The lease-up clock is ticking to reach stabilization—fast. Yet factors such as supply and demand, competitor pricing, and a property’s location can disrupt reaching this mission-critical milestone.

One element that investors and operators can control is marketing. A strategic marketing plan executed by an agile team can increase the speed units are leased, enabling investors and operators to reach their leasing goals on schedule. 

We analyzed over nine months of occupancy and campaign data across a sample of apartments in the lease-up stage to determine which campaign decisions were the most effective at speeding up the leasing velocity. Read on to discover our findings.

The Research

To better understand the marketing approaches that impact lease-up timelines, we executed two studies based on client data to identify marketing campaign factors that impact leasing velocity.

In study one, we analyzed occupancy and campaign performance across eight lease-ups located across Washington, Oregon, and Arizona from March 2023 to December 2023. We studied the time it took for these communities to reach 80% occupancy and the marketing mixes that contributed to fast turnaround times.

In study two, we looked at ten lease-ups from the same period located across Washington, Oregon, Arizona, and Maryland to assess the impact of syncing property-level CRM data with ad operations to enable proactive ad updates. These updates included price-related ad updates, and the addition of floorplan focuses in Google Ads. 

The Result

In the initial study of eight lease-up properties, the average starting occupancy rate was 17% in March 2023. By December 23, 2023, six of the eight lease-ups had reached 80% occupancy, taking an average of 192 days. Of these six, four reached between 93-98% occupancy. 

Top performing campaigns within this research sample had the following marketing mix in 90% of the months analyzed in the study: Paid Search, Display Retargeting, Paid Social, and The Conversion Cloud®. 

Furthermore, top performers with this marketing mix experienced better conversion rates and lower acquisition costs from the traffic these campaigns generated.

• 2.5x higher website traffic conversion rates
• 78% lower costs per website conversion
• 23% lower marketing acquisition costs per unit 

In the second study, we assessed the impact that campaign optimization had on reducing the time it took to fill vacancies. We theorized that the more proactively a campaign was managed and the more targeted the advertising was towards filling vacant floorplans, the faster a property would achieve stabilization. 

During the study period, we compared campaigns where one of the following optimization events occurred: 

• pricing extensions were added
• floorplan focuses were implemented
• neither price extensions nor floorplan focuses were added (this was our control group)

Our findings revealed that floorplan focuses have a multiplier effect on leasing. Clients in the study that included these in campaigns saw increases in leasing activity, faster rolling unit velocity (calculated as total units occupied at the end of each month divided by the total available units at the end of each month), and higher returns on their ad investments.

The Takeaways

Multichannel Marketing Moves Prospects Through the Customer Journey Faster 

The best-performing campaigns to reach stabilization applied a multichannel approach to marketing that connects with prospects throughout their customer journey. These campaigns include a mix of the following to drive awareness and leads:

• top-of-the-funnel strategies (Paid Social)
• mid-funnel strategies (Paid Search and Display Retargeting)
• lower-funnel lead generation strategies (The Conversion Cloud®) 

This holistic strategy ensures consistent engagement across different touchpoints, efficiently guiding prospects from awareness to conversion.

Integrated Efforts Yield Better Results

Syncing property-level CRM data with your ad operations gives advertisers a line of sight into critical property-level changes to make strategic campaign optimizations faster. This integrated approach ensures that marketing efforts align with the leasing goals, adapt to market dynamics in real time, and deliver qualified leads.

Maximize Your Ad Investment With Strategic Targeting 

While high-level brand awareness is key to filling the top of your marketing funnel, a more targeted approach to keyword targeting and ad copy will help fill your remaining units as you reach stabilization. 

Optimization strategies such as floorplan focuses can direct your ad dollars toward the prospects most likely to lease your remaining units, filling your pipeline with the most relevant rental candidates while providing you with a higher return on your ad investment.

Fill Vacancies Faster with Conversion Logix

Ready to supercharge your leasing velocity and optimize your ad investment? Create your next campaign with Conversion Logix. Schedule a call with a Conversion Logix team member to discover how we can help you fast-track your leasing goals.

The post How to Speed Up Leasing Velocity appeared first on Conversion Logix.

As Conversion Logix set on a new course toward revolutionizing predictive leasing in the multifamily housing industry with its acquisition of Bend.ai, we sat down with our new Chief Analytics Officer and Bend.ai co-founder, Martin Stein, to discuss the state of predictive analytics in the industry and how new technology and data science methods will transform the industry for the better.

Tell us about your analytics background and the story behind Bend.ai.

I’ve had a career in tech and multifamily marketing, working at organizations such as IDG, Apple, and G5. Over the course of my career, I’ve focused on the intersection of data science, marketing technology, and automation and built solutions for Marketing Attribution Modeling, Call Scoring, and Budget Optimization, among other initiatives. 

In the past four years, I’ve applied those experiences to build my own data science consultancy, Bend.ai, which focused on attribution solutions and mastering today’s cookie challenges.

You mentioned applying data science to improve attribution. Can you speak to the current state of attribution in the industry and where you’ve seen the greatest room for improvement?

Marketers in the multifamily housing industry are used to reviewing monthly move-in reports along with statistics like marketing spend, conversion rates, tours, and more. These figures are interrelated, yet the nature of their relationship often remains unclear.

