Whether you’re coordinating with investors or resolving an issue with your residents, how people see you matters. Public Relations (PR) and Crisis Communications can impact everything from your development schedule to your renewal rates, so you need the right tools to build positive relationships. But how can you avoid classic PR mistakes in the real estate industry and ensure you always meet the goals you’ve set out in your apartment marketing plan? Understanding these simple PR dos and don’ts could be the difference between a reputation-destroying scandal and the unwavering trust of prospects and residents…or it could just help you empower smooth and steady operations day in and day out.
Do Your Homework
Understand your stakeholders, the history of your community, and the needs of your audience. A little market research goes a long way in the world of PR. That’s because the most effective PR is proactive, not reactive. Doing your research ahead of time helps you anticipate any potential issues before they ever arise and proactively generate positive PR to offset any challenges that may arise.
Engage With Your Community
Speaking of proactive PR, taking the time to involve yourself with your local community builds brand recognition and trust, improves word-of-mouth reputation, and broadens your opportunities for positive press. Participating in local initiatives and charitable efforts can also help engage audiences looking for socially conscious brands, which is increasingly relevant for today’s renters, who have more outlets to stay connected and socially aware than ever.
Do a Visibility Audit
Understanding how and where your brand is visible is the necessary foundation for you to build on. Part of good PR is ensuring that your brand is as visible as possible—through SEO efforts, media coverage, social media activity, and so on—but it’s just as important that what’s visible represents your brand in a good light. In other words, it’s great if your brand is the first Google search result for relevant keywords, but if it’s also associated with overwhelmingly negative reviews on its Google My Business page, the harm might offset the good.
Get a holistic picture of your brand’s optics to start, then identify areas for improvement. Next steps might be a round of SEO improvements to your website, launching a paid Google Ad campaign, rehabilitating your reputation management strategy or becoming more active on social media.
Write Your Own News
You don’t have to sit around hoping for positive press—write it yourself! Writing your own blog posts and press releases allows you some control over your own narrative and helps capture your community at all its best angles. Generating positive news is especially relevant for new start communities looking to generate buzz in advance of their open date. So take the time to tell your story wherever you can—on a blog on your website or your social media accounts—and solicit good press by writing press releases showcasing updates, milestones, charitable initiatives, and more newsworthy events.
Build Media Relations
While writing your own story is part of the puzzle, the other part is getting others to share it. That’s where networking becomes important. You can write all the press releases and media pitches you want, but if you don’t know who to direct them to and how, you’re merely shouting into the void, and wasting your energy in the process.
Become familiar with the journalists, bloggers, influencers, and thought leaders on real estate in your area. Understand how you can work with them toward mutual benefit. Don’t assume you can count on them for help without first understanding what you can offer in return. In other words, try to offer content that is genuinely newsworthy, that speaks to their audience, or that offers insight on an industry trend.
With these simple PR guidelines, you’ll expand your positive media coverage, control your story, and highlight the best features of your real estate brand. For most brands, this is enough to generate buzz and avoid snafus.
If you could use help with a more robust PR strategy within a complex market, or need help responding to a crisis, enlisting the help of a professional is often the right call. If you want that help to come from an agency with extensive experience in your real estate market, Threshold is always here to help. Learn more about our PR and Crisis Communications services to determine if they’re right for you.
Before signing a lease with you, your prospects are going to research your community’s online reputation on sites like Google, Yelp, Facebook, Apartments.com, and ApartmentRatings.com. It’s important that what they find inspires their confidence. Incorporating a reputation management strategy in your real estate marketing plan is key, because a poor online reputation means fewer prospects make it to your website, choose to schedule a tour, or take the plunge and sign a lease with you. In fact, Harvard Business School recently published a study showing that a one-star increase in your ratings can result in up to a 9% increase in your overall revenue.
So how can you avoid the trials and tribulations of negative property reviews (and worse, fumbled review responses) and ensure that your reputation works for you and not against you? We’ve been around this block a time or two, and here’s what has always worked for us.
