Making a housing decision for college can be an exciting and sometimes stressful experience for college students and their families. While each purchasing journey is unique, the process typically involves these recurring buyer personas. 

Student Buyer Personas vs. Parent Buyer Persona

• Solo-Student Buyer: This segment of the student housing audience is made up of independent students who play a central role in the research and decision-making process. These students are often the ones funding their housing experience and are more likely to be proactive.
• Co-Decision Makers: This segment is students who are co-decision-making with their parents. The parents are just as important to convince in the selling process as the student and are likely to search for housing earlier and be more proactive than the student. 
• How They Differ: While students making purchase decisions on their own exhibit similar buying behavior to students who are making a decision with their parents, the way parents shop in the buying process differs a lot more. The generational differences play a role in the way these two audiences shop online as well as what they are looking for from the housing experience. 

In this blog post, we will share our expertise in developing advertising strategies that effectively reach both students and parents in the student housing buying process.

Budget Allocation

We find that parents search earlier in the purchase journey between the months of November and March as opposed to most Gen Z college students, who are more likely to look around the spring and summer months. Knowing this, you can plan your marketing strategy and budget accordingly. 

More often than not, marketers have to work within the budget they have and reallocate instead of increasing spend. If this situation sounds familiar, you can get the most out of your marketing investment by knowing when parents and students are searching and how best to reach them. With these insights, you can change your marketing mix throughout the year to maximize your reach and ensure you are meeting all the buyers while staying on budget.

Understanding Gen Z College Students

When it comes to marketing to the latest generation of college students, here’s what we know about their buying behavior and how it affects the way they shop for housing.

1. Gen Z turns to social media vs. traditional search engines like Google when they are making purchase decisions.
2. Gen Z expects immediate communication from brands and will drop out of the purchase journey if they have to wait.
3. Gen Z is more likely to text than email.

Our Recommended Marketing Strategies for Reaching Students

Short-Form Video

The best way to drive massive brand awareness even through advertising is TikTok, followed by Instagram Stories and YouTube. Once those bases are covered, we encourage clients to expand into connected TV ads leveraging the assets they have from other campaigns.

With Gen Z, short, fast-paced video content on the platforms they spend the most time on is the best way to build awareness.

Social media influences their purchase behavior, and we see this when looking at website data. A lot of organic search activity is driven by students seeing a community name on social, through Display ads, or somewhere else, and then they type the name into Google and click on an organic listing.

SEO

This leads us to another area we think student housing communities should focus on, SEO. Gen Z doesn’t always click on ads to get places, they are more likely to be subliminally influenced and then seek it out later. Making sure your community is visible when they do search for it online is important to get the most out of your brand strategies. Once you drive the demand, you need to be discoverable so you can capture it.

As important as the process above is, driving website traffic isn’t your only job when it comes to building a Gen Z marketing strategy. Delivering real-time information to this audience once they start asking questions is critical.

Live Chat & Automation

We’ve found that Live Chat, SMS opt-ins, gating virtual tours with automation, and providing real-time tour scheduling for in-person tours help our clients convert anonymous website traffic into leads they can follow up with and nurture. 

Proactive Lead Generation

Another critical part of this strategy is building a waitlist. Considering how the student housing industry typically leases, you may have students looking months out for future accommodations. Creating a call to action for this on your site and automating the creation of an interest list is key to pre-leasing way ahead of the next semester.

Understanding Parents of Gen Z College Students

1. Unlike Gen Z, their parents are more likely to see ads on Facebook or Instagram than TikTok. 
2. This audience searches for student housing at a different time of year than Gen Z.
3. When they search, they start with Google, as opposed to a social search engine, and will click on ads in the results to find the information they are looking for.

Our Recommended Marketing Strategy for Reaching Parents

The parents of today’s college students are primarily Gen X and turn to different platforms for information and entertainment online.

Facebook and Instagram

Facebook and Instagram video feed ads are an effective strategy for reaching the parent audience online. With its wide Gen X user base, Facebook serves as a go-to destination for parents. This audience utilizes the platform to connect with other parents, join relevant groups, and access helpful resources for their college-bound child. Instagram, with its visually appealing content, is also popular among Gen X parents, providing a glimpse into the college experience and allowing them to follow university accounts or student organizations from the student and university perspective. 