Today’s marketers often find themselves relying on heuristics — mental shortcuts and rules we’ve developed, beliefs that outline the assumed relationship between our marketing activities and business outcomes. We assume how first-touch, last-touch, or even multi-touch affect move-in. But these models don’t directly dictate the probabilities of a move-in. Furthermore, the digital landscape is evolving where reliance on cookies for tracking user behavior is diminishing.

This is where data science can come into play. 

With cutting-edge data science techniques, we can build predictive analytics tools like predictive leasing to understand the relationships between marketing activities in the customer journey.

This provides a holistic view of the customer acquisition processes, allowing marketers to measure the impact of each channel and campaign, facilitate an assessment of potential conversion rates, and clarify the contribution of specific initiatives within the overall marketing mix.

Tell us more about how predictive leasing works.

The purpose of predictive leasing is to determine the probability of move-ins based on past customer journey patterns. By tracking individual customer journeys at scale, we can identify patterns and relationships that will help us understand what has the greatest impact on leasing results at a specific property. 

To do this, we take a path from one lead — which sites they visited and what campaign links they clicked —  and compare it with other lead paths to draw conclusions about campaign effectiveness and buyer behavior. We observe which touchpoints are common among those who converted and those who did not, which types of campaigns led to tours, and which patterns result in move-ins at specific property types. Part of the process involves simulations and tests to see what happens when we remove aspects of a campaign to determine their impact. Armed with this information, we can then identify campaigns that don’t work, add ones that may, and optimize those that are already yielding results.

Who benefits the most from predictive leasing, and what is its biggest advantage?

Predictive leasing benefits apartment marketers, operators, and owners by providing them with access to better campaign insights and data management. With a good data infrastructure, everyone is freed hours and hours of laboring over reports to get information that may or may not affect a lead’s probability of booking a tour or moving in. Instead, marketers, operators, and owners are given actionable data that leads to better decisions and optimizations when it comes to marketing a property. There’s less guessing, more accuracy, and better strategy insights.

How do you envision the industry changing once this technology becomes mainstream?

Predictive leasing built on first-party data will be instrumental in helping organizations maintain and improve marketing performance in a cookie-less world. The attribution aspect of the technology will help marketers measure and communicate the value of their campaign recommendations and guide operators and owners toward the most cost-effective solutions, which will put markers in a great position going forward. 

The key to using this technology to its greatest potential will rely on striking the right balance between leveraging data science and AI and having human experts in the loop. The technology won’t do all the work, and human expertise will be needed in the mix. As marketers, we will need to spend more time becoming strategic and less tactical.

Coming Soon: Conversion Logix and Predictive Leasing to Keep You Ahead of the Curve

Now armed with Bend.ai’s cutting-edge artificial intelligence capabilities, Conversion Logix is in the process of developing a predictive leasing platform that will provide our clients with advanced solutions that identify optimal marketing mixes and advertising budgets at scale. We look forward to sharing more news about the platform in the coming months so don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter for updates.

The post Ahead of the Curve: The Power of Predictive Leasing appeared first on Conversion Logix.

The student housing industry is set to see a rise in competition as new supply hits the market. Yardi forecasts 46,285 new beds will be added by the end of 2024, a 30% increase from the 35,610 beds delivered in 2023.

As the demand for student housing is tampered with by rising supply and increasingly cost-conscious families, how you market and position your student property will be more important than ever in the years ahead.

If you’re tasked with leasing student properties in high-supply markets and aren’t meeting your expected targets, here are five marketing strategies you can apply to ramp up pre-leasing activity.

Optimize Keyword Targeting in Paid Search

Paid Search advertising is highly effective for reaching prospects actively in the market for student housing. With one of the highest lead conversion rates, traffic from this channel tends to be the most qualified. To get the most out of this channel,  ensure you have a tight keyword strategy in place to avoid wasting ad dollars on really broad search terms if you are in a highly competitive multifamily market. Consider increasing your search budgets during seasons when your two buying personas tend to search more (November and March for parents, then spring and summer months for students) and adjust your location targeting accordingly.

Reach Students Living Near Campus With Hyper-Local Targeting Strategies

Increase your brand awareness among current students with local targeting strategies. While state and national targeting is typically the most effective location targeting strategy for reaching parents and incoming freshmen, local targeting can be an effective way to increase leasing activity among college students looking for new accommodations for the next semester or school year. When it comes to local search optimization, maintaining an up-to-date Google Business Profile can be key to increasing visibility in Google Maps and local search listings in Google. In addition to optimizing your Google Business Profile, consider leveraging radius targeting in Display and Paid Social advertising to ensure your property is discoverable throughout the school year.

Increase Visibility With Social Media Advertising

Social media is important to students. They use it as a source of information and as a way to connect with family and friends. 

Simply publishing content on social media, however, means running the risk of reaching audiences that are not interested in off-campus housing. Invest in ads so you can make use of targeting options such as location and interests that guarantee you’re reaching your buyer personas. Consider advertising on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok to ensure you’re reaching as many interested people as possible. While Facebook is widely used by Gen X parents, Instagram and TikTok cater to both students and younger parents. YouTube spans both of these age groups.

