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.

In a world full of multiple online and offline touchpoints, it’s become increasingly important for communities to understand the journey their prospects engage in before they become a lead.

Where do potential renters go to find trustworthy sources of information about your community? Which marketing touchpoints do they engage with first? Are the channels prospects go through to find your community online and in person working for or against you? Amidst this growth in complexity, marketing channels and platforms are making a greater effort to give companies more transparency and better tools to answer these questions.

One of the channels communities have the most control over in the customer journey is their website. Most communities already have the tools they need to understand how prospects are interacting with it but don’t know how to use them.

In this two-part series, we’ll help you retrace your prospects’ digital footprints so you can find out which pages on your website lead to engagement, and which lead to abandonment. In part one, we’ll show you the pages website visitors are visiting as they navigate through your website. In part two, we’ll explore the website journey that highly interested prospects took before they became a lead.

Are you ready to start your investigation?

Step 1: Log into your Google Analytics account.

Yes. that scary place with all the numbers, charts and arrows. Don’t worry, we’ll make sure you make it out of there alive.

Step 2: Enter the “Behavior Flow” page.

On the left-hand side of your account sits a menu. To navigate to the “Behavior Flow” page you’ll need to first click on the “Behavior” tab.

Once you click on this tab the drop down menu will appear underneath it. Click on the tab labeled, “Behavior Flow”.

Step 3: Select your time range.

In the upper right-hand side of this page, you have the option to select the time frame you want to view the data from. We recommend looking at at least a month’s worth of data to get a better sample. A year’s worth is more ideal.

Navigating Through Your Behavior Flow Results

Now you should have an overview of your website traffic flow. In the first column, you can see the landing pages that your website visitors are entering into your site from. In most cases, your homepage will be the landing page you get the most traffic from (your homepage will be delineated by “ / “ or “/index”).

In the second column, you will see the starting page in your website visitor’s journey, if people leave the website from this page, they will be counted as a drop-off. The drop-offs are visually represented in red. If you hover over the red flows you will see the total number of people who dropped off after visiting a given page.

The grey flows show you where the traffic moved from one page to the next. The size of the flow represents the relative amount of traffic that passed through that customer journey. On most apartment websites the largest flow will be from the homepage (and other variations of it like the index page”) to the floorplans page. In this example, the floor plans page was the second page most website visitors visited after viewing the homepage. After this page, most people went back to the homepage.

Tracking Customer Journeys by Source & Campaign

One of the more interesting features that behavior flows offer is the ability to segment website journeys by marketing source or drill down to the marketing campaign or ad level. If you change the segmenting options within the first left-hand column in white, you can navigate between these filters.

Source

If you want to evaluate the flow of your traffic by the source of your marketing traffic, you can do so by selecting “Source” from the green drop-down menu on the upper left-hand side.

Once you select this view you will see a page that looks like the one below. At this level, you can evaluate whether some traffic sources lead to more drop-offs or whether if a marketing source is bringing in the website visitors who navigate through a series of pages on your site.

Campaign

If your community is running any specific marketing campaigns, such as Paid Search, Display, Social, or Email, you should use the campaign view to segment your traffic flow. All you have to do to navigate here is search or select “campaign” (it lives under the “Advertising” heading) in the same drop down menu you used to segment by source.

To get the most out of segmenting options like these, you can opt to highlight flows of traffic that come from different campaigns. If you select on the white campaign boxes on the left-hand side, an option appears to highlight website traffic from a campaign.

Once you take this step you’ll see a highlighted flow chart like the one below. This will help you isolate the traffic flow and drop off rates specific to a given campaign and compare them to your other marketing efforts.  

To return to the overview level, select the white campaign box and click on “clear highlighting”.

Interpreting Your Behavior Flow Results

High Drop Off Rates

If you’re noticing a high drop off rate on a particular page that could be an indication that your page isn’t effective or that your traffic isn’t as qualified. If you’re experiencing heavy drop-offs on your floorplans page that could be an indication that your pricing, types of units, and availability aren’t in alignment with your website traffic. If you believe traffic quality is the issue, dig deeper and uncover which campaigns have higher drop-off rates. Use this information to improve your targeting efforts. If your traffic is qualified but is still leaving your site at a high rate, it could be due to slow load times, bad website layouts or a lack of relevant information.

In the case of a one-page website, or with pages that contain the majority of the website’s information, a prospect doesn’t have a reason to navigate to another page, so communities will see a high drop off rate there.

Optimize Critical Pages

The most visited pages on your website are the most valuable pages on your website. If your average prospect only visits the homepage, floorplans page, and the gallery page, you know that those pages are critical to selling your community online. If you know which pages are the most important to your marketing efforts, you can prioritize optimizing those particular pages to get the most ROI from your site. In the examples stated above, it would make sense for that community to try incorporating gallery images of specific floorplans within the floorplan page so that prospect can find the information they are looking for right away. Communities should also ensure that call to actions are visible and relevant on critical pages so your community can maximize conversions in the places that are most likely to see the most traffic.

Conclusion

The first step to creating an exceptional customer journey is to understand the current one. We hope you walked away from this article with the skills you need to start tracking a critical component in your community’s online journey. Stay tuned for part 2, where we break down the path that led your most interested website visitors took before they converted into a lead.

The post Uncovering Your Prospects’ Website Journey: Part 1 appeared first on Conversion Logix.