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.

At the beginning of the U.S. spread of COVID-19, our team tracked the impact that market uncertainty and changing health concerns had on our multifamily clients. At the beginning of the pandemic, we saw a slump in website traffic and searches for apartment communities nationwide. As time progressed the trends changed and amidst the crisis, we saw an upward trend among our client base.

As we sit here in July, a key leasing period for multifamily communities, the leasing environment we are seeing looks healthier than what many of us might have imagined. Communities will continue to make tough decisions in the months ahead but from where we are sitting right now, the demand for rental housing and the desire for apartment seekers to move this summer is still strong. We looked at several signals across a variety of industry sources, combined with our own internal data to give you a glimpse into today’s rental market.

1. Google Trends

A commonly cited source for national search traffic, Google Trends shows the relative popularity that a search term has in a given period of time. Over the past year, searches for both “apartments for rent” and “apartments near me” show the resurgence of apartment searching beginning in the month of April and continuing into July. Search popularity for “apartments for rent” was even higher in early July this year compared to early July 2019. We saw this same search trend play out across our own client portfolio when looking at organic search website sessions over time.

2. Apartment Website Traffic

Communities typically experience a rise in website traffic in the spring and summer. While communities experienced a decline in March that dropped levels down into the typical winter season level of traffic they rose to meet the typical website traffic levels we are used to seeing in Spring and Summer. Since most apartment searching is happening online, a community’s website plays a large role in its ability to attract apartment seekers. Our own client base shows a 73% year over year rise in total website sessions and a 38% increase in website goal completions* (June 2019 vs. June 2020). This indicated that apartment seekers are spending more time on apartment sites and are more willing to engage with communities there.

*Goal changes are also impacted by the adoption of our website conversion software, better attribution, and overall marketing performance improvements that took place from June 2019 to June 2020.

3. Communication (Chat, Phone & Email)

Live Chat conversations, phone calls, and emails to leasing teams are all signs that renters are actively inquiring about properties and moving beyond the browsing stage. We saw a rise in overall communication with leasing teams across our multifamily client base from March to June.

The following call and email data represent click to call data and click to email data from a sample of over 600 apartment websites.

Live chat conversations from our client’s apartment websites increased a total of 36% March-June compared to the four months prior. 

4. Scheduled Tours

At the beginning of the pandemic, communities worried about their ability to lease apartments in a situation where prospective residents couldn’t easily tour the building. Communities switched from an in-person tour model to a virtual tour model overnight. Many apartment seekers were ok with this shift and we saw communities scheduling tours again at the end of March. We have a few hundred communities who used our tour scheduling platform to promote and schedule virtual tours throughout the pandemic. The average number of tours each community scheduled increased month over month throughout the pandemic. The average community self-scheduled 24 tours last month, twice the average of March.

5. NMHC Rent Payment Tracker

One of the biggest questions the industry had at the start of the pandemic was whether renters would be able to make rent payments. The National Multifamily Housing Council collaborated with several apartment industry data sources to assess the percentage of renters to pay their monthly rent. Throughout the pandemic, the rate of rent payments remained higher than predicted. Rent payment rates by the end of April, May, and June remained in the ninety percent range and only slightly deviated from last year.

When comparing weekly rent payment rates, July payments were only down 2 percentage points from last year by July 20th.

*It’s important to note that not all of the rental properties in the U.S. are represented in this tracker. Only professionally managed multifamily communities with 5+ units are tracked. While this represents a large portion of the rental market it underrepresents 1-2 unit rentals which have fared differently in the recession than the larger multifamily communities we’ve worked with.

6. Survey Results

In late March, Rentcafe interviewed apartment seekers about their willingness to move during the pandemic. In this survey of over 6,000 renters, they found that a majority (60%) were not planning on postponing their move. 49% said that their preferences had not changed compared to what they were looking for before.

Zumper conducted a more recent survey of over 500 renters at the end of April to see how the apartment outlook had evolved throughout the pandemic. When asked how COVID-19 has changed their apartment search criteria, the most popular response was “looked for more virtual tours” (34%). Surprisingly when asked about the biggest challenges renters are facing in their apartment search the most popular response at 55% was not receiving a response back from a community.

The current state of the apartment search process is not without its trials. 52% of apartment seekers say they prefer in-person tours over virtual tours despite the rising popularity of virtual tours. While most apartment seekers still plan to move and nearly half have not changed what they are looking for in an apartment, 28% of renters are looking for a cheaper apartment (RentCafe) and 19% are expanding their search radius (Zumper). However, a small portion of renters (5%) are actually increasing their budget and 9% are narrowing their search radius (Zumper).

Making Sense of the Signals

COVID-19 hasn’t changed the desire for most apartment seekers to make a move. The recent surge in apartment searching online, the increase in engagement with leasing teams that occurred from March to June, and the rise in self-scheduled tours indicates that there is still an active renter base looking to move despite the changing environment.

Among current residents, rent payments for the full month of June indicated that most apartment seekers were able to pay rent and rent payment rates remained very similar to payments before the pandemic. 

So what has changed? The apartment search process, which has become even more virtual than before. Google searches, website traffic, self-scheduled tours, and live chat conversations have all increased in popularity year over year. While apartment search behavior has historically always peaked in the Spring and Summer, time will tell if the current rise in apartment searching will carry over into fall. 

Stay up to date on the latest multifamily marketing trends. Fill out the footer form below to subscribe to our multifamily marketing newsletter and receive invitations to our upcoming webinars. 

The post 6 Signals of a Strong Summer Rental Market appeared first on Conversion Logix.

Facebook and Instagram steal a lot of the spotlight in the advertising world. But they aren’t the only powerful players in the advertising game. Google’s social media frontrunner, YouTube is now the most used social media platform in the country. More U.S. adults use YouTube than Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat or Twitter.

They aren’t just watching cat videos all day either. American adults are watching thousands of years of apartment video content. In the past few years, YouTube viewers spent over 7,300 years of watch time on apartment and home tour videos (YouTube Advertising).

We know most U.S adults watch YouTube, and we know that they are watching apartment content, but are they watching ads?

On average, one-third of people who are presented with one of our client’s apartment ads actually views (watches or engages) with the ad. (Google defines a view as someone who watches 30 seconds of your video, someone who watches the duration of the video if it’s shorter than 30 seconds, or someone who interacts with your video.) These views aren’t expensive either. It only costs an apartment advertiser $0.05 per view (on average) to reach apartment seekers in their local area.

So what is holding so many communities back from advertising on YouTube? Many communities don’t know much about the advertising options that exist on YouTube or what to include in the video creation process. In this blog post, we share five best practices communities can use to overcome those hurdles and successfully advertising their community on YouTube.

1. Run 30-second or longer in-stream video ads

Over the last few months, we’ve been testing a variety of video lengths for apartment ads on YouTube. We’ve tested 6-second bumper ads, 15-20 second in-stream ads, and 30 second or longer in-stream, ads. We’ve found that in-stream video ads that are thirty seconds or longer receive better ad engagement rates than their shorter counterparts.

Bumper ads had the lowest click through and post view rates when compared to 15 seconds, 20 seconds, or 30-second ads. These short, six second ads, don’t provide enough time to successfully introduce apartment communities on YouTube. While these short ads aren’t the best for building brand awareness, they can be helpful as a reminder retargeting ad for someone who has already visited a community’s website and are able to recognize the brand from a quick video ad.

2. Highlight the location of the community

Location. Location. Location. This is one of the most important things to an apartment seeker. If you leave out your location or fail to present it prominently at the beginning of your ad, people will skip or ignore your ad. It’s critical that your advertisement is relevant to the viewer. Even if your targeting options only encompass your local area, you still need to make it clear that you are an apartment community located in “X” area at the beginning of the video. It’s even more helpful to the viewer when you describe where your community is in relation to landmarks or well-known neighborhoods.

3. Give prospects a tour of your community

Apartment ads that feature a tour have higher click through and post view rates than apartment ads that only feature lifestyle content. Our previous research found that combining both tour and lifestyle content leads to even better ad performance.

Apartment seekers want to see your community. They want to know what the units look like and they want to see the amenities in action. Make this tour content even more engaging by showing someone using the apartment unit or enjoying the community’s amenities. To learn more about tour vs. lifestyle video best practices, check out this blog post.

4. Use affinity targeting and custom intent targeting

YouTube runs on Google’s ad platform, and Google has been making many of the features that are available in search ads, available within YouTube. One example of this is custom intent audiences. Communities can now target people on YouTube who search for apartments in their local area. We’ve found that non-brand local apartment campaign keywords work really well for keyword targeting on YouTube (think “apartments near me”, “apartments located in (city)”, “apartments near (city)”).

Advertisers can also use affinity audiences (these are similar to Display or Facebook audiences) to target people on YouTube. These audiences allow advertisers to target people who are ready to move, people who have been searching for apartments, and a variety of interest-based options like people who like pets, people who like fitness, foodies, etc.

5. Segment ads by floor plan

If you want to get the most out of custom intent targeting, consider creating video tours of different apartment units. Then present these ads to apartment seekers interested in specific floorplans. Blend affinity audiences and custom intent audiences so that every time someone in the market for an apartment in your local area searches 1 bedroom floorplans, they see an ad for your community’s 1 bedrooms. This strategy is especially helpful for communities who end up with a lot of vacancies for a specific floorplan and need to get the most qualified traffic possible.

The post 5 Best Practices for YouTube Apartment Ads appeared first on Conversion Logix.

Do you know what students type into Google when they search for an apartment? Do you know why some student housing ads get more clicks and impressions than others?

Most multifamily professionals know search marketing is an important component of a student housing marketing campaign, but they don’t know how student housing search marketing campaigns differ from general apartment search marketing campaigns, or what communities can do to stand out from others in the search engine.

By the end of this article, you won’t be like most multifamily housing professionals. You will have a better idea of how students search for apartments and what types of search ads they click on. You will know why some student housing search campaigns perform better than others and how your student housing community can use paid search campaigns to generate more traffic.

What do students look for in an apartment?

The best search marketing campaigns start with a clear understanding of the searcher and what they are looking for in a community. Many communities focus on flashy amenities and community spaces when they market to students. While these are great ways to stand out in the market and capture attention, we’ve found that more often than not, the best way to appeal to students is to focus on addressing their fundamental apartment needs.

A recent study conducted by For Rent University found that students look for practical amenities when they are searching for an off-campus apartment. The most important amenities to students are high-speed wi-fi, in-unit washer and dryers, parking, gyms, and computer/printing stations. Most of the amenities that students care about are centered around convenience.

Students are looking for a community that meets their basic needs at a price they can afford. The one apartment feature that stood out to us from this study was pet-friendly. Pet-friendly apartments have risen in popularity across general apartment communities and we found it interesting that this trend has also spilled into the student housing market.

How students search for apartments

Keywords

We’ve found that a majority of student housing searches are university-specific. It can be difficult for communities to rank organically for these types of terms which is why Google advertising plays an important role in a comprehensive student housing marketing campaign.

Some examples of commonly searched university specific keywords include:

• apartments near [college name]
• [college name] [city]
• [college name] apartments
• student housing near me
• [brand name] [city]
• [college name] student housing

Over the past five years, searches for “student housing near me” have increased in popularity which indicates more location-based mobile searching is occurring. This is why location-based targeting can be a valuable strategy to include in student housing paid search marketing campaigns.

Who is doing the Searching?

It’s no surprise that 18-24-year-olds saw the most student housing ads among our student housing clients’ search campaigns. But what we did find interesting is that more 45-54-year-olds were searching for student housing than 33-44-year-olds or those 55+. This indicates that in 2018 both parents and students were actively searching for student housing. There were also a lot of 25-34-year-olds who searched for these communities which may represent older undergrad students or grad students, another key segment that student housing communities might be overlooking.

Our Strategies

Targeting

Through location targeting, we are able to adjust budgets between campaigns and target searchers in the locations that are most likely to lead to website visits and conversions. Student housing campaigns differ from general apartment search campaigns in that more searchers are living outside of the city or state of the community.

