by threshold | Jun 27, 2022 | Digital Marketing, Marketing, Tech/Web, Thought Leadership
For some, real estate marketing can feel like a shot in the dark; throwing money at separate tactics, crossing your fingers, and praying to whatever deity you believe in that people see your ads and there will be a line of a thousand future tenants at your leasing office’s doorstep the next morning.
Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be that way. A Business intelligence (BI) tool leverages technology to allow your team to collect, prepare, visualize, analyze, and present your performance data across all marketing channels. These insights help inform several types of business decisions, allows you to optimize your budget in the most efficient way possible, and improves marketing processes and outcomes.
So why should your business invest in a BI tool? Let’s go over the main benefits a little more in detail:
Identify trends and recognize opportunities
With a BI tool, you have the ability to splice, drill down and analyze large amounts of data at the few clicks of a button. This gives you full visibility into your marketing campaigns as well as allows you to derive external insights such as current events and the economy that may be affecting performance.
With regular analysis of both campaign performance and external factors, your team essentially creates a self-optimizing feedback loop that continually improves your campaigns over time.
Determine how to allocate spend
It’s hard to know how to allocate marketing spend when your current view of your data is limited by factors such as time, metrics, attribution, or visualization features that prohibit you from extracting valuable insights. When using BI for marketing, you can assess which tactics drove leads—both in quality and quantity—and which tactics didn’t.
When you assess which strategies were effective and which weren’t, you can optimize your investment by shifting your budget towards the most effective methods and away from those that underperformed.
Understand your audience
As you begin to collect more data and create more robust dashboards and reports, you will begin to get to really know the types of future tenants to go after with your marketing efforts. Using BI, you can begin to understand your audience’s demographic characteristics, their interests, the technologies and platforms they use, and so much more.
This will give you a better idea of what messaging and imagery to incorporate into your ads that will resonate with your target audience.
Improve internal efficiencies
Not only can you use business intelligence to make your marketing spend more efficient, but you can also use it to detect inefficiencies within your internal processes. Project management tools often provide limited insights into how your company is spending its time and what it’s spending it on. Once you pipe the data from your project management tool into your BI dashboard or report, you will be able to extract custom insights around inefficiencies within your internal processes. As you uncover and address more of these insights, your marketing processes will become more efficient, improving your overall return on marketing investment (ROMI).
An advantage over competitors
There’s a good chance that some of your competitors are already leveraging business intelligence to identify and target the same potential tenants that you are. Investing in BI will not only level the playing field but potentially surpass them as well as any competitors who haven’t yet made that investment.
Revenue growth
Ultimately, leveraging a BI tool helps you drive revenue and reach your leasing goals faster. As you make better decisions and continually improve your processes, you’ll see improved results from your marketing.
Now that you understand the benefits, it’s time to go out and implement your tool of choice. Looker, Tableau, PowerBI, and Domo are all tried and true options. No matter what the tool, you’ll want to identify your goals in using it, set up processes for collecting your data from various sources, and begin organizing it into dashboards and reports for your team to analyze. Business intelligence is an ongoing process. As you extract more interesting and valuable insights, your reporting and visualization needs may change and you will continue working through these steps and refining your techniques.
Congratulations, your team can now begin to make truly data-driven decisions. The insights that were once difficult, impossible, and/or time-consuming to gain are now readily available at your fingertips. Your team is now able to take action much much faster on valuable insights, increasing your ROMI and leasing up your property in a much faster and more efficient manner.
by threshold | Jun 14, 2022 | Digital Marketing, Marketing, Tech/Web
What role does email marketing play in your larger real estate marketing plan? What does your email nurture path look like? How effective is your email messaging and design?
If you’re unsure of the answer to some of these questions, you could be missing out on one of the most cost-effective digital marketing strategies available today. Although other digital tactics like search ads and SEO tend to get more of a spotlight, email is still one of the most effective ways to nurture leads without overspending.
