Here at the Anti-Vacancy Agency, we understand that housing fair season can be a stressful time for property managers and their staff. That’s why we filmed this short VLOG to reveal some of our favorite tips for marketing to students at campus housing fairs.
Watch the video below and don’t forget, Shop Threshold can supply your property with all the promo items you need to bring your student housing marketing ideas to life at your next event!
Why Combining Content Marketing and PR Strategies Is a Good Idea
To achieve business success in today’s digital environment, it’s always best to have content marketing and public relations help on staff.
Until very recently, both teams had similar agendas, yet worked separately from one another.
Things are very different now and content marketing and PR teams now seem to be working together more and more. Especially since most are remote workers, it’s easy for them to work together on modern approaches.
This makes sense since they both work in a similar fashion to achieve additional exposure online.
Each one of these teams can deliver the goods as far as online exposure is concerned. But when they work together, their efforts are magnified and together they achieve much greater heights.
Are you thinking about integrating your PR and content marketing teams?
We feel this is a no-brainer, but maybe you haven’t come to the same conclusion.
To help you better understand why these team should always work together from now on, we will share a few different reasons to help you finally see the light.
Putting Everyone’s Head Together Makes Idea Generation a Snap
Whether you’re trying to gain media attention for a hot new restaurant, an app, or a website focused on tech solutions, it’s never easy to come up with story placement ideas that meet the latest trends.
Separately, both of these teams had to find out precisely what bloggers and journalists wanted to publish online. And they also had to discover precisely what their target audience wanted to know more about.
Working together, both teams have the ability to stay far ahead of the curve. They can brainstorm ideas together, research together, and ultimately get better publication placements by working together as a group.
As each team figures out what to expect with placements, the content marketing side will achieve better results because they will target their audience correctly and share relevant content that everyone wants to read.
PR teams will also improve by working with content marketers because they can use all resources to find better placements, better story ideas, and keep the brand message consistent at all times.
Working Together Helps Amplify the Reach of Your Content
Content marketing is specifically focused on creating blog posts, webinars, articles, and other brand identification materials.
On the other hand, public relations work well because they have personal connections with the biggest influencers in your market.
By utilizing these connections, they can get better story placements and additional exposure during product launches and other times when they need an extra boost.
The combination of both of these teams creates an influential and powerful way to touch base with your target market. With every successful product launch they will be able to repeat the successes in a new mission.
But there is one other amazing benefit that you get when you combine PR and content marketing.
Sure, you’ll definitely find your target audience a lot faster. And that’s a great thing that everyone should strive for.
Guess what?
Combining PR and content marketing also makes it possible to reach a new, broader, hungrier audience as well.
Most companies are already investing in PR and content marketing.
By combining both of these avenues of outreach, you’ll have a better chance at increasing your ROI since both teams are already working toward the same objective.
Achieving Brand Message Consistency
Finally, having your PR and content marketing team working together means your brand message is always going to be on the same page.
Why is that?
Well, both teams always know what the other is doing.
By having access to this information, they can share similar stories and focus their content in a similar way so that their message is clear at all times.
Conclusion
As you can see, having content marketing and PR teams working together is definitely a great idea. If you haven’t tried it yet, you should give it a shot and see the amazing results for yourself.
Author Bio
Wendy Dessler
Title: Super-Connector at OutreachMama
Wendy is a super-connector with OutreachMama and Towering SEO who helps businesses find their audience online through outreach, partnerships, and networking. She frequently writes about the latest advancements in digital marketing and focuses her efforts on developing customized blogger outreach plans depending on the industry and competition.
We’re all busy trying to fill vacancies, right? Let’s jump right into it then. These are the questions you should be asking yourself to see if your apartment digital marketing is working.
1. You may have followers, but are you getting engagement on social media?
An engaging social media post usually ends with some kind of call to action. It can be as simple as “comment below” or as complex as “like, follow and share to enter.” There are a few ways to engage through social media posts, although some require more effort than others. The easiest way to get your followers to engage with your social content is by promoting a contest. Whether you’re giving away something expensive like a TV or something simple like a Starbucks gift card, you should ask your followers to like, comment and share your post to enter. By encouraging all three actions, you get the most possible engagement out of each follower. Of course, you don’t have to give away TVs to get engagement. You can also do something simple like post a trivia question and ask people to comment their answer.
So why does engagement matter? Because engagement is a great way to measure the effectiveness of marketing to millennials. When Person A has friends who like and comment on your post, that post will show up on Person A’s feed, even if Person A doesn’t follow your page.
2. How much are you paying for each lead you generate?
Cost-per-lead is an important metric to monitor because it reveals your residential marketing ROI. You pay for marketing so you get leads to drive revenue. But do you know how much you’re paying for each lead? All you have to do is divide the cost of each marketing method by the number of leads generated directly by that method.
Here’s why digital marketing is so important: Even though digital marketing costs less than printing flyers or running a magazine ad, digital is able to reach more people than those methods and thus generate more leads.
