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.

The marketing and technology landscape is moving faster than ever as we approach 2024. While modern marketers are no strangers to change, the rapid and transformative power of AI (Artificial Intelligence) has skyrocketed the pace, setting the stage for a fast-paced year ahead. 

Amidst major technological evolutions, the apartment market is facing a medley of challenges and opportunities, from burgeoning supply trends (over 600,000 market-rate units are likely to enter the market by year-end) to steady demand driven by wage growth and modest inflationary expectations. With downward pressure on rental rates due to the growth in supply across the top 50 metros, the focus of the year is anticipated to be on maintaining occupancy vs. rent growth as renters are presented with more options in top markets.

In 2024, multifamily marketers will need to be forward-thinking and laser-focused on developing competitive marketing strategies that leverage cutting-edge technology without losing focus on the fundamentals. With this in mind, we’ve compiled five apartment marketing strategy recommendations to guide your planning in the new year.

BUT FIRST…A QUICK WORD ON THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MARKETING STRATEGY VS. TACTICS

The word strategy is thrown around a lot as a way to describe plans for achieving goals or testing out new technology. These are often tactics rather than strategies, and in many cases, these lists of ideas exist in isolation from the overall landscape impacting marketing teams. 

When planning for 2024, think about the challenges your company and the industry is facing. Consider your unique strengths and weaknesses. Then, think about an approach you can take to overcome these challenges using the opportunities available that can set your company apart and provide you with a competitive advantage in the marketplace. 

These strategies should be high-level enough that multiple tactics can be devised beneath them that can be executed to achieve your goal but specific enough to make the approach unique, actionable, and relevant to today’s marketing landscape.

As we walk through the five strategy recommendations below, consider the challenges we outlined at the beginning of this blog post and how these strategy recommendations can help you address these challenges while capitalizing on new opportunities and resources.

1. A Hybrid Intelligence Approach to AI 

It should come as no surprise that one of the biggest trends for 2024 is anticipated to be the adoption of AI, specifically the adoption of AI-based chat technology. Prospective residents have come to expect immediacy from all industries, and the rental sector is no exception.

AI and automation, in general, excel in their ability to deliver scale and immediacy. In a chat environment, this technology enables property managers to overcome a long-standing struggle: providing faster response times to leads. 

Solely relying on AI doesn’t come without its drawbacks. There is a subset of prospects who want a human response to their questions and concerns, and nuanced and unique questions can’t be easily answered by AI.

This is why we recommend you take a Hybrid Intelligence approach to adopting AI in your organization. This means pairing the skills and experience of humans with AI to deliver superior customer experiences and more intelligent business decision-making.

Within the scope of customer experience, this could be implementing an AI chat solution that gives prospects the ability to switch to a live human agent in real-time to prevent leads from falling out of the funnel while maintaining superior customer service (a unique solution we offer you can learn more about here).

2. Building Better Business Intelligence

In a recent LinkedIn Live, “2024 Multifamily Marketing Predictions,” we hosted with the VP of Marketing at Brookfield Properties, Jannah Hobday, and Chief Insider at Multifamily Insiders Brent Williams, one trend that kept coming up in the conversation was the need for centralization between vendors and platforms in the industry. 

As marketing becomes more complex and technology becomes more sophisticated, property management teams are reliant on specialized labor and tools to remain competitive in an evolving field. While this makes it possible for property management companies to implement innovative marketing tactics and offer cutting-edge customer experiences with less investment, it also means data and information about marketing campaigns, leads, and residents’ lives in many places, making it difficult for marketing managers to make informed decisions and implement strategy changes quickly.

One way to go about this is to develop a source of truth for resident information and work with vendors that offer integrated marketing solutions. 

At Conversion Logix, we partner with the top CRM vendors in the industry to sync the lead and tour data we capture from our lead management system with our clients’ CRMs. We also pull data from platforms like Yardi, RealPage, Entrata, RentCafe, and Apartments.com to provide an Ad Automation service that makes lightning-fast ad updates when pricing, offers, and availability changes in a client’s CRM.

This integrated approach gives marketing managers a line of sight into the information they need to be better-informed decision-makers while providing vendors with the information they need to be more effective partners.

3. Advertising on Channels Competitors Aren’t 

eMarketer released a study claiming 25-54-year-olds spend more time on TikTok than any other social platform. In 2022, TikTok surpassed Instagram in total daily minutes spent and is expected to surpass Facebook by 2025. Despite this, many property management companies are reticent to get started on the platform. 

Property management teams get stuck on this idea that in order to be on TikTok, they have to build up a library of organic video posts and invest in follower-building and virality tactics. This prevents a lot of management companies from taking advantage of this platform. 

While it takes a higher monthly minimum in ad spend to get started on TikTok, we’ve seen clients experience success leveraging repurposed video content for Instagram Reels as TikTok ads. Unlike organic posts, TikTok advertising enables you to reach a larger audience consistently with the same piece of content and gives you the ability to target and track your ideal audience.

Another breakout in the media industry is streaming networks. Streaming outperformed both cable and broadcast TV for the first time in history in July 2022, according to a Nielsen report. Connected TV advertising is one of the most overlooked advertising opportunities in the multifamily industry. Connected TV ads can be displayed on a range of devices, from Smart TVs to computers and mobile phones. They have some of the highest ad recall rates in the industry and offer a unique opportunity to build brand awareness where others in the industry aren’t competing. 

By opening up your marketing strategy to include popular channels your prospects are on that your competitors aren’t, you’ll be in a better position to establish your brand among prospects and prevent new developments from stealing your market share.

4. Leveraging First-Party Data to Develop More Targeted Campaigns 

Struggling to find qualified leads is a common challenge that has driven many marketing managers to our door. Targeting in the multifamily industry has always been challenging as marketers seek to reach the most qualified renters while maintaining fair housing-friendly campaigns. This challenge is also likely to become exacerbated as privacy restrictions rise and cookies become deprecated.

New advancements in audience cohort tracking in Google Analytics 4, AI bidding strategies, and conversion tracking are making it possible for marketers to develop targeted campaigns despite these challenges. 

The key to unlocking these strategies in 2024 will be collecting first-party data and working with partners on the cutting edge of these targeting techniques to ensure you can find and convert qualified leads at scale.

5. Focusing on the Follow-Up

In a market where new developments have the potential to overstep demand, follow-through becomes even more important. Prospective residents who come in to tour or engage on the website may be considering several properties at one time. By giving attention to prospective renters throughout the entirety of their apartment search, you stand a greater chance of converting leads into leases.

If you aren’t already using automation to develop lead nurturing sequences via text and email, 2024 is a great time to start. Keep in mind that the better your company is at collecting and storing lead information, the more powerful and personalized your automation sequences can be. Consider creating specific sequences for floorplan-specific campaigns, pet owners, or renters with longer move-in timelines to remain top-of-mind and increase lead-to-lease conversions.

TAKE YOUR MARKETING STRATEGY TO THE NEXT LEVEL

Need help creating a personalized strategy for your community? Contact us today for a personalized consultation with a multifamily marketing expert. We’ll assess your strengths and areas of improvement while exploring opportunities to incorporate cutting-edge ad campaigns, automation, and AI into your 2024 marketing strategy.

The post Top 5 Apartment Marketing Strategies for 2024 appeared first on Conversion Logix.

During our webinar with Student Housing Business, “You Have Eight Seconds: How to Market Student Housing in 2023,” we received insightful questions from the audience about ad targeting, TikTok, chat services, and marketing attribution. (If you haven’t had a chance to watch that webinar, click here to watch the recording.) 

In this blog, two of our speakers, Kat Callender, Conversion Logix’s resident student housing marketing expert, and Andrew Cederlind, our President and COO, answered all of your pressing student housing marketing questions. Let’s dive into the Q&A to discover their tips and strategies. 

Digital Advertising

Question: What is the best practice for creating video content for TikTok?

Andrew: Take high-quality photos and videos and then use an agency that can turn that into an engaging ad that speaks to your community. Keep it simple, and don’t try to overcomplicate it with influencers.

Question: Our off-campus student housing is trying to do paid ads through Facebook/Instagram. We want to capture the audience in our area, but Facebook/Instagram rejects us when doing so, and it wants us to promote to the entire United States. Do you have any insight on paid ads and how we can target our area?

Andrew: When you properly categorize the ads and follow ad targeting rules, you should be able to run the ads with more location targeting options. If your ads are getting rejected, it could be because you are selecting targeting options that aren’t recommended or allowed. I recommend working with an agency that specializes in EHO and student housing paid social to ensure you are doing this correctly. 

Question: What is the best way to submit an ad for targeted student population housing ads on Instagram and have it not get rejected? And, under what category? 

Andrew: They should be categorized under housing ads and follow the EHO rules.

Question: How do you deal with the targeting limitations for housing ads, specifically in the special ads category on social media platforms (Instagram/Snapchat) and the limited targeting of TikTok? 

Andrew: We do this in several ways. One of the primary strategies we use is to focus on targeting prospects with intent to purchase or an interest in student housing. We use a variety of interest and behavior targeting strategies to do this. TikTok is great for this because it is more granular than most other forms of advertising and has a large college-aged audience. In addition to interests, we get strategic with location targeting, and with the platforms and placements we choose to advertise on. We run ads on TikTok and Instagram Stories when we want to be discovered by students and Facebook to make sure our ads also reach their parents.

Question: How much do you use GeoFencing to capture who has been at your property? Is it worthwhile?

Kat: During the height of the pandemic, we didn’t use it much as it was harder to pinpoint prime locations for its use, and most touring was virtual. Now that schools are fully back in class and on campus, the school’s location can be a great choice for geofencing to capture students looking to move off campus for the first time or to encourage previous off-campus dwellers to visit your property. We’ve been adding Precision Mobile Targeting Plus more frequently to properties we work with.

Prospect Communication

Question: What do you recommend for our on-site leasing teams to implement to be authentic in replying to Messenger inquiries, texting, phone calls, and emails? We have leasing team members responding to Messenger messages by asking them to call the leasing office when they reached out by digital text/form. A lost opportunity to reach people on the platform they started the convo. What do you recommend for better conversations with students who have reached out primarily via text/forms?

Kat: I recommend having someone dedicated to SMS conversations. Part of what makes live chat so attractive is the quickness of response. They do not want to be told to call the leasing office. Gen Z has grown up entirely in the digital/social age and spent most of their high school and early college life on Zoom due to Covid, this is how they feel comfortable. Being able to accommodate this is critical to winning their buy-in.

Question: Is there a live chat that you recommend? I’ve tried out a few that seem more geared towards multi-family instead of student housing.

Andrew: We have a 24/7 managed live chat service that performs well with a 75% chat-to-lead conversion ratio. It also includes real-time translation into 40+ languages which is great for international students.

Marketing Attribution

Question: How do you attribute leads to digital advertising?

Kat: Through MatchBack reporting with The Conversion Cloud® and Live Chat, we were able to cross-reference leases in a year vs. the leads that engaged with the applications on the client’s website. This resulted in an 11% to 22% conversion rate per property.

Question: Can the panelist share something they did (TikTok, ad, etc.) that had a measurable ROI? 

Kat: We designed a video ad for a student housing property showcasing imagery of their apartment interiors and copy about the types of apartments they have available. These were their results over four months:

• 1,176,434 ad impressions
• 14,718 watched the video 100%
• 1,870 ad clicks
• 13 leases attributed at this time

This is how we were able to identify the ad’s impact on leasing:

1. We identified a lift in organic website traffic correlated with the ad campaign.
2. We launched our lead generation application, The Conversion Cloud®, on the client’s website. This allowed the team to collect the names, emails, and phone numbers of students who scheduled a tour or signed up to join the waitlist. 
3. In our Conversion Cloud® platform, we have attribution reporting that lets you see if they clicked an ad or searched organically to get to the website before converting. We were able to upload a resident list for this community and identify matches between the lead list and the leases through MatchBack, our lease attribution feature.

Question: What is a typical/average new tenant acquisition cost in the student housing industry, as far as marketing/advertising cost per new tenant who signs a lease? $300 to $500 per new tenant? 

Kat: Based on the MatchBack report we ran vs. the monthly cost of a search engine marketing (SEM) campaign, the spend per lease hovered between $78 and $135. You can get away with slimmer budgets on student campaigns if you target effectively and make quarterly optimizations to adjust to the constantly changing audience, which includes parents and students.

Wait! There’s More…

If you benefitted from Kat and Andrew’s student housing marketing expertise, you’ll want to watch the recording of their previous LinkedIn Live event, “TikTok Ads For Student Housing Q&A”.

Want more tips about communicating with Gen Z? Check out How to Get Gen Z Renters to Talk to You. 

Interested in learning more about our student housing marketing services? Visit our Student Housing page.

About Conversion Logix

Conversion Logix®, LLC provides digital marketing services, and licenses lead generation software to industry leaders in the student housing, multifamily housing, senior living, automotive, and small business markets. Conversion Logix has been ranked on the Inc. 5000 seven years in a row and listed in Austin Business Journal’s Fast 50 Growing Companies. Conversion Logix is a Premier Google Partner, a Facebook Business Partner, and developed The Conversion Cloud®, a lead generation software suite designed to help businesses generate more leads, appointments, and sales.

The post How to Market Student Housing in 2023: Q&A With Industry Experts appeared first on Conversion Logix.

In anticipation of Google’s Universal Analytics platform sunsetting, we reached out to our experts at Conversion Logix, VP of Ad Operations Daniel Ekdahl, and our Campaign Performance Manager, Liam Keller, to give you an inside look at how our team is leveraging Google’s new analytics platform, GA4.