There are a lot of advantages email marketing has over other areas of digital real estate marketing. For example, it excels as a retargeting strategy, keeping your property top-of-mind at various stages of a prospect’s housing search or reminding a current resident of all the reasons to renew. It’s also easy to track performance, with open, click-through, bounce, and unsubscribe rates all easily visible in any major email client. Plus, it reaches your audience whenever and wherever they are, with most people checking emails multiple times every single day.
If you’re looking for general email marketing tips, try starting with our post on Email Marketing for Apartments: Best Practices That Actually Earn Leases. That post will get you started with some of the core principles and tactics behind successful email marketing. If you’ve read that article and you’re ready for more email marketing ideas related to nurture paths, online reputation, improved analytics tracking, time-saving tactics, and more, then keep reading. These are the tips for you.
Set Up a VIP List or Waiting List
Setting up a VIP List for a new development that hasn’t begun leasing or a waitlist for your fully leased-up property is a great way to get more leads into your leasing funnel and get a headstart on leasing down the road. After all, email marketing is only as strong as your list of email addresses; you can’t make the most of this strategy if you have no one to send marketing emails to.
For VIP Lists, be sure to add a sign-up form to the landing page for you community and entice sign-ups by giving VIPs the chance to be the first to hear about development updates, availability, and special offers.
To implement a waitlist, consider adding a sign-up form on the floor plans page with messaging that directs users who are looking for currently unavailable floor plans to sign up for the waitlist to be notified when this floor plan is available. That way, once this floor plan has availability you can send their notification email and start them on a lead nurture campaign that includes info about special rates and other community perks to keep your community top of mind.
Define Your Email Nurture Path(s)
Speaking of nurture paths, do you already have an automated nurture path set up in your email client of choice? If not, you’re likely missing out on the full potential of email marketing. Even with a great CRM platform, it’s easy to lose track of all the individual touchpoints that add up to effective email marketing campaigns when you haven’t automated the process.
Creating an automated Customer Journey is possible in most leading email clients, including MailChimp and they’ll save you a lot of time and headache in the long run. Customer Journeys (what we’re calling Nurture Paths) help you create a customized series of emails depending on the behavior of your audience. For example, you can automatically send a welcome email with some basic information when a contact is added to your email list. Then, depending on whether they open that email, you can send different follow-up emails with targeted messaging to try to engage them further. Or, if they clicked a particular link within the email, you can set up an automated email to send them more information related to the link they clicked on. This way, you tailor your marketing messaging in accordance with each user’s individual priorities and needs.
One way to further specialize your customer journey (AKA nurture path) is to create tags for different types of leads coming in. For example, student housing communities might have tags for parents vs. students and senior apartments might have tags for seniors vs. their children while multifamily communities might create tags for resident referrals vs. leads generated by paid marketing strategies. That way, the only manual step you have to do is tagging each new contact that comes in wherever possible. Tags like these help you target your email content based on different segments of your audience and what is most important and relevant to them.
Send Timely Emails About Special Rates
When you implement a special, you want to make sure everyone knows about it. After all, a special rate can easily be the deciding factor in a prospect’s housing decision. Make your specials work harder by sharing them with your leads as soon as they are implemented.
Improve Your Online Reputation By Earning More Reviews
Prospects aren’t the only ones you should be marketing to. Email marketing can also be used to turn current residents into brand advocates. For example, a friendly email asking current residents to leave a review can help improve your online reputation and entice more future residents.
To increase the likelihood of positive reviews, consider the timing of this email. A good time to send review request emails might be after a maintenance request has been completed in a timely manner or after a successful resident event. You can also send tour follow-up emails after a prospect has taken a tour in order to thank them for coming, remind them of any specials, provide an application link, and prompt them to leave a review about their tour experience.