With 2.9 billion monthly active users, YouTube exposes your ads to a wide range of audiences but can be coupled with keyword targeting to ensure your ads are sure to reach a high-intent audience.

Leverage the Rise of Connected TV Popularity

Another video platform that is gaining popularity is Connected TV, especially for those within your current student and parent age groups. As more households get an Internet-connected TV device (87%), CTV usage is projected to be at 110 million among Gen Z and millennials. The good news for marketers is that almost 75% of these CTV viewers say they don’t mind watching ads on CTV as long as content remains free over paying for ad-free content. Non-skippable and with impressive targeting capabilities based on viewing habits, interests, and demographics, CTV ads are highly personalized and can, therefore, offer high conversion potential.

“Sell” the Right Lifestyle Messaging

One of the reasons students opt for off-campus housing is that it’s more private, it’s less chaotic than in-campus dorm life, and it offers more freedom. Highlight how your student housing can provide all of these – and more – to the student prospects. Talk about your amenities and how convenient their student life will be living in one of your units. Make these pieces of information known by publishing them on your social media channels and website.

Set Your Property Up For Success in a Competitive Market

While the reopening of schools has brought back a consistent flow of students seeking accommodation, the competitive landscape underscores the importance of strategic marketing efforts. By implementing targeted strategies such as local targeting, social media advertising, video advertising, paid search, and emphasizing lifestyle benefits, property owners can effectively position their offerings to attract discerning students and parents. In an increasingly competitive market, differentiation through effective marketing will be key to maximizing occupancy and profitability in the student housing sector.

Let us help you shape your student housing marketing strategy. Book a call today.

The post Student Housing Marketing Strategies to Turn Around Occupancy Quickly appeared first on Conversion Logix.

Busy marketing leaders need help keeping up with constantly changing pricing, promotions, and ad optimization. With tight budgets and staffing shortages, marketers must leverage the power of strategic automation to stay ahead of the competition.

Today, we are excited to announce the launch of several enhancements to our Ad Automation platform. These new features leverage automation to improve our client’s ability to make campaign changes faster and scale ad management, unlocking new opportunities to increase performance and deliver personalized messaging to prospects.

Dynamic Pricing Gets an Upgrade

The ability to incorporate up-to-date pricing in Google Ads can have a profound impact on your campaign results. By including pricing in ads, you can pre-qualify prospects and ensure your ad dollars are spent on clicks from informed, self-qualified renters.

Previously, ad extensions were the most reliable way to scale the incorporation of pricing across a comprehensive ad campaign. However, communities with less than three floor plans to highlight and limited budgets were unable to take advantage of these benefits.

With our new automated Dynamic Pricing, our team can sync pricing data daily from the top multifamily CRM providers regardless of floor plan options or budgets to ensure ad headlines include up-to-date pricing.

Concession Automation Expands to New Channels

It’s now easier than ever to manage changes to promotions across your portfolio. With Concession Automation, our team is automatically notified to update your ads when offers change within your Apartments.com listings. In the past, these updates were only used to revise offers across Paid Search campaigns.

Our Concession Automation service has extended beyond Paid Search to include ad updates across Display, Meta, Instagram, Google Business Profile Accelerator, and Spotlight users in The Conversion Cloud®. This means once a concession update occurs, it automatically updates all ads, ensuring promotions enter the market faster and with greater visibility.

Clients who’ve enabled instant updates (no proofing) have experienced accelerated concession updates from a three-business-day turnaround to less than one business day across more channels. For clients with requested proofing, changes happen within one business day of approval.

RentCafe, Welcome Home, and REBA Users Can Now Access Ad Automation

We’ve recently made our ad automation service available to users across three additional CRM and Business Intelligence providers. Now, RentCafe, Welcome Home, REBA, Entrata, Yardi, and RealPage users can fill vacancies faster without constantly monitoring offers, pricing, and availability changes across their properties.

Get Started With Automation

Visit our Ad Automation page or schedule a call to learn how we can scale your marketing while saving you time.

Ready to integrate your CRM with Conversion Logix and opt-in to Ad Automation? Contact your account manager today to get started.

The post Conversion Logix Introduces New Ad Automation Updates appeared first on Conversion Logix.

Seattle, March 25, 2024 – Conversion Logix, a pioneering force in the marketing and technology space, today announced the strategic acquisition of Bend.ai, setting a new course toward revolutionizing predictive leasing in the multifamily housing industry. This move marks a significant milestone in the industry’s evolution towards a more AI-driven approach, leveraging Bend.ai’s advanced technology to develop a groundbreaking predictive leasing platform.

At the heart of this acquisition is the vision to merge Bend.ai’s cutting-edge artificial intelligence capabilities with Conversion Logix’s deep marketing expertise. By combining advanced analytics, predictive modeling, and tailored marketing recommendations, Conversion Logix aims to address the budgeting and forecasting challenges facing property management companies today. 

Jeff Jobe, CEO of Conversion Logix, underscored the transformative potential of this merger, stating, “Our acquisition of Bend.ai is a game-changer for the industry. It propels us towards realizing our vision of building a predictive analytics solution that will not just forecast but shape the future of multifamily housing. With Bend.ai’s AI prowess integrated into our operations, we’re setting a new standard for innovation, efficiency, and client success in the market.”