What industry trends set the stage for Google’s introduction of GA4? 

Danny: There are a couple of trends that have been prevalent in the industry for a long time that Universal Analytics started to address, but Google has pushed the boundaries further with GA4. 

We know internet users are switching devices from their mobile phones to their laptops and now to TVs with the adoption of smart TVs. Marketers have always found multichannel attribution to be challenging. Google is trying to help marketers with this by taking into account how a user encounters a brand across multiple devices while still maintaining privacy.

Liam: To elaborate on Danny’s point about privacy, it’s an interesting time right now in the marketing world because analytics is becoming privacy-centric, but at the same time, as an industry, we are trying to be more data-driven. We now understand cookies are eventually going away, and machine learning is being explored as a way to close that gap. 

A lot of the evolution we are seeing in Google Analytics really centers around those trends, understanding cross-device behavior and improving the way we capture data from mobile devices while giving users the anonymity and privacy they desire.

How is GA4 different from Universal Analytics?

Liam: GA4 is definitely more focused on understanding how people interact on a website. Comparatively, Universal Analytics was focused on understanding traffic volume and less granular methods of collecting user intent, like bounce rate and pages per session. In place of these types of volume metrics, GA4 provides more engagement metrics.

Danny: The biggest paradigm shift is the move from session-based to event-based analytics. Events are the star of GA4. In Universal Analytics, you had the ability to define goals (now called conversions in GA4), but in GA4, Google delineates further between events and conversions. Now advertisers are led to think about what actions are leading to other actions.

Liam: Especially when studying the purchase journeys we analyze for the multifamily housing and senior living industries, we know a user doesn’t just teleport to the end conversion [apply to lease an apartment or move a loved one to a senior living community]. There are micro-conversions that happen along the way, and Google is getting better at helping us track these smaller steps.

With these new metrics, what is your team using to evaluate campaigns?

Liam: Engagement rate and conversions are the main two metrics we look at when evaluating campaigns for clients. These action-focused metrics tell us whether prospects are engaging in ways that indicate they are interested in our clients. If these metrics are low for specific campaigns, then I would consider making changes to the campaign or moving the budget towards campaigns driving more engaged traffic.

Can you share an example of how you have used GA4’s new metrics or features to optimize campaigns?

Liam: One of the more exciting things we can do in GA4 is set up audiences (segments of users with similar website behavior) and port them into Google Ads campaigns. While audiences were available in Universal Analytics, in GA4, they’ve become more robust and easier to leverage for campaign optimization. Once added to the Google Ads platform, we can then target the users in these audiences and tailor our bidding strategy. We’ve tried this by modifying Google Ads bids based on their engagement with floor plan pages. This helped us bring high-intent users back to the client’s site, increasing conversions. 

Overall, Google is making it easier to optimize campaigns across their platforms with GA4 so advertisers can leverage tools from one platform into another, which is great news for advertisers. 

What new insights are available with GA4 that weren’t accessible with Universal Analytics?

Liam: Danny eluded earlier to the importance of understanding how users engage across multiple channels and platforms. In GA4, Google is getting better at tracking and reporting on multitouch attribution. We’ve always known how impactful top-of-the-funnel advertising campaigns like Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Display, and YouTube are in driving high-converting prospects, but so much of that journey gets lost when we only focus on direct conversions. With GA4’s new multitouch reporting, we can now clearly see users taking four or five touches before converting, giving us a better reflection of how marketing actually works. It’s not a simple landscape by any means, and it’s nice to see the industry make progress toward understanding that.

What should marketers do to prepare for the sunset of Universal Analytics?

Danny: Most importantly, establish a GA4 property as soon as possible. Spend time learning how the new platform works and getting familiar with the new metrics and features to get the most out of the platform.

Google recently announced that they are now giving users a six-month window past the sunset date to extract and store Universal Analytics data. If you have a Universal Analytics account, I suggest looking into the best option for storing that data for your organization.

What can we expect from GA4 in the future?

Danny: The industry has been blaring the cookieless future siren for a while now. Google has been exploring alternatives to cookies. I’d expect more innovation from Google around privacy in the near future.

Liam: Predictive analysis is another area I see Google building upon in the years to come. While machine learning already makes up the backbone of GA4, I expect GA4’s predictive features to improve over time as the platform gathers more data. Right now, we can see cool things in GA4 like, “Google Ads was a part of 63% of user journeys for this account”. I see insights like these becoming more predictive as more data is collected. 

GA4 Resources to Keep You Ahead of the Curve 

New to GA4 and ready to learn more about it? Check out our four-part blog training series to help you get started. 

