I’m sure this isn’t your first time hearing a marketer wax poetic about the benefits of reaching prospects on social media and “meeting your future residents where they are”. These platforms have forever changed media consumption habits making it a can’t-miss opportunity for marketers. 

As much as we love all social media, the inevitable day comes when the social fabric changes and everyone jumps ship to a new platform to reach their audience.

Today that ship is TikTok, and it’s become a megayacht transporting its users through a sea of personalized video content.

The short-form video-sharing app is most popular among young adults, with 43% of users ages 18-24 and 32% of users ages 25-34 (DataReportal, 2022), making it an incredible platform to reach students and young professionals.

Building up a presence on a new social media platform can feel daunting, and for many organizations, “going viral” isn’t a viable marketing strategy. If this is the case for your organization, the best strategy is to leverage TikTok through advertising. Unlike uploading organic video content to TikTok and hoping to “make it big”, TikTok advertising offers a targeted and scalable approach to reaching college students in the market for an apartment. 

Here are five reasons why we think student housing marketers should consider advertising on TikTok.

1. TikTok ads are immersive.

TikTok offers full-screen mobile video placements that can highlight the features and benefits of highly visual products like apartments. 

Whether you are sharing a video walkthrough of a unit, showcasing student social life, or a splash into the community pool, the vertical video format can bring your units and amenities to life across your prospects’ screens in a way that static images can’t match. 

This lifelike ad format makes TikTok ads more memorable, increasing brand recall. Across client campaigns, we saw lifts in organic and paid search results after running TikTok ad campaigns, indicating the stickiness of video-first branding strategies like TikTok.

2. TikTok has powerful targeting and AI capabilities. 

The platform has evolved in recent years from its initial focus on music and dance videos into an entertainment platform that caters to all types of interests and niche communities.

Today the platform is well known for its intelligent learning algorithm. It excels at determining which video content users are likely to respond to, which is why its “for-you-feed” is such a popular feature of the platform. 

As a TikTok advertiser, you gain access to a wide variety of interest-targeting options that ensure you reach your target market consistently. When creating student apartment ads, we were able to layer TikTok’s targeting strategies to build an audience of prospective renters looking for housing for a specific university, enabling us to reach the right audience for our clients.

3. TikTok users are more engaged.

The TikTok user base engages on the platform more than other social media sites, with 79% of users reading the comments and over half saving sound clips or searching hashtags (Nielsen). 

Even though the content is primarily video, users on the platform aren’t just passively scrolling through content. They are opening and reading comments, sharing content, and utilizing the search function to discover new content. 

4. TikTok prioritizes discovery.

The platform is unique in that it prioritizes discovery, presenting users with a wide variety of creators and content curated to their user behavior. A Nielsen study commissioned by TikTok found that 88% of TikTokers love discovering new content while using the app, and 52% of users say they discover new products through ads on TikTok.

Unlike other social networks, where users follow friends and expect to see most of their content from their followers, users are in a discovery mindset on the platform, making them more open to seeing content from new users and brands.

5. TikTok users are receptive to advertising on the app.

Over 80% of users say ads on TikTok are enjoyable (Kantar). 43% of heavy TikTok users feel that the advertising on the platform blends in well with the content, and 61% of users feel that advertising on TikTok is unique compared to other top social and video platforms (Nielsen).

Interested in bringing your brand to TikTok but don’t know where to begin? Learn more about Conversion Logix’s TikTok advertising service and how our team of social ad experts can get you started. 

The post Five Reasons Student Housing Should Advertise on TikTok appeared first on Conversion Logix.

At Conversion Logix, we understand that a continuous marketing approach brings benefits to everyone. Driving traffic to your site, generating conversions, and analyzing where that traffic comes from lets you make immediate changes to your campaign for a better customer experience. Today, we introduce two new features to deliver successful campaigns.

Continuous Marketing Approach: 

These new solutions enhance the capabilities of our three-step approach to digital marketing, “Capture, Connect, and Convert.” The 3Cs represent the process of driving traffic, generating leads, and nurturing prospects until they convert. 

Analyzing attribution in the last conversion step shows us the customer journey and enables insights that we leverage for performance-enhancing optimizations.

Reach Your Target
Market On TikTok

TikTok rose to social media juggernaut status during the beginning of the pandemic when video consumption and social media usage were on the rise. It’s now a preeminent social network with over one billion monthly users worldwide (TikTok).

With the addition of TikTok advertising, we expand your reach across social media channels, delivering another powerful “capture strategy” for our clients. 

We’ve tested the effectiveness of TikTok advertising among a sample of student housing and multi-family housing clients and found promising results.

Our Findings:

• Expanded reach. TikTok ads delivered high volumes of impressions and quality traffic.
• Increased brand recall. We identified a lift in organic search traffic, paid search, and direct traffic for clients running TikTok advertising, indicating the effectiveness of our ads in building brand awareness.
• Higher ad engagement. TikTok ads received high volumes of clicks, video views, and video completion rates. 
• Lead generation. In our study, TikTok ads drove traffic that completed lead-generating actions in our Conversion Cloud software platform. These actions included: scheduling a tour, claiming an offer, or contacting the community.

Expand Your Marketing Mix With TikTok

Reach out to your Conversion Logix account manager to include TikTok in your campaign strategy.  If you’re new to Conversion Logix, schedule a call today, and we’ll help get you started!

Our New Virtual Assistant, Say Hello To Claire

To enhance the customer experience, engage prospects with immediate information, and reduce stress on your staff, we are introducing a new virtual assistant, Claire. Claire is a complementary addition to The Conversion Cloud and can answer frequently asked questions anytime, day or night. Pairing Claire with Live Chat further enhances the customer experience allowing a live team to answer those tough or detailed questions.  

This will be a game-changer for clients that haven’t yet made the leap to adding live chat services to their site. This chat product will enable our clients to respond to inquiries instantly during times when onsite teams may not be available to answer a call or respond to a web inquiry.

Claire can:

• Prompt engagement. The vast majority of queries are related to pricing and availability. Claire can prompt customers with frequently asked questions, increasing the likelihood of engagement. 
• Deliver instant responses. The automated nature of a virtual assistant provides immediate information to website visitors. This ensures your website visitors have instant access to support 24/7.  Many common questions, including pricing and availability, arise outside of business hours and can be immediately addressed.
• Increase lead conversions. Claire encourages prospects to schedule a tour or claim an offer after their initial chat conversation, increasing lead generation from your site.
• Gain customer insights. Identify the topics most frequently asked by your target market with real-time reporting in The Conversion Cloud.
• Fully integrate with Live Chat. Seamlessly incorporate Live Chat with your virtual assistant experience to deliver personalized responses from highly trained chat professionals.

Bring Claire to Your Website

Reach out to your Conversion Logix account manager to enable Claire as a part of your Conversion Cloud subscription. If you’re new to Conversion Logix, schedule a call today and we’ll help get you started!

The post Conversion Logix® Introduces TikTok Ads and Virtual Assistant appeared first on Conversion Logix.

For many businesses, the Facebook Ads platform is the wild west. The platform is constantly evolving with updates to the algorithm, new features, and changing consumer preferences that can make or break your ad creative. As a preferred Facebook Business Partner, we’ve had a front-row seat to the changes in the platform and how they impact campaigns. In this blog post, we’re sharing our most up-to-date learnings for getting consistent results in the Facebook Ads platform.

Target In-Market Prospects

While it’s common knowledge that Facebook can target users based on their demographics, location, and platform behavior. A lesser-known tactic is to leverage interest data to find people in the market for your product or service. To leverage this data, we target Facebook and Instagram users who have visited pages or websites related to popular brands in a given industry. As an example, when creating ads for our apartment clients, we target Facebook and Instagram users who have searched for apartments on popular listing sites. This ensures communities meet equal housing opportunity advertising requirements for the industry while marketing to an audience that is more likely to convert into a lead or resident.

Allow Facebook to Manage Ad Placements

In the old days of Facebook Advertising, we manually selected placements and segmented campaigns by platform as a common practice. Today, Facebook has become more sophisticated in adapting ads to fit more than one format and they can deliver impressions intelligently across a variety of ad placements. It’s now more common for advertisers to give Facebook control over ad delivery and to use ads that fit across a variety of placements. 