The new software solution will anticipate property-level leasing trends and identify optimal marketing mixes and advertising budgets at scale. By leveraging these insights, property management companies will maximize acquisition costs across their portfolios with greater speed and precision, improving their net operating income.

Martin Stein, CTO and co-founder of Bend.ai, expressed his excitement about the opportunities this partnership unlocks: “Joining forces with Conversion Logix is a thrilling prospect. Our technology, combined with their market reach and expertise, promises to deliver exceptional value to the multifamily housing sector, driving forward a new era of AI-enabled predictive insights and strategies.”

Andrew Cederlind, President of Conversion Logix, highlighted the strategic importance of the acquisition, stating, “The future of multifamily housing is intelligent, predictive, and data-driven. Our acquisition of Bend.ai is a critical step towards becoming the industry leader in predictive leasing, providing our clients with advanced solutions that redefine the property marketing landscape.”

About Conversion Logix

Conversion Logix® is at the forefront of integrating marketing and technology in multifamily housing and senior living sectors. With a track record as a seven-time award winner on the Inc.5000 fastest-growing companies list, Conversion Logix is renowned for delivering innovative marketing solutions and best-in-class campaign management for leading property management companies nationwide.

About Bend.ai

Bend.ai stands out as a leading predictive and generative AI/ML startup, offering in-depth market research, generative AI tooling, marketing workflow modeling, and strategic product development guidance. Known for its commitment to advancing technological innovation, Bend.ai has earned a reputation for excellence and forward-thinking in the tech community.

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Artificial Intelligence is here to stay. With more and more companies adopting the technology, you will be left behind if you don’t incorporate (or at least plan to incorporate) AI into your marketing strategy. But you also don’t want to implement AI just for the sake of doing it. You need to ensure it works to your benefit and delivers the desired results.

But we’ve always known new technology can be overwhelming. So before we dive into best practices for your AI implementation, let’s break down what it means to use AI in marketing.

Defining AI in Marketing

There’s a wealth of possibilities with AI in marketing so it’s easy to get lost when you’re just getting started. Here are the two most important applications of this new technology for marketers:

Predictive AI. This analyzes patterns in your data to predict possible outcomes. For example, it can look at your contact list and let you know which behaviors and attributes make a lead more likely to convert.

Generative AI. This type of AI helps create text and images based on known patterns from previous data. A good example of this is ChatGPT, which is now being used to generate text answers to questions and prompts. In the design world, even established editing software like Adobe and Canva are now leveraging Generative AI to edit and produce imagery.

Implemented together, these two forms of AI can enable you to automate repetitive tasks, segment your audience, and reach out to these segments with personalized messages and offers.

Implementing AI: Best Practices

AI systems are one of the most powerful tools marketers can leverage to increase marketing performance with limited resources. Here are some best practices for implementing AI to ensure you get the most out of this amazing technology.

Plan your approach by setting clear goals.

Hopefully, your marketing goals are already in place even before implementing AI. This will help in identifying how AI aligns with your overall marketing strategy and which specific areas it can work to support your goals.

Here are some common AI use cases in marketing to help you identify how it fits into your strategy:

• Audience segmentation. For businesses managing hundreds and thousands (or more!) of leads, AI can help segment audiences based on their interests, traits, and behaviors. For marketing teams, this is important in creating more informed decisions and effective campaigns.
• Chatbots. AI chatbots deliver a more personalized and seamless customer service experience, even during times of day when no live agent is available. Once trained, AI chatbots can quickly close tickets with answers that are more relevant and personalized to your prospects.
• Content generation. As AI can pull information from multiple sites quickly and easily, it can guide content creation teams during the research phase. With the right prompt, AI can also generate working outlines that writers can easily follow and edit to churn out blogs, social media copy, and other written content.

Ready your data.

In this age of big data, managing customer information can be very tricky. While AI can help you harness data into something usable for your team, it is important to have clean, high-quality data before doing a full AI implementation. AI systems can only be successful if the data it is fed to analyze is accurate and relevant.

Identify which workflows you can automate.

One of the benefits of implementing AI into your marketing strategy is that it allows you to save time and money by eliminating redundant and monotonous tasks. Identify these tasks, such as data entry, email or social media scheduling, and report generation, to speed up workflows and focus on more important tasks, such as campaign ideation and strategic initiatives.

Enable your people.

As amazing as AI is, it still cannot replace human expertise, so treat AI as a companion and not a replacement for what you and your team can do. Train your team on how AI fits into their daily work routine and allow for continuous learning of the new tools and processes. This also eliminates people’s fear of the new technology, easing their worries about being replaced and instead assuring them that AI is only here to enhance the way things are done.

Stay ethical and adhere to data privacy laws.

With data collection becoming more intrusive and with data being used for personalized marketing implementations, it’s important to build a strong ethical, technological foundation. Be transparent to your prospects about the kind of data you are collecting and how the data will be used. Ensure your AI implementation is data privacy compliant, and take time to review laws periodically so you can make adjustments when necessary. As required by most countries, give a clear opt-out option for your leads.

Level-Up Your Marketing Strategy: Start Using AI

Integrating Artificial Intelligence into your marketing strategy is no longer a trend but rather a necessity to stay competitive in today’s digital landscape. By embracing AI as a complementary tool to human expertise, you can harness its power to drive meaningful results and enhance the overall customer experience.

Interested in learning more about AI marketing? Subscribe to our newsletter and stay up-to-date on the latest AI marketing trends.

The post Best Practices for Implementing AI in Your Marketing appeared first on Conversion Logix.

As supply drives greater competition in the multifamily market and rents soften, multifamily marketing leaders are turning to new technology to create efficiencies and greater performance when faced with limited budgets. 

Nearly half (43%) of multifamily marketing leaders surveyed found Delivering the Same Marketing Performance With a Smaller Budget to be one of the most challenging aspects of their job. When asked where they saw the biggest room for improvement, this group mentioned embracing automation and AI as a top priority.

While this new tech is transforming property management processes at a rapid rate, it’s still in its infancy. In this blog post, we explore five ways marketing automation and AI is poised to disrupt the industry.

Automated Lead Generation and Nurturing

Automation is revolutionizing the lead generation and nurturing process, enabling marketers to build their lead pipeline faster and more cost-effectively. Instead of manual and time-consuming processes, marketing leaders can utilize automated systems to identify and qualify leads efficiently. Self-scheduling applications, gated virtual tours, and chatbots integrate seamlessly into your website, can engage with potential residents, answer queries, and guide them through the application process. This not only streamlines operations but ensures a prompt and personalized experience for prospects.

Personalization at Scale

One of the challenges facing multifamily marketing leaders is delivering personalized experiences to a diverse audience at scale. Technology, like AI chat experiences, gives property management teams the ability to provide customized answers to inquiries faster, more consistently, and with greater detail than before. As marketing leaders lean into marketing automation within their lead management platforms, new doors open up to streamline the email and text follow-up process with Lead Nurturing.

With machine learning algorithms, property management companies can develop the ability to analyze vast amounts of data to understand resident preferences, enabling them to tailor marketing messages, promotions, and even property offerings on a granular level. These insights could be applied to increase the performance of marketing activities while moving prospects through the leasing journey faster.

Predictive Analytics for Strategic Decision-Making

The future of property marketing demands a data-driven approach. Predictive analytics powered by AI can provide invaluable insights into market trends, resident behavior, and the effectiveness of your marketing strategies. By analyzing historical data, AI algorithms can forecast future trends, enabling marketing leaders to make informed decisions and allocate resources strategically. This proactive approach ensures that your marketing efforts stay ahead of the curve.

Streamlined Ad and Content Creation

New generative AI technology is making the content creation process easier and faster by automating the ideation phase of content creation. From generating catchy headlines to suggesting optimal posting times based on user behavior patterns, AI can significantly reduce the time and effort required for content creation. Tools like these can help onsite teams tackle tasks that require content at scale, like maintaining social media profiles, posting to a Google Business Profile consistently, producing content for websites, email messaging, and more. This not only enhances efficiency but also ensures that your marketing materials remain fresh, relevant, and aligned with the preferences of your target audience.

Ad Optimization for High-Performance KPIs

As giants in the marketing technology space, ad platforms like Google, Meta, and TikTok, among others, are leading the charge in adopting AI and Automation into their platforms. With the advancement of new features like Smart Bidding and Responsive Ads in Google Ads, automated event tracking in GA4, and conversion-focused ad objectives in Meta and TikTok, there are now more tools to optimize ad performance with AI. These tools provide savvy advertisers with the opportunity to create more targeted and high-performing campaigns within the same budget by leveraging their immense user data and tried and true machine learning algorithms.

Embrace the Future

As we stand at the forefront of a tech-driven revolution in multifamily marketing, the opportunities presented by AI and automation are too compelling to ignore. The landscape is evolving, and embracing these innovations isn’t just about staying relevant; it’s about making profound improvements to processes to set marketing teams up to meet the growing demands of the industry. Adopting AI and automation will position your property management company for success in a competitive market where speed to lead, a personalized prospect experience, and insights into the customer journey are critical.

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In the era of doing more with less, AI is a powerful ally for marketers and operators seeking out new ways of doing business. As an ad agency in the multifamily and senior living industries, we’ve leveraged the latest innovations in the ad industry for years to keep our clients on the cutting edge. From ad creation to performance enhancement and measurement, AI is quickly becoming an added ingredient in every area of campaign management. In this blog post, we’ll explore how AI is transforming the advertising landscape and what that means for companies looking to maximize media budgets.

Overview of AI-Powered Ad Management Tools

AI’s superpower lies in its ability to scale the unscalable and make complex calculations based on massive amounts of data in real-time speed.

At Conversion Logix, we create, launch, and manage ad campaigns for property management companies across a variety of channels, including Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Display Networks, and Connected TV. Within these platforms, we’ve AI-built tools to streamline, enhance, and scale the process while keeping a human in the loop. Here are a few of the ways we leverage AI in ad management today. 