1. What is GA4? [Updated for 2023]
2. GA4 Essentials: What You Need to Know About GA4 [Updated for 2023]
3. GA4 Essentials: Interpreting New Metrics in GA4 [Updated for 2023]
4. GA4 Essentials: How to Set Up Conversions in GA4 [Updated for 2023]

Don’t miss our exclusive LinkedIn Live, Unlocking the Power of GA4: Best Practices from Google and Conversion Logix! Danny and Liam are teaming up with our agency advisors from Google to give you an inside look into the new GA4 platform.

The post Ahead of the Curve – GA4: The Next Frontier of Marketing Analytics appeared first on Conversion Logix.

Ready to be the most informed multifamily marketer in the room? Read our hot takes as we rate our level of excitement over this year’s industry trends.

Artificial Intelligence

Chat GPT is one of the hottest topics technology topics this year. The platform has garnered millions of users overnight and is changed the way all industries are looking at AI. If you have used the platform, it is impressive in its ability to adapt its speaking style and information to a user query, going beyond what we are used to seeing from Google search. While moving faster than ever, we still have a ways to go before AI is super effective in the apartment marketing space. 

We have seen platforms like Google and Meta use AI for years to target online users, place bids on behalf of advertisers, and optimize campaigns. However, we are still seeing the need for human oversight of AI and human intervention when new information is presented.

What you need to know:

• Chat GPT is making AI a more high-profile initiative for tech companies.
• AI is rapidly improving and becoming more helpful but still requires human intervention to course correct and provide timely information. 

Short-Form Video​​​​

New research from HubSpot reveals short-form video to be the most popular trend among marketers, with 90% of marketers planning to increase or maintain their investment in the content format in 2023.

The popularity of TikTok played a large role in the growth of short-term video consumption and still continues to offer a big opportunity for marketers in the years to come.

New in 2023, is the growth in short-form video outside of TikTok. YouTube, owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, reported a huge rise in the adoption of YouTube Shorts. In a recent earnings call, the CEO of Alphabet announced that YouTube Shorts has surpassed 50 billion daily views, up from 30 billion one year ago. The company also announced ad funding for creators developing YouTube Shorts on the platform at the start of the year. 

What you need to know:

• Test TikTok if you want to scale brand awareness in 2023. Apartment brands, particularly properties geared towards college students, are seeing impressive brand reach statistics and search engine traffic gains from TikTok Ads.
• YouTube Shorts is gaining massive popularity and will provide ad revenue to creators in 2023.

Local Search Marketing

Google Business Profile is still the most common way for renters to discover you in the search engine, making this a continual focus for property marketers. In addition to updating your profile regularly and filling in all the fields you are allotted, what else are multifamily marketers doing to dominate local search results? Focusing on the basics of authority-building SEO strategies that support all aspects of search engine marketing and making strategic investments in Google Ads. While it’s certainly not a new strategy for 2023, it’s a foundational strategy that comes up every year and supports your overall marketing efforts. 

What you need to know:

• Google Profile losing optimization is crucial to your local search strategy.
• Communities investing in awareness campaigns like social advertising should maintain a strong local search presence so prospective renters can find them in the search engine when they come back to search for the brand.

Floorplan Specific Ad Campaigns ​​

We’re seeing communities shift from focusing solely on brand campaigns and overall community attributes to developing segmented and targeted strategies around promoting specific floorplans. With ad automation in the mix, this is now happening in real time. Another way marketers are doing new things with this strategy is virtual tour video content by floorplan and incorporating that in ad campaigns and linking ads to special floorplan offers that appear on the site. 

What you need to know:

• Floorplan marketing is more agile than ever with ad automation. 
• Communities are creating more floorplan-specific videos and incorporating them in ads and follow-up links in emails.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing, while popular in many B2C industries, has always been seen as hit or miss for the multifamily industry. We’re seeing a shift in focus from influencer marketing to UGC across all industries. While influencer marketing isn’t a top strategy we recommend, developing UGC content for video ads is something we are curious to explore with clients in 2023. We know prospective residents value authenticity, trust, and social proof in marketing. We just don’t see influencers as essential as a distribution channel. If you want to tap into the video creation side of outsourcing social media, we suggest looking for everyday people who can help you create new content while retaining control of the distribution through your own brand’s advertising channels.

What you need to know:

• Influencer marketing in multifamily is overrated.
• User-generated content that you can distribute across your own brand campaigns is trending.

Connected TV

Connected TV is a trend that all advertisers have been sleeping on. While traditional TV advertising has historically received a bad rap for being too expensive and vague in the way it targets and reports viewers, Connected TV advertising breaks these assumptions. These ad campaigns work more like Display ad campaigns than traditional TV and can enable you to target based on actual behavior and intent to rent. This channel tracks post-visits from people who saw an ad and then later searched and expands multifamily marketing beyond mobile, and provides cross-device opportunities to scale awareness. 

