by threshold | Aug 17, 2018 | General
Threshold/Carve has made its first appearance on the Inc. 5000 list, coming in at 1,158! We’re incredibly proud of the team members and partners that have helped Threshold/Carve make its inaugural appearance in the top 25% of the Inc. 5000 — the most prestigious ranking of America’s fastest-growing private companies.
Threshold/Carve was born in 2013 with the goal of helping property management companies develop their apartment marketing ideas, and now ranks among America’s fastest growing companies. This appearance on the Inc. 5000 list comes just one year after Threshold/Carve was recognized by the Austin Business Journal as the fifth fastest-growing company of our size in Central Texas.
It’s been another tremendous year of growth for THC, and we’re pouring resources into new services and new people to help our clients achieve new levels of success. In the past few months alone, Threshold/Carve has added seven new team members. We have new faces in both Waterloo, ON and Austin, TX and as a result, we’re already launching new initiatives and developing innovative marketing ideas for apartments.
Our digital department is more robust than ever, and we’re upgrading our proprietary reporting software, ThreshBOARD, to keep up with the demand from over 300 client properties in North America. It’s an extremely exciting time for both the company and our clients.
As we expand our presence in both the Canadian market and in the United States, we’ll continue to base our success on our clients’ success. If there’s one thing we’ve learned in the past five years, it’s that we are defined not just by our own growth and the success of our apartment marketing ideas, but also by the growth and continued success of our clients.
Our chief executive officer, Billy Wilkinson said it best, “Honors like the Inc. 5000 demonstrate how our emphasis on driving results for our clients is paying off. We look forward to continued growth and success in the coming years and thank our clients and partners who continue to support us.”
To all our amazing clients; thank you for helping us achieve this tremendous growth in such a short period of time. To everyone else, stay tuned for more!
by threshold | Aug 9, 2018 | General
Question: What’s more important than coming up with effective apartment marketing ideas?
Answer: Understanding why the ideas are effective.
It’s one thing to create an effective marketing system, but only by understanding the intricacies of that system will you be able to replicate it time and time again. With that in mind, let’s look at the numbers to see why location-based advertising is one of the most effective digital marketing systems in use today.
It all starts with the phone in your pocket. That sleek metallic object is barely even a phone anymore; It’s a computer; It’s a camera; It’s a GPS system. That last attribute is what makes your phone the perfect advertising tool, and it’s why location-based advertising is such an effective digital marketing method.
We’re here to tell you why location-based advertising is effective, why marketing dollars go further when they’re spent on location-based advertising, and why it’s one of the best digital marketing ideas for apartments.
The most important aspect of any marketing campaign is getting your message in front of the right people.
Think back to the last time you took a cross-country road trip. While driving, you probably saw multiple billboards that told you to, “Take a Left in 5 Miles,” or “Exit Now.” Gas stations and fast food restaurants pay big money for these billboards because they know their message will get to their target audience; people on the highway.
The same principle applies to location-based advertising. Instead of a billboard, however, the ads show up on smartphones — reaching audiences on the devices they use most often.
You don’t need statistics to tell you that people like to use their phones, but consider these two bits of info:
90% of US mobile users keep their phone’s location services turned on.
47% of consumers would shop somewhere that offered promotions when they’re nearby.
Almost everyone allows advertisers to see their location, and half the population says location-based ads would be effective. Still, just 22% of businesses are taking full advantage of location-based advertising. Businesses that do take advantage will find themselves one step ahead of competitors.
Apartment complexes are unique in their ability to use geotargeted ads because location is everything in the residential industry. One way properties can take advantage of location-based advertising is by using the ads to promote “Tour & Sign” or “Look & Lease” specials. Everyone who sees the ad will already be within a couple blocks of the leasing office, making it easy for them to take advantage of the offer.
Location-based advertising is still fairly new, so it’s still possible to leverage this new technology before your competitors. Time is running out, however, and businesses are catching on.
The mobile location-based advertising market was a $16 billion industry in 2017, and is expected to reach $30 billion by 2020.
Let’s get your property started on the location-based advertising path before the competition catches wind of it. We recommend using geotargeting and geofencing for property events, housing fairs, promotions and more! Reach out to a Threshold/Carve team member today for a customized quote and more apartment complex marketing ideas.
by threshold | Jul 29, 2018 | General
Before there was Yelp, or Facebook, or Google Reviews, there was word-of-mouth. While people sometimes talked about their positive experiences with businesses, they usually just complained about the negative ones. When businesses got a bad rap, there was little owners could do except try to provide better customer service.
Some people still listen to word-of-mouth reviews, but far more people use online reviews to decide whether or not to visit a business.
90%of consumers read reviews before visiting a business, which means 90% of consumers begin to form an opinion on your business before they ever make a call or visit an office. The truth is, it doesn’t matter how good your apartment marketing ideas are if your apartment community has a bad rating on Yelp.
It’s important to understand that reviews affect more than just your reputation. Businesses with more reviews rank higher on Google, and reviews can actually affect much as 10% of your overall SEO score.
With so many review sites and reviews out there, it might seem like you have no control over your business’ reputation. That couldn’t be farther from the truth, however, thanks to a popular service we call Reputation Management.
Reputation Management is both Reactive and Proactive
It’s easy to show that you care when a customer has a less-than-stellar experience. Your business’ Yelp page could be filled with negative reviews, but if you respond to them all and show that you’re taking steps to take care of these customers, people will notice. You can also encourage more people to post positive reviews by responding and showing them how much you appreciate their input.
Reputation Management is one-part responding to reviews and one-part gathering reviews. The second part is just as important as the first, and it’s one of the most effective apartment complex marketing ideas you can implement. If you want positive reviews, you have to go out and get them.
72% of consumers only take action after seeing a positive review, and 68% of consumers trust a local business more if they have positive reviews. We recommend asking for reviews in person and at the end of every promotional. It’s all about making it easy for the customer to leave a quick review.
The best way to manage your reputation is to be both reactive and proactive. You can react to reviews— both positive and negative — by posting thoughtful responses so new customers see that you care. You can proactively gather positive reviews by asking for them in emails and in person.
Now that you understand how important it is to manage your business’ reputation, you can learn how to do it!
Review Response Do’s and Don’ts
For negative reviews:
Do respond with facts
Do apologize
Do offer a solution
Don’t pick a fight
Don’t ask the person to remove their review
Don’t threaten the reviewer with litigation
Hopefully, you see far more positive reviews. Here are some do’s and a don’t for managing those:
Do respond right away.
Do mention specific things about the reviewer’s experience
Do thank the reviewer for any recommendations they provide.
Don’t offer rewards or incentives for positive reviews
Here at Threshold/Carve, we recommend reactive and proactive reputation management. By responding to reviews with facts, you can limit the damage. By asking for reviews and gathering positive results, you can promote the parts of your business that people love. If you need help managing your business’ reputation or coming up with more marketing ideas for apartments, don’t hesitate to shoot us an email or give us a call.
by threshold | Jul 26, 2018 | General
This post is part of our Guest Blog Series, and was written by Brittany — one of our Client Success Managers.
Does your website have strategy behind it’s design? Do you use multiple pages to track user behavior and keep customers in the sales funnel? If not, we’ve got some digital marketing ideas for apartments that can help you catch up with cutting edge web practices.
Let’s talk about landing pages.
What is a landing page?
A landing page is a simple web page that contains basic information users need to make a decision on an action. Users generally arrive on the landing page by clicking on an ad. The page usually contains photos, copy that matches the ad, a call-to-action, and a contact form. The goal of a landing page is to control the user’s journey in order to get to a desired outcome.
Why do you need one for your digital campaign?
Think about your website for a moment. Think about all of the tabs in the navigation and all of the copy on each page. Now think about your digital ads. They probably say something like “3 months free on luxury Houston apartments!” If someone clicks your ad and is taken to a website that’s rich with copy and calls-to-action, do you think they’ll take the time to click around and find the hidden information about the current special? Most likely not.