Ask for Honest Reviews
Having no reviews at all can sometimes be just as damaging as having a low average star rating. But you don’t have to just wait around hoping someone will share their experience online. Your average visitor or resident won’t be motivated enough to write a review on their own, but asking politely for a review can turn some of those people into your best advocates.
As long as you don’t ask too often, current residents or leads you’ve been nurturing usually won’t mind you asking for their honest review on sites like Google, Yelp, and ApartmentRatings.com. You legally can’t (and shouldn’t) incentivize review-writing, but you also don’t have to. Providing a great customer service experience such as a well-executed tour, a prompt email response, or well-maintained amenities is usually enough to earn a few minutes of a reviewer’s time. Just don’t be pushy; a simple, “If you’re able, we’d love to hear your review of our service on Google or Yelp” will suffice.
Accept Criticism
It’s going to happen. Sometimes it’s genuinely your fault and sometimes it may not be. But no one trusts a brand that can’t accept an honest critique without trying to brush it under the rug or rattling off a defensive response. Consumers trust a brand that learns from its mistakes and seeks to right wrongs for the good of the consumers that they serve. Speaking of which…
Learn From Your Mistakes
Negative reviews can become positive growth if you treat them the right way. Many of the common complaints real estate brands see can provide invaluable insight into how to create a better user experience for prospects and current residents alike.
For example, when a prospect arrives for a tour but feels neglected, it may be an opportunity to discuss new strategies with on-site staff (or reinforce existing ones). When a resident complains about a lack of communication from property staff, you may need to rethink your existing processes around mass resident communications or direct follow-up emails from office staff. Nine times out of ten, even a belligerent review that may feel unfair presents some valuable kernel to learn from.
Respond Promptly & Honestly
When you get an online review, especially a negative one, it’s important that it doesn’t go unanswered. As often as possible, craft a personalized response to the reviewer’s specific concerns. Express that you’re sorry you’ve contributed to their negative experience and you intend to do better in the future or to rectify the situation if possible. If necessary to expedite review responses, draft a few templates for responding to common issues so that your staff has a head start on the response content (this way they’re also sure to stay on-script with PR-friendly strategies).
If the reviewer is a current resident, let them know you’ll call or email them to follow up on their concerns (and then actually do it). If your customer service response is truly top quality, they may even update their review to indicate that your team resolved this issue for them, and these kinds of review updates can inspire even more trust for those who read them than a handful of non-specific 5-star reviews.
These guidelines should help you make the most of your online reviews and even allow you to turn challenges into triumphs. If you’re looking for professional help with a particularly challenging situation or you just want to free up your staff’s time for property management needs, there’s always the option of hiring a real estate marketing agency like Threshold to help you out. Our team is here to chat if you’re interested.
When 2020’s pandemic hit, real estate brands all over the world started bracing for a shift. It wasn’t yet clear what the year would bring, but many were anticipating a challenging leasing season. It seemed that with the need to shelter in place would come fewer tours, fewer new leases, and more frugal prospects. On the other hand, the pandemic could also encourage more renewals as residents chose to put off moving into a new home for more stable times, or, more pessimistically, as hiring freezes contributed to less job mobility and residents were therefore less likely to move for work.
Indeed, COVID-19 has had a complex array of impacts on moving trends in 2020. But real estate professionals may actually be surprised at some of the trends that have emerged. Early research shows that the story is far from simple, especially when considering that behaviors have undergone different shifts for different markets. Let’s talk 2020 moving trends.
Likeliness of Moving
One study, called the America at Home Study, surveyed a representative group of 3,001 renters and homeowners aged 25-55+ making housing incomes of $50,000 or more per year. This group was asked to rate their likelihood to move from their current homes as a result of COVID.
The segment of respondents who were 55 and over represented the majority of homeowners planning to move sooner than expected due to COVID-19.The same group also represented the majority of homeowners that had no change in moving plans, meaning that they still planned to move.
Meanwhile, respondents 35-44 were more likely to say they planned to stay in their current home longer as a result of COVID-19, while most respondents aged 45-54 were split between no change to their moving plans or a desire to stay at home longer.