The one exception to this best practice we’ve experienced is with Stories ads. While you can still run this placement with an ad designed to run in the Facebook feed, Facebook will auto-adjust your photo or video to show a blurred background at the top and bottom of the content. Since these placements are presented in a full-screen photo and video format, we recommend using a vertical video or photo designed just for Stories so your ad looks more native to viewers watching Instagram and Facebook Stories.

Avoid Optimizing Campaigns in the Learning Phase

When an ad is first launched in the Facebook Ads platform it can take a few days for Facebook to gather enough data about users’ reactions to optimize delivery. This is known as the “learning phase.” It’s best to avoid making changes while the ad is in this state. If changes are made, Facebook will reset the learning phase and keep your ad in this stage for a longer period of time. The faster you can get out of this stage the better. Once you exit this stage, Facebook will optimize your ad delivery and maximize your budget. 

Your budget and audience are both variables that impact how quickly you exit the learning phase. The larger your audience and daily budget the faster your ad will exit this stage. If you have a very small budget and a highly targeted audience, it will take Facebook longer to reach enough users to exit the learning stage. 

Update Ads Every 30-40 Days

At the same time, you don’t want to avoid updating your Facebook ads altogether. After analyzing thousands of ads we found that ads that ran for less than 15 days or over 50 days don’t perform as well as ads that run for 30-45 days. This showed us that the sweet spot for updating an ad is monthly. If you make updates too quickly you run the risk of disturbing the learning phase and you lose the momentum of Facebook’s data collection and optimizations. If you let an ad rotate for too long it can end up delivering a high volume of impressions to the same audience and become stale.

Conclusion

We hope you found these tips helpful in understanding how the Facebook ad platform works and what you can do to get the most out of the platform. For more tips like these check out How to Create Thumb-Stopping Moments, Facebook Domain Verification for iOS14, and other articles about Facebook advertising on our blog. 

The post Facebook Ad Best Practices appeared first on Conversion Logix.

Instagram Stories was introduced back in 2016 and since then it has taken off to become one of the most used features on Instagram. The Facebook-owned, 15-second format has allowed businesses to create engrossing and powerful advertising for a wide audience. Before jumping straight into brainstorming your quarter-minute masterpiece, let’s go over the 5 things you need to know about creating Stories ads for your apartment community.

1. Best Way to Reach Millennials and Gen Z

Millennials and Gen Zers are a huge segment of apartment renters. Instagram Stories is a great way to reach this demographic. 60% of Millennials and Gen Zers watch and post stories to their account, while 25% actively watch Stories of products and services they want to buy. Still not convinced you’ll be able to reach a younger audience with Instagram Stories? Almost two-thirds of US-based Instagrammers are 19-29 years old, a higher proportion than almost any other social media platform.

2. Higher Reach

At the end of the day, if no one sees your ad, they can’t take action. Over 500 million Instagram users watch Stories on a daily basis, and the relatively new format means you won’t be competing with as many advertisers as you would on traditional Instagram ads.

3. Powerful Targeting

Facebook has one of the most robust audience targeting tools in the industry. Marketers will be happy to know that all those powerful systems can be applied to Instagram Stories as well. You can use interests, locations, and behaviors to create the perfect audience for your ad.

4. Stories Format

Stories take up the full vertical screen on mobile devices. Only your content is viewable to the user. This allows your story viewers to be fully engrossed in your video with no distractions. Stories can take the form of a single vertical photo, a single video, or a sequence of photos or videos in a carousel format.

5. Brand Recall / Video

As with any marketing channel, video content is one of the best-performing ad formats on Instagram Stories. Tap-forward rate, which is when a user skips past your content by tapping it, is 5.65% lower with video than it is with images.  (Source: Socialinsider). Not only will more people view your story, but they will remember it too. According to Insivia, 95% of a video’s message is retained by viewers. If that still isn’t enough to persuade you, video social posts receive almost 50% more views than static images

Conclusion

Story ads are a great way to get your business in front of your audience. In only three years the story format has grown faster than anyone could have predicted. Plus, it is one of the least competitive formats to advertise on. This magic mix of a huge audience and low competition won’t last forever though, so marketers that jump on it now will have a huge head start on the competition. Need some help getting started? Schedule a consultation with our digital marketing experts today!

The post 5 Things Apartment Communities Need to Know About Stories Ads appeared first on Conversion Logix.