Get Better Insights By Using UTM Codes
UTM codes are added to the end of a URL so that Google Analytics can identify the source of a click more easily. Incorporating them in your emails can help you get more digital marketing insights to understand how your audience thinks and behaves. For example, with a UTM code in place, you can explore the user journey on your site when someone arrives after clicking an email. How many pages (and which ones) do they view after clicking in an email? Do they take certain actions when clicking through from one email more than another? What email content corresponds with more conversion actions? Implementing UTM codes in your email links can help you gain powerful insights like these.
Save Time With Ready-To-Send Email Templates
Designing an email that impresses prospects and stands out from the sea of other emails in their inbox isn’t easy. After all, the message is only part of the puzzle and a poorly designed email could even backfire by making you seem amateurish. But great design takes time and graphic design isn’t a skill most property managers have in their back pocket.
That’s there email templates can come in handy. Whether you create a template internally, buy one for cheap from a site like Threshify, or work directly with a real estate marketing agency to create ready-to-send email templates customized for your brand, using a template can save hours of time, saving you money and headache in the long run. Consider creating templates for everything from tour confirmations to rent reminders to maintenance request confirmations to review requests to rent renewal notifications. Remember, marketing shouldn’t stop after a resident moves in. Emails are a great way to improve resident experiences and earn more renewals, referrals, and positive reviews.
At Threshold, we regularly create ready-to-send email templates customized for seasonal events, leasing milestones like tours, move-ins, and lease renewal reminders, or ad hoc templates requested by clients. In fact, our templates are typically animated in order to increase email engagement and really wow prospects and residents alike. Ask your real estate marketing partner if they can create email templates like these for your community or reach out to us if you’d like to learn more about Threshold’s email marketing services.
by threshold | May 24, 2022 | Digital Marketing, Marketing
In the world of student apartment marketing, what you do during the spring and summer months can make all the difference in next year’s occupancy rates. If you’re struggling to fill your final beds for summer or fall semesters, this blog is for you. These digital marketing tips can help you get heads in beds fast.
Use Geofencing To Your Advantage
Know when your target audience is likely to be in town and take advantage of it with geofencing campaigns targeting specific locations. Housing fairs, new student or transfer student orientations, and community or leasing events open to the public are the perfect kinds of events to capture. Once you’ve captured your audience through this geofencing campaign, retarget them with tailored messaging to increase brand awareness, encourage tours, and increase foot traffic. Event retargeting allows you to connect more personally with the audience you captured because you know they attended a specific event for a specific reason and you have a solution to a need that they are looking to satisfy—a place to live.
Raise Your Ad Spend Now When It Matters Most
With most student housing properties, we see August move-in dates and May-July move-out dates, so don’t be afraid to spend your marketing budget in the spring when it matters most and you’re down to the wire to fill beds for summer or fall. Spend your budget on digital marketing tactics that will drive qualified traffic—like search ads—or increase brand awareness—like geotargeting or social ads. Speaking of social ads, don’t just stop at Facebook and Instagram. Think about TikTok and/or YouTube where a video component can go a long way to encourage online engagement. And don’t forget to implement a retargeting component to keep your brand top of mind as prospects continue shopping.
Scale your budget back when you’ve reached your leasing goals and maintain a presence online without breaking the bank. Then do it all again next year. Being flexible with your ad spend throughout the year helps maximize the impact of your ad budget by allowing you to solve for leasing challenges quickly or proactively get in front of them before they even become a challenge.
Strategically Expand Your Audience Targeting
Expand your audience targeting by creating custom audiences based on websites your audience may have visited such as a university housing page. Several tactics allow for customer matching or lookalike audiences. Use data that you already have collected to find similar users.
Refine Your Messaging to Earn More Qualified Traffic
What REALLY sets you apart from your competitors? Ask yourself the question, “Why would a student choose my property over our competitors?” Focus on one or two key differentiators in your ad messaging in order to tap into the segment of your student audience that really values what makes your community unique. For example, if your community is located right across from campus and your competitors are a mile away, focus on your location, using clever phrasing when you can. “Tired of taking the shuttle?” is a great way to get your point across in a playful way.
If you’re not sure what messaging to focus on, try listening to feedback from prospects and residents. What questions are they asking when they call you or visit your leasing office? What feedback have they given you about other properties they have visited in the area? What do they mention in positive reviews on your community? Notice any trends within the feedback and incorporate into your messaging where possible. Getting a lot of calls about pricing? Prominently display pricing in your ad copy and utilize price extensions in search. Getting a lot of questions about a specific floor plan layout? Create a carousel ad on social highlighting that floor plan, detailing the features, and incorporate some photos of that specific floor plan.
And don’t forget about the parents. Parents are still involved in housing decisions and are most likely paying the bills, so don’t leave them out. Your messaging can still be amenity focused and playful while still taking into account the things that are important to parents: all-inclusive living, fully furnished, privacy, etc. Just remember where your parent audience is. Most likely, parents are on Facebook while students are on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube. Remember to use multiple ads and select different placements so you can tailor your messaging for students and parents.
by threshold | May 17, 2022 | Creative, Design, Marketing, Thought Leadership
Written by Mike Krankota, Art Director
We’ve all been there: You have this magnificent idea, but you can’t get it out of your head and onto paper. Or perhaps you have grand hopes for a goal but are having trouble plotting out the concrete path to get there. Whether your project is visual, conceptual, or written, we all struggle with this process from time to time.
For clients working with agency partners, this creative block often manifests itself through statements like, “I’m not sure what I want, but I’ll know it when I see it,” a strategy that often leads to extensive trial and error that introduces added frustration for all involved. On the agency side, it can manifest in the form of hours spent staring at a screen until the imposter syndrome fully takes over and every idea feels equally terrible. In other words, creative blocks are no fun for anyone and often contribute to outcomes no one is satisfied with. So how do we combat them and break on through to the other side?
As an Art Director with many years of experience, I’d love to walk you through my process for dealing with creative blocks on the path to better real estate marketing (using a bit of good humor along the way).
Write Your Way Out of the Problem
The best advice I have ever received in my career—and one I pass on to my team—is that sometimes the messaging should steer the design and not the other way around. If you’re feeling like the idea isn’t quite there, often a great copywriter can pull it out of the trash with a magnificent tagline or bite-sized messaging idea that gets things going. Don’t be afraid to reach out for written inspiration to help get the gears moving again on your project. In lieu of external copywriting help, creating a word cloud of simple bulleted list of the big ideas you want to convey can also be a great place to start. You can also reach out to Threshold for help with your creative process! Our writers specialize in writing their way out of the problem and helping inspire messaging-driven content.
Walk Away For a Minute
A wonderful mentor advised me once to sometimes go walk a dog. Take care of your plants. If you must, mess about on social media or something. Just take that little break. Keep the thing in the back of your mind, let the ideas happen organically, and just see what comes up. It can be easier said than done (there is a certain inertia to overcome before getting away from your desk), but brains are excellent at working through challenges in the background and sometimes that’s the best path forward.
Personally, I rely on my garden and dogs for help with this. I didn’t acquire these things specifically for this purpose but they certainly don’t hurt. For others on the creative team, it might be pestering a cat, taking the trash out to the dumpster, or doing a crossword. Whatever your strategy, walking away from the desk is a fantastic way to consider, find, and explore new ideas.
Flip It Upside Down
So you’re looking at a possible idea. Say it’s a name. A logo. A website. But something isn’t quite right. What if you flip it all the way over to find new ideas? What is the opposite? And when you consider it, does it resonate? Is there a place to find a new perspective from flipping the idea and seeing the other side of it? Why or why not?
Often, our internal creative discussions start with “what if…” and that is why we succeed. Asking that question always leads to big ideas.
Sleep On It
This tactic is like “Walk Away For A Minute” taken up a notch. It works best when you’re partway through your creative process or have reached the end of a certain stage and can’t decide how to proceed to the next. In these cases, sometimes, the answer is to just muse for a moment. Again, your brain is great at working through things in the background, so sleeping on it (literally or figuratively) can really help you wrap your mind around a complex project or elusive strategy.
For example, at Threshold, we always encourage clients to give immediate ‘gut reaction’ feedback but also to think about it for a few days and offer additional thoughts after they’ve had time to sit with it. Sometimes, the presentation is what draws you. Or a color. Or a feeling. But ultimately, you need to make sure this is the right call for you and your company/property/startup/etc. and giving it some time can sometimes be the best way to get there.
That said, make sure the time you take is intentional and structure. Give yourself a deadline and think about the questions you need to answer in order to proceed. If you wake up the next morning and still like everything you saw, consider why. What appealed? Why did it resonate? How can we turn this into something that sells?
At Threshold, we are experts in this process, so we try to guide feedback based on our levels of experience. It’s a fun process, especially when timelines allow the opportunity to involve multiple stakeholders in the creative process to ensure the end result is something everyone feels invested in.
Phone a Friend
Sometimes, a single creative can do this. Often, it’s a group effort. “Hey, I have this idea, any thoughts,” is all it takes. Creative teams are naturally collaborative. We are stronger than each individual part, and the sum of a true team is far greater than you can imagine.
This is a strategy we use constantly as an agency team, but it applies to client teams too. If you can’t come to a consensus among those you collaborate with, it’s often wise to ask someone who understands the larger goals of the project. Their feedback, whether positive, negative, or neutral can help push past the half-baked concept and illuminate actionable steps toward a more perfect execution.
Threshold has a collaborative environment that demands that the best idea wins, regardless of who came up with it. At the same time, we pride ourselves on being a client partner who can work with everyone to make sure it’s a win all around. After all, if you can’t successfully champion the ‘why’ behind a particular strategy, there’s likely a better idea out there and working together is the best way to find it.
In Conclusion
Creative blocks and “I’ll know it when I see it” attitudes are a pain for both agency creatives and client-side stakeholders. But a holistic thought process and a willingness to collaborate can turn something that seems impossible into some of the biggest wins of your real estate marketing plan.
by threshold | May 10, 2022 | Creative, Design, Digital Marketing, Marketing, Tech/Web
Setting a new start community up for success is among the most complex projects you can undertake as a real estate developer or property manager. From branding and positioning to floor plan creation and event planning, the sheer number of marketing projects necessary to attract new residents and turn great construction into a successful community can quickly become overwhelming. That complexity is multiplied when you take into account the various touch points you’ll need along the way to translate a central brand identity across every digital and print asset, from websites to brochures to signage.
That’s why new start developers and asset managers often turn to full-service marketing agencies to help them navigate all the moving parts. A full-service agency is a marketing partner that covers the full array of digital, print, and strategic services that feed into a successful marketing plan for you property. Because new start developments are working from scratch to stand out among the competition and reach an untapped audience, working with a full-service partner is key. Spreading your marketing needs across multiple partners and vendors can compromise your strategic vision and dilute your brand identity, leading to less effective real estate marketing.
So what services should you look for in a real estate marketing partner? For new starts, here are the key services your marketing partner should be able to cover.
Research & Discovery
Any good real estate marketing plan begins with research and discovery. Skipping this step can be tempting if you are already familiar with your market (especially if you live locally yourself), but that’s never a good idea. Every new start enters a unique market defined by its precise location, existing competition, and ever-changing audience demographics and interests. That’s why we always recommend working with a marketing partner that will do their own research and discovery before launching into the branding process.
Although savvy developers usually conduct their own internal market research in order to design communities that will meet market demand, a marketing partner will cover additional nuances that help you activate a specific target audience and ensure your vision comes through loud and clear. While a developer might pay attention to rental rates, amenities, floor plan availability, and housing density in the area, a marketing partner might pay extra attention to competing brands, audience demographics, local history and culture, and other details that complete the picture of how your community can connect with new residents.