What you need to know:

• Young adults are streaming TV in addition to social media video consumption, and Connected TV advertising offers a path to reach them at scale.
• Increasing spend on Connected TV advertising has proven to have a significant impact on overall campaign performance.

Website Analytics Evolves ​​

All Google Analytics users will be forced to make the shift to Google Analytics 4 this year. With this new shift, we’ll see an increasing reliance on engagement metrics that look past bounce rate to judge the level of intent prospects have on your website. The new platform promises to deliver more mobile-focused website analytics and improves cross-device and platform tracking capabilities. They’ve also made new additions to multitouch attribution, filling in gaps with machine learning.

What You Need to Know:

• Website analytics will be more engagement-focused in 2023.
• Multitouch attribution is becoming a bigger topic as marketers seek to understand the impact of social media and video ad investments.

The post How We Rated 2023’s Multifamily Marketing Trends appeared first on Conversion Logix.

If you manage marketing initiatives for large-scale residential locations like apartments, senior living facilities, and student housing communities, you know how important yet challenging it can be to find and reach the right target audience for your brand.

Effective ad targeting can be a huge win for your team; reaching the best possible audience for each ad dollar spent can mean the difference between a profitable lead-generating campaign or a community with low traffic numbers struggling to convince lukewarm prospects to commit to a lease.

Today’s property management companies need reliable and strategic targeting capabilities that can account for the online and offline approach your target market is engaging in in a post-pandemic world.

To equip residential teams with this capability, we launched Precision Mobile Targeting (PMT) in 2018, a mobile advertising service that targets prospects as they visit a strategic mix of locations in a local area. This year we are excited to announce a new expansion to the service with PMT+. 

What’s New

PMT+ gives property management operators the ability to target prospects after they leave a target location, expanding the reach and effectiveness of their location-based targeting campaigns. The service operates like a retargeting campaign, but instead of serving ads after a prospect visits a website, it targets them after they visit a physical location.

Why Upgrade to PMT+

• Increase ad engagement. Conversion Logix clients using PMT+ experienced a 137% increase in CTR (click-through rates) on average compared to traditional PMT campaigns.
• Meet prospects where and when they will engage. Modern marketing requires meeting the prospect on their schedule. PMT+ expands the window of time you can market to your audience, increasing your chances of reaching prospects when they are most likely to engage with your brand.
• EHO-friendly hyper-targeting. Gain all of the benefits of strategic location targeting with none of the risks. Our team of digital marketing experts is trained to design EHO-friendly campaigns that convert.

Get Started With PMT+

If you are already a Conversion Logix client, you can launch your next PMT+ campaign within five business days. To add this strategy to your campaign, contact your Conversion Logix account manager.

New to Conversion Logix and interested in learning more about our PMT and PMT+ services? Visit this page to learn more or schedule a consultation with a strategic campaign advisor.

The post Conversion Logix® Expands Location-Based Targeting Service With PMT+ appeared first on Conversion Logix.

In this blog post, we shared a recap of the video trends these marketing leaders presented to help guide your video marketing strategy in the coming year.

#1 Show Don’t Tell

Video has become a popular entertainment, and educational tool for personal and professional uses as the format engages multiple senses and increases information retention among customers and employees.

In this discussion, Kristi shared the following eye-opening stat, “People retain 90-95% what comes from video vs. 10% from written content”. She went on to say, “if you are tired of prospective residents asking the same questions over and over again, show a video they will retain it better”. 

Andrew elaborated on this point by sharing that at Conversion Logix, video has become a go-to media format for clients to showcase their property and within the company between employees. He shared the effectiveness of sending videos within the organization to quickly communicate a point or demo instructions for a task, providing a reference that employees can go back to. 

#2 Authentic Video Engaging Prospects

With the popularity of video formats like TikTok and Instagram Stories, the demand for authentic video content is growing. When it comes to apartments, this means that apartment seekers are expecting real-life reflections of what a community is actually like.

Kristi advises property managers to gather behind-the-scenes content. While the everyday renter may not think about some of the things that go into getting an apartment ready to rent during their search, things like watching the carpets being cleaned, new paint, and unit upgrades could increase affinity for the community through video.

It’s also important to note that just because authenticity is on the rise, doesn’t mean low-quality visual content is. Andrew mentioned that it’s still important to create visually appealing video assets but to focus on the message, delivery, and content over high-production styling.