Google Search 

Google Search plays a crucial role as parents turn to this search engine powerhouse to find specific information about student housing options, nearby amenities, and safety ratings. While local and brand SEO is important to optimize for and can often yield strong results, it can be challenging to appear organically for searchers looking out of state at a university. Paid Search is a valuable addition to a community with a competitive budget to stay ahead of the competition and in front of parents.

Master Student Housing Marketing 

The most important thing to remember about student housing marketing is to not set and forget it. Marketing to this audience is more complex than traditional multifamily housing marketing. There are multiple buyers involved, changing timelines with shorter leases, and differences in where and how these buyers shop. Combine this with a limited budget and high leasing expectations in an increasingly competitive market, and it’s obvious that today’s student housing marketers have to be agile and strategic to succeed. 

Want more? Become a master marketer in the student housing industry with these resources:  

Are you ready to work with student housing marketing experts who can deliver qualified traffic to your community? Let’s talk! Schedule a call to learn about our services and solutions.

The post Seasonal Marketing Strategies for Student Housing to Stay Ahead of the Competition appeared first on Conversion Logix.

College-aged students live on their mobile devices. Most spend their time watching videos and using social networking sites. Student housing communities have a variety of choices when it comes to marketing on social media video sharing platforms. YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat all have a share of this market’s attention.

Each of these platforms has its own purpose and communication style. In this blog post, we show you where your target market is engaging with video content, the opportunities, and limitations that these platforms provide student housing marketers, and strategies for getting the most out of these communication channels.

How Students Use Social Media Platforms

In a previous post, we wrote about Gen Z’s online behavior, “What Student Housing Needs to know about Gen Z”. In this blog post, we shared a Google Think study that found that 51% of teenagers spend 3 or more hours a day on social networking and 71% spent 3 or more hours a day watching videos. In recent years, social media channels have put a greater emphasis on video creation, sharing, and promotion.

YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat remain popular among this generation in part because of this group’s preference for video-based content and engaging messaging platforms. While college students interact with all of these social platforms, the way students use these platforms, how frequently they use them, and how they view branded content on these platforms differs.

YouTube

What are the kids doing these days? Watching YouTube videos. Along with the rest of the U.S. adult population. According to Apple, YouTube rose from the third spot in 2017 to the first spot in 2018 in the app store. YouTube beat out Snapchat and Facebook as the free app with the most downloads of the year. A whopping 96% of 18-24-year-olds watch YouTube videos. YouTube usage is the fastest growing among Gen Z (59%) compared to Snapchat (56%) and Instagram (55%).

While YouTube is a popular channel for students to search for and watch video content, it’s not where Get Z prefers to follow brands (only 5% selected it as the number one platform they prefer to use to follow brands). Other studies show that while YouTube isn’t the number one place Gen Z prefers to follow brands, it is a place that Gen Z is comfortable seeing branded content. 79% said that it is always or ok to see branded content on YouTube from influencers.

So what do Gen Z students use YouTube for?

YouTube is where Gen Z is going to discover informative content and enjoy entertainment.

• 66% watch how-to videos.
• 51% watch YouTube for a good laugh.
• 24% use it for shopping recommendations.
• 23% use it to keep up with the news.

Facebook

A majority of college-aged students have a Facebook account (80%), but they don’t use the platform to consume branded content and connect with brands as much as older millennial siblings and their parents. Only 15% of Gen Z prefer Facebook as their number one platform for following brands. 26% of Gen Z uses Facebook to keep in touch with friends but the experience is more passive than Snapchat or Instagram. One of the primary uses Facebook provides 18-24 years olds is to sign up for and create events. Facebook is also a place where Gen Z goes to watch the news and look for shopping recommendations. Though 16% use Facebook to look for shopping recommendations, a greater percentage use YouTube or Instagram.

Video content on this platform is more likely to appeal to the parents of students looking for housing than the students themselves. A Nielsen study found that Gen X spent on average 6 hrs 58 min per week on Facebook (the highest platform usage among the age groups studied).