It’s not easy to track each lead back to the marketing method that brought the lead into your leasing office, but if you can, you’ll be able to accurately measure your marketing ROI.
3. Is your website getting new visitors, and if so, where are they coming from?
It’s easy to get sucked into the idea that a high number of visitors to your website indicates success. In fact, you should be looking at the number of new visitors that find your site each month. If that number’s high, you’re doing well.
Next, try to find out where those new visitors are coming from. Is it your social media page? Organic search? If they’re coming from Google, that means your keyword optimization is working, and people are beginning to see your site in search results. If they’re coming from social media, that means your content is engaging, and its being shared so it can reach users who’ve never heard of your property.
4. Does your site have a high bounce rate, and if so, why?
Your bounce rate is the rate at which people come to your site then leave without clicking any other page. High bounce rates can be a result of ineffective homepage strategy. A good homepage should reveal just enough information so that the user is tempted to click on other pages, but not so much information that the user gets what they want and leaves.
Creating a blog page is a good way to combat a high bounce rates. It’s true, blogs are good for more than just SEO. Putting a link to your blog on your homepage gives visitors a reason to click around. Once they arrive at your blog page, they should find more links —embedded in the blog— to guide them to different parts of the site. It’s all about keeping users on your site until they convert.
Follow Threshold on social media for more creative marketing ideas for apartments, courtesy of the Anti-Vacancy Agency.
Name: Haley McCarley
Title: Digital Marketing Specialist
Haley takes apartment marketing ideas and turns them into dynamic social media campaigns, effective PPC ads and a whole lot more. Her student housing marketing knowledge helps the entire digital team get a leg up on the competition, keeping CTRs high and spirits even higher.
Get to know Haley below!
What are 3 words you would use to describe Threshold?
Organized, Excited, Inventive
If you had an office nickname, what would it be?
“The lone female on the digital team”
What is your favorite line from a movie?
“Remember Red, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”
If you were stuck on an island, what three things would you bring?
Paddleboard, Dos Equis, and The Harry Potter series
What is the title of your autobiography?
How Haley Got Her Groove Back
What is/would be your motto or slogan?
Hook ’em horns m/
If you had a superpower, what would it be?
Flying, so I wouldn’t ever have to drive or park in Austin again
What is your hidden talent?
I am pretty awesome at doing makeup, even though I rarely wear it ;P
If you were famous, what would it be for?
Longest Netflix binge in the world
Favorite Austin eats?
Homeslice Pizza and Hopdoddy Burger Bar
The first challenge for any senior living marketing team is to make sure their target audience finds their property. Whether that’s online or through word of mouth, it doesn’t matter so long as you’re getting in front of both the potential residents and their children, as both end up playing a role in the decision making process.
Unlike with multifamily marketing or student housing marketing, senior housing marketing requires convincing decision makers that your community can play the role of both host and caretaker. A fancy apartment is great, but the community must also display an understanding of the senior’s individual needs. That’s not to say senior living industry doesn’t follow the “luxury amenities” trend. Just take a look at the luxury amenities available in some assisted living communities.
Some of the communities we work with go as far as to offer Smart Home technologies, giving seniors the ability to turn off lights, adjust thermostats and even close their blinds without ever having to get up.
Memory Care is another emerging area that some communities are really beginning to focus on. Some high end senior living complexes use sight and smell therapy to revive their residents’ memories. By decorating with carefully selected objects and styles from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, community caretakers are able to continuously take seniors on trips down memory lane. Care providers are finding this to be an extremely effective way to to enhance their residents’ memories.
This nostalgia-based approach has been shown to take the stress out of memory care for seniors. Its a more passive approach to memory improvement. Instead of framing memory care as a sort of class where seniors have to work hard to improve their minds, this approach integrated memory care into everyday life. Besides room decor, certain kinds of music can be another form of memory care.
Some of our senior living clients actually partner with a group called Music and Memory, which provides seniors with iPods that contain preloaded, personalized playlists. The music can tap into deep, long forgotten memories that have not yet been lost to dementia. In some instances, it can even bring back certain parts of a resident’s personality. Caretakers have reported instances in which a resident has listened to the playlist, then rediscovered their ability to converse and socialize.
Beyond caring for their residents, many senior living communities are beginning to care for the environment too. After all, Baby Boomers were once—and in many in cases, still are—the generation responsible for bringing the issue of climate change into the mainstream consciousness.
Most new assisted living buildings are built to adhere to the EPA’s Energy Star standards. A smaller, but still significant percentage of new buildings use renewable energy like solar power, or have eco-friendly practices like serving their residents vegetables grown in organic gardens and providing locally sourced food in the dining room. With so much competition in the senior living market, new communities have to find ways to set themselves apart.
If your community needs to set itself apart with beautiful marketing materials, Threshold can handle all your senior living design needs for websites, brochures, information packets and more. We can also improve your community’s digital presence, which might be necessary since more and more seniors are using smartphone technology. Give us a call today.