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.
In the world of real estate marketing, video advertising remains underutilized. It’s well-known by experts in the industry that real estate brands tend to be later adopters of digital strategies, so it comes as no surprise that CTV advertising on platforms like Hulu and other streaming services is still catching on.
If you are among the real estate professionals who have recently started to wonder if CTV advertising is right for your brand or you’re completely new to the topic of CTV advertising and want to learn more, this article is for you. We’ll be explaining what CTV advertising is, how it works, and where it excels as part of your real estate marketing plan. As you read on, you’ll learn how running CTV ads on Hulu and other top streaming platforms could earn you more leads and leases.
What Is CTV Advertising (and how is it related to Hulu)?
CTV stands for Connected TV, which refers to today’s Smart TVs and other devices that allow you to stream digital video content on your TV. Popular examples include Roku, Apple TV, Google TV, and Amazon Fire. These Connected TV devices allow users to stream content through a variety of apps such as Hulu.
This is where advertising campaigns come in: ads are shown while users stream content on CTV apps, much like a traditional commercial on cable TV. Hulu is just one of dozens of streaming platforms where CTV ads can be placed. Other popular platforms include Pluto TV, tubiTV, and Crackle.
Because connected TVs have become so ubiquitous in recent years, this form of advertising represents a promising frontier for real estate marketers. In fact, 82% of households in the US have at least one Connected TV device. Millennials represent the bulk of Connected TV users, with Gen X and Gen Z not far behind, making this particularly promising for multifamily marketing and student housing marketing as well as the next generation of active adult and senior housing marketing as older Gen Xers begin to move into these age ranges and younger Gen Xers and Millennials help make housing decisions for their older parents.
Targeting Tactics For CTV Advertising
One of the benefits of CTV advertising is the wide array of targeting tactics available to marketers. Not only do real estate marketers have the usual demographic and behavioral targeting tactics at their disposal (such as specific interests, websites visited, and searches performed), they also benefit from addressable marketing tactics that allow them to target a specific address list or use custom data aggregation and GPS data.
Marketers may also retarget users who have already been served a CTV ad, encouraging clicks and conversions by serving ads on other platforms and devices to an audience that is already aware of their brand.
How Is Success Measured for CTV Ad Campaigns?
Video completion rates, mute rates, pause rates, and impressions are among the key performance indicators (KPIs) for CTV ad campaigns. These metrics help determine the extent to which users are actually viewing your CTV video ad.
When it comes to tracking ad engagement and conversions, online conversions are measured by tracking whether a user visited your website and completed a conversion action (such as a contact form fill or application start) on a device within their household after being served your ad. Meanwhile, offline conversions can be measured by tracking when a user’s mobile device enters a conversion zone (such as your leasing office), which is defined by drawing a micro-geofence around the desired location.
These KPIs can be broken out by channel/app, device, and keyword to provide further insight into how your CTV ads are performing and how to further optimize for your target audience.
How Effective is CTV Advertising?
At Threshold, we’ve seen exciting results from our CTV advertising campaigns, but there’s no need to take our word for it. In addition to strong performance across the KPIs mentioned above, marketers using CTV advertising have also reported a positive impact on brand awareness and engagement, overall conversion rates, and number of repeat customers.
There are several reasons why CTV advertising is an effective choice for real estate marketers looking to reach more potential renters and increase lease and occupancy rates. We’ll discuss some of the top advantages below.
CTV Advertising As an Awareness Tactic
Awareness tactics are a key part of any holistic real estate marketing plan. These tactics focus on increasing brand awareness among a broad audience in order to reach prospects during the early phases of their housing search so that when they move onto the consideration phase, your brand is more likely to make the cut. In other words, it establishes a strong marketing funnel from the very beginning so that your have a higher chance of finding the prospects for whom your community is an excellent fit.
CTV ads excel as an awareness tactic because they can reach a wide yet relevant audience even when they’re not actively searching for housing. Not only can CTV ads be targeted to reach thousands of potential renters, but because they utilize a more engaging format than static display or search ads and usually reach users during their leisure time, users are more likely to absorb your message and remember details like your brand name and URL once the ad is over.
These factors make users quicker to click and convert when they encounter your brand again during a housing search. In the best cases, users may specifically search for your brand name after seeing an ad that intrigues them, even if considerable time has passed since they viewed your ad.