The user may have only clicked the ad because the special caught their eye, not because they were in the mood to search for apartments. We only have a few seconds to keep users engaged, which is why most property websites have high bounce rates.
Landing pages typically just include the info users needs to make a decision, and they’ve got the same exact special and keyword groups that you used in your digital ads, which affirms that the user is in the right place. They should also contain the simple information the user is looking for such as property photos, location map, standout amenities, floor plan examples, prominent calls-to-action, and most importantly, a contact form. Contact forms should make it as easy as possible for the user to get in touch with your on-site team. We recommend asking for the name, email address and optional message box. That’s it. Sometimes, you don’t need to come up with inventive apartment marketing ideas; you just need your on-site team to win over the user with their stellar sales skills.
Need more proof? The numbers speak for themselves.
We have numerous clients in the Houston area with beautiful properties and amazing leasing teams. However, one particular Houston client was struggling to get prospects in the door. We helped them launch a digital campaign complete with search and display ads, as well as geofencing, Gmail and Waze ads. Though their clicks were high, they struggled with conversions because of the amount of information on their website. In December, they had 1,293 clicks and only 3 conversions. Our solution for conversions was to create a landing page that would provide users with the information they need and allow them to quickly get in touch with the property through a contact form.
We launched the landing page in January, and they saw 149 conversions in February and 178 conversions in April!
Make it happen for your property
We love helping our clients achieve their leasing goals by using landing pages to deliver warm leads. We can create custom landing pages that match your branding, or if your budget is tight, we also have template options! Feel free to shoot us an email or give us a call today to get more custom apartment complex marketing ideas.
by threshold | Jul 12, 2018 | General
Take a moment and picture your business’ website. In your head, is it appearing on a phone or a laptop?
We’re used to thinking of desktop as the default, but the truth is that two-thirds of website traffic happens on smartphones — not laptops. We keep these kinds of trends in mind when coming up with digital marketing ideas for apartments, and that how we keep clients one step ahead.
Everyone knows that their website should to be “optimized for mobile,” but what does that mean, exactly?
Mobile optimization is about more than just making the buttons bigger; it’s about reimagining your website’s layout so that it works the way smartphone users want it to work.
We pulled the data behind our most popular student housing websites and discovered some interesting insights. When you examine data, you come up with better apartment marketing ideas — and that’s exactly what we’ve done below!
- The bounce-rate for mobile sites is much higher than for desktop sites, and users view more pages per session when using the desktop site.
- For both mobile and desktop, the most-viewed page is almost always the Floor Plans Page. However, the formats had different results when we looked at the longest-viewed pages…
- When comparing the amount of time users spent on the most-viewed pages on mobile and desktop, we found people are actually willing to spend more time on mobile pages.
We can make adjustments to our mobile website layouts by taking this user behavior into consideration.
Here are five things we know, and five things we can do differently based on this information:
Bounce Rate: Higher on mobile sites
Mobile sites have a shorter window of opportunity to hook users than desktop sites do. Whatever you’re going to say, you better do it quick.
Pages Per Session: Lower on mobile sites
People visit fewer pages on mobile, so mobile sites should pack more info into each page.
Time Spent on Longest-Viewed Page: Higher on mobile sites
People are looking for specific information on mobile sites — we should make it easy for people to get straight to the information they came for.
Gallery and Amenities are the longest-viewed pages on mobile
Floorplans aren’t easy to view on mobile devices, so people check out the perks and the images instead, perhaps sharing those pages with friends. Mobile websites should feature high-quality images and limit the amount of detailed floor plans.
Floor Plans and Parents are the longest viewed pages on desktop
While the longest-viewed pages on mobile sites are more superficial, the longest-viewed pages on desktop are related to deeper levels of the buying cycle. We know parents are more likely to use desktop websites, so we can gear mobile sites towards students.
We’ve got troves of data behind the websites and digital ads we make every day. When we take a moment to unpack the data, we can reset our strategies and originate new apartment complex marketing ideas. If you’d like your marketing to be driven by data, feel free to reach out.
