by threshold | Aug 24, 2021 | Design, Digital Marketing, Marketing, Tech/Web
Digital apartment marketing experts will often say that it’s important to update your website frequently, but have you ever wondered why? We are often recommending periodic website updates to our clients, but not always for the same reason. The truth is, there are many different reasons why updating your website frequently pays off for your digital apartment marketing goals. Here’s how updating your website can boost your SEO, improve your user experience (UX), increase your online conversions, and more.
Google Will Reward You With Higher Search Rankings
Google takes a lot into account when determining where your site ranks in search results and how current your site is plays a key role in their search algorithm. Think about it: Google wants to deliver users relevant and accurate info when they search so that they keep using Google. Having updated your site recently signals that your website more likely to be up-to-date with accurate info, modern web design, and other factors that contribute to a positive user experience.
Web Standards Are Constantly Changing
If your website hasn’t been updated in several years, there’s a good chance some of the web standards you’re following have gone defunct, fallen out of vogue, or even become illegal. For example, Flash used to be the main way to display multimedia content, but now fewer operating systems are supporting it because there are better ways to accomplish what Flash was once used for. Web security guidelines and requirements are also constantly being updated.
Additionally, state, federal, and international regulations can also dictate what you must and must not have on your website. For example, nearly every website now has a pop-up of some kind prompting users to accept the use of cookies in order to use their site.
Helps You Keep Up With Apartment Marketing Trends
You may be keeping up to date with apartment marketing trends in your industry, but does your website reflect that? Planning regular website updates puts you on a schedule to audit your website for off-trend features, messaging, and design elements that can make your community seem older and less desirable. For example, it may be time to update your amenities list to reflect how people are referring to their amenities these days (e.g. dog park vs. bark park, sparkling pool vs. resort-style pool, etc.). Additionally, take a look at the functionality your competitors are including on their site: Do they have a chatbot? An online tour scheduler? Virtual tours for every floor plan? Are you less competitive in your market if you don’t have these features?
On a related note, take a look at the information your competitors are including on their websites. The recent example of COVID-19 messaging, which is now common on apartment websites, shows how important it can be to make timely website updates in order to meet the new expectations of your audience and keep up with your competitors.
Leads to More Conversions
Keeping up with or even pushing ahead of the curve goes a long way to inspiring confidence from prospects and current residents alike. Your site doesn’t have to be flashy and cutting edge, necessarily, but just having accurate information, timely specials, no broken links, and messaging that speaks to trending housing needs can ensure your property makes it from a prospect’s awareness phase to their consideration phase. Plus, residents who see their apartment community working hard to maintain consistent website functionality and provide current information will be that much more likely to renew their lease and recommend your property to others.
Best Ways to Update Your Real Estate Website Regularly
So now that we’ve established why you would want to update your website regularly, what are the best ways to go about that? It all depends on what your primary goals are and what resources you have at your disposal.
Adding a blog to your website is one of the most common ways to incorporate regular website updates into your digital marketing strategy. This isn’t just so that you can share useful information with residents and prospects, it’s also a great way to boost your on-page SEO efforts. Not only does it allow you to update your site each time you post (signaling to Google that your site is current), but it also gives you added opportunities to incorporate SEO keywords without running the risk that Google interprets your efforts as keyword stuffing because your keyword density is too high on a given page (which can actually hurt your SEO).
But while a blog is great for SEO, it isn’t the only way to update your website regularly. Consider: what do your prospects need from your website? Were there features you didn’t initially include that you could add now, like a chat bot, tour scheduler, or virtual tours? Do you have current photos or video of all your amenities and community spaces? Do your prospects have a way to view current specials? Could you benefit from adding resident reviews on your website?
In addition to these considerations, we recommend that once a year or so, you review your keyword strategy. If you’re not sure how to create a keyword strategy, check out our post on How To Do Keyword Research For Your Real Estate Website. As search trends change, you may find that you’re missing out on a lot of potential traffic from keywords you hadn’t been targeting before.
Finally, every few years, we recommend that you do a more in-depth design update. Trends change and a website can begin to look out-of-date quickly. You don’t necessarily have to overhaul your entire website design, but a few tweaks here and there can help you keep up with the times.
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 | Aug 10, 2021 | Digital Marketing, General, Marketing, Tech/Web
If you read our Quick and Dirty SEO Tips for Apartment Marketing, then you know that 75% of people never scroll past the first page of search results. That means it’s incredibly important to rank on the first page of Google results if you want to earn any organic website traffic. But in our increasingly digital world, that fact probably doesn’t surprise you. These days, apartment marketers, owners, and managers all know that SEO is important, but not everyone knows where to start.
