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.

Every generation brings a new challenge to marketers and Generation Z is no different. How do you reach them both as a group and as individuals? With Gen Z reaching college-age, student housing communities will need to start approaching their marketing a bit differently to make sure they aren’t left with vacant units. Check out these 6 tips to increase your student housing website lead conversions.

Show Don’t Tell

The old saying “sell an experience, not a product” is especially true when selling to Gen Zers. They have been bombarded with online advertisements their entire lives, so a photo of your community with a “Tour Now” tagline just won’t cut it. You want to make sure your website conveys an experience that they can’t get at any other community. Show happy students using your amenities and smiling as they leave the building on their way to school. Have consistent messaging and imagery on all your campaigns to help push your experience. Remember, showing prospects what makes your community special converts more leads than simply telling them.

Video Content

Video consumption is at an all-time high, with over 50% of consumers watching a video about a product before making a purchase. Younger generations watch even larger amounts of video, with 89% using YouTube on a weekly basis. Suffice to say, if you want to get your student housing community in front of Gen Z, video content is going to have to be incorporated in your marketing campaign. Not sure where to start? We’ve got you covered with this video guide for apartment communities and this social media video guide.

Respond to Reviews and Social Media

41% read at least 5 reviews before making a purchase. That number is higher when the product is an apartment. Try having your google and yelp reviews feed directly to your website. Not only will this make you more transparent, but it will keep visitors on your page longer.

If they leave a review or comment on your social media networks, then it is even more important to respond. These are people who are invested in your community and are willing to share their experience. Thank those that leave a positive review, and help those that leave negative ones. Bad customer service is the number one reason tenants leave apartments. Showing you are determined to fix a student’s problem will make them more willing to stay at your community their entire college career. 

24/7 Availability

Your leasing office may not be active all night, but students sure are. Having the ability to schedule tours and ask questions from your website at all hours of the day is vital to converting students to sign leases. Automatic tour schedulers and chat options will allow your community to still be active even after your leasing office has gone home for the night.

Unique Offer

82.3% of students want an email with a special promotion or discount. How they redeem this offer is just as important as the offer itself. Gen Zers grew up in the age of instant gratification. That means having them jump through several hoops to sign up for a promotion won’t work. Use tools such as Concession Manager to make sure your promotion is displayed prominently on your site and easily accessible regardless of the page the visitor is on.

Mobile Friendly

Gen Z spends more time on their phones than any other generation. Make sure your website is optimized for all those mobile visitors to avoid low conversion rates. Take the time to test and make sure the site is functional on various devices, including android, ios, and tablets. Have someone unfamiliar with the site go through and see if they can find information quickly and easily before setting it live. This will ensure a quality user experience and reduce site bounces.

Conclusion:

The good news is that Gen Z isn’t too different from the previous generation. Implementing the changes mentioned above will help prevent your student housing community from getting stuck in the past and losing potential residents. If you want to learn more about how to get students to your site, check out this article about Search Marketing Strategies for Student Housing.

The post How to Increase Student Housing Leases Through Your Website appeared first on Conversion Logix.

Getting prospects to visit your website is only half the battle. 97% of website visitors leave webpages without ever converting. That is a lot of missed opportunities for senior living communities trying to fill their units. Here are some helpful tips to make sure you are maximizing webpage conversions and getting the most out of your online presence.

Helpful Content

When someone visits an assisted living website, they are coming for information. Your website must be able to accommodate them. Having plenty of helpful and relevant content on your site will build trust between you and website visitors, leading to more conversions. Examples of content you can create include blogs, e-books, and newsfeeds.

Mobile Friendly

With 70% of internet traffic coming from mobile phones, having a website optimized for mobile users is a must for staying competitive.  80% of smartphone users are more likely to purchase from companies with mobile sites or apps that help them easily answer their questions. Those questions can be answered with all the helpful content that you now have on your site.

Reviews

Do you remember the last time you made a significant purchase without reading the reviews for the product/service? Reviews are the best way to build trust between a brand and a website visitor. Having customer reviews on your site creates transparency, and makes visitors feel at ease knowing others have had positive experiences. You may be worried about negative reviews but these actually add to your brand’s image as long as the positives outweigh them.