Naming & Branding
Without a cohesive naming and branding strategy, all marketing collateral suffers. You need a brand identity that is unique and recognizable so that potential renters have something to latch onto when comparing you to a sea of competitors. After all, details like amenities and floor plans matter when selecting a home, but what matters even more is how you tell the story of those advantages so that your audience takes the time to engage and learn more.
Telling this story begins with a suite of branding decisions that can be consistently applied across all collateral in order to amplify brand recognition and brand loyalty. That means naming, logo design, colors and patterns, typography, voice guidelines, and lifestyle imagery guidelines should all be established with your marketing partner, then codified into a comprehensive brand guidelines document so that future collateral builds upon the central brand identity.
Web Design & Development
In many cases, a landing page or full website is the first place your brand will come to life and get the chance to connect with your audience. Working with the same marketing partner on web design and development that you worked with for research, naming, and branding helps ensure that this crucial milestone fully realizes the brand identity you worked so hard to create. Few things can compromise an otherwise solid marketing plan more easily than a poorly executed website that is out of step with your larger marketing strategy.
Along the way, it’s also essential that your web designers and developers understand UX and SEO best practices so that your website isn’t just pretty and on-brand, but also pleasurable to use and easy to find so that your audience of potential renters can actually connect and take action. Make sure your marketing partner is well-versed in UX and SEO so that your websites and landing pages continue to pull their weight long after they’ve been launched. In fact, we recommend working with a real estate marketing partner that offers long-term hosting, management, optimizations, and periodic design refreshes on your site so that as trends change, you can stay ahead of the curve.
Print & Digital Asset Creation
In addition to website design and development, there is a wide array of digital and print assets that contribute to your brand efficacy and help your audience make their housing decision. Included in this category are assets like floor plans and site plans, virtual tours, photography and videography, brochures, flyers, business cards, and letterhead. Each of these separate touch points is a chance to amplify your brand identity and engage your audience. If executed poorly, they can have the opposite effect—diluting your brand identity and failing to connect with potential renters.
Once again, consistency is key when it comes to asset creation. Every asset should be an extension of your larger branding and marketing strategy in order to maximize ROI. Details like these can often go unnoticed unless they clash with your brand or otherwise fail to meet expectations, so they can sometimes become an afterthought for developers and property managers. A great marketing partner knows how important it is to get these details right so that everything fits seamlessly together.
Environmental Graphics
The real estate marketing funnel is increasingly digital, but environmental graphics still play a key roll in raising awareness, driving foot traffic, and creating great tour experiences. From construction banners and billboard graphics to temporary lease space design decked out with floor plan graphics, rendering graphics, and targeted messaging that speaks to your unique differentiators, your marketing partner should be able to help with it all. Meanwhile, permanent signage should also be carefully crafted to amplify your brand identity so that you’re never at risk of blending in among your local competitors.
Digital Marketing
As you work hard to complete your new development project, your digital marketing should be working just as hard to raise brand awareness, generate leads, and nurture those leads so that your efforts pay off with a swift lease-up. When it comes to digital marketing, you’ll benefit from having the same partner involved in your ad campaigns and email tactics that was present for the research & discovery, branding, and design projects along the way. This digital marketing partner is then better equipped to target your unique audience with the right message at the right time in the right place.
Promo & Swag
As you prepare for open houses, housing fairs, grand opening events, and move-ins, branded promotional items can go a long way in keeping your new community top of mind with prospects and delivering a great move-in experience that turns residents into brand advocates. Welcome kits, giveaway items, and event promo should be more than an afterthought; the right item outfitted with a unique design can be the difference between a memorable brand experience and a throwaway object that people quickly forget about.
If you’re still looking for a new start marketing partner who covers all these bases from discovery to promo, we’d love to chat! Threshold covers all this and more in order to deliver cohesive marketing strategies that build on one another to accelerate lease-ups and drive high ROI. Keep us in mind for your next new start project or use our chatbot, Trent, to schedule a no-strings consultation to learn more about what we do.
