by threshold | Feb 22, 2019 | General
Today’s Customer
In the ever-changing landscape of technology available to students, it can be hard to truly understand how today’s students’ are hearing about you, narrowing down their options and making their final selection. This makes developing leasing ideas for the student housing market especially challenging. Instead of driving around searching for “For Lease” signs in the front yard, students now have a plethora of options to locate, research and select a new home from the comfort of their own couch.
So the question now becomes, are you a part of their search for a new home or apartment? To ensure you are a part of this journey, we have broken down the major stages consumers go through when looking to find a new apartment rental and what digital services can enhance your apartment complex marketing ideas.
The Online Customer Journey
Awareness Phase: During the awareness phase our target audience speaks to peers, keeps an eye out for housing options and often times compares options to their current unit. They may be doing a few Google, map or other online searches to find available options in the area they would like to live in. Reviewing these properties at a glance, they are likely influenced by reviews and property ratings.
Key Tactics: SEM, SEO, Reputation Management, Social Media
Consideration Phase: When moving into the consideration phase of the customer journey, the student has a set of options to compare amenities, price points, location and online/peer reviews. If a parent is involved in the housing choice of the student, they will likely review these alongside the student and come to a decision together. The research for this phase is going to heavily rely on property websites to provide easily digestible information around amenities, pricing, and location along with online reviews to evaluate preview experiences of tenants.
During consideration, students will often visit and tour multiple properties before signing a final lease. This provides opportunities for the property staff to influence the experience and opinion, while email communication offers personalized and timely follow up messaging to stay top of mind.
Key Tactics: Website, Reputation Management, Social Media, Retargeting, Display, Geo-fencing, Email Nurture
Purchase Phase: During the purchase stage, the student has narrowed it down to 1 or 2 properties and begins the application process. This is typically completed either through the property’s website or in-person. When applying online applicants will be influenced by the online process and its ease or difficulty.
It’s possible for the student to apply to multiple properties, which creates an opportunity to stay top of mind through email outreach. This ensures they continue the process through to signing a lease.
Key Tactics: Website Functionality, Email Nurture
Service Phase: Congrats, you’ve added a new resident! The service phase covers their time as a resident and includes maintenance requests, staff interactions, payment experience, community events or surprise/delight moments as a resident.
Key Tactics: Email Nurture, Property Operations, Reputation Management, Social Media
Loyalty Phase: The loyalty phase is an ongoing process around finding moments in which the resident is a loyal customer. They express this by sharing their experiences through online channels of reputation management, surveys or their participation in loyalty programs.
Key Tactics: Social Media, Email Nurture, Reward Programs, Customer Surveys
Advocacy Phase: Advocacy begins at the end of the journey. This is often conducted as the resident is leaving the property through exit surveys, promoting online reviews and word of mouth after their experience.
Key Tactics: Reputation Management, Social Media, Email Nurture
How can you keep up?
The key to any customer journey is ensuring you understand and keep in touch with the consumer and their behaviors, especially when addressing the student audience. This research can be done by surveying your current customers or conducting focus groups. Each can deliver actionable information that may point to a new apartment marketing plan with digital channels, tactics, and services that you may be unaware of.
Whether it’s Google’s new map integrations with property websites or new reputation services, students are early adopters to many technologies and create new challenges every day to pinpoint the ideal channel to place your student housing marketing dollars.
The only guarantee when it comes to consumers is that change is inevitable, and that means we must be methodical in the frequent challenging of our real estate marketing plans to ensure they are accurate and evolve as needed.
by threshold | Feb 7, 2019 | General
2018 is in the rearview mirror, and it’s time to look ahead. How are you going to implement a real estate marketing plan that works for both your property and the tech-savvy renters that will sign your leases?
Before you get too far into your apartment marketing schedule, take note of these important marketing trends for 2019. If you’re not implementing these new marketing tactics, you might be falling one step behind the competition.
Let’s dive right into the list of apartment complex marketing ideas, so you can get back to work.
- Spring for 3D Floor Plans and Virtual Tours
Your floor plan page is one of the most important pages on your website. In fact, it’s usually the second-most viewed page on property websites behind only the amenities page. If a huge percentage of your website users are going straight to your floor plans page, it only makes sense to make that page as engaging as possible. 2D floor plans don’t cut it these days, not when your competitor has virtual tours available on their website.
