First impressions last — and in the dynamic world of multifamily housing, a creative apartment advertising strategy is what ensures you make a great first impression. A fresh and imaginative approach is what puts your property in front of your target audience as they scroll through their feed.

In this blog post, we explore five creative advertising ideas that will spark curiosity for your property and leave a lasting impact on prospective residents.

Tap Into TikTok Ads

TikTok videos are short, authentic, and informative, making them a powerful marketing asset to introduce a lease-up or expand the reach of an existing brand. Post-pandemic, TikTok has become one of the most popular social media platforms. At the beginning of 2023, eMarketer reported that users aged 25 to 54 spent more time on TikTok than any other social media platform. While creating organic content is great for building your brand on the platform, paid ads offer a more reliable way to reach in-market renters.

Here are two quick tips to take your TikTok ads to the next level:

• Experiment with different video approaches. With TikTok expanding its video lengths from 15 seconds to 10 minutes, video marketers now have more freedom in showcasing their properties. While featuring the property itself has proven to be effective, try featuring faces and sharing helpful tips. Study metrics like video watch time, ad click-through rates, and website conversion rates to determine which video creative resonates the most and double down on top-performing strategies.
• Maximize available ad targeting dimensions. Every penny spent on advertising should reach your target audience. Thankfully, the TikTok ad platform gives you plenty of ad-targeting dimensions to help you achieve this. Behavior targeting, interest targeting, and hashtag targeting capture audiences interested in multifamily housing in your local area. As with other social media platforms, you can also harness the power of custom audiences to build segments off your website traffic and engagement.

Target with Keywords in YouTube Ads Campaigns

Promoting video ads on YouTube enables you to reach a high-intent audience through keyword targeting. In addition to targeting strategies like data segments and demographics, YouTube offers advertisers the ability to build audiences based on users’ Google search activity. By using words or phrases for targeting, you can show your ad to people proven to be already interested in apartments in your local area.

Here are some best practices for YouTube advertising:

• Leverage learnings from Google Ads. Assess what keywords and ad campaigns are the most successful in Google Ads and leverage these same targeting strategies when creating YouTube Ads. Are neighborhood keywords driving the most high-quality traffic? Incorporate them in your YouTube ads targeting strategy to reach renters across a variety of channels and mediums.
• Leverage brand names as keywords. Using your company or property name can be effective as well, especially when there’s prior interest already. This may also be useful for those large brand awareness campaigns where you’re directing your audience to specific pages on your site. Lastly, if your company or property name is a common term, doing brand keyword targeting coupled with your industry keywords helps you reach your specific audience.

Get Ahead of the Competition and Advertise on Connected TV

Traditional TV viewership might be on the decline, but Connected TV media time is on the rise. Overlooked by many in the multifamily marketing industry, Connected TV advertising can be a great opportunity to reach your audience on a less competitive playing field. With an expected daily 2 hours spent with CTV this 2024, you’ll be ahead of the competition if you start advertising on this channel in the coming years.

Here are a few more reasons why you should add CTV to your marketing strategy:

• Advertising on a bigger screen allows for more room for creativity. Advertising on CTV lets you explore formats that may not be possible on smaller screens or static ad platforms. This also means you’re able to highlight your property’s features and floorplans without being restricted to smaller video dimensions.
• It prepares you for a cookie-less future. Cookies are going away but hard data such as IP address and device IDs are not. With CTV, you won’t be as reliant on cookies, but you still have data to ensure you’re still spending ad money on the correct audience.
• Reach a more detailed target audience who are more likely to finish watching your video ads. One of the metrics most video marketers are worried about is the completion rate. Sometimes, even the most creative videos only get viewed for a few seconds. CTV ads are non-skippable, so completion rates tend to be higher than other video platforms. The bigger screen also results in 62% ad recall, which is around 15% higher than ads seen on smartphones or computers.

Promote “Tour Your Way” Options in Ads

People love having options, especially when shopping for a big purchase. This is especially true when it comes to touring your community. 

Incorporating an option to “Tour Your Way” in ads puts your property top-of-mind for renters who want to tour your property but live out-of-state or are too busy to tour during business hours.

Here are two creative ways to promote flexible tour options in your ads:

• Use guided tours as video ad creative. There’s no better way to showcase what your property can offer than with a guided tour video ad. If your community has a pre-recorded tour that they have sent to prospective renters, this could be a good resource to source video clips that can be used in ads. This kind of ad can be used as a teaser to get a prospect to watch a full pre-recorded guided tour video or schedule an in-person tour. Include features unique to your property and features that have proven to have the highest conversion rates for your current residents for the best results.
• Create floorplan-specific video ads. Unless you are marketing a lease-up, you likely have specific floorplans that you are trying to fill vacancies for at any given time. One way to ensure you reach the prospects you need is to create floorplan-specific video ads and target renters searching for these floorplans with keyword targeting on YouTube or Display Retargeting campaigns that leverage website data to target prospects who’ve visited floorplan pages on your site.