Interestingly, respondents aged 25-34 were amongst the most likely to have changed their moving plans due to COVID, but like the group 55 and over, they were more likely to be planning to move sooner rather than being inclined to stay in their current home longer.
Likeliness of Homebuying
Perhaps even more interesting are the results from a question that asked renters to rate their likelihood of buying a home as a result of COVID.
Of the people polled, 50% of renters said that they have an increased desire to buy a home after living through the pandemic. Of those renters that said they were more inclined to buy, 25 to 34-year-olds represent the majority. But interestingly, 25 to 34-year-olds also represented a majority of renters that were less inclined to buy. This could simply be because this age group represents a majority of renters considering buying a home for the first time, as they are statistically most likely to be marrying, expanding their families, and growing in their career. In other words, this age group is likely to be in transition, so it’s unsurprising that they have plans to buy and that those plans are affected by the particular timing of COVID, even if they are split on the nature of that impact. Still, the relatively even split among this group between those more inclined to buy and less inclined to buy is interesting in its own right.
Meanwhile, a significant number of 35 to 44-year-olds were also interested in buying a home, but tended to be somewhat less inclined to buy due to COVID. Conversely, respondents in the age range of 45-54 were overall the least interested in buying a home, but if COVID influenced their likelihood at all, it tended to make them more inclined to buy, not less.
And interestingly, respondents 55 and up were the least likely to report being influenced one way or the other by COVID with respect to their plans to buy a home. A significant portion of this age group did have plans to buy a home. In fact, they were more likely to express interest than the group aged 45-54 and about as likely to express interest as the 35 to 44-year-olds.
Caveats
While this study offers useful insights, it must be said that it does not offer a full picture. It does a good job of breaking down the data from respondents that fall into the categories it surveys (25-55+, homeowners/renters, minimum salary of $50k). However, it does not account for people 18-24 (which may include students and first-time renters) or people who earn a salary of less than $50k a year.
In other words, it excludes a lot of people from its scope, and these exclusions are likely to predominately apply to minority populations and disadvantaged groups like Blacks, Latinx folks, and people with disabilities. It’s also more likely to exclude people in lower-paying industries like retail and food service or people who may have lost their jobs and income due to COVID-19.
Takeaways
So with that grain of salt in mind, what have we learned from existing market research?
First and foremost, we’ve learned that people are still moving. Whether they were looking to rent or buy, folks across all age groups are not seeing COVID as an insurmountable barrier to moving. In fact, for some, it provides reasons to move sooner than they may have before.
This isn’t necessarily surprising. After all, people will always need a place to live, and now more than ever, it’s important that they be satisfied with where they live. Among those who can still afford to move, moving may present an opportunity to find a space more suited to their needs, especially now that they’re likely spending more time at home.
Younger Millennials and older Boomers are the groups most likely to move right now, likely for opposite reasons. While Millennials may be looking to build families or find a home closer to their new job, Boomers may be looking to downsize or transition to active or assisted living environments.
Something we’re also seeing is that most rent is still being paid, in spite of COVID. One analysis showed that in June 2020, 94% of rent payments were collected. However, this data is collected through rent tracking software like Resman, Appfolio, etc, which means it only accounts for properties and property management companies using this kind of software to collect and report on rent collections. This likely excludes smaller property owners and Mom & Pop landlords and may in turn be more likely to exclude renters of minority racial or ethnic groups, folks making below a certain salary, and other groups.
Here at Threshold, our data confirms these trends. Across digital campaigns, impressions, clicks, and conversion results are strong and driving qualified traffic. Occupancy rates that were falling are now starting to climb again. Our clients are filling spaces where people have moved out, keeping occupancy rates strong by offering concessions and renewals with no increase in the rental rate. In other words, conditions are stable enough that properties are making it work.
Improving your visibility online has never been more important in the world of apartment marketing. According to research by HubSpot, 75% of people never scroll past the first page of search results. That’s probably not very surprising for you—after all, how often do you find yourself scrolling even as far as the bottom of the first page? Real estate marketers today know that SEO is one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies because, when done right, it costs very little to implement, leading to low cost-per-conversion and increased traffic and leads.