#3 Repurposing Video Marketing Assets to Extend Your Budget

Brands are extending the life of their video content by repurposing it. Prospects are demanding video in various formats and across many different channels. To keep up with this demand, communities can take video assets they are already developing, like virtual tour content, and reuse them across assets like their ads, emails, and social media channels, or as a lead generation opportunity. 

During the live event, Kristi shared a story of a community that pre-recorded video tours and pre-recorded videos of post-tour follow-up messages from the property manager. The community leveraged these authentic videos on multiple platforms and even tried testing the videos in ads. The result was a 300% ROI! Their team built awareness and trust by using the community’s staff and a personable approach to talking about the community.

#4 Accelerate the Sales Process

Using video in the tour process can save communities three times as much time. “The average tour lasts 14 minutes while the average in-person tour lasts 45-50 minutes”, says Kristi. Considering the staffing crisis the industry is experiencing, leveraging virtual tours to sell your community while in-person staff focuses on prospects further down the sales funnel is key. 

Andrew illustrated the importance of video in the prospect journey by sharing a recent Zillow study that found people used to tour five communities in person and are now only going to two. “The more we can meet people how they want, the better the experience. That way, the people on site are there because they want to be there versus they have to be there.”, says Andrew.

#5 Experimenting With Video Marketing

Creating video marketing content can feel intimidating for many operators which is why they don’t get started. In the live event, Kristi encouraged operators to get more comfortable on camera by doing it more often and putting themselves out there. “It’s ok to be vulnerable,” says Kristi. We are all learning and trying new things when it comes to video. The more you do it, the better you will be at it.

The speakers both shared the importance of testing new things with video to find out what resonates.

Andrew remarked, “what I think is going to work isn’t always right.” You don’t always know for sure what video content will grab people, especially with ads which is why A/B testing is so valuable. He went on to share a recent experience when he was analyzing the results of a multifamily video ad campaign. Everyone thought the video that was less polished and more off the cuff wouldn’t perform as well as the polished video. On the contrary, the less polished video outperformed the traditional style video ad two to one in conversions on the website. 

With the new technology built into ad platforms, video testing is more accessible than ever and is something everyone should try.

Bonus: AI-Generated Video Marketing Tips

At the end of their discussion, Andrew and Kristi tested out the trending AI platform ChatGPT to see if AI software had additional video marketing tips to share. The AI shared the following advice for operators and marketers working with video that was spot on.

Don’t Miss Our Next LinkedIn Live

Wish you had the chance to watch this discussion live? Follow Conversion Logix on LinkedIn to make sure you are the first to know when we have our next LinkedIn Live event.

The post 5 Video Marketing Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2023 appeared first on Conversion Logix.

Casting a “wide net” when marketing a lease-up may seem like the quickest way to reach your occupancy goals, but sometimes, narrowing the focus of your marketing efforts can yield better results. Recently, we partnered with a new development in Portland, Oregon, that had a below-average lease-up marketing budget but successfully hit full occupancy within twelve months. 

The secret to their success: investing in high-intent local traffic to maximize their budget and deliver qualified leads.

In this case study, we’ll walk you through the strategies our team activated to target local renters, build awareness, and generate enough leads to secure 100 leases within one year.

A Multichannel Local Marketing Strategy to Generate Leads

This community needed a strategic marketing campaign to fill a 286-unit lease-up with a moderate-sized media budget in Southeast Portland. Without a strong online presence in search engines or social channels, digital advertising offered the best way to scale the community’s reach within a short period. 

As with any lease-up, discoverability and brand awareness were critical to their success. To maximize their ability to be found and remembered, our team focused the client’s budget on local targeting strategies within a variety of channels to deliver multiple impressions to high-potential prospects.  

The Conversion Logix team drove brand awareness among apartment seekers through social and display advertising networks while capturing local search traffic through our Paid Search and Google Business Profile Accelerator services. 

The campaign generated 20,074 direct and post-view website sessions, proving the impact of a multichannel strategy. 

To ensure prospects remain engaged after visiting the site, we launched two applications (Spotlight and Schedule Genie) from our software suite, The Conversion Cloud® to promote concessions and automate tour scheduling. This approach resulted in 567 leads. With access to the community’s lead list and rent rolls, we were able to attribute 100 leases to the leads generated through The Conversion Cloud. 

The Advertising Strategy: A Detailed Look

Search Strategy

Our search experts developed a Paid Search campaign focused on local radius targeting and neighborhood keywords. The team also published weekly posts to the community’s Google Business Profile to increase the listing’s visibility in local map searches. 

Display Strategy

The Conversion Logix media team drove brand awareness through Display banner ads featuring the community location and images of the property. They paired this with a Display retargeting strategy that re-engaged previous website visitors to market to prospects throughout their leasing journey.

