by threshold | Dec 7, 2021 | Design, Digital Marketing, Marketing, Tech/Web, Thought Leadership
If you’re a property manager looking to get a real estate website up and running quickly, you may be asking yourself whether an apartment website template is the way to go. But while the industry’s leading template providers seem like an attractive solution for some apartment brands, they often present more difficulties than they solve, turning short-term expediency into long-term headaches.
People use real estate website templates because they expect them to be the easy solution. In fact, many of these template providers are also Property Management Software providers, which is appealing to property managers because it has the potential to save time and effort when integrating their PMS and their website. It’s also affordable for most budgets because it’s a one-size-fits-all approach. By relying on a template instead of a fully custom site, property managers save money for their properties. Sounds pretty sweet, right?
Unfortunately, this picture perfect scenario often fails to materialize. Where leading template providers offered to save time and effort, they often deliver further challenges and sub-par results down the road, requiring further intervention from property managers to address these challenges. Here are some of the common issues we and our clients have noticed when working with the leading real estate website template providers.
Strict Templates Make You Blend In With The Crowd
Most apartment website templates are easy to spot a mile away. That’s because most templates are built for quantity, not quality. In other words, template providers want their templates to be applicable to a wide variety of housing brands, which tends to strip away a significant amount of visual character and functionality that might clash with a subset of brands.
The result is a look and feel that is very generic, with limited flexibility to showcase your specific branding elements and key differentiators. This is especially disadvantageous if your community is part of a competitive housing market and/or offers a lot of unique amenities and features that could earn you more attention, if only you were able to show them off more easily. Instead, with hundreds of other property sites out there using the same real estate website templates, by the time your prospects find your site, there’s a good chance they’ve already run into multiple lookalike apartment websites during their housing search. That means their first impression of your community is that it’s just like all the rest. Not exactly conversion-inspiring.
You might think this is an issue with all templated apartment websites, but not all templates are made equal. In fact, many templates offer more customization options so you can showcase your brand colors, patterns, voice, and key differentiators more prominently while still keeping costs low. Some real estate website experts also combine a templated approach with the assistance of professional web designers and developers to help you fully adapt a template to suit your needs, which could suit some brands better than the bare bones approach that most templates provide. Full disclosure: Threshold is one such real estate website provider, but we’re not the only option out there delivering this hybrid approach to real estate website design. Even if you work with another real estate marketing agency, we highly recommend this hybrid approach to launching a templated apartment website.
Not All Integrations Are Made Equal
While some leading template providers offer integrations with their own property management software and basic Google Analytics without too much trouble, integrating with other software can present surprising amounts of difficulty. This can be a problem when it comes to implementing a diverse ad mix, tracking digital marketing results, and identifying optimization opportunities.
For example, while some website template providers list dozens of available integrations with leading property management software, Internet Listing Services, analytics providers, collections and billing, marketing platforms, resident screening providers, and more, the truth is that many of these integrations are complicated and fickle, requiring a savvy web developer to decode and troubleshoot. And if you’re considering a templated website, it’s probably because you wanted to keep things simple and easy rather than needing the assistance of an expert in web development for apartments.
Plus, many desired integrations are missing, including leading third-party chatbots and CRM software. This means that the average templated website may be a poor choice for teams wanting a cutting-edge web experience with the modern touch that consumers have come to expect.
“Set It And Forget It” Leads To Poor UX
Typically speaking, property managers who opt for templated apartment websites are looking to simplify their life and avoid a lot of messing around with the website backend. For these folks, the ideal that they envision might be to get the real estate website design project out of the way so that they can focus on other things and not have to worry about the website again. Sounds nice, right?
Unfortunately, this “set it and forget it” approach often leads to poor UX when it comes to apartment websites. Templates may offer a quick way to get a basic website up and running, but this short-term advantage can pale in comparison to the long-term reality of real estate website maintenance. Amenity photos, external links, and specials info soon become outdated. Integrations break, leaving ugly and confusing elements on the your website—or worse, incoming leads fall through the cracks instead of being converted into new leases. In many ways, this isn’t a unique failing of templates, it’s just a reality of website management that property managers should be aware of while forming expectations and launching a website.