CTV Advertising As a Conversion Tactic
While CTV campaigns excel as an awareness tactic, they can also be paired with retargeting tactics across other devices to help move your audience further down your leasing funnel as they weigh their housing options.
For example, you might create a display ad campaign that retargets users on their phone or desktop up to 30 days after they first viewed your CTV ad. Now that they are already aware of your brand, you can stay top of mind and give them further reasons to convert by showing off high quality images of your community and incorporating messaging about current specials, available floor plans, or other time-sensitive information.
Interested in learning more about CTV advertising? We’re always available for a no-strings-attached consultation to walk you through this unique marketing tactic. Try using out chatbot, Trent to schedule a call!
Influencer culture is not going anywhere anytime soon. Influencer Marketing grew to approximately $13.8 Billion in 2021, with Instagram and TikTok leading the way. About 3/4 of Gen Zers and Millennials follow influencers on social media and over 50% say they trust the influencers they follow, according to The Influencer Report. In an Influencer Marketing Benchmark Report in 2021 with over 5,000 surveys with marketing agencies, brands & other relevant professionals, Influencer Marketing Hub found that 59% admitted to having a standalone budget for content marketing & 75% of them now intend to dedicate a budget to influencer marketing in 2021.
5 Reasons Why People Advertise Through Influencers:
People buy from people because it feels personalized & authentic
People want to see content that relates to them
People research on bigger commitments
People are more likely to buy if they come to you
People will read/view your content because they already cared to start with
Like, Subscribe & Growing
In the world of real estate marketing, shows like “Selling Sunset” on Netflix are popularizing real estate influencers or agents using their strong social media following. With the rise of niche micro-influencers since the pandemic started, and marketing platforms and agencies growing by more than 3 times since a few years ago, influencers will continue to entertain and establish a trustworthy relationship with Millennials, Gen Zers, and those who follow.
Whether we are talking cryptocurrency, virtual reality (VR), non-fungible tokens (NFTS), or Web 3.0, they all center around a progressive switch from physical to digital. As many things like art, events, and currency shift to become more digital, it seems inevitable that the digital realm will continue to expand into more and more places where we spend our time. That’s exactly what the Metaverse intends to accomplish.
If you are unfamiliar with the term, The Metaverse is an immersive, computer and user-generated digital environment consisting of virtual avatars that represent actual people and combines aspects of augmented and virtual reality. If this still doesn’t make sense, watch the trailer for Steven Spielberg’s 2018 film Ready Player One. The Metaverse will combine video games, technology, and social media in one place.
Is The Metaverse a Fad or the Future?
Just as print advertising was king in the ’90s and slowly began to lose ground to the digital ads and social media marketing we see today, we are at the beginning of a similar transformation to marketing in The Metaverse. Facebook, which saw over 31 billion dollars in ad spend in 2020, announced in October 2021 that they were rebranding their company name to Meta. This shift in name reflects the company’s new focus on The Metaverse. If Facebook is shifting its billion-dollar advertising business to The Metaverse, it’s fair to say that many savvy real estate marketers will follow suit.
What Will Be Different?
Did you know that during a global pandemic, a musical concert drew an attendance of 12 million viewers? Maybe you didn’t, but your kids did. That is because the show was performed by musical artist Travis Scott in a digital arena in Fortnight, one of today’s most popular video games in which users create avatars and compete in a large-scale battle royale. Fortnight can be considered almost a beta version of what The Metaverse is becoming and how companies will use it creatively to connect millions of people in a digital world.
As the way we reach users changes, so will our metrics for real estate marketing success. Conversions will pivot to be more inclusive of virtual actions. Ads will become more immersive and likely call upon marketers to incorporate all five senses. Tracking a user’s phone behavior will no longer be as valuable as that user’s avatar movement. Moreover, if The Metaverse is built on a decentralized platform, advertisers’ restrictions could likely disappear.
Since real estate digital marketers will go where they can get the most traffic, as The Metaverse evolves, so will our marketing strategy.
What Marketing In the Metaverse Might Look Like
As we begin attending more digital events and living within a completely digital universe, we won’t be spending time on our phones so much as in our phones. As that evolution continues, so will the need to adapt our real estate digital marketing campaigns. Instead of going to YouTube on their computer, users might put on their virtual reality headsets and walk their avatar to a YouTube Movie theatre. The way we create real estate digital ads will be completely different because they will be consumed in a different medium. Facebook banners will be replaced by digital billboards at
a busy intersection across from a Van’s Virtual Skatepark. Pictures of floor plans and clickable Matterport videos of apartments will likely become obsolete. Instead, the Metaverse will allow prospects to virtually walk around that apartment before signing a PDF and emailing it in. The buyers’ journey will be completely different, thus so will a real estate marketer’s touchpoints.