Easy to Navigate

When someone visits a website, they do not want a steep learning curve. Have someone that isn’t familiar with your site go through it to try and find various resources. The same goes for the mobile version of your site. 57% of mobile users won’t recommend a brand with a poorly designed site. One way to improve the design of your website is to use software such as Schedule Genie to make it simple for your prospects to schedule tours and contact you.

Help Options

Speaking of a prospect’s ability to contact you, make it easy for visitors to get the help they need. This is key for boosting the quality of your customer! Having a chat service on your site where visitors can quickly ask a representative questions will make them feel important and more likely to convert. Using a live chat service is generally preferable as older generations prefer speaking to actual humans over a bot.

Unique Offer

The Senior Living market is crowded so making sure your site sticks out is a must. A great way to accomplish this is by offering a deal or discount on your website. Generally, when a prospect visits a Senior Living community’s website they are not ready to commit for several weeks, if not months. A compelling offer can help you capture a lead’s contact information so you can remarket them in the future. You can use a tool like Concession Manager to promote your offer on multiple pages of your website and help you capture your website visitors’ lead information.

Video Content

Including video content on your site is a must. Video is more effective at converting leads than any other form of content. Very few assisted living communities have implemented video in their marketing. This is a huge opportunity for those that do it sooner rather than later.

Conclusion

Nothing is worse than losing a potential future resident due to a poorly created webpage. Luckily, if you implement some or all these tips, you’ll see your conversion rates jump in no time.

The post 7 Easy Ways to Increase Senior Living Website Conversions appeared first on Conversion Logix.

In the first part of this two-part series, we showed you how to track the path that website visitors take when they visit your site in Google Analytics. In part two, we will show you how to track the path prospects take before taking lead generating actions on your website. We will explore the “Conversions” section in Google Analytics, cover the most relevant reports for understanding your lead flow, and help you interpret your results.

Goals in Google Analytics

The best place to start analyzing your lead data is the “Goals” section under “Conversions” in Google Analytics. This is where you will find the number of leads generated from your site, where they converted, and what marketing channels brought in the leads. The first report you want to open in this section is the “Overview” report.

In this report, you will find the total number of Goal Completions that occurred in a given time period, an overall Goal conversion rate and a breakdown of Goal completions by Goal type. Most communities set up Goals for actions like phone calls, contact form submissions and apply now button clicks. In the example below we track additional Goal Completions from actions taken on our two Conversion Cloud products, Schedule Genie and Concession Manager.

To isolate a given Goal type as you analyze these reports, select your Goal Option in the upper left hand side.

To get the most out of your analysis, you’ll want to select the Goal types that are the most linked with lead generating actions. While at first glance it may appear that Apply Now and Application Complete are the closest actions to a lease, but these two Goals aren’t often good indicators of leads or leases on apartment websites. Apply now is often an overinflated metric and Application Complete is often underinflated. Many applications are filled out onsite and apply now clicks represent people looking for information about the application process that aren’t really interested in submitting an application. If you have a tour scheduler on your website, looking at leads who booked tours will likely be the best conversion for you to perform an analysis on. In the example above, we selected the Create Lead Goal from Schedule Genie, which is a step in the tour scheduling process where the prospect submits their contact information for their tour.

Below the breakdown of Goals Completions by type is a list view with the top marketing sources and mediums that Google attributes to your Goal Completions. If you limit your view of the Overview page to a single Goal type, the data in this part of the report will be limited to the source data relevant for that Goal type.

By default, Google uses the Last Non-Direct Click attribution model when measuring and reporting on Goal Completions. This means that the last marketing channel that a lead comes in from (not including direct sources) will get all the credit for a conversion in this report.

Direct traffic sources appear when Google can’t attribute the true traffic source or if the only source present is a direct entrance to the website.

If you want to explore other attribution models outside of the default Last Non-Direct Click model, go to the “Model Comparison Tool” under “Attribution” in the “Conversions” section. There you can compare how many conversions are attributed to a given source if you use a different attribution mode. Some examples of these include the First Interaction Model, Position-Based Model or Time Decay, among others. To learn more about what these different attribution models do check out this resource from Google.