Make Your Ads Interactive

With the Internet exposing your potential residents to a multitude of distractions, from competitor listings to other interesting stuff online, it’s important that you capture their attention by preparing ads that give them a reason to engage. One great way to do that is through interactive ads.

With HTML5 display ads, you’re now able to create interactive ads that deliver a unique experience to your target audience, giving them more incentive to stay on an ad and engage with your brand.

Adding to the previous suggestion of creating floorplan-specific ads, interactive ads can also be utilized to deliver a clickable ad that lets them explore your floorplan or other unique features. You can also create animated display ads that showcase your property “in action.” The possibilities are endless!

Check out how interactive ads can work for your property with our Premium Ad Design service.

Develop A More Imaginative Approach to Your Advertising Strategy

In the fast-paced world of real estate, where first impressions linger, and competition is fierce, a creative apartment advertising strategy lets you stand out from the sea of generic ads on multiple platforms. Your creative idea is what turns a potential resident’s casual scroll into an engagement and, hopefully, a new lead.

We’ve explored five creative apartment advertising ideas designed to leave a lasting impact on your potential renters. Partnered with other tried-and-true digital marketing strategies, these ideas can help ensure you have a winning strategy for the new year.

Read these blogs next for more multifamily marketing inspiration.

The post Creative Apartment Advertising Ideas appeared first on Conversion Logix.

YouTube has over 1 billion monthly viewers (Google) and is used by over 70% of U.S. adults (Pew Research Center). It’s no secret that YouTube is an incredibly popular marketing channel. So why aren’t more marketers incorporating YouTube into their marketing strategy?

The Problem

There is a long-standing belief that in order to succeed in video marketing you have to have expensive equipment and a team of videographers, actors, and editors. When faced with expensive video production costs and time constraints marketers become too intimidated to add YouTube to their strategy. According to a recent study by Social Media Examiner, only 14% of marketers are advertising on YouTube. Paralyzed by the expectation that a YouTube ad has to be as highly produced as a TV commercial, over 80% miss out on YouTube advertising.

Asking the Right Questions

What if this long-held assumption wasn’t actually true? What if you could produce a video ad without high production assets? Would it perform as well? We analyzed a sample of apartment YouTube ads to find the answer to the question, “Does video production quality have an impact on YouTube ad performance?”. We looked at two types of video ads, highly produced videos, and professionally edited slideshow videos comprised of images, music, copy, and call to actions. Here’s what we found.

High Production Videos Don’t Perform Better Than Professional Slideshow Videos

Communities that spent thousands of dollars on highly produced video footage did not have markedly better ad performance than communities that spent less than $300 in editing fees on professional-looking slideshow video content.

Slideshow Video Results vs. High Production Video Results

View Rate

View rate is the percentage of people who are presented with your ad and watch your entire ad, watch more than 30 seconds of your ad, or engage with your ad. The view rate for slideshow video ads was only 22% lower than the view rate for highly produced videos. If you stopped here and only looked at view rate you might think highly produced videos performed slightly better than slideshow videos. It’s a good thing we didn’t stop here. When we dove deeper and studied the rate of clicks and leads these ads generated we saw a different story.

Click-Through Rate

CTR measures the percentage of people that saw your YouTube ad and clicked on the ad to visit your website. Click through rates on slideshow videos were 3% higher on average than highly produced videos.

Cost Per Click

CPC measures the cost for every click on a YouTube ad. Slideshow video ads had a 17% cheaper CPC than the highly produced videos in our sample.

Goal Completion Rate 

Goal rates measure the percentage of website visitors that came from your YouTube ad and then took a lead generating action on your website (scheduled a tour, clicked to call, claimed an offer, filled out a form, etc.). The rate of goal completions coming from slideshow video ads was 2% higher than highly produced video ads.

What does this mean for Communities?

You can run a successful YouTube ad campaign without spending thousands on video production.

The factors that determine YouTube ad performance have more to do with targeting decisions and platform management than they do with the production level of your video content.

While the view rate for slideshow videos was 22% lower, the areas of ad performance that matter most (ad clicks and leads) revealed better performance for slideshow videos at a lower cost per click. If a community has less than $300 to spend in editing fees they can promote a professional-looking slideshow video and see even better costs per click and goal completion rates.

Does your community have high-quality image assets and a website? You have the key ingredients to get started with YouTube advertising.

Finally ready to give YouTube advertising a try? Speak with an experienced multifamily marketing professional today.

The post High Production Video Ads vs. Slideshow Video Ads 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.

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