We’ve discussed SEO Tips before, but today we want to zero in on Keyword Research—how to do it and why it matters. Not only is Keyword Research an essential step when creating a real estate website, but keyword research can also help you create more effective search ads and understand your target audience better.
So if you’re not sure how to conduct keyword research (or whether you really need to), this is the post for you! Let’s start by exploring some of the reasons why keyword research is absolutely essential to your digital apartment marketing strategy (and how it can help other areas of your real estate marketing plan too).
Why Keyword Research is a Must
Most of the time, keyword research is discussed as the first step of your SEO strategy. After all, optimizing your rank in Google search results requires knowing the keywords your audience searches for so that you can use those keywords in on-page SEO efforts (such as incorporating those keywords into your website headers, meta descriptions, and page titles). Trying to improve your SEO without first performing keyword research could result in a lot of wasted time and effort without much payoff in the form of website traffic or conversions. That’s because you’re just guessing at what keywords people actually use when searching for housing like yours, and your best guess only goes so far. It’s much more effective to take a data-based approach.
But keyword research doesn’t just help SEO efforts. It also leads to more effective messaging, ad targeting, UX design, and so much more. That’s because it helps you understand your audience more effectively. Seeing what search terms are most popular when searching for apartments like yours can reveal what’s most important to your audience. It can show you what floor plans they prefer, which local hotspots they care about being close to, or how important it is to be pet-friendly. Knowing about your audience’s priorities helps you bridge the gap between your prospects and your property by enabling you to emphasize the features they are looking for.
One of the specific and direct ways in which this improved audience understanding can help you is when it comes to paid search ad strategy. Knowing how your audience searches empowers you to build more effective search ads that are relevant to your audience’s priorities and are a genuinely strong match based on their search query. That way your search ad headlines, descriptions, and snippets present a user with information that doesn’t appear out-of-place for their search query.
How To Identify The Best Keywords To Target
To identify the best keywords to target in your digital apartment marketing strategies like on-page SEO and paid search ads, you first need to access a keyword research tool. This is a tool that will help you see the search volume and competitiveness of different keyword variations, helping you find the most relevant and most advantageous keywords being used.
There are many keyword research tools available online, but today we’ll touch on just two of them: Google Keyword Planner and SEMRush. Google Keyword Planner has the distinct advantage of being free when you create a Google business account. SEMRush, on the other hand, is the most popular paid keyword research tool available today and offers some additional functionality. Both these tools allow you to type in a keyword (for example, “apartments in Toronto”) and output a list of related keywords alongside their search volumes and competitiveness. Both also allow you to search for keyword ideas based on a website URL (for example, the website of a competitor).
The main difference between Google Keyword Planner and SEMrush is that those who pay for SEMrush enjoy the option of getting a deeper dive into the keyword strategies of your competitors and where you can most easily beat them at their own game. SEMrush also offers more nuanced representations of the competitiveness of a certain keyword; rather than telling you whether the competition is low, medium, or high, it provides a numerical “competitive density” value as well as a “keyword difficulty” rating. This helps you see both how difficult it would be to rank for a given keyword as well as how many of your competitors are actually trying to rank for it, which is a sometimes subtle, but important distinction.
Regardless of what tool you choose, the basic strategy in selecting your target keywords is simple: find the relevant keywords with the highest search volume and the lowest keyword difficulty possible. This is the sweet spot where ranking for these keywords will actually help you earn added site traffic (because many people are searching for these terms) and there’s not so much competition for the keyword already that your efforts are unlikely to get you within the first page of Google results for those keywords.
Every keyword research journey starts with a query into your tool of choice, but where do you start exploring? Below, we discuss how to get started once you’ve selected your keyword research tool.
Start With Common Sense
When it comes to keyword research, your intuition is a great place to start. Think: if I were a potential resident for this apartment community and others like it, what would I search for? Start relatively broad, with terms like “apartments in Austin” or “Birmingham student apartments” and see what comes up. If your search is broad enough and common enough, a tool like SEMrush or Google Keyword Planner will then pull in an entire list of related keywords, allowing you to compare and contrast among the results. Remember, you’re after the variations with the best balance of high search volume and low difficulty or competitiveness, without straying beyond what’s relevant to your product.
As you see additional variations, you can repeat the process by using one of these variations as your new query to generate a new list of keywords that are related to that keyword. For example, say you search “apartments in Austin” and “2-bedroom apartments in Austin” comes up in the related keywords. You might then search “2-bedroom apartments in Austin” and see more options like “2-bedroom apartments in East Austin,” “2-bedroom apartments in downtown Austin,” etc. As you explore, be sure to keep track of the metrics of the promising keywords you find so that you can make a list of relevant keywords you want to target, organized by priority. Both Google Keyword Planner and SEMrush have useful “save” or “add to plan” options that can help you collect your list without having to write it all down manually.