So ultimately, the question isn’t, “will The Metaverse change digital marketing?” it’s “how will it change digital marketing and how can we keep up as real estate marketers?” It is hard to fully grasp the changes likely to come from The Metaverse. After all, we didn’t know having a GPS on our phones would lead to the emergence of Uber until it was already happening. But one thing is sure: those changes aren’t just coming; they are already beginning, right now. With that in mind, the important question becomes, “Are you ready to change your digital marketing for The Metaverse?”
Out of all the digital real estate marketing strategies available today, it can be hard to determine which strategies will best help move the needle on your leasing and sales results. After all, you’re not just choosing from the wide variety of advertising platforms out there, you’re also sifting through many different types of ad campaigns those platforms offer—so how do you make the right choice for your real estate brand?
Answering that question comes down to your marketing priorities and the results that are most important to you right now. For those who are launching digital marketing for a new development or getting the word out while occupancy rates are already stable, brand awareness tactics should be at the top of your list. Brand awareness tactics help you reach potential residents during the Awareness phase of their digital renter journey, sometimes before they’ve even begun their housing search.
Brand awareness tactics aren’t focused on getting quick conversions so much as they’re focused on, well, making people aware of your brand. That means impressions and views are the name of the game more so than clicks and conversion actions. So when focusing on brand awareness, you’ll want to select digital real estate marketing tactics that optimize for impressions and views rather than skipping straight to the click-driving, conversion-oriented tactics like lead generation ads or retargeting ads.
Here are some of the top-performing digital tactics for real estate marketers looking to drive impressions and views that increase awareness among your target audience.
Video Ads on YouTube
Since views and impressions are the name of the game with brand awareness, YouTube ads are an excellent place to start. Video ads on YouTube can be targeted to a wide audience in your area based on a variety of targeting characteristics. With an average view rate of 31.9%, YouTube ads are a great way to get in front of your audience at any stage of their renter journey, including before they’ve even performed a housing search.
Video ads are also a great awareness tactic because they are engaging and informative—far more so than a static display or search ad tends to be. You can feature more photos, value propositions and qualifying details in a 30-second video ad.
If you’re early in your development process and have limited photography or renderings to include in your video ad, that doesn’t mean you’re out of luck. Supplement your visual assets with lifestyle footage, which can be found on platforms like Adobe Stock and Shutterstock.
Social Ads on Facebook & Instagram
Social ads for apartments on Facebook and Instagram offer similar targeting capabilities compared to YouTube, giving you the opportunity to reach your audience on some of the digital spaces where they spend the most time.
There are a variety of ad types you can run on these platforms, but to reach prospects in the awareness phase, we recommend Traffic ads on Facebook and Instagram. Traffic ads are focused on driving traffic to your real estate website, so those who do click are given the opportunity to learn more about your property. When optimizing for brand awareness, we particularly recommend opting for carousel ads over single image ads because they provide a fuller glimpse of your community and provide a way for users to engage with your ad (by scrolling through the images) even if they’re not ready to click through to your website and really dive in. This provides a fuller opportunity to become intrigued and commit your brand to memory.
Addressable Marketing & Geofencing Ads
Targeting specific households, businesses, hotspots, or competitors in your area can help you raise awareness among a highly specific audience who is most likely to resonate with your brand. Addressable marketing and geofencing ads both rely on virtual “fences” drawn around specific locations within which users may be served your ad. Typically, a conversion zone is also drawn around a physical location such as your leasing office in order to measure offline conversions, but you can also measure online conversions from these ads when a targeted user visits your apartment website.
When a prospect enters the fenced location (e.g. their home address), they will be targeted with your ads on their mobile and desktop devices for 30 days. When the customer enters the conversion zone (e.g. your leasing office) with their mobile device after being served your ad, the conversion zone recognizes the prospect and attributes their visit as an offline conversion. Or, if a prospect converts online by filling out a contact form, that action is measured as an online conversion.
Addressable marketing campaigns allow you to target prospects based on household location, income level, home equity information, number of household members, and a variety of interests, contributing to highly qualified online and offline traffic down the road. By raising awareness among a highly qualified audience, you increase the chances that awareness eventually turns into action when your prospects are ready to start or continue their housing search.
One addressable marketing tactic we recommend is CTV (AKA Connected TV) ads, which allow video ads to be served to Smart TVs while your target audience is using a TV app like Hulu and other streaming services. Like YouTube video ads, these ads are more engaging than static display ads and reach prospects while they’re going about their day-to-day lives, so they’re aware of your real estate brand when it comes time for them to search for housing.
Though video ads may on platforms like YouTube tend to be more engaging, Google display ads are also a great way to increase brand awareness among your target audience. Whether you create an animated ad or keep it simple with a static image, Google serves display ads over a vast network of partnered sites, targeting users across many of the same parameters you’ll find on YouTube ad campaigns (Google owns YouTube, after all).
Display ads are a strong choice for brand awareness because they reach users while they’re going about their normal online browsing activities, but also link directly to your website so that impressions can easily turn into traffic. And even if a user doesn’t click through when served your ad, just getting their eyes on your brand makes them more likely to convert later when they are ready to conduct their housing search and learn more about some of the options in their area.
With many different ad sizes available, you can choose a variety of placements, but the 300×250 size tends to get the most impressions and clicks.
Written by Abby Browning, Digital Marketing Manager
Are you finding it more and more challenging to keep up with the inevitable changes to your digital marketing platforms? Google and Facebook are constantly evolving, and so must your approach for digital real estate marketing. Recently, Google announced some changes that affect keyword behavior and ad types. We’ll review what these changes are, how they affect your digital apartment marketing, and how you can continue to drive results despite these changes.
What changes have been made to keyword match types and behavior?
In July of 2021, Google officially eliminated modified broad match keywords. Previously, ads would show for search queries that contained all of the keywords included in your modified broad match keyword, regardless of order. For example, a user could be researching moving companies Atlanta to Austin. By using a broad match modified keyword in your search strategy, “+moving +companies +atlanta +to +austin” would show ads for any query that contained all keywords, regardless of order, including moving companies from Austin to Atlanta.
As of September 2021, Google has loosened up restrictions to phrase match in order to operate more similarly to broad match modified, though they will not be an exact replacement. The main reason for Google making these changes is to boost the relevance of ads that are being served to users by focusing more on text and intent behind the query. According to Google, “The updated phrase match simplifies match types by combining the control of phrase match and the expanded reach of the discontinued broad match modifier.”
What happens moving forward?
Take this opportunity to reduce keywords in your thematically consistent ad groups by removing any match type duplicates or close variants. We recommend leveraging negative keywords to ensure that you’re filtering out unqualified traffic. The newly improved search terms report will also be a useful tool to reference to understand which keywords and match types are triggering your ads, providing insights into new keyword additions to build or exclude in your campaign.
What changes have been made to expanded text ads?
Earlier this year, Google announced that Expanded Text Ads (ETA) will no longer be available to create or edit as of June 2022. Expanded text ads have three headline fields and two description fields and are optimized for mobile. After June 2022, ETA will still be able to run, but the only changes that you will be able to make are to pause or remove them from your search campaigns.
What happens moving forward?
Google released Responsive Search Ads (RSA) in 2018, and over time, we have seen RSAs dramatically improve clicks, CTR, conversions, AND conversion rates. RSAs allow you to create ads that adapt to show more text and more relevant messages by entering multiple headlines and descriptions. Because of the responsive nature of this ad type, RSAs increase ad group performance because they help you compete in more auctions and reach more people. With the announcement of the changes occurring to ETA in June 2022, you will want to be sure that all of your ad groups contain at least one RSA as this will be the new default ad type when creating search campaigns. Now is the best time to perform A/B tests, if you are not doing this already, to see which of your ETA headlines and descriptions perform best. Save this information and be sure to use it come June! Dynamic search ads, which are ads created by Google, and call ads will still be available despite the elimination of expanded text ads.
In conclusion?
In an ever changing digital landscape, your digital marketing strategy must adapt. The changes that were recently announced by Google to keyword match types, behavior, and ad types are improvements overall. As with any shift in strategy, continue to monitor campaign performance and traffic quality driven by the updated phrase match keywords, and continue testing multiple headlines and descriptions to encourage continued interaction and engagement through the use of Responsive Search Ads.
Written by Alfred Perez, Digital Success Manager
Written by Zac Segula, Digital Success Manager
Written by Abby Browning, Digital Marketing Manager
