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.

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.

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

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

Tap Into TikTok Ads

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

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

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

Target with Keywords in YouTube Ads Campaigns

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

Here are some best practices for YouTube advertising:

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

Get Ahead of the Competition and Advertise on Connected TV

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

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

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

Promote “Tour Your Way” Options in Ads

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

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

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

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

Make Your Ads Interactive

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

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

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

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

Develop A More Imaginative Approach to Your Advertising Strategy

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

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

Read these blogs next for more multifamily marketing inspiration.

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

For years, we’ve used Data-Driven Display (DDD) as a strategy to deliver multiple brand impressions in the customer journey, often pairing it with Display Retargeting to re-engage prospects.

To prove this tried-and-true strategy, we studied hundreds of client’s DDD and Display Retargeting campaigns to uncover the impact of keeping these ads in the market for longer periods of time.

The Research

Our product team studied the effect of combining both Data-Driven Display and Retargeting for different lengths of time by analyzing direct and post-view website traffic and conversions for ads that ran in the following timeframes:

Each cohort contained between 69-171 clients.

The Result

Traffic Levels Rise the Longer Display Ads Are in the Market

We compared traffic and conversions in 2022 between the cohort that ran a combined Display approach for 1-3 months vs. 10-12 months. 

The result, the cohort that ran these campaigns between 10-12 months saw a significant increase in site traffic and conversions over the clients who ran a combined Display campaign for 1-3 months.

Data-Driven Display and Retargeting Work Better Together

When comparing clients with only Display Retargeting vs. both Data-Driven Display and Retargeting, we found that clients who added two strategies experienced the following traffic lift:

The Takeaways

Display advertising can have lasting effects on your website traffic and conversions. Conversion Logix clients that ran Data-Driven Display and Display Retargeting for 10-12 months saw significantly higher traffic and conversion rates a year later. Clients who ran both Data-Driven Display and Retargeting campaigns saw much better results than clients who ran Display retargeting alone.

Display advertising can have lasting effects on your website traffic and conversions. 

Conversion Logix clients that ran Data-Driven Display and Display Retargeting for 10-12 months saw significantly higher traffic and conversion rates a year later. 

Clients who ran both Data-Driven Display and Retargeting campaigns saw much better results than clients who ran Display retargeting alone.

How to Apply These Insights

1. Pair Data-Driven Display and Retargeting as a joint strategy for a minimum of a year for best traffic growth.
2. Talk to a Conversion Logix digital marketing strategist to increase your website traffic and conversions.

The post A Dynamic Duo: The Long-Term Impact of a Combined Display Strategy 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.

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.

How Onsite Teams Can Leverage Lead Data to Personalize Outreach

Making prospective residents feel as if they’ve seen their future home is what the multifamily sales and marketing journey is all about. Understanding where prospects are in their journey then leveraging this information to customize their experience is critical to achieving a positive leasing experience. Use these strategies to engage prospects earlier in the journey and increase your lead-to-lease conversion rates.

Personalize Tours

One of the more obvious, and most effective ways to personalize the sales process is to use the insights collected from a lead to personalize the tour experience. If you discover that a prospect is interested in a one-bedroom, has a dog, and works from home, you can tailor the tour to focus on pet-friendly amenities and one-bedroom layouts with office space, increasing the chances the lead sees the community as a good fit.

Use Custom Fields on Autoresponders & Mass Emails

Automating the initial response when prospects schedule a tour or engage with a lead magnet ensures website leads receive an instant response. To make these auto-responders more personalized, you can set up custom fields that automatically populate a lead’s name, their tour date, or an offer they claimed. This enables your team to leverage automation to save time while delivering a customized response.

Another method for using custom fields to nurture leads is including personalization in mass email campaigns. Our multifamily email retargeting open rates consistently exceed the industry average when using first-name personalization in our subject lines (it’s our best-kept secret). By dynamically changing this field, you leverage the benefits of automation while catching the attention of the prospect and showing them you care about personalizing your follow-up.

Continue the Conversation Through Text 

Give your onsite team tools to access texts on their work computer and manage responses. Prospects are more likely to read texts than answer a call or read an email. Once a prospect opts in, your leasing team can use this medium to get faster responses from prospects and nurture them in the lead journey. If you share one platform to manage texts, you can share conversation history with other team members, ensuring the prospect receives a consistent experience. 