- Don’t skimp on quality photos
High-quality imagery matters, and it’s useful across all your marketing channels. Consider your budget for high-quality photos before you engage a marketing agency. The more high-quality photos you have, the better your marketing materials will look. We’re not just talking about websites and brochures, either.
Your property’s Instagram page will benefit from high-quality imagery, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Facebook posts with quality images get more engagement. Digital ads do better when the feature pictures of amenities. Every piece of your marketing matrix will be more effective if you use up-to-date, high-quality photos instead of renderings or stale imagery.
- Zero in on hyper-local marketing
As marketers, we sometimes feel that we’re at the mercy of Google’s algorithm changes. The only way to build SEO, these days, is by staying up to date with algorithmic changes. One such change is Google’s preference for local search results. If you type “apartments” into Google right now, the results will feature apartment complexes closest to your current location. Even if you’re in a massive city like Houston, TX, the results will remain hyperlocal.
So, how should this affect your marketing strategy? It’s simple; make sure your local listings are up to date. We’re talking about your property’s Yelp page, its Facebook page and its Google My Business page. Take control of your local search results by verifying the info on these pages and responding to reviews. These local listings might show up ahead of your website on Google’s search results, so be sure to treat them like the customer-facing marketing materials that they are.
For more leasing ideas that can drive results for your property, get in touch with a Threshold team member today.
by threshold | Jan 10, 2019 | General
Twenty-seven stories. It’s hard to sell that twenty-seven stories of condominiums, especially in one of the most competitive real estate markets in Canada. One of Ontario’s largest high-rise condo developers came to us with this problem, and we solved it through distinctive branding and powerful apartment complex marketing ideas.
Located in downtown Kitchener and on the edge of the city’s stunning Victoria Park, this 27-story condominium would stand out visually whether we named it or not. Still, Threshold set out to attract certain kinds of buyers; young professionals and real estate investors. The high rise would need avant-garde branding that reflected the local art scene.
Turning a Condo into a Celebrity
One idea quickly emerged from brainstorm sessions as a winner; Charlie West. It would be a persona; a name that happened to be a nod to the building’s address on Charles St. West. Building on this persona, we created a campaign with actionable messages like – “Meet Charlie West.” The whole idea was to create a “celebrity” feeling around the new high-rise.
A buyer database that delivers results
Even the best marketing ideas for apartments are useless without a sound strategy. Our digital team quickly went to work getting the Charlie West persona in front of an audience that included real estate agents, brokers, investors and end users. Using Facebook ads and AdWords, we pushed our audience towards a landing page that collected leads and built a database of buyer info. Once the database was built, the digital team began sending out automated emails to do two things; provide registrants with updates and establish a relationship with prospective buyers.
The database built, Threshold went to work building out the physical sales center. That brand experience — which we’d worked so hard to create online — needed to extend to the real world. Through scale models, signage and touchscreen kiosks, we helped the sales team with their goal of closing the sale and hosting memorable events for people who’d registered online. The city was buzzing about Charlie West — the newest celebrity in town.
Sealing the deal with sales
When it came time to sell the condos, people came in droves. The sales event required entrance management due to the volume of attendees. Local media coverage drove even more buzz and awareness. In just four months, the digital marketing efforts delivered 1,000 quality leads. By the time the sales events were over, more than 80% of the condos were sold. That’s the power of celebrity.
Strong apartment marketing ideas can have this effect. If you’d like ideas that drive results for your property, get in touch with a Threshold team member today.
by threshold | Dec 20, 2018 | General
Reporting is massively important to maintaining client relationships, developing strategies and reaching client goals, especially as it pertains to marketing ideas for apartments. Reporting can seem like a daunting task when you consider the needs of clients and the sheer volume of data produced and consumed by modern agencies. However, that doesn’t mean reporting needs to consume an excessive amount of an agency’s time and resources. To help understand what makes for successful client reporting, we’ve put together a list of five critical factors that contribute to effective reporting strategies.
- Reporting must be timely
Reports should be issued on a consistent schedule that’s communicated ahead of time to clients. Clients may have internal reporting — which relies on data provided by the agency — and a consistent reporting schedule allows clients to better prepare for their own reporting. Reports should be issued as soon as possible after the end of the reporting period to ensure the relevance of the information. Delayed or inconsistent reporting can lead to missed opportunities and challenges when responding to changing conditions.
- Reporting must be consistent
Metrics and data can only be relied on when they’re consistent. Once key indicators are identified, they must be reported consistently. Any changes should be expressly disclosed through the reporting. If changes are made in the report but aren’t communicated clearly, you run the risk of a client walking away with an incomplete or even inaccurate understanding of the story you’re trying to tell.
- Reporting must be customizable
While some reporting can be automated, reporting must be responsive and capable of evolving to suit the changing needs and preferences of the client. Custom reporting is a necessity when the client has complex or unique needs. You might have to go through many iterations of a report before you reach a version that shows a complete picture. It can be frustrating to go through such an iterative process to make major changes to the report, but it’s necessary when clients are facing new challenges or implementing complex apartment complex marketing ideas.
- Reporting must be actionable
Provide suggested actions and tactics in the report that take advantage of opportunities exposed by the data. Reports should look forward while still showing historical data. Reporting should serve as a tool for establishing goals and strategies rather than just being a simple recap of past performance. A client should always walk away with an understanding of not only what actions you plan to take on their behalf, but also what actions they can take to help them reach their goals.
- Reporting must tell a story
Reporting that tells a story is the most important component of effective reporting, and should be the primary goal when establishing reporting processes. It’s your responsibility to provide the insight behind the metrics. The story behind the data is almost always more relevant than the data itself.
The factors that influence decisions — and the results of those decisions — are often qualitative and can’t be represented through data alone. The report should communicate how a client’s investment is paying off, and provide context for both failures and successes. Providing a detailed story of what’s working and what isn’t creates opportunities to work with the client to develop new strategies and refine current ones. Overall, the effectiveness of any reporting is reliant on a high quality and exhaustive narrative that ties together all the data.
Here at Threshold, we always report on the quantifiable success of our apartment marketing ideas. If you want to work with an agency that values transparency, get in touch with us today.
by threshold | Dec 6, 2018 | General
Every property manager hopes to fill their community as quickly as possible, but sometimes external factors put that goal out of reach. That was certainly the case for one community who came to us in need of apartment complex marketing ideas.
Alexan CityCentre is located in one of the most saturated markets in America — Houston, TX. Because of the incredibly high number of existing competitors, Alexan CityCentre wasn’t showing up on the first page of Google. It wasn’t showing up on the second page either, or the third, or the fourth. In fact, it was nearly impossible to find the Alexan CityCentre website unless you already knew the URL. You could type the property’s name in the search bar letter-for-letter and you wouldn’t be able to find the website until you reached the 4th page of search results.
As a result of the property’s lackluster SEO performance, Alexan CityCentre was 1% occupied and 3% leased when the owners came to Threshold/Carve in March of 2017. They needed help, and they needed it fast.
Canvassing the community with digital ads
The first order of business was to get the property’s digital marketing back on track with digital marketing ideas for apartments. Threshold/Carve launched search ads, retargeting ads and geo-targeted display ads for Alexan CityCentre. The geo-targeted ads were specifically targeted at competitor’s property’s; a strategic decision that was intended to encourage residents of other community’s to consider a new apartment. Supplemental digital marketing tools also included Waze ads to drive local foot traffic and Gmail ads to get the logo in front of potential customers.
Kickstarting the SEO strategy
Once those digital ads were up and running, it was time to kickstart the property’s SEO performance. After all, nobody is going to sign a lease at an apartment they can’t find. However, SEO takes a few months to go into effect because of the cumulative nature of Google’s search algorithm. That process can be sped up, however, with a branded search campaign. This branded campaign focused on getting the property’s website to show up even when potential residents misspelled the property’s name. The website’s click-through-rate went up, but conversions remained low because the website still needed to be conversion-optimized.
To address the conversion issue, the Threshold/Carve digital team created a landing page that provided potential residents with property information and a contact form. With these two new digital tools, Alexan CityCentre finally had a way to gather leads and drive conversions.
Digital marketing that drives results
So, what did all that digital marketing do for Alexan City Centre’s 1% occupancy rate? Within a year, it boosted that occupancy rate to 75%. The property was 3% leased when Threshold/Carve got involved, and 84% one year later.
Remember those conversion-optimizations we mentioned earlier? The new landing page and contact form helped Alexan CityCentre earn 178 conversions in April of 2018 after seeing just 3 conversion in December of 2017.
If you want results like this for your property — and who wouldn’t — get in touch with a Threshold/Carve team member today. We’ve got more apartment marketing ideas than we know what to do with, and we’re itching for the chance to put them to good use.