Ad Creation 

One of the most exciting and new use cases for AI is designing ads with the help of Generative AI. Generative AI, a form of AI that can generate original content in the form of text, images, or audio, is helping marketers reduce the initial stage of copywriting and creative ideation. From asking AI to write a headline under a certain character count that captures a key message to feeding AI images and asking it to generate relevant copy, Generative AI is dramatically speeding up the time it takes for advertisers to develop ads. 

We’ve built EHO-friendly Generative AI tools into our own ad creation process and found these capabilities especially helpful when designing ads for Facebook, Instagram, and Google. Leveraging these tools, Google’s generative AI suggestions, and ChatGPT have helped our campaign managers reduce time spent on ad copywriting by 30 – 40%, while maintaining ad rankings of excellent. This has enabled us to bring campaigns to life across large client portfolios faster than ever before.

Bid Optimization

Advertising platforms have become increasingly more sophisticated over the past few years in their targeting capabilities to help advertisers reach the most relevant audience for their products and services. But in an auction environment, marketers not only need to reach the right audience at the right time, but they also need to outbid competitors trying to do the same.

Google, in particular, has led the charge in this with Smart Bidding, which is now used by over 80% of Google Ad users. Smart Bidding strategies, which are trained from your campaign and website conversion data, leverage AI to identify and increase bids for higher-quality leads. These tools enable marketers to maximize limited budgets by ensuring ad dollars are being spent on the impressions and clicks that are the most likely to lead to high-value conversions. Advertisers leveraging AI for optimization have seen a 15-20% increase in conversion rates.

Each of these bidding strategies has different advantages based on your overall marketing strategy. As a general rule, the more data you can provide AI, the better your results. If you want to optimize your campaign for higher-level actions like leads and tours, you’ll need enough data to feed ad platforms so they can help you optimize toward your desired goals. In one study of over 100 Conversion Logix client accounts, our ad managers found that campaigns that could support and leverage Max Conversion Bidding strategies yielded 20% more conversions than those that used Max Click Bidding, illustrating the value of tracking and producing website leads to enhance AI’s effectiveness.

Dynamic Personalization 

In addition to adjusting bids on the fly to win ad auctions, AI is also being used to help advertisers increase ad engagement. The key to this lies in data gathering and analysis to understand a target audience and then provide a customized ad in real time to generate higher engagement with this audience. 

Google Responsive Ads, driven by machine learning, can pull from a list of prepopulated headlines and descriptions to adapt and personalize ad copy to each searcher. Leveraging a wide variety of high-quality headlines and descriptions allows Google’s machine learning to mix and match ads that will yield the best engagement. 

On average, Conversion Logix has seen Responsive Ads improve click-through rates by 5-6%.

Reporting & Insights

To make better marketing decisions, marketers need better information and help to analyze the daily flood of cross-channel data streams. This is one area where AI can be especially useful. 

With tools like GA4, marketers now have access to AI insights directly in their website analytics platform. These automated insights leverage machine learning to identify trends in your website traffic to help you identify your best and worst-performing strategies and provide suggestions for improvement.

With access to even more data, advertisers can gain access to even greater insights. As an advertising and technology provider with thousands of campaigns and over a million leads generated in the multifamily and senior living space, we’ve been developing a proprietary AI recommendation engine that can analyze ad and lead performance across various marketing channels. 

Tools like these enable us to benchmark performance across our multifamily and senior living portfolio and train AI to offer strategic recommendations for campaign optimization. Our account managers leverage these insights to provide data-driven guidance and when assessing and optimizing campaigns.

The Role of Human Oversight

Contrary to popular misconception, the age of AI in advertising doesn’t mean human advertisers can or should be automated out of the process.

Even the most powerful AI systems today are still very task-driven and specialized. These systems are designed to produce specific outcomes based on parameters and the data they have been trained on. While these tools can be great assistors to the ad management process, they lack the big-picture understanding that human ad managers possess. Think of ad management AI as tools in a toolbox; someone still has to decide whether a hammer or a drill is needed to solve the problem. 

Humans are more creative, strategic, and adaptable than AI. They also have a social and emotional intelligence that is critical to success in advertising. Even as AI advances, human marketers will be needed to decide which direction they want to take in ad creation, what audience they think the AI should help target, and what bidding strategy to use. This combined approach to AI is known as Hybrid Intelligence, a concept that illustrates why the best future outcomes of AI technology will involve humans working in tandem with AI.

Stay Ahead of the AI Revolution With Conversion Logix

Advertisers leveraging AI are moving faster, saving time, generating more leads, and achieving more with limited budgets, giving them a clear competitive edge in the market. 

At Conversion Logix, we’re at the forefront of marketing innovation, leveraging cutting-edge AI solutions to redefine success for our clients in the multifamily and senior living industry. With over a decade-long commitment to understanding the unique challenges of this sector, we’ve developed and leveraged a suite of proprietary AI tools that address industry-specific pain points and provide our clients with a competitive edge. 

Check out these blog posts next to learn more about how we use AI in marketing and our take on the future of the industry.

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The unique thing about senior living prospects is that when they start searching for communities online, they are most likely just in the beginning phase of their journey and are not yet ready to move in. This makes lead nurturing very critical because the decision-making process for senior care is often longer and takes more things into consideration. Senior living decisions are significant and emotional, and many seniors and their families have concerns and objections related to the transition to senior living.