Contact Prospects Who Chatted on Your Website

Work with a technology provider that enables your onsite team easy access to reading live chat conversations to understand a prospect’s interests and objectives. Let’s say a prospect chats with a live chat service and asks if you have any two bedrooms available. If an onsite team member has access to chat records and the chat service captures their lead information, the onsite team can follow up via email or phone to let the prospect know when the floorplan they want is available. This creates a seamless experience for the prospect and increases your team’s chance of closing the deal.

Ideally, marketing and the onsite team can work together to develop a strategy that can increase the community’s lead to lease conversion rates. This starts with technology that collects lead data, records the prospect journey, and enables the community to analyze successful marketing activities. To learn how your team can leverage lead journey data to find high-quality leads, stay tuned for our upcoming blog post, “How To Use Lead Journey Data to Increase Lead Quality”.

Improving Your Lead Generation & Attribution with The Conversion Cloud

Give your marketing and sales team the technology they need to power personalized leasing experiences. The Conversion Cloud is a lead generation and attribution platform that helps marketers transform anonymous website visitors into actionable leads. Since 2018, the platform has generated over 600,000 leads across 800 businesses.

The post Creating Personalized Leasing Experiences: Part 2 appeared first on Conversion Logix.

Today, we’re going to tell you how a San Jose lease-up community signed 48 leases in three months using an integrated digital advertising and lead generation strategy.

Over the past ten years, Conversion Logix has partnered with the nation’s biggest property management companies to generate leads, tours, and leases online. During this time, we’ve seen communities face the same challenges:

• Capturing the attention of apartment seekers in a competitive digital landscape
• Converting anonymous website visitors into high-intent leads 
• Nurturing prospects lower in the funnel
• Attributing leads to leases

In this case study, we’ll walk you through the steps we took to help a new property exceed their lead-to-lease targets and generate enough high-intent leads to sign 48 leases in three months.

An Integrated Strategy to Generate High-Intent Leads

Building awareness of a new community is the first step to helping a lease-up reach their occupancy goals. However, relying entirely on top-of-the-funnel marketing strategies can leave communities with a top-heavy approach that doesn’t translate to generating fast leasing results for onsite teams. Instead, the best lease-up strategies combine awareness-focused media campaigns with lower-of-the-funnel retargeting and leverage lead generation technology to engage leads throughout their leasing journey. This is exactly what we did to help the community in this case study.

To build awareness of the community and drive website traffic to the site, our media team ran a comprehensive advertising campaign across Google, Facebook, Instagram, Display, and YouTube.

The campaigns successfully captured attention driving 17,088 prospects to the community’s website.

We added three modules from our lead generation and attribution platform, The Conversion Cloud®, to the community’s website to engage prospects and collect their lead information. 

Our team diligently monitored and optimized the campaigns to achieve these results within three months:

• 3,895 website conversions 
• 383 high-intent leads
• Using the MatchBack feature in The Conversion Cloud, the community matched 48 of the leads to leases
• A 12.53% lead-to-lease conversion rate

The Advertising Strategy: A Detailed Look

Search Strategy

Out of all of the community’s marketing channels, search marketing drove the most website visitors to their site and converted the greatest number of prospects into leads. Our team of Google Ads specialists targeted non-brand, location-specific search terms, and brand search terms to ensure the community displayed at the top of the search engine results for relevant searches.

Display Awareness Strategy 

We designed a customized set of banner ads for the community’s Display campaign promoting their convenient location in San Jose and encouraging in-market prospects to visit the community’s website to schedule a tour.

Social Awareness Strategy

Our Paid Social team launched a Facebook Ads campaign targeting local apartment dwellers with a Facebook and Instagram feed ad and an Instagram Stories video ad. Throughout the social ad campaigns, the community promoted their specials, location, and a virtual tour video ad to help the community fill vacancies for a specific floor plan. 

Our video advertising team enhanced the community’s social awareness strategy through a YouTube ad campaign targeting apartment seekers who searched Google for apartments in the San Jose area. We weaved together a virtual tour video of the community with image assets of the property to bring the community to life at a time when apartment seekers were cautious about visiting in person, making viewers feel as if they are walking through the property.

