by threshold | Dec 10, 2019 | Digital Marketing
Internet Listing Services (ILSs) have long been a major part of the marketing strategies of real estate brands, and it’s not hard to see why. These online listing sites like Apartments.com, Apartment Finder, and Zillow help real estate brands ensure their properties show up in Google search results, driving clicks and conversions while freeing up the property management to focus on concerns beyond digital marketing strategy.
However, ILSs may not be the best marketing option for real estate brands today, and a shift away from these services is already beginning within the real estate industry. There are a few key reasons for this, which we’ll discuss, but the main takeaway is this: internet listing services simply aren’t worth the money real estate brands spend on them—at least, not when relied on as heavily as they traditionally have been.
So what should real estate brands be doing instead? Well, the answer is complex, and we’ll get into it, but the short version is that these brands should be diversifying their digital marketing mix. Let’s talk about why and how.
Internet Listing Services Are Easy But Not Efficient
We’ve already touched on why real estate brands have been putting their marketing dollars into ILSs: it makes things simple. It is a truth universally acknowledged that most property managers have enough on their plate without worrying about how to optimize their digital marketing strategy. Many real estate brands choose to let ILSs worry about that stuff for them, knowing they can benefit from the strong SEO and SEM of established ILSs that prospects already recognize and use.
However, real estