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

Visual Quality

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

Engagement

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

Conversion

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

Winter is a dreary time of year for apartment communities. The days are shorter, the weather is colder, and with the holidays taking center stage during the month of December, searching for an apartment isn’t top of mind for many apartment seekers across the country. While many leasing teams try to weather through the storm with the same strategies that brought them leads and leases in the summer, you came here because you know deep down you need to change your strategy.

Like you, we know that seasonality plays a role in a community’s ability to fill vacancies. We’ve helped communities all over the country to fill vacancies in the winter and we’ve gathered our best tactics and strategies in a winter guide to help leasing teams navigate the slow winter months. We analyzed thousands of apartment marketing campaigns across hundreds of clients to give better insights into the marketing mix, budget allocation, ad messaging, ad imagery, and conversion strategies communities can use to improve leasing results. To give readers a better understanding of the recommendations we provided in the guide, we wrote this blog post.

In this blog post, we share the marketing landscape we see affecting apartment communities in the winter so your team fully understands the challenges and opportunities facing your community in the least magical time of year.

The Challenges…

Most communities invest in a paid search strategy year-round to augment their organic website traffic. While paid search is traditionally one of the best sources of paid website traffic for apartment communities, paid search campaigns aren’t as promising in the winter as they are in the spring and summer. 

After the summer months, online Google searching for apartments steadily declines until it reaches an annual low in December. Searching picks up after the holidays in January and February but remains lower than the spring and summer months that follow.

When looking at lead conversion rates on apartment websites from organic Google search traffic, conversion rates start to drop below average from September all the way into February. When looking at conversation rates specifically in the winter months, December rates are lower than January and February. 

The drop in organic searches that occurs in winter reflects the overall lack of apartment searching during this season. Amidst a drop in the number of people searching Google for apartments, the number of apartment communities advertising on Google stays constant.

As a result, we’ve seen the price of apartment ads on Google increase during the winter months. Higher costs, fewer searchers, and steady competition creates a paid search environment that is less favorable for apartment communities.

The Opportunities…

Social media and display marketing are cheaper in the winter after the holiday season. Cost per click drops on Facebook and Instagram in January and February. January is the cheapest time of year to market an apartment on Facebook. The average CPC for apartment Facebook ads in January is 15% lower than the annual average. December is a slightly more expensive time of year to market to apartment seekers on Facebook. This is due mostly in part to the pool of advertisers running ads in the news feed in anticipation of the holidays. Once the holidays are over cost per click on Facebook drops 20%. Cost per click on Instagram drops 35% from December to January and remains 20% lower than the annual average through February.

Since it’s cheaper to reach apartment seekers on social platforms during January and February, apartment communities’ ad budgets stretch further on these platforms. This increases the volume of quality of website visitors coming into a community’s site.

The percentage of Facebook ad traffic that takes a lead action on apartment websites climb 27% on average from December to January. Instagram advertising conversion rates increase 67% on average from December to January and remain higher in February. More conversions per dollar spent make awareness-building platforms a better investment for communities in the winter months, especially after the month of December.

Creating a strategy for the winter months…

December is a tough time to market an apartment. Renters are focused on the holiday season and aren’t actively searching for apartments online. While marketing to apartment seekers on Facebook and Display networks isn’t at its peak in December, search is at its lowest point of the year, making awareness campaigns a better use of your ad dollars. As other advertisers compete to show holiday ads in the news feeds in December, prices remain higher across all platforms. Once the chimney smoke clears and the holiday season is over, communities are presented with a favorable outlook across social ad platforms like Facebook and Instagram and Display networks.

In the winter, communities get a better return on their advertising investment from channels that build awareness, compared to channels that capture demand. Advertising channels like Google ads are more expensive this time of year compared to the spring and summer and the audience searching is smaller. Apartment communities looking to get the most out of their marketing budget are better off shifting more ad spend towards awareness campaigns on social and display platforms and less on search ad campaigns from December to February.

So how do you build social and display ads that are positioned to succeed in the winter? What kinds of concessions and conversion strategies can communities use to create better winter marketing campaigns?

The post Winter Apartment Marketing Outlook appeared first on Conversion Logix.