We’ve found that non-brand keyword search campaigns targeting searchers located within the community’s state or within the nation received more ad impressions than non-brand local search campaigns and brand based campaigns.

We also found that ad engagement (measured by click-through rate) was higher for state and national brand campaigns than local campaigns. Out of state students, in-state students that aren’t from the local college town, and their parents are more likely to search for and have a need for student housing options, which is why campaigns targeting these locations generate more visibility and engagement.

Ads

The most important thing to include in the copy of search ads are the keywords you want to rank for. Google uses ad relevance to determine if you’re ad will be presented in the search engine. After incorporating relevant keyword copy, we’ve found that a few topics outperform others within student housing campaigns.

Ad descriptions and headlines that focus on how conveniently located the community is to the university, receive higher click-through rates and are more likely to be related to popular keywords. 50% of students believe that after price, proximity to the school, nightlife, and restaurants is the most important factor they look for when selecting an apartment.

When communities offer fully furnished units, we’ve found that highlighting this feature also leads to more ad engagement. Fully furnished units offer convenience and cost savings, two things that students really care about during the apartment selection process.

Concessions within ad descriptions also lead to more ad engagement. Students are price sensitive and we’ve found that including offers within paid search ad copy is an effective way to catch their interest in the search engine.

Ad Extensions

Ad extensions that appeal to the needs and desires of the student housing market lead to more ad engagement and website traffic. Structured snippet extensions and call out extensions are the extensions we typically use to highlight apartment amenities and features in Google ad campaigns.

Structured snippets and call out extensions give advertisers an additional line of copy under an ad’s description. These are some examples of structured snippet extensions that performed well for our student housing clients.

Notice how this ad extension focuses on some of the popular convenience based amenities we discussed earlier in this blog post. Through ad extensions, your community can convey its unique selling points and signal to students that you offer the features they are looking for. Ad extensions are also a great way to generate calls, share your location, showcase great review ratings, and qualify students with floor plan pricing.

The post Search Marketing Strategies for Student Housing appeared first on Conversion Logix.

The American Pet Products Association’s 2017-2018 National Pet Owners Survey found that 68% of U.S. households own a pet. Last year, RentPath revealed research claiming that 66% of renters are pet owners. In an effort to cater to this growing renter base, many communities have adopted pet-friendly pet policies. Most of these policies allow renters to have up to two pets and they require additional pet rent and a pet deposit. 

While much of the pet market is pet-tolerant, not as many communities encompass the true definition of pet-friendly. If your community embraces this pet demographic, there are many ways you can signal to pet owners that your community is a good fit for them. Here are some pet-friendly apartment marketing ideas your community can use to get the attention of pet owners.

Search Engine Marketing

We know that there is a demand for pet-friendly apartments, but are renters actually searching for apartments this way in Google? Emphatically, the answer is yes. Over the last five years searches for “pet-friendly apartments near me” has grown significantly in popularity. This Google Trends report nicely illustrates this growth.

Our Google Trends research also found that popularity for this search term was the highest among the following regions.

Popularity for pet-friendly apartment searches was the greatest among metros in the Midwest, New England and Los Angeles. If you happen to be marketing a community in one of these areas, this is a rental segment you don’t want to miss out on!  

How can communities capitalize on the rising demand for pet-friendly apartments in their search strategy? Create pet-friendly ad sets. Our paid search experts include a robust set of pet-friendly keywords within a pet-friendly community’s campaign. They also create a set of paid search ads with pet-friendly headlines so that prospects searching for pet-friendly apartments are presented with a relevant ad. Ensuring the ad headline includes pet-friendly also increases the chances that Google will favor the ad in pet-friendly searches, which leads to a higher search ranking.

Ad Extensions are another way to show off your pet-friendly status in search ads.

Our team typically adds “pet-friendly” in callout extensions and lists pet amenities (ex: Pet Spa) in structured snippet extensions (referencing the sample ad above, the callout extensions are under the description copy and the structured snippets are in the line below the callout extensions).