You can toggle between Source/Medium and Goal Completion Location within the list view. If you select Goal Completion Location, Google will show you the pages where the goal completions took place.

For a more in-depth report, visit the Goal URLs page.

To get an idea of the pages that leads came in from before converting on a given webpage, check out the Reverse Goal Path report.

How long does the typical prospect take to become a lead?

Within the Conversions section in Analytics, under “Multi-Channel Funnels” is a report called “Time Lag” where you can find out how many days took place between the first interaction users had on your website and the day they made a conversion.

In this example we looked at the time it took for leads that scheduled a tour in the month of May to convert. Most conversions occurred within the day of the first visit, but three leads came back to the site 2-4 weeks later to schedule a tour, and one tour was scheduled two to three months after the lead first visited the website. This just goes to show how varied the apartment search process between individuals can be and why communities should evaluate their marketing performance using longer attribution windows.

Within this report, and others in the Conversions section in Analytics, Google lets you select a lookback window. This is the period of time that Google tracks user activity before a conversion.

By default, Google selects 30 days. While many online conversions occur within a day or two of a website visit, there are still prospects who spend months in the searching phase and come back to a community website over a longer span of time before they convert, which is why you’ll want to select a 90 day look back window (the longest period Google lets you select).

You can drill down on the Time Lag report by paid, organic, and direct traffic sources to compare the length of time it takes for paid and organic traffic to convert. You might want to select a longer attribution window when making these comparisons in order to get enough data.

To make time lag comparisons between marketing sources, click on “Conversion Segments” in the upper left hand corner of the report and select between the comparison options available.

How many website visits does a typical website visitor make before they convert?

You can find this in the “Path Length” report under “Multi-Channel Funnels”. This report shows you how many times a prospect came to your website before becoming a lead. Most conversions take place within a single website session but come back and forth to the site before making the decision to connect with the community.

How many marketing channels contribute to a conversion?

To get a better idea of how different marketing channels work together to convert a website visitor into a lead you can look at the “Top Conversion Paths” report.

This report shows you how many leads convert through paths that involved multiple marketing sources and in which order they engaged with your marketing campaigns before becoming a lead. Within indirect paths, it isn’t uncommon to see a combination of paid and organic journeys where website visitors come in to a website initially from an ad and then later through an organic or direct search.

It’s important to note that if a prospect sees an ad, email or social media post and doesn’t click into your website, then comes back later through another marketing channel, the original marketing efforts won’t be tracked by Google Analytics. When these prospects come back to your website later through another source, that source will be given the credit for the conversion. This traffic is often lumped in with organic and direct sources.

Since Google often attributes unknown traffic sources as direct traffic you might want to filter this source out when you analyze this report. You can do this by selecting the “advanced” and setting up a filter.

Select “Exclude” and then type in “Direct” and click “Apply” to filter out this traffic.

This will help you narrow in on more interesting conversion paths and give you better intelligence to make optimization insights with.

How to Apply This Data

So far we’ve learned where to go to see the number of conversion that took place on your site, the types of conversions that occurred, the pages they occured on, what marketing channels contributed to the conversion process and how many days it took a prospect to take a converting action.

Here’s how these new tools can help you assess and improve your marketing efforts.

By comparing the types of Goals that get the most engagement you can gain insight into where your leads are in the leasing process and how many leads you have coming down the pipeline. If they call you or fill out a contact form, they are likely interested in seeking out more information about your community. If they schedule a tour or redeem an offer on your website, they are showing a greater interest in coming in person or moving further down the leasing funnel.

Your marketing source data and your top conversion paths give you an idea of the types of marketing efforts that are effective at moving leads through the funnel. The marketing channels that played the greatest role in generating traffic that converts are the ones you want to optimize for or make greater investments in when you need to generate more leads. When you make modifications to your campaigns, you can track the success of your changes by how many conversions these marketing channels helped generate. By looking at a holistic view of your conversion paths you give more credit to marketing channels that often get left out of the attribution picture.

The post Uncovering Your Prospects’ Website Journey: Part 2 Lead Flow appeared first on Conversion Logix.