So what can you do today to improve your apartment website SEO? If you’re not interested in hiring an SEO expert on our team, there’s still a lot you can do to execute your own SEO services to rank more highly on Google. Here are some quick and dirty tips that can help you get started and see results.
On-Page SEO for Apartment Marketing
On-page SEO is a collective term for the ways in which your website content—from page titles to headings to alt tags to meta descriptions to site maps and more—impacts your Google search rankings. There are lots of ways to impact your on-page SEO, and it all starts with a little research.
Use Keyword Planner
Use Google’s Keyword Planner to your advantage. This tool can help you do the keyword research that will be the first step to making informed SEO decisions. You want your site to use keywords in strategic ways so that Google will deem your website relevant when a user types out those same keywords in a Google search. But in order to select strategic keywords for your property, you need to know what people are searching for. That’s exactly what Keyword Planner tells you.
There are also popular tools like Semrush with similar functionality, but Google Keyword Planner has the advantage of being free to use, so it’s a great place to start.
How To Use Keyword Planner for Apartment Marketing
When you’re using Keyword Planner, start by typing in the search terms people might use when looking for an apartment in your area—your common sense is your best friend here. The tool will then return suggested keywords similar to what you entered, showing the search volume and competitiveness for the suggested keywords. You’ll want to target the least competitive keywords with the highest search volume. This is the quickest way to see more organic traffic.
However, be mindful of user intent when you’re choosing the keywords to target. Just because a keyword offers what looks like a particularly juicy opportunity doesn’t mean that users will actually click on your website in search results. Your website also has to be genuinely relevant to what they’re looking for. For example, it might seem tempting to attempt to rank for “apartmentfinder” but users typing in this search term will typically be looking for the website ApartmentFinder, which is bound to claim the first spot in Google results. Once they’ve made their search, there’s extremely little chance of them going on to click on your website, even if it claims the second position in the search results.
For this reason, you should always include hyper-local keywords in your SEO strategy. Keywords like “apartments in [city],” “[city] apartments,” “[district] apartments” or “apartments in [zip code]” are usually great places to start. Sometimes, a keyword that mentions a particular landmark, employer, or school district can also earn high search traffic.
While you’re at it, it’s also a great idea to put your property’s street address and contact info on the footer of every page of your website and make sure that your address and contact info is also on your property’s Google My Business page. This helps your website capture more local traffic by letting Google know exactly where you are.
When In Doubt, Learn From Competitors
You can also use Keyword Planner to see what keywords a competitor’s site is ranking for. If you’re like most apartment communities, you probably have a competitor just down the street with comparable amenities and solid SEO. While you might be frustrated knowing you’re losing business to them just because they show up higher in search results, they are also the perfect example to learn from. Put their website domain name into the Keyword Planner and see what comes up. Remember to go after the keywords with higher search volume but lower competitiveness scores—this could help you beat out your competitors and see lots more organic traffic.
Place Keywords in High-Impact Areas of Your Site
Now that you know what keywords you want to target, it’s time to put them all over your site. But there are areas of your site that will offer higher impact than others, so before you go slapping keywords throughout your site, take a second to plan things out.
When Google indexes a site for search, it pays particularly close attention to page titles, headers, and alt text on images to determine what your page is about. When you can, incorporating keywords in these areas can have a higher impact on your ranking than putting them in the body copy. That’s not to say you shouldn’t put them in body copy too, just don’t neglect the sections of your site that offer the highest SEO impact.
Add a Blog to Your Apartment Website
Adding a blog to your apartment website is one of the easiest ways to expand your SEO opportunities. That’s because the more words and the more pages your website contains, the more space there is to incorporate those keywords.
Including keywords in your page titles and headers is great, but these areas represent precious little real estate on your website. To provide more opportunities to enhance your SEO, you need more space to incorporate keywords. But nobody likes a cluttered homepage and absolutely no one wants to sift through a bunch of paragraph copy while they’re just looking for a list of amenities.