In the end, “set it and forget it” never lasts as long as you hoped, because before long, you’re forced to make site updates to ensure that your website continues to provide a quality user experience that inspires confidence in your prospects and delivers all the information and functionality they need to actually convert. So the goal you aim for in your apartment website should never be to “set it and forget it.” Someone will always need to be responsible periodically for ensuring the website is continuously optimized, or at least in proper working order. With this in mind, it may be well worth your effort to opt for a more hands-on approach from the very beginning, rather than locking yourself into a template that limits your capabilities and presents challenges for the web developer(s) you work with.
by threshold | Nov 18, 2021 | Creative, Design, Marketing, Tech/Web, Thought Leadership
Written by Heather Ford, Senior Designer & Web Developer
People love a good story. It’s been scientifically proven that when humans hear a story that they like, it can increase their levels of oxytocin, the ‘feel good’ hormone that boosts feelings of happiness, empathy and trust. Savvy marketers have been capitalizing on this for ages, creating engaging stories for brands that resonate with people and, ultimately, persuade them to open their wallets. (Super Bowl ads, anyone?) Storytelling works in marketing because, beyond the brain hormones, it gives people a way to relate to your brand on a human level. And in the digital world we live in, this has never been more important.
While print and especially video media seem the obvious choice for this sort of humanized communication, there is another, maybe counterintuitive, area that property developers and managers can take advantage of storytelling’s powerful ability to sway the hearts of their potential tenants: their real estate website.
All good design uses color, shape, flow, imagery and copy to craft a story. Beyond these things, you can consider the common ‘three-act’ structure that many stories use when laying out the structure of a webpage:
Act 1: The Set Up. This is where your audience is introduced to the main idea of the web page they are looking at. It’s the hook that makes them keep reading, so an apartment webpage hero should be visually interesting and clear in its messaging. Act 1 in a story is also when an inciting incident happens, or a thing that drives further action. In the case of web design, this can be a strong, punchy call to action.
Act 2: The Action. This is where the bulk of the plot, or in the case of property websites the detailed information, occurs. Any text or content-heavy sections of your web page, like exhaustive lists of features and finishes, should go in the middle. Once the viewer has been introduced to the main idea of the page they are on, they can decide they want the information that is below the hero section.
Act 3: The Resolution. If you’re feeling super fancy, you can also call this the ‘denouement’. At the end of your webpage, don’t just let your content fizzle out. People have made it all the way to the bottom; they deserve a satisfying conclusion to the story. Use this as an opportunity to outline how your property solves a common pain-point for renters, or create a sense of urgency and provide a clear next-step for your users, like “Apply Now!”
A single page on your property website can encompass an entire story, or a piece (a chapter, let’s call it) in an overall story you are trying to tell about your brand. Given the way people interact with web pages, scrolling is just like page flipping. Rather than jumping randomly from page-to-page, users progress through information as a linear sequence. Because of this, a story on a website has to unfold vertically, and not in small chunks that have no visual connection between them. Unlike books, there are many ways websites can enhance this to their advantage, such as:
- Using animation. Animation on a website can be used to enhance people’s attention toward important plot points (useful information, promotions, or CTAs) and shift their attention from one place to the next, allowing you to control the flow of the story.
- Stories within stories. Embedded, interactive elements and social feeds can be used to strengthen user engagement. These are natural storytelling mediums that have been proven to improve SEO because Google knows they enhance the user experience.
- Parallax scrolling. This technique allows for interesting transitions from one section on a webpage to the next and can be combined with well-crafted illustrations and diagrams to create strong storytelling.
- Video content. Good stories use what is called “indirect characterization,” which means showing rather than explicitly telling the audience something about a character. Video content is a powerful way this can be used in apartment marketing websites. You can say that you are a family-friendly property, or you can display a video hero that shows children playing and family-friendly amenities which says the same thing—if not more—to your viewers.
Storytelling in web design is much more than words and brand voice. While these are definitely important elements, it is the unique opportunities that the digital platform offers that can really enhance a real estate brand’s story and turn a really mundane experience into a compelling one that will keep your viewers at the edge of their seat.
Sources:
1 – Speaker–listener neural coupling underlies successful communication
2 – 5 Storytelling Techniques Applied to Web Design
3 – How To Start Your Story: Story Structures
by threshold | Nov 2, 2021 | Digital Marketing, Marketing, Tech/Web, Thought Leadership
Written by Michael Smart, Digital Strategist
The world of digital apartment marketing is a constantly evolving, confusing, and sometimes even chaotic one. Staple advertising platforms like Google and Facebook are changing their UI or adding new features on an almost monthly basis. New extensions, targeting capabilities (or limitations, thanks to updates like those introduced by iOS 14) are constantly changing, making it difficult to know what’s resulting in leads and what isn’t.
But outside of diving into the individual platforms and looking at the performance from a siloed point-of-view, how do you know if all of these efforts are working? What does your combined Cost Per Acquisition look like across all platforms on a month-over-month basis? How does your performance compare to this month last year, when the scramble to find housing began to slow down? More importantly, how can you prove to stakeholders or property managers that their marketing dollars are being spent wisely?
This is where developing a digital marketing performance report comes into play. A digital marketing performance report can come in the form of a dashboard or recurring static report that marketing strategists, managers, and property owners alike can use to quickly analyze campaign performance, spot trends, and optimize where needed.
First, sit down with relevant stakeholders and discuss what information and metrics are most valuable to you and your team. While this should ultimately result in multiple dashboards updating in real time and automated reports that are relevant for different teams, we suggest starting small and defining what metrics have the biggest impact determining performance and ultimately, attracting new tenants to your property.
Here are a few basic cross-platform metrics that should be included in your performance report:
- Impressions
- Conversions
- Conversion Type (Applications, Calls, Contact Forms, etc)
- CTR (Click-Through-Rate)
- CPA (Cost Per Acquisition)
The fun doesn’t end there though. It’s important to add as much context to these metrics as possible. For example, if your Search campaign has a 15% CTR, what does that actually mean? How does that compare to the same month last year? How does it compare to last month? How does it compare to benchmark in the same “subvertical” (i.e. Student Housing, Conventional, etc.)?
While all of these questions can be answered in the form of pretty looking graphs and charts, the most important thing is to identify any outliers that need immediate attention. Set up some conditional formatting that highlights your campaigns that are performing in the bottom 15th percentile. Identify campaigns that have 0 conversions over a certain period of time, or after spending a certain percentage of budget.
If you can add as much context as possible to a campaign’s performance and back it up with as many data points as you can that make sense, this will allow for your digital apartment marketing team to quickly decipher what’s going on and where optimizations can be made. The more context you add, the quicker and more accurate the analysis. The quicker and more accurate the analysis, the more optimized your ROMI (Return On Marketing Investment) is and the quicker your property becomes leased up by happy tenants (hopefully). Who knew data could be so much fun!
by threshold | Sep 28, 2021 | Creative, Design, General, Marketing, Thought Leadership
Written by Mike Krankota, Art Director
There are a lot of elements that go into creating a real estate brand. Everything from voice and tone to visuals like color palettes, shapes, and patterns must be considered in order to develop a coherent brand identity…but in the process of developing a visually striking brand, design efficacy sometimes becomes an afterthought. When this occurs, marketing results suffer, because if your brand doesn’t stand out from the pack, then it doesn’t really matter how pretty it is. In order to stand out, a brand has to not only be eye-catching, but also interesting and memorable against the backdrop of other competitors. As we discuss how to create effective real estate branding, we’ll focus on logo design specifically, but these principles can and should apply to everything from naming to advertising.
Consider brand logos that you’ve encountered and remember. Chances are very likely that it’s not something that looks ‘trendy’ or similar to other brands in its space. The reason it sticks with you? Boldness. For example, consider the candle aisle at your local Target or similar. Can you think of one single brand that has a memorable logo? Not really. They all kind of look the same. It’s either filigree and florals, or stark and modern. “But,” you may be saying, “who cares about the logo, it’s the scent, right?” But when you do see something that stands out for being different, you’re compelled to at least pick that candle up and give it a sniff.
The same applies to your property. Ultimately, a flashy logo design isn’t going to compel potential tenants to live on that property. It’s going to be the interiors, the amenities, the space, the location. So why even care about a big bold brand?
Easy! Because we want to be bold and eye-catching to make that potential renter stop and take a look. We want something that will pique interest and make that person think, “I could see myself living here.” This is doubly true for new construction. When what you have is a construction site and fence wraps, creating an entire vibe with bold branding is extremely important for pre-leasing and lead generation.
Be smart with your logo design as well. The days of just being able to slap some trees flanking “The Oaks at Washington Heights” or whatnot are over. Consumers have become more sophisticated, and demand brands that are tailored to their lifestyle. More to the point: brands that are tailored to their perceived idealized vision of self. It’s always aspirational. This especially plays into the importance of a decision like where a person is going to live. You’re not just selling a place to store your stuff. You’re selling a community. An area. A lifestyle. And overwhelmingly, people want to feel cool and interesting—and to have their home reflect how unique and interesting they feel.
So how do we do that? By embracing the unexpected. Take elements from the location. Consider the design of the property. Analyze the area. Establish the target demographic. And then the key is to execute based on an idealized aspirational vision of that target demographic. For example, a bold brand that targets millennial creatives who want a live/work/play kind of community is very different from a bold brand catering to active adult senior living. But both can be achieved! It all starts by asking the question, “If I were the target resident for this property, what would be a logo that would inspire me to stop and learn more about this cool looking place?”