Retargeting Strategy

To re-engage prospects who visited the community’s site early in their leasing journey, our advertising team nurtured interested prospects with retargeting ads across Display networks, Facebook, and Instagram. This ensured the community stayed top-of-mind throughout their prospects’ leasing journey, ultimately increasing the number of leads that converted into leases.

Converting Website Visitors into Leads: A Detailed Look 

The community’s lead generation strategy was critical to attributing marketing activities to leases. The Conversion Cloud modules made it easy for prospects to engage with the community and take action.

• Schedule Genie®: Real-time availability to schedule tours on the community’s website resulted in 227 tours.  37 of those tours went on to lease at the community. 
• Concession Manager: By promoting “Up to 8 Weeks Free” and “Take a 1-Bd Tour Now” in our promotion module, our team was able to capture lead information for 147 additional prospects, driving 18 leases. 
• Live Chat: Our 24/7 live chat agents converted 60 chat conversations into leads ultimately resulting in eight new leases. 

Three Key Takeaways

We hope you found value in learning how this lease-up leveraged digital advertising and lead generation technology to create a successful marketing strategy.

The post San Jose Lease-Up Attributes 48 Leases in Three Months to Integrated Lead Strategy appeared first on Conversion Logix.

The senior living market comes with its own interesting set of challenges and opportunities. Since COVID impacted the industry in 2020, communities have had to change their strategic approach to marketing and sales. As a digital marketing agency with over ten years of senior living marketing experience, we know what it takes to promote a community online. In this guide, we’ll walk you through the marketing strategies we’ve used to help hundreds of senior living communities maintain their occupancy goals.

Create a Google Ads Campaign

Google keyword data reveals there are over 22,000 searches a month for “senior living communities” in the United States. Google has become an undeniable resource for families looking for senior care at all levels. If your community is brand new and just getting started with advertising, Google Ads is the best place to start. Google Ads has evolved to give advertisers powerful features that allow marketers to target senior living searchers by keyword, location, and likeliness to click on an ad or convert on a website.

Optimize Your Google Business Profile

Local searching has been on the rise over the past few years as more Google searchers utilize Google’s location tracking to identify businesses near them. There are, on average, over 49,000 Google searches a month for “senior living near me”. As you can see from the Google Ads keyword data below, monthly searches for local senior living options have increased dramatically from 2017 to 2021.

One of the best ways to capture this local search traffic is through a Google Business Profile (GBP), a free tool businesses can use to build up an online presence in Google. 

GBP listings are prioritized when Google users search for location-based searches, particularly on mobile devices. The listing presents your community’s name, location, imagery, and reviews.

Many communities miss opportunities to stand out in GBP listings. To get the most out of your profile, you’ll want to do the following: 

• Upload imagery and a video 
• Post offers, events, and announcements weekly using GBP Posts
• Link a self-scheduling tour option, and make sure you maintain up-to-date hours and contact information.

Promote Your Community with Facebook Ads

50% of U.S. adults 65 and older and 73% of adults ages 50-64 use Facebook (Pew Research). Facebook is one of the best places to promote a senior living community to both seniors and their adult children. While this platform is a great place to reach adults looking for senior care, posting to a Facebook page on a daily basis isn’t the best way to maximize your community’s reach. The average organic post on Facebook reaches only 5.2% of page followers in 2021 and yields a 0.25% engagement rate (Hootsuite). For this reason, Facebook Ads have become the best way to reach the prospects in-market for senior care.

Retarget Website Visitors with Display Ads

Because the buying cycle for senior living can vary, it’s a good idea for communities to incorporate a retargeting strategy. This allows you to remarket to prospects who searched for their community early in the buying cycle. One of the most cost-effective ways to do this is through display advertising. Display ads present banner ads to your target audience as they spend time on online publications like news sites and blogs. Retargeted display ads target prospects who visited your community’s website and present them with a banner designed to encourage them to come back to your community’s site and take the next step in the customer journey.

Target Senior Living Searchers with YouTube Video Ads

83% of 50 – 64-year-olds and 49% of 65+ adults watch YouTube (Pew Research), making it the second-best social media platform to promote your senior living community. One of the things that makes YouTube such a powerful ad platform is the fact that it is owned by Google. This allows advertisers to target Google searchers in the YouTube platform, making it possible for your community to promote video ads to a very specific audience with high purchase intent.