Lead nurturing can help maintain engagement and awareness over an extended period, guiding prospects through each stage of their decision-making journey. With consistent communication, marketing teams can build trust, address concerns, provide information, and create a sense of familiarity and comfort to establish strong relationships with potential residents and their families so they know you are the obvious choice when it’s time for them to move through the next phase of the sales funnel.

Here are three lead nurturing ideas that can work wonders in your marketing strategy.

1. Deliver Value-Add Content With An Automated Workflow

“Content is king” is a classic marketing tactic and is still especially true when nurturing your leads.

For content to truly work towards nurturing your leads, however, they should provide value. For senior living prospects, these could be in the form of content designed to educate them on the right care level and to address any concerns and objectives.

For educational content, provide extensive information about the available options, services, amenities, and the overall lifestyle your community offers. Share answers to common questions and valuable resources to help prospects make informed decisions. Good examples of educational content are topics like “how to determine if assisted living or independent living is right for your family” or “how to help an aging parent downsize and move.”

When addressing concerns and objections, create content that helps your senior prospects and their families remove any barrier towards senior living. Two of the most common barriers and how your content can help solve them are:

• Senior is afraid of losing independence. Create email and social campaigns that emphasize how your community supports and enhances independence. Make your content showcase the variety of activities, services, and amenities that empower residents to maintain their lifestyles while benefiting from the convenience and security provided.
• Fear of loneliness. Create articles and campaigns accompanied by photos that highlight the vibrant social life within the community, showcasing various activities, events, and communal spaces where residents can connect. Testimonials from residents who initially had similar concerns but found a sense of belonging and friendship within the community will also do great in addressing this barrier.

When you have a wealth of valuable content, couple it with automation so these great content pieces reach the right audience at the right time. Because senior living prospects don’t move down the pipeline as quickly as prospects in other markets, you must have enough content to nurture them until they become sales-qualified leads. Spread out content on a specific period to not overwhelm your leads while you remind them about your community and what it offers.

2. Send Personalized Emails

Email remains one of the most effective arsenals of marketing teams. Regardless of age, email usage remains at roughly 90% average. However, to actually garner engagement with email, you’ll have to go a step further to stand out in the inbox. We recommend personalizing your email content to make sure you’re not just some random email that they read and discard or even click straight to trash. Create customized, visually appealing emails that address your lead by their name and that include calls-to-action that are also personalized based on their lead history. Keep track of where your leads are in the resident journey and ensure they are receiving the right content for where they are in the funnel. 

3. Retarget With Ads Across Multiple Channels

Lead nurturing beyond the inbox is important because you want to reach your future residents and their families in whichever channel they’re in. Because you’re talking to a wide range of audiences, from age groups that are heavy on social media and web hopping to your actual future residents who may be more into watching videos or looking up information online, you need to have a way to nurture them in all channels possible. Remind your leads about your community as they click around the web by setting up retargeting ads on multiple channels: social media (Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn), other websites through Display Retargeting Advertising, and even Connected TV.

Start Nurturing Your Leads Now

Make the most of your lead generation efforts and nurture them to establish brand trust and position your community as their only choice when they’re ready to move in. Contact us for your lead nurturing solutions.

The post 3 Ideas to Nurture Your Senior Living Leads appeared first on Conversion Logix.

The senior living industry is so diverse and dynamic that there’s never a shortage of strategic marketing trends to look out for. As the start of the new year unfolds, now is the perfect time to revisit your marketing plan, evaluate what has been working and what has not, and get to know new trends.

We’ve compiled ten senior living marketing ideas to inspire your marketing strategy for 2024.

1. Targeted Social Media Advertising

Having a social media presence is imperative these days for building your reputation as a senior living brand. But if you are only relying on organic posting and community building to grow your reach, you are missing out on key opportunities to reach targeted audiences at scale.

Successful marketing starts with defining your target audience, and when your target audience is as wide and varied as the senior living market, ranging from your future residents to their families and caretakers, reach is all about quality over quantity. Social advertising on platforms like Facebook and Instagram provides targeting options that can help you reach a high-intent target market more consistently. Leverage location and interest targeting to get in front of prospects looking for the care levels and living accommodations your community specializes in.

Once you have a successful ad campaign in place on tried and true platforms like Facebook and Instagram, consider exploring emerging channels like TikTok to deliver ad content to adult children of seniors on the platform.

2. User-Generated Content Campaigns

User-generated content is one of the most impactful marketing tools at your disposal. It’s cost-effective, authentic, and created by the very people your target audience is most eager to hear from.

This year, encourage your residents and their families to share their experiences through various types of content, like videos, photos, and testimonials. Amplify the reach of this content through social media advertising campaigns, email newsletters, and your website to build trust and credibility among seniors and their families.

3. New Video Advertising Opportunities

Surprise, surprise video marketing makes the list again. While you’ve likely heard us talk about video marketing trends before, video strategies are often overlooked by marketing teams each year because of the perceived effort and time they take to produce.

