Digital marketing should be in your real estate marketing mix if it isn’t already. Whether you’re marketing a new lease-up looking to drive brand awareness or you’ve been established for a while and want to maintain a steady online presence, your property will benefit from digital marketing. The goal for any marketing campaign is to target the right audience, optimize towards conversion rates and continue to improve on them, increase customer loyalty, and gain better credibility. We’ve compiled a list of the top 8 digital marketing trends for 2023. Let’s take a look!
Gather 1st Party Data Through Forms
The trend to own your own data is growing. Being more proactive on attaining and implementing 1st party data is paramount in today’s day and age. Digital privacy laws are in place across the globe and it shows no signs of slowing down as users are looking to big data providers to become more private with the information they share. Forms are a great way for you to own user implemented data; the form used is a great way to keep the users engaged and to have a better success rate in gathering that data.
Build Your Email Marketing List
Email Marketing is a trend that continues to rise. 89% of marketers use email marketing as their primary method for generating leads. Being able to reach out to users who have subscribed to your email list but have not bought anything yet is a great way to reconnect with an interested user. Plus, you can leverage the first party data you’ve collected to personalize content for more accurate targeting email campaigns. .
Stand Out From The Competition
With many digital applications and tools out there, finding a way to use that application or tool in a new, creative way will help when it comes to real estate marketing. To find a way to get noticed and have users engage with your marketing efforts, you have to stand out among the competition. Consumers are looking for more personalized experiences and content curated specifically for them and their interests. Focus on collecting user generated content for short-form videos for TikTok and social media posts, or utilize surveys in stories or in email marketing to encourage engagement and gain valuable insights into what your audience likes or dislikes. Don’t be afraid to get creative and try something new. The data speaks for itself and will let you know if your efforts are working and resonating with your audience.
Incorporate Real-time Messaging Feedback
Real-time messaging would not be on this list 10 years ago. Consumers expect to get information as quickly as possible, and if you are not utilizing tools that collect information and provide instant responses, you may be missing out. We’re not just talking about answering phone calls. Most consumers prefer to interact with business digitally. Make sure you’re providing communication outlets on your website (chatbots), through social media, and texting.
Get The Most Out Of Influencer Marketing
Influencer Marketing is continuing to boom and doesn’t show signs of slowing down. Through social media funnels like TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, users have built “relationships” with influencers and that trustworthiness is what makes Influencer Marketing a success. As of now, ROI is about $5.50 for every $1 spent. One thing to keep in mind is that influencers are usually in niche spaces so aligning your product to their channels is ideal or your message may fall flat among their audience. Want to dive deeper into how utilizing influencers in your marketing strategy can benefit you? Check out our blog about How The Rise of Influencer Marketing Could Enhance Your Real Estate Marketing.
Provide Online Shopping Gratification
Similar to real-time messaging, consumers want what they want, and they want it now. We recommend removing any blockers that will hinder the customer’s online journey and cause them to look elsewhere. Utilize data from Google Analytics to understand where customers are dropping off on your website and find out ways to help answer questions that might stop them from buying. For example, offer virtual tours on your website or provide video walk-throughs for those who are not able to meet in-person, ensure you have a functioning website and applicant portal, and provide information on your website for those frequently asked questions, like pet fees, parking fees, etc..
Digital Marketing Agencies Are Growing
Outsourcing is a great way to get more done and free up your leasing teams to complete the most important step; converting the lead into a lease. Don’t let limited in-house resources hold you back from expanding upon your marketing efforts. Outsourcing to marketing agencies, like Threshold, could be the difference in small to large growth in your first year. When trying to find the best real estate marketing agency for your goals, consider Why You Don’t Need a Local Real Estate Marketing Agency Partner when making your decision.
Chatbots Increase User Experience
Building upon real-time messaging, Chatbots also have had time to mature. They help answer FAQs, collect first-party data, and provide the user instant information in a digestible way. Plus, they can take care of some of the communication that doesn’t need involvement from a real person, like scheduling a tour.
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.
With an ever changing real estate industry, developing a real estate marketing plan informed by strategic thinking is absolutely essential to be able to stand out from your competitors. When it comes to your print marketing strategy, you may feel that your number one goal is to create the perfect flyer or brochure that your team can distribute in high traffic areas. However, what happens next when the prospect receives and reads the flyer is oftentimes an afterthought. In reality, it takes careful consideration of the full leasing/sales journey to create print assets that really make an impact on your prospects.
While COVID-19 brought a large decrease in the number of prospects touring leasing offices and sales centers in person, that number is quickly on the rise again and so is print marketing. Since the real estate industry is quickly changing, your strategic plan should also be changing. Your vision will likely remain the same but your goals should be frequently reviewed. For most clients to the real estate industry, the enduring vision is to impact your bottom line (e.g. improving occupancy rates or increasing revenue), but you can’t get there unless you set more specific, granular goals along the way. For example, one goal might be to increase the number of leases or sales contracts that are signed each month. In order for you to achieve that goal, you need to build a hand-crafted strategy that will push prospects into your leasing office or sales center to close the deal.
Every community is different. One might have a great location where others might have strong brand awareness in their market. If your community is located in a great location, guerilla marketing can be a great supplement to your existing digital marketing. But what happens once your prospect receives your flyer? The prospect will likely view your website and head into your leasing office or sales center for a tour.
Furthermore, your strategic plan shouldn’t end once the prospect walks through the door. A well thought out tour is your next step. In what order should property information be presented to your prospect? In most cases, this is the order of operations that yields the best results:
Property overview
Apartment amenities
Community amenities
Property location
Floor plan types
This gives prospects the ability to get to know your property and hopefully be wowed by amenities so they’re already picturing themselves living in your community and exploring the local neighborhood by the time you get down to the specifics of floor plan options. This makes many prospects eager to lock down a specific floor plan as you broach this subject with them during your tour.
Leasing offices and sales centers are likely your last chance to wow your prospect and can make or break your prospect’s likelihood of signing a lease. You may have a well thought out strategy to get them in the office and a tour strategy that piques their interest, but what is really going to make you stand out from the crowd? Creating an experience that will resonate is key, so environmental graphics within your leasing/sales center are important factors in sealing the deal. Living green walls, Instagram walls with neon signs, or custom corkboards where you can add photos of prospects signing are all unique ways to achieve that wow factor. If you stay on top of trends, you won’t be surprised. In fact, you’ll be far ahead of others because you’ll have had years to strategize and adapt, so that when disruption hits, you not only have a plan, but are already implementing it.
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.
Written by Alfred Perez, Digital Success Manager
Written by Kathy Jones, Agency Operations Manager
Written by Heather Ford, Senior Designer & Web Developer