Build Brand Awareness with Connected TV

Another way to maximize your community’s reach across digital video platforms is connected TV advertising. Video ads on YouTube that are longer than 6 seconds are skippable by viewers on the platform. Connected TV, on the other hand, presents non-skippable video ads to viewers watching TV shows and movies across a huge range of online media channels. According to eMarketer, 51.5% of boomers in 2018 streamed or downloaded digital video content, and 47% of those ages 55 to 64 had a video subscription service in their household. The widespread use of video streaming among the boomer population makes connected TV ads a great channel to build brand awareness in senior communities.

Conclusion

We hope you found this guide helpful in creating a marketing plan for your senior living community. If you need further assistance in implementing digital advertising or adding lead generation technology to your website, schedule a call with a Conversion Logix senior living marketing specialist.

The post The Ultimate Guide to Senior Living Marketing appeared first on Conversion Logix.

Before you copy and paste last year’s marketing budget for 2022, make sure you aren’t missing out on opportunities to maximize your marketing dollars. Keep in mind these five tips when planning your marketing budget for 2022. 

1. Adjust for Seasonality

Plan to adjust your budget according to the time of the year apartment communities in your area have the greatest demand. Online searching for apartments picks up in early spring and peaks in late summer. Assign more of your budget to strategies like Google Ads and Retargeting when online searching is high. Searching activity and ad engagement drops in fall and winter and is at their lowest point in December. This is when you will need to build interest in your community. Allocate your awareness-building strategies like Facebook and Instagram Ads, YouTube Advertising, Display Banners, and Connected TV more budget in the months when demand is low. By adjusting your budget this way you will ensure your marketing investment goes towards the strategies that will deliver the best results each month of the year. 

2. Invest in Marketing Channels with High ROAS

Doubling down on the strategies that have brought you the best results last year is one of the best ways to maximize your marketing budget. The key is to find the things that worked last year and are still likely to bring you strong results in the following year. Right now Google and Facebook are dominating the ad market. Ads on these platforms are giving advertisers the best conversion rates. These platforms have massive amounts of user behavior data and their users have become comfortable engaging with ads. Google owns YouTube and Facebook owns Instagram, giving these two ad platforms the best mix of search and social networks to target apartment seekers online. What makes these platforms superior at advertising? Large audiences, accurate and detailed targeting, built-in conversion optimization tools, and a growing list of ad placement and ad formats. Make sure you are investing in these strategies as the foundation of your campaign budget in 2022. 

3. Consider Your Market Position

One of the common pitfalls marketers face when planning a marketing budget is not taking into consideration the community’s market position relative to the local area. If a community’s rates are above the market or if it doesn’t have comparable amenities, design, and location to other properties nearby it’s going to take more marketing dollars to overcome a lower conversion rate. If you are budgeting for a community in this situation, factor in the costs of reaching a larger audience and promoting concessions through multiple marketing channels.

4. Budget in Video

Video content opens up opportunities to reach apartment seekers in new channels and create engagement in the ones you are already marketing in. Investing in video creation, editing, and media buying can help a community reach its leasing goals faster and provide a greater ROI with each ad dollar spent. If the community you are marketing has had trouble getting started with video in the past look for low-cost opportunities to maximize the assets you already have. Get creative with low-cost editing solutions to create videos you can leverage across ad networks. Create 6, 15 and, 30-second video assets from community imagery, recorded apartment tours, and social media content. If you have more to invest, shoot and edit footage for multiple videos so you can change out your video ad content each month.

5. Ensure Lead Capture

If your website isn’t leveraging lead capture technology to convert website visitors into sales opportunities your ad investment won’t go very far in generating leases. Investing in advertising without a lead generation strategy is like filling water in a leaky bucket. Technology that keeps visitors on your site and gives them a reason to give you their contact information is essential to maximizing your ad investment. Self-scheduled tours, limited-time offers, live chat, and click-to-text features are ways you can utilize today’s lead capture technology to convert your hard-earned website visitors into leads, tours, and leases.

Conclusion 

We hope these tips will help you create a realistic plan for your marketing investment in 2022. If you want more guidance on creating a marketing budget for next year or are in the process of looking for a digital marketing vendor, feel free to schedule a call, and a Conversion Logix multifamily marketing expert will help you get started.

The post 5 Tips for Creating a Multifamily Marketing Budget for 2022 appeared first on Conversion Logix.