Ad extensions that incorporate pet-friendly features are set to run across all of your ads, so if there are searchers who have pets but are searching for communities using generic search terms, i.e. “apartments near me”, they still have the potential to see your pet-friendly callout and structured snippet extensions. To get a better understanding of how ad extensions work and which ones are right for apartment communities, check out this blog post.

Social Ads

Incorporate your pet amenities in your social campaigns. Carousel ads on Facebook and Instagram are a great way to present pet-friendly services and features alongside your other apartment amenities. You can highlight the amenity or service using a headline and an image. If pet owners make up a significant portion of your target market, you may want to use targeting options in Facebook that present your ad in front of pet owners in the rental market within the geographic radius surrounding your community. These two examples below showcase how two different pet-friendly communities used pet amenity carousel cards within their Facebook and Instagram ads to better appeal to pet owners.

Facebook Carousel Ad:

Instagram Carousel Ad:

Do you film video content to advertise your community? Have the pets in your apartment complex make a cameo appearance. You can use the footage you film as a part of an overall community video tour or break up the pet-friendly clips and use them on your website, organic social media or for short video ads on YouTube, Facebook or Instagram targeting pet owners.

Need an idea of what to film? Try interviewing happy pet owners about why they like living in your community with their pet. Show them in action using your amenities or walking their dog.

Website

Make sure your pet policy and pet-friendly amenities are listed on your community’s website. On many apartment websites, finding the pet policy can be a trying task. If a pet owner came to your community’s site through a pet-friendly search or social ad, they are going to be interested in reading your pet policy. 

Consider creating a landing page on your website that houses the information pet owners care about in one place. Include any pet deposits, pet rent, and pet restrictions in your pet policy. Bring this page to life using pictures of your pet-friendly amenities and testimonials from pet owners. This webpage can also serve as a relevant landing page for any pet owner specific marketing campaigns you might want to run in the future.

Pet-Friendly Amenities

Are you interested in targeting pet owners but don’t feel that your community is currently offering a competitive and compelling pet experience? Consider implementing some of these amenities to make life more convenient for pet owners.

Dog Parks & Dog Runs

One of the things dog owners crave the most is more green space for their fur children. Most dog owners wish they had a yard to let their dogs run around and expel their energy. Dog parks and dog runs give residents a place to play with their dog, meet other pet owners and let their dogs socialize. Is your community cramped on outdoor space? Some communities are using indoor dog areas that are covered and lined with fake grass to replicate the dog park experience while providing pet owners with the added benefit of a weather protected area to walk their dog.

Partner with Pet Service Providers

Partner with dog walking, pet grooming, and pet sitting services to make your residents’ lives more convenient. A NMHC 2018 Consumer Housing Insights Survey found that convenience was one of the most important benefits a community can offer renters (92% of renters stated that convenience was an important factor for them). Communities can go as far as providing these services as built-in amenities, charge an additional monthly fee, or give residents a list of recommended pet walkers, vets and sitters upon move in. In any case, giving pet owners the resources to make their lives easier with needed pet services will help you attract and retain residents.  

Pet Spas

Make it easy for pet owners to wash their pets with a pet washing station. This can be as simple as adding an outdoor pet bath or as involved as creating an entire indoor pet spa space. While this definitely can become a luxury amenity, even just an outdoor wash space can be helpful for pet owners looking to wash their pets off before they enter their unit and prevent pet hair from clogging their bathtub.

Pet Parties

Host resident pet events so that pet owners can get together and bond over their mutual love of their pets. Pet owners love to talk about their pets the same way parents love to talk about their children. By hosting a pet event you create an environment where everyone at the event has something in common and increase the likelihood that residents will make friends, stay engaged with the community, and continue to renew their lease.

Treats at the Front Desk

This is a simple yet effective way to win over pet owners. Keep pet treats at the front desk and use them as an opportunity to surprise and delight residents. If your community isn’t able to invest too heavily in pet amenities but want to add a meaningful touch to the pet renter experience, this is a great small step your community can take to show residents you care.

The post Pet-Friendly Apartment Marketing Ideas appeared first on Conversion Logix.