That’s why adding a blog is a great way to have your cake and eat it too. You can preserve the streamlined usability of your main site while still incorporating plenty of copy where you can drop in those keywords without seeming spammy. Try writing a post about the top restaurants near your apartments or the best ways to keep your in-unit laundry machines running smoothly. You’ll find it easy to drop local keywords into this kind of content, plus your residents and prospects can genuinely benefit from the information.
Posting fresh content to your blog consistently also makes Google’s algorithm happy and makes your site more likely to rank highly in search results. That’s because it prioritizes fresh content to ensure it’s providing up-to-date and hyper-relevant results for its users.
Add Video to your Apartment Website
Google’s algorithm likes websites with content that sees high engagement. That’s why it tends to favor websites that include video as part of their user experience.
Video offers the opportunity to communicate a lot in a short amount of time and users love that. A user is a lot more likely to watch a 1-minute video than to read through your paragraph about all your top amenities. Since Google’s mission is to connect users to content they’ll find valuable, it tries to deliver sites that offer great UX, and video is just part of that equation, but a powerful one.
Wondering how you can incorporate video on your website? A virtual tour is the perfect place to start. An impressive fly-over video that acts as the hero image for your homepage might also be a great option.
Whatever video assets you implement on your site, always ensure that they have a full description and meta data included. This is necessary to tell Google what the video is so it can index it properly.
Improve Your Mobile Experience
Most apartment websites are built first for desktop, then optimized for mobile, which is a fine strategy. But with more than half of all internet traffic now coming from mobile devices, it’s essential that you don’t skip that second step. It’s bad UX, and Google will fault you for it.
Having a responsive site—i.e. one that looks great on a variety of screen sizes, including mobile—will not only make users happier (which leads to more conversions), it will also help you rank more highly in Google’s search results by showing Google that your site can provide a great experience. While ensuring your site design is optimized for mobile, it’s also important that you minimize load times for your site. A slow-loading website will result in high bounce rates—especially for mobile users—which hurts your SEO rankings.
Off-Page SEO for Apartment Marketing
Off-page SEO refers to the ways in which content elsewhere on the internet (i.e. not on your site) can impact your website’s Google search rankings. While you have less control over these factors, there are still steps you can take to improve your off-page SEO.
Manage In-Bound Linking
In its effort to deliver relevant and up-to-date search results for its users, Google takes cues from other pages on the internet to determine how credible and how current your site is. Social media pages and reputation management sites are likely to comprise the majority of in-bound links to your site, so this is what Google will pay attention to.
To enhance your off-site SEO, ensure that all these pages list the correct URL for your site so that Google sees these in-bound links and deems your website that much more important. It’s also worth ensuring that these off-site pages are up-to-date with the same phone number, address, office hours, and other information listed on your website. This further demonstrates to Google that your site is credible and current.
Invest in an SEO Audit
If you’re doing all of the above already, or you’re overwhelmed and don’t know where to start, an SEO audit can help you identify what’s contributing to your SEO woes. There are lots of SEO experts out there who can help, and we’re one of them. Our SEO services range from a simple SEO audit to full-service SEO overhauls and SEO blog writing. If you’re interested, you can learn more by viewing our SEO product slick or chatting with a team member today.
Now more than ever, great property photos and videos are an essential piece of real estate marketing. With fewer prospects touring in person and renters looking to find all the information they need online, great photos on your property website and reputation management profiles can single-handedly make or break your property at the beginning of a prospect’s buyer journey. Not only that, but great photography is essential to building display ads that get users to click.
High-quality video has even higher potential to impact your marketing success. You probably know by now that video ads drive higher engagement and conversion rates than ads using still images. Landing pages with video are also known to increase conversions (by up to 80%) and get more organic traffic from Google. And a video tour on your website can bridge the conversion gap for potential residents even if they can’t visit in person.
So how do you create eye-catching photos and videos that do all this heavy lifting for your real estate marketing? With a few tips, it could be easier than you think.
How To Make Photos Work For You
When it comes to great photos, hiring the right photographer goes a long way (or you can have your agency partner do that for you). But whether you’re opting to hire a photographer or do it all in-house, there are a few things you can do to ensure you walk away with assets that bring your property website, Google My Business page, display ads, and social media profiles to life.