As you’re considering the answer to this question, don’t fall into the trap of believing everything has to pretty and perfect. Embrace dissonance. Perfectly perfect design is often boring. It’s blandly pretty, with no unique features that create a WOW factor. Imperfections, asymmetricality, bold typographic choices, and even unexpected bursts of color can create a pleasantly dissonant effect that will get your brand described with those words all marketers love to hear: Edgy! Bold! Brash! Unique! Interesting!
Ultimately, the goal is not to blend into the neighborhood. If it was, you could simply put a for rent sign out and not even bother naming the building. Your real goal to stand out. Yes, you want to create something that resonates with the community and the target demographic, but you also want to be a linchpin of that community and not simply a cog. In order to accomplish that goal, it’s important to prioritize bold and impactful design choices over elements that are pretty, but innocuous.
by threshold | Aug 11, 2021 | Creative, Design, General, Marketing, Thought Leadership
Written by Emily Barker, Graphic Designer
In the midst of the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing protests around the U.S., the design community revived discussions of anti-racism and activism and how it fits into the field of Graphic Design. Just what exactly does designing for social change look like? Specifically in the field of marketing and advertising, the topic of social justice can often feel at odds with the day-to-day worklife in an agency. That’s especially true in the field of real estate–centered design, where the emphasis is often ‘heads-in-beds’ and being 100% leased up, without much room for discussions on equity. However, this sort of all-or-nothing thinking, especially in fields that are complicated, nuanced, and related to issues of housing and equity, can stymie conversations on race and equity before they even get started. The truth is that there are many avenues toward anti-racist marketing while also meeting the needs of clients whose focus is on leads and leases, and real estate designers have a unique position in advocating for those anti-racist strategies.
Creating Historically-Informed Real Estate Design
Anoushka Khandwala in her article entitled “What Does it Mean To Decolonize Design” talks about understanding the schema of one’s own history as a way to re-examine motivations and find new and better modalities of design for the future. She argues that, “With every design choice we make, there’s the potential to not just exclude but to oppress; every design subtly persuades its audience one way or another and every design vocabulary has history and context.”
What can that mean for us as real estate designers? At Threshold we delved into the history of redlining and the Fair Housing Act as a way to better understand the industry and its numerous failures and shortcomings. This meant a combined team of creative and digital staff researched the history of the Fair Housing Act and redlining to create an agency-wide presentation of the history of the Fair Housing Act and red-lining. The creative team made social posts outlining the history of redlining and the creation of the Fair Housing Act during the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement. For more information on redlining and how it denied Black American’s housing and generational wealth in the U.S. please click here.
What this revealed to us was that, as real estate marketers, we had an obligation to help our clients adhere to the FHA rules and regulations. Strictly speaking this meant using photos of diverse individuals in the marketing materials, ensuring that websites were ADA compliant, and using FHA and ADA icons. But it also revealed holes in the system or gray areas where we could advocate for our clients to choose inclusive marketing and branding strategies and also choose to go above and beyond in their digital marketing strategies to prioritize inclusivity.
How Designers Can Be Advocates for Social Change
In Jarrett Fuller’s article on Isometric Studios he describes the studio as one that is “rethinking the way in which designers build a better world”. The founders Andy Chen and Waqas Jawaid describe their clientele as broad: “We’ll take on any kind of client who demonstrates a desire to think about what authentic inclusion looks like, what foregrounding marginalized narratives looks like.” The article goes on to describe the work of Isometric as that of advocates as well as designers.
This is a familiar role for designers as we are already advocating for good design as we talk to our clients about our work and advise them on the best choices for their brand. Isometric Studios would take that same advocacy a step further and challenge the client’s perspective on social issues when needed and advocate for development of brands that support the greater social good. Sometimes this advocacy can look like recommending that a client incorporate people of diverse races in their lifestyle photography or choosing a logo that celebrates the existing community culture where their new development will be built.
One important way to have these conversations with clients is to directly addressing the elephant that is so often in the room: gentrification. By addressing this openly we are better able to advocate for our clients to help them maintain a positive reputation and resident satisfaction. These types of conversations present the opportunity for us to simultaneously advocate for our client and the greater community’s needs by encouraging our clients to create positive connections with their communities.
How do we ask our clients to connect with the communities they will exist in? Here are a few suggestions:
- Hosting events for the neighborhood at the property
- Striking mutually advantageous partnerships with local businesses
- Resident appreciation events that feature goods and services from the local community
- Hiring local instructors to teach fitness, art, or meditation classes
- Hiring local artists to design artwork for the property
- Host a concert of local musicians
- Offer communal spaces to local groups for weekly meetings
- Organize volunteer days with residents or staff in the local community
The point of these conversations and ongoing partnerships with the community isn’t to whitewash the real estate industry, but to offer real-world pathways for community engagement for our clients.