Instagram

Popularity for Instagram has surged in recent years. The platform introduced stories, direct messaging, a TV channel, and new discovery and shopping functionality. Today 81% of 18-24-year-olds use Instagram and 55% use the platform several times a day. Gen Z is more comfortable with seeing branded content on Instagram than other social platforms (Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat).

In a recent survey of 2,400 Instagram users, one-third became more interested in a product or brand after seeing it on Instagram Stories. 70% of Gen Z consume stories content on Instagram.

Snapchat

78% of college-age students use Snapchat, 82% use it daily, and 71% use it multiple times a day. People under the age of 25 use Snapchat for 40 minutes on average every day, more than Instagram’s latest stat for the same demographic. Gen Z is more likely to consume stories content on Snapchat (73%) than create it (58%), however, stories creation is more popular in Snapchat than Instagram (39%) or Facebook (13%).

Although students are actively engaging in creating Snapchat content, Snapchat is the platform that students are the least comfortable following brands on. Gen Z primarily uses Snapchat to interact with their friends (Gen Z prefers to use Snapchat over Facebook and Instagram for this purpose) and therefore are less likely to welcome content from people outside of their network.

The Opportunities and Limitations of Organic vs. Paid Social Video Campaigns

YouTube

YouTube’s advertising opportunities are expanding. YouTube released “ad pods” last year (two ads per break at the beginning and/or middle of a video) on browsers and are rolling out these back to back ads on mobile this year. Recent research has shown that video ad watchers on YouTube mobile watch over 60% of ads. YouTube ads are unique in that they are more likely to be seen and heard. 95% of YouTube ads are audible vs.15% of Facebook videos. Google claims that audible videos receive more brand awareness, ad recall, and consideration, another reason why this ad platform may be one of the best opportunities to reach college students in 2019.

YouTube isn’t the place that most students are looking to follow brands and many communities may find it difficult to maintain the level of video production needed to create an active and consistent YouTube channel. For this reason, student housing communities have more to gain from pre-roll video ads than organic marketing strategies on YouTube.

Facebook

Organic reach is declining on Facebook as the platform makes room for more advertisers in the feed. Organic content is more likely to be shared in the feed of students and parents if it receives lots of views, likes, shares, and comments in a short period of time. This is becoming harder and harder to achieve as fewer and fewer people see the content in the first place. Video content, however, stands a greater chance of receiving visibility in the news feed than static photo content.

Facebook pages are still a good opportunity for communities to share event details, show off reviews and post about their community, but most of the action that these pages receive will likely be driven by active searching, rather than news feed discovery.

Communities can extend their visibility in the newsfeed using ads. Ad campaigns offer more robust targeting and optimization strategies than sponsored posts, increasing the chances that communities get the kind of interactions they are looking for from their social content on Facebook.

Instagram

Instagram still provides communities with opportunities to expand their reach organically through feed and stories content, but just like Facebook, organic reach is declining. Since Facebook owns the platform, Instagram ads have the same targeting and format options that Facebook ads offer. Your community can target students at a specific university interested in apartments and certain hobbies, activities, people, and brands. Video ads can be presented in the newsfeed and in the stories feed.

In Instagram stories you can show three different ad formats: 15-second video, single image, or carousel (three back to back 15-second videos). In our experience running Instagram stories ads for apartment communities, click-through rates tend to be lower than ad campaigns that run in the newsfeed but the traffic tends to be engaged (the prospects complete online conversions or stay on the site for a while). With most video ad campaigns, it isn’t uncommon to see a smaller, yet more engaged group of website visitors.

Snapchat

Communities looking to use this platform have three main options to reach students. They can post to their stories, create Geofilters or run ad campaigns.

Communities looking to attract followers and post to stories organically will see high viewership rates among followers but struggle to gain followers in the first place. Hootsuite claims that for every 1,000 followers, 900 will watch your story, but Gen Z isn’t as likely to follow brands on Snapchat as they are in Instagram or Facebook.

Brands can pay for Geofilters to try to build brand awareness among students. Geofilters are graphic overlays that Snapchatters can place over the images and videos they sent to friends. Communities can target specific radiuses (around a stadium during a game or around a college campus) for a limited period of time. These filters tend to be expensive to run in popular locations for a prolonged period of time and require a skilled graphic designer to create.