If that’s you, these numbers will change your mind:

• Video marketing leads to purchases: 84% of consumers purchase products after seeing them in videos.
• Videos reach more of your potential residents: More than two-thirds of the US population watch digital videos daily. In 2023 alone, video takes up 82.5% of overall web traffic.
• YouTube users by the billion: By October 2023, YouTube’s monthly active users have reached 2.5 billion.
• Connected TV is on the rise: Time spent watching connected TV is expected to double from 1 hr per day (in 2019) to 2 hours per day in 2024.

YouTube and Connected TV advertising are often overlooked by digital marketers but offer impressive targeting capabilities for reaching local in-market prospects.

Other video advertising opportunities to explore include short-form mobile video ads, such as Instagram Stories and Reels.

4. Interactive Ads

In a sea of ads, expanding the boundaries of ad creative is one way to ensure your ads stand out. With new media creation opportunities that leverage HTML5 in ads, you can create interactive ads that deliver a unique experience to your target audience.

These ads can give users the ability to click through care options within a display ad or email campaign to keep prospects engaged and increase ad recall.

5. Hyper-Local Targeting

For many senior living communities, future residents and their families reside in the local community and can be found in as small as a five-mile radius around the property. Hyper-local targeting strategies like geo-fencing and Google Business Profile optimization can capitalize on this and help you reach your target audience with greater precision.

Last year, the average US adult clocked in at least 4:36 hours of daily mobile use. With strategies like geo-fencing, you can deliver mobile ads at the property level, targeting prospects that step into relevant local businesses and community centers.

To ensure prospects searching for care in your local area can find you when they search their favorite search engine, add to your Google My Business profile by providing complete information about your business and creating daily posts to increase your presence in local search results.

6. AI to Scale Content Marketing

For many families, shopping for senior living is a new and unfamiliar experience. At the start of their search, they’re likely to research they may not know which care level their loved one needs or how to compare communities. Content marketing that educates prospects about senior living in your local area and how to select care experiences can place you at the start of a prospect’s consideration set and help you build authority and trust among prospects.

With advancements in generative AI, you can now leverage free tools like Chat GPT to brainstorm relevant articles and source outline ideas to streamline the content creation process. This can open up opportunities to create a wider range of content that your team can publish on your website, post to social media channels, or deliver in email newsletters.

7. Creative Offers to Increase Tour Appointments

Think outside the box to encourage prospects to move to the tour stage of the customer journey. Play off of the traditional lunch-and-learn concept and test out new offers to increase tour conversions on your website.

Is your community located near a wine region? Offer “Wine Down Wednesday”, where prospective residents and their families can come in for a tasting and then take home a bottle of wine after the tour. Another spin on the lunch-and-learn concept is to have your chef prepare the prospect’s favorite meal or dessert rather than whatever is on the menu that day to make the experience more memorable. 

Make it easy for prospects to schedule tours with an automated tour scheduler to prevent long response times from impacting your sales pipeline. Expand your tour options with gated self-guided virtual tours and guided virtual tours that can be easily accessed from your property website.

8. Chat Solutions to Increase Speed to Lead

Today’s prospects expect immediacy. 75% of customers expect help within five minutes or less. However, with an omnichannel presence, it can be difficult for onsite teams to track messages and provide responses within a matter of minutes. Chat solutions, like chatbots, can help you ensure prospects get a response right away. With the emergence of AI, these applications can be more sophisticated than ever before, providing prospects with relevant information about communities in a matter of seconds. 

However, in an industry like senior living, where the information-gathering process is complex and emotional, it’s prudent to pair automated solutions with a human in the loop. This is why we recommend a hybrid chat solution that can enable prospects to switch between an AI and a human agent for a fast and personalized experience.

9. Long-Term Lead Nurturing Campaigns

In the senior living industry, it’s not always a race to get them to move in the moment they enter the sales cycle. Most of the time, when prospects start researching senior living communities, it’s a long way from awareness to purchase as there may be multiple decision-makers or it’s just not yet time to “buy”, and they’re merely looking at what options may be available when the right time comes. Even as residents move in, the consideration stage never ends, as some need to change their care levels as time passes. 

This is why lead nurturing is a must in your marketing playbook. Ensure you don’t miss out on any important opportunities to connect by implementing automated lead nurturing solutions that can email or text information and offers based on specific triggers and sequences.

10. Intimate Outreach Events

When it comes to creating outreach events, as counterintuitive as it seems, sometimes less is more. For many prospective residents, large social gatherings can be intimidating, and it’s easy for introverted seniors to get lost in the fray. 

We’ve seen communities switch to promoting smaller, more intimate events at a more frequent pace and see greater success at converting those prospects to residents. Events that speak to specific interests and hobbies, like a book club, bible study, or painting, can bring like-minded people together and forge a stronger connection with your community. 

To ensure these events are attended, regardless of size and type, make sure to promote them on your website, in emails, through social posts, and within ad campaigns.

Create the Ultimate Senior Living Marketing Playbook for 2024

Make 2024 the year you shake up your marketing game plan. With the emergence of AI, the emphasis on automation, and the influence of social video platforms on the future of marketing, the best senior living marketers will stay nimble and innovative to meet the needs of today’s prospects. As the year unfolds, try implementing these ten strategies to stay ahead of the pack and establish yourself as an industry trailblazer.

The post 10 Strategies to Add to Your Senior Living Marketing Playbook in 2024 appeared first on Conversion Logix.