Isometric Studios, in their interview with Jarrett Fuller describes their name’s origin as “a floor plan drawn at a thirty degree angle where the same scale is used for every axis, creating a non-distorted image. ‘It’s an ideal that isn’t really possible,’ Jawaid said. ‘But we’re interested in that ideal. We’re designing for that ideal.'”
In the same way, we can also struggle towards a more ideal design practice in real estate design. We can become advocates for creative work that will be better suited for this current, complex, and multicultural world and our clients will benefit from the nuance that design will bring to their brands.
by threshold | Jul 20, 2021 | Digital Marketing, Marketing, Tech/Web, Thought Leadership
Identifying key audiences is critical to any marketing campaign, and that is even more important when you are attempting to drive foot traffic and the right audience to your website. That’s why real estate marketers are constantly innovating around digital targeting tactics in an attempt to maximize your reach without wasting ad spend on unqualified leads and impressions. Addressable marketing is one of the most cutting edge advancements in audience targeting because it allows apartment marketers to target their audience on a household-by-household basis, achieving a granularity that was previously unheard of in location-based marketing.
If you’re new to addressable marketing and unsure if it’s right for your real estate asset, this post can help you understand what addressable marketing is, how it works, and how it can add to your real estate marketing plan.
What is Addressable Marketing?
Addressable marketing campaigns allow ads and other media to be served to individual households across a number of personal devices—Connected TVs, smartphones, personal computers, etc. These ads can target prospects based on household location, age, income level, home equity information, number of household members, and a variety of interests, resulting in highly qualified online and offline traffic from prospects who are more likely to convert.
Because it targets your audience household-by-household, this tactic shares many of the benefits of a direct mailer while also saving on design and printing costs and allowing you the flexibility to target your audience with data aggregation tools rather than requiring you to have a list of addresses ready at hand. Think of it like the direct mailer for the digital age.
How Does Addressable Marketing Work?
It used to be that location-based targeting was relatively limited in terms of the specificity it could achieve, but nowadays, it is possible to use GPS data combined with IP information and plat line data to specifically target on a household-by-household level. This image from Simpli.Fi, one of Threshold’s vendor partners, shows the evolution of available technology.
When creating an addressable marketing campaign, you start by defining the audience you’re hoping to reach across factors like household location, interests, and other demographic information such as age, income level, etc. Then, through data aggregation tools, micro-geofences are drawn around each physical address that meets those data requirements. Next, a conversion zone is drawn around a specific location where you want to measure foot traffic (e.g. your leasing office).
When a prospect enters your micro-geofenced locations (e.g. physical home address), they will be targeted with your ads on their mobile and desktop devices for a set amount of time (30 days is typical). When the customer enters the conversion zone (e.g. 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.
Who Should Be Using Addressable Marketing Campaigns?
Addressable Marketing tactics can be useful for any real estate vertical, whether it be student housing, multi-family, senior living, or commercial. But in general, the more time your audience spends at home (or at the geofenced location), the more opportunity you have to engage them with Addressable Marketing campaigns. This makes it a great option for multi-family communities with a target audience that includes work-from-home professionals. It also makes addressable marketing a particularly lucrative choice for senior living brands.
In fact, since the COVID-19 pandemic changed how we work, live, and relax, the emergence of addressable marketing as the next frontier of digital real estate marketing has only been bolstered. Targeting users while they are at home has become especially important during a time when going out is no longer the norm. In fact, with fewer prospects visiting leasing offices, addressable marketing is one way to off-set the reduced in-person marketing opportunities.
Simpli.Fi, a leading provider of addressable marketing services, put it this way:
As the COVID-19 outbreak continues and social distancing becomes the new normal, people are spending more and more of their time at home. It is essential for businesses to be able to effectively reach consumers in their homes in order to increase online sales.
Furthermore, because addressable marketing is emerging as the direct mailer for the digital age, it is regarded as a particularly excellent choice when marking housing to seniors. Because addressable marketing campaigns use data aggregation tools and fine-tuned targeting factors like age, home equity, and interests, they are able to hone in on senior prospects who may be ready to move, like empty nesters looking to downsize, for example. For more advertising tactics for senior living, check out our post on the Top Digital Marketing Strategies for Senior Housing.
Ready to see addressable marketing in action? You can see how an addressable marketing campaign contributed to 165 online conversions for one senior living property by checking out this Senior Living Case Study. And when you’re ready to try it for yourself, you can always reach out for a free consultation on our contact page.