For those communities that don’t have a large Snapchat following and who don’t want to pay a premium for filters will have better luck getting traffic from ads. Ads in Snapchat can be no longer than ten seconds (a few seconds less than Instagram stories). Ads can run in between friend’s stories, creator’s stories, and publisher’s content. Communities can target affinity audiences and send students directly to the community’s website. While these campaigns receive higher bounce rates (they tend to get more accidental clicks) they also tend to get more overall traffic than Instagram stories and they have been known to generate online conversions.

Social Video Marketing Strategies

Whether you’re running a video ad campaign on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, or Snapchat, there are a few fundamental things student housing communities should incorporate in their ad campaigns.

Be Relevant

Ads are skippable, swipeable, and scrollable. Communities only have a matter of seconds to capture a student’s limited attention when they run a video ad. What’s the key to getting prospects to pay attention? Relevancy.

If you were about to watch a video on YouTube and you saw an ad about an apartment community with no clear idea of where the community is located, would you watch it?

It’s imperative that at the start of your student housing video that you make sure students know that you are an apartment community located near their university. Unless you make this crystal clear within seconds, they will likely skip your ad.

Beyond the basics of communicating who you are and where you’re located, what else helps communities establish relevance with their audience?

Pricing, floor plans, and amenities.

Price is the most important factor for students when looking for a community. While many communities may not want to lead with price in their videos, it can be used as a way to qualify your audience and elicit more from those that can afford your community. Since many communities use dynamic pricing, incorporating ad messaging later in the video that says, ”Pricing ranging from $1200’s-$1800’s” or “Prices starting at $1300” can help your community establish relevance without using exact pricing.

Our team conducted a YouTube ad performance study and found that videos that incorporated both tour and lifestyle content led to more ad engagement than videos that only incorporated tour or lifestyle content alone.

Use your video content to highlight the amenities that students care about. If your units are fully furnished, pet-friendly, and have updated features, showcase these in your video. Make sure to show what the units look like and mention which floorplans you offer to maintain relevancy and qualify prospects.

Be Authentic

Gen Z, more than any other generation, is sensitive to inauthentic online content. Most choose to follow influencers and consume stories content because they perceive this content to be more trustworthy and genuine. The newsfeed in Instagram and Facebook is still considered to be a place for polished, less realistic content. Stories content in Instagram and Snapchat tends to be more user-generated, unpolished, and playful.

What can your community do to create a more authentic video ad?

Show your community in a realistic light. Video content can be both high quality and authentic at the same time. Give a short video tour of your community and showcase real people using your amenities. Consider incorporating real resident testimonials. 86% of Gen Z reads reviews before making a first-time purchase using their own money, and about two-thirds need to read at least 3 reviews. Film resident reviews of your community that feel honest and informative. Consider weaving this content together as the voiceover in a video ad. If you incorporate this content in a Facebook or Instagram ad, consider captioning the content. While most users watch YouTube and Snapchat videos with the sound on, most don’t in Facebook’s platforms.

Guide the Prospect to the Next Step

End your videos with a clear call to action. We know that leasing agent’s number one goal is to sign leases, but there are steps that prospects take before they get to that stage of the funnel. For some communities, running a campaign with a See Floorplans, Learn More, Tour Today, or Attend Our Event call to action can lead to better results. If you are serving a retargeting ad to someone who has already visited your site, a stronger “Tour Now” or “Lease Now” call to action may make more sense.

Even though this message is known as a “Call to Action” we don’t recommend your community use a “Call Now” message at the end of a student housing campaign. Most students prefer to engage with your community online over making a phone call. Students are more likely to use tour scheduling tools and live chat services to answer questions and set up appointments instead of placing a phone call.

Conclusion

College students use popular social media platforms differently. Communities need to understand the way students use these platforms and where and in what format students want to see content from apartment communities. The days of spray and pray with social media are over. Communities looking to effectively use social platforms to reach college students need to consider investing in advertising. Apartments looking to get the most out of their ad dollars should create videos that are relevant, authentic and that lead prospects to the next stage in the customer journey.

The post Social Video Marketing Strategies for Student Housing 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.

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