Capture All The Right Angles
Your prospects want to see as much of your community as possible and you want them to see your good side. Carefully curating your shot list will ensure you both get what you’re looking for.
First, think about what your key differentiators are and make shots that illustrate them your top priority. Do you have a state-of-the-art fitness center? Show it off! Is it your on-site staff that set you apart? A shot of the leasing office might be in order. Got a fantastic location? Bring attention to it with an exterior shot that shows your community as part of the neighborhood.
Regardless of what you’re most proud of, you should make sure prospects can find photos of as many amenities as possible, especially the apartment amenities. Folks want to know what their bathroom, kitchen, bedroom, and living room will look like at the very least.
Whether you’re capturing your fitness center, your pool, or your apartment interiors, you’ll also want to think about the photo composition. You want photos that show things from a prospect’s point of view if they were to tour in person, but you also want to capture areas with the most visual interest and striking aesthetics. In other words, shoot your kitchen from a spot that captures the island, the stainless steel oven, the modern lighting, and the custom cabinetry all in one; don’t bother with a photo that only shows the sink and the countertops or is dominated by empty spaces like floors and ceilings.
Control Your Lighting
Good lighting is absolutely essential and natural lighting is best (even for indoor shots). The best times for taking photos with natural light are a few hours after sunrise and a few hours before sunset to ensure there is plenty of light without harsh brightness or exaggerated shadows.
If taking photos where no natural light is available, make sure to turn on all the lights in the area. You may also want to bring additional light sources with you (ones specially made for photography if possible) to ensure diffuse but bright light that doesn’t result in strange shadows or overly warm or washed out photos.
Set The Stage
An empty apartment doesn’t do your property justice. Whenever possible, stage your model unit carefully and stylishly to show your prospects its full potential. That means towels hanging in the bathroom, a cute succulent on the kitchen island, a colorful rug amongst the living room furniture, and so on. Careful staging helps ensure your prospects have no barriers to imagining themselves living in your community.
How To Make Videos Work For You
From video ads to stunning homepages to informative virtual tours, high-quality video assets can do a lot of work for your apartment marketing. Again, we recommend hiring a professional videographer and/or video editor (or getting your agency partner to help). Either way, these tips and recommendations can help you get video assets that drive conversions and inspire engagement.
Film a Breathtaking Flyover
Drone footage capturing your property from the sky is a great way to capture breathtaking visuals and add a luxurious feel to your community. This option is especially effective if you have rooftop spaces, lush interior courtyards, or lofty high-rise views. Videos like these are often displayed prominently above-the-fold on a property home page, and there’s a reason for that. They result in lower bounce rates and more time spent on-site, giving prospects a higher likelihood of converting.
Create Video Ads From Still Photos
If you’d rather opt for the budget version or need a quick turnaround, you might choose to turn existing photo assets into engaging video through the power of editing. Even a simple slideshow set to pleasant music and featuring a few key messages through written copy can enhance the impact beyond that of still photos alone, making for a great video ad strategy on Facebook or YouTube. Just make sure to keep it short; the most effective video ads, according to Facebook, are between 5 and 15 seconds long.
Shoot a Video Tour
Virtual tours are a must these days, and shooting real video of one of your leasing agents or community residents showing the viewer around a model apartment is one effective way to get that done. A video tour posted prominently on the website, shared on social media, or sent out in your email marketing is a great way to provide the experience of in-person touring without the hassle or the hazards of visiting the community in person.
Get a Matterport Video
Did you know you can get a simple video tour made for you that combines still images into a virtual 3D floor plan and allows prospects to measure and explore the layout with a click of the mouse? Matterport videos are one such tool, and another great virtual tour option that you can embed on websites, post on social media, or send in emails. For more information, talk to a Threshold team member (no strings attached).
That’s it for our property photos and video tips! From coordinating shot lists to editing videos, we hope these tips can help you create assets that work for your property. If you’re looking for more advice or help getting started, we’re happy to put the full force of the Threshold team at your back! Reach out to our team to learn more about our videography and photography services, or check out our product slick.