See What Competitors Are Doing
Don’t forget that keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner and SEMrush allow you to explore keywords that a specific URL is ranking for! You can use this to check in on your competitors and see what they’re up to. This not only helps you see what you’re up against, but it can also be a useful shortcut to identifying keywords that may be relevant to your product too. Type in some of your competitors’ websites to see where their traffic is coming from and identify areas where you might be able to rank for the same keywords (SEMrush is a great tool for this, but Google Keyword Planner works decently as well).
However, keep in mind that you are not your competitor, so the keywords that drive traffic and conversions for them may not always work for you. For example, if you are a C-Class property and there’s an A-Class property nearby ranking for keywords that include the word “luxury,” that may not apply to your property. Even if you manage to drive traffic by incorporating “luxury”-related keywords, you’re unlikely to see conversions from users who arrive at your site after looking specifically for a luxury apartment. Once they arrive, they’ll realize your property isn’t what they were looking for and usually bounce quickly, which can actually hurt your SEO rankings in the long run.
How To Apply Your Findings
Now that you’ve completed your keyword research, how do you apply your findings to start ranking in Google, launch great search ads, and connect with your audience? There are lots of ways you can apply your new knowledge to your digital real estate marketing strategy! See our post below to keep exploring.
Quick and Dirty SEO Tips for Apartment Marketing in 2021
by threshold | Jul 9, 2021 | Digital Marketing, Marketing, Tech/Web, Thought Leadership
Written by Alfred Perez, Digital Success Manager
In 2010, 1.8 billion people had access to high-speed internet. Six years later it was 3 billion. Now, experts are forecasting that the entire world—and its roughly 8 billion people—will have high-speed internet access as early as 2022. With all that connectivity, much of our lives take place fully online already. These realities paved the way for new approaches to work when the COVID-19 pandemic hit: many businesses have shifted their attention to working remotely and/or a hybrid approach.
According to Review 42, before the coronavirus hit, 4.7 million people were already working remotely. Once the pandemic hit, 88% of the organizations, worldwide, made it mandatory or encouraged their employees to work-from-home. One benefit to employers and employees of this approach is that the rise in the availability to work-from-home offers the employees the option of living in cheaper, outskirt cities rather than being tethered near the office to avoid commutes.
WFH, The New Normal
The longer this pandemic forces people to work remotely, the more businesses are looking to expand their remote offerings and policies for current and future employees.
- In April 2020, a Gallup survey revealed that 60% respondents said that they’d prefer to work remotely as much as possible once coronavirus is under control.
- In August 2020, a report by CNN polled about 800 employers. 83% of respondents said they would have more flexible remote work policies after the pandemic.
- In September of 2020, Reuters surveyed about 1,200 Chief Information Officers (CIOs) in which they said they expect 34.4% of their employees to be permanently remote for 2021.
How Apartment Communities Can Adapt to This Shift
To stay competitive, owners and managers should consider providing amenities and services to appeal to potential residents who work-from-home and tailor their marketing messaging with this focus.
There are 3 main focuses that owners, management, and apartment marketers can use to attract residents who work-from-home:
- Tools and resources like high-speed internet or fiber internet. 92% of residents would like to have high speed internet in their apartments. 76% were interested in having USB ports in the wall.
- Allow the potential resident to visualize living and working there. Apartment marketing constantly adapts to the current situation and right now, it’s work-from-home. Examples include virtual staging tools to stage balconies or workspaces in vacant apartments, large windows for ample light, amenity spaces where residents can plug in and get to work, and rooftops and courtyards for a fresh video call backdrop. There has also been a correlation between work-from-home residents and being a pet owner so try incorporating apartment ads and messaging on your website related to that as well.
- Don’t forget about your current residents when you’re out looking for new ones. Current residents are more likely to renew and they are the best source for referrals. People crave human interaction and work-from-home residents are no exception. Adapting the community spaces to be more work-from-home friendly and hosting community events will help retain work-from-home residents.
Remote Work Is Not Going Anywhere
The pandemic threw a screwball in just about every business, but one thing is for sure, we learned how to adapt because of the rise in technology advancements. By allowing employees to work-from-home, businesses have lower overhead costs and studies show that employees are also more productive. We’re more connected than ever and businesses can still operate remotely in full effect. When the pandemic has gone away, we know working remotely will stay. That means the adaptations you make to your apartment marketing strategy will be beneficial even after the pandemic wanes.
by threshold | Jul 6, 2021 | Creative, Design, Digital Marketing, General, Marketing, Tech/Web
Floor plans: every apartment marketing team needs them, but how important are they really? You might be surprised at how big a role floor plan graphics have to play in your digital real estate marketing strategy. Not only can a lack of floor plan graphics result in poor UX on your website, but it can also rob you of key branding and marketing opportunities that help drive qualified leads and conversions.
Here are some of the key ways floor plan images can make or break your digital real estate marketing results.
Prospects Refine Their Apartment Search Based on Floor Plans
Keyword research shows that, no matter what your market or your target audience is, people are searching specifically for floor plans based on the number of bedrooms. It’s part of what makes ILS platforms like Zillow and ApartmentFinder so popular; users can refine their search by the number of bedrooms and bathrooms. But when they take their search to Google, they refine their search manually by typing in search terms like “3-bedroom apartments in Austin” or “studio apartments Austin.”
These search habits have a lot to teach us about user intent: from the very beginning of their apartment search, the number of bedrooms is central to their housing decision. When a prospect encounters difficulty in gathering detailed floor plan information about your property, they’re that much more likely to bounce from your website or disqualify your property as they move into the consideration phase of the digital renter’s journey.
And the more information prospects can learn from these floor plans, the more likely they are to recognize your property as a viable option and take the next step by scheduling a tour or starting an application. In other words, 3-D floor plans, floor plans with dimensions, and higher-resolution floor plan graphics help result in more qualified leads coming in through your web presence.
Floor Plan Images Can Be Used Throughout Your Digital Real Estate Marketing
Floor plans aren’t just for your brochure or your website (although you should definitely use them there!). Floor plan images also provide fodder for additional digital marketing platforms like Google My Business posts, social media posts, and ad images or video. And the higher quality these floor plans are, the more versatile they will be.
Say, for example, that one of your floor plans has a high vacancy rate while others are sold out. Having high quality floor plan images means you can easily promote that specific floor plan through your posts and stories on Instagram and Facebook. You could also run an ad campaign featuring the floor plan graphic alongside interior photos or renderings. Carousel ads and video ads work particularly well for this purpose.
Floor Plans and Site Plans Add Branding Opportunities
Floor plans aren’t just a convenient way to convey information. They’re also an opportunity to show users that you’re committed to providing a positive user experience, which also signals that they can expect a positive renter experience at your community. Plus, floor plans and site plans can be used in creative ways to highlight your brand personality. Doing so ensures that your units don’t blend in among all your competitors offering similar unit types.
Everything from brand colors and patterns to unique messaging can be added to your floor plan design. You could show off your branding through the floor plan design itself or by adding a branded border or background. You could even implement a unique hover state on each floor plan image on your website, if you have the ability to do so. Whatever tactic you choose, the more you can signal that your apartments are unique to your community, the more likely it is that your prospects will pay attention and eventually reach out to schedule a tour or start an application.
High-Quality Floor Plans Signal Modernity and Reliability
Not all floor plan graphics are created equal. A low-quality, low-detail floor plan image can be almost as bad as no floor plan at all. Your floor plan images should be accurate to scale, have good color contrast (which is particularly essential for prospects with color blindness or other vision impairments), and match the look-and-feel of your brand. If they feature easy-to-read dimensions, room labels, and amenity labels for sought-out features like in-unit washer and dryer and walk-in closets, that’s even better. Best of all, 3-D floor plans help bring your apartments to life complete with interior design elements and a clearer sense of scale for the viewer.
For the sake of argument, let’s compare the two floor plan images above. While the 3-D floor plan on the right does not include labels or dimensions, it still does a much better job of portraying the scale, features, and personality of the one-bedroom apartment it represents. A user viewing this floor plan can imagine themselves living there and feels confident that the unit comes with the amenities that are important to them, since they are clearly visible in the image. Meanwhile, floor plans like the one of the left don’t inspire much confidence in the user viewing them. Why? Not only does it lack detailed labels or dimensions, it also makes it challenging for the viewer to understand how large each room will feel, how modern the unit is, and what amenities it has. The apartment on the left could be fantastic, but it comes across as lackluster and illegible, making it less likely that a user will continue exploring this community for long enough to fall in love.
Those are just some of the key ways that floor plan graphics can make or break your digital real estate marketing results. For more information on how you can improve your digital marketing results, check out our post on How To Improve UX on Your Property Website (and increase conversions) or take a scroll through the Digital Buyer’s Journey For Real Estate.
