Student Housing Community Preleases 60% With Social Video Strategy

The Situation

A portfolio of five student housing communities located across Texas, Virginia, and Missouri wanted to pre-lease their properties a year in advance of the upcoming Fall semester. Their budgets for each property ranged from $1,649-$3,149 per property and wanted to maximize their investment.

The Solution

We used a combination of TikTok, Instagram Stories, Display Ads and Facebook Ads to generate awareness and encourage pre-leasing. We added Live Chat, automated tour scheduling, and a lead magnet to increase lead and tour conversions. This enabled the portfolio to become 60% pre-leased for Fall 2023 by the end of January 2022, eight months ahead of move-ins.

The Strategy

Understanding the importance of social media and instant responses for this audience, we crafted a strategy that focused on social advertising and converting anonymous website visitors into leads. By leveraging short-form social videos across a range of channels, we rapidly expanded our brand reach. As a result, we witnessed a notable increase in overall site traffic, which we converted into leads and tours through our human-powered Live Chat service and website lead capture tools in The Conversion Cloud®.

Social Video

Our social ad strategy successfully targeted both students and parents. By creating engaging video ads, we reached students on TikTok and Instagram while focusing on Facebook to reach parents. The short-form video ads effectively showcased the unique features and amenities of student housing properties, generating interest and driving conversions. These brand strategies resulted in increased organic search traffic, eliminating the need for an aggressive Paid Search campaign.

Display Advertising

To increase the scale of our social brand awareness efforts, we implemented a Display banner campaign showcasing the communities’ unique features and proximity to campus. We targeted website browsers with an intent to lease a student housing community and reinforced community brand names. This kept these properties top-of-mind for students and their parents in the research phase of the leasing journey.

Live Chat

Our Live Chat service provided instant and personalized assistance to prospective students when they landed on a property’s website. This real-time communication enhanced the user experience and built trust. It streamlined the lead generation process, allowing for efficient capturing of visitor information and facilitating follow-up actions.

Automated Lead Capture

In addition to Live Chat, we implemented Schedule Genie®, our automated tour scheduling application, and Spotlight, our offer promotion application, to capture and convert active leads around the clock outside of the leasing office’s business hours. This gave the onsite teams a strong lead pipeline and helped them gather the information needed to qualify and follow up with leads.