Social Strategy

Our social team launched a Facebook and Instagram ad campaign targeting local renters while promoting property photos, the community’s location, and unique selling points.

Converting Website Visitors into Leads: A Detailed Look 

To convert high-intent prospects into leads and tours, we launched two lead generation applications through the Conversion Cloud on the community’s website: Schedule Genie and Spotlight.

• Schedule Genie, a self-scheduling application to generate 305 tours
• Spotlight, a promotional application to highlight concessions adding, yielding 262 claimed offers

Key Takeaways

1. When facing a limited budget for a lease-up, search, social, display, and lead capture tools offer the best marketing mix. 
2. Campaigns targeting a local area drive conversions at a higher rate compared to regional or national targeting strategies.

Capitalizing on a multichannel strategy and incorporating lead-generating applications on your site can significantly increase your engagement and leads generated.

If you’re ready to adapt these strategies to your particular situation and accelerate your marketing, schedule a call with a campaign advisor today!

The post Portland Lease-Up Attributes 100 Leases to Local Targeting Strategy appeared first on Conversion Logix.

I’m sure this isn’t your first time hearing a marketer wax poetic about the benefits of reaching prospects on social media and “meeting your future residents where they are”. These platforms have forever changed media consumption habits making it a can’t-miss opportunity for marketers. 

As much as we love all social media, the inevitable day comes when the social fabric changes and everyone jumps ship to a new platform to reach their audience.

Today that ship is TikTok, and it’s become a megayacht transporting its users through a sea of personalized video content.

The short-form video-sharing app is most popular among young adults, with 43% of users ages 18-24 and 32% of users ages 25-34 (DataReportal, 2022), making it an incredible platform to reach students and young professionals.

Building up a presence on a new social media platform can feel daunting, and for many organizations, “going viral” isn’t a viable marketing strategy. If this is the case for your organization, the best strategy is to leverage TikTok through advertising. Unlike uploading organic video content to TikTok and hoping to “make it big”, TikTok advertising offers a targeted and scalable approach to reaching college students in the market for an apartment. 

Here are five reasons why we think student housing marketers should consider advertising on TikTok.

1. TikTok ads are immersive.

TikTok offers full-screen mobile video placements that can highlight the features and benefits of highly visual products like apartments. 

Whether you are sharing a video walkthrough of a unit, showcasing student social life, or a splash into the community pool, the vertical video format can bring your units and amenities to life across your prospects’ screens in a way that static images can’t match. 

This lifelike ad format makes TikTok ads more memorable, increasing brand recall. Across client campaigns, we saw lifts in organic and paid search results after running TikTok ad campaigns, indicating the stickiness of video-first branding strategies like TikTok.

2. TikTok has powerful targeting and AI capabilities. 

The platform has evolved in recent years from its initial focus on music and dance videos into an entertainment platform that caters to all types of interests and niche communities.

Today the platform is well known for its intelligent learning algorithm. It excels at determining which video content users are likely to respond to, which is why its “for-you-feed” is such a popular feature of the platform. 

As a TikTok advertiser, you gain access to a wide variety of interest-targeting options that ensure you reach your target market consistently. When creating student apartment ads, we were able to layer TikTok’s targeting strategies to build an audience of prospective renters looking for housing for a specific university, enabling us to reach the right audience for our clients.

3. TikTok users are more engaged.

The TikTok user base engages on the platform more than other social media sites, with 79% of users reading the comments and over half saving sound clips or searching hashtags (Nielsen). 

Even though the content is primarily video, users on the platform aren’t just passively scrolling through content. They are opening and reading comments, sharing content, and utilizing the search function to discover new content. 

4. TikTok prioritizes discovery.

The platform is unique in that it prioritizes discovery, presenting users with a wide variety of creators and content curated to their user behavior. A Nielsen study commissioned by TikTok found that 88% of TikTokers love discovering new content while using the app, and 52% of users say they discover new products through ads on TikTok.

Unlike other social networks, where users follow friends and expect to see most of their content from their followers, users are in a discovery mindset on the platform, making them more open to seeing content from new users and brands.

5. TikTok users are receptive to advertising on the app.

Over 80% of users say ads on TikTok are enjoyable (Kantar). 43% of heavy TikTok users feel that the advertising on the platform blends in well with the content, and 61% of users feel that advertising on TikTok is unique compared to other top social and video platforms (Nielsen).

Interested in bringing your brand to TikTok but don’t know where to begin? Learn more about Conversion Logix’s TikTok advertising service and how our team of social ad experts can get you started. 

The post Five Reasons Student Housing Should Advertise on TikTok appeared first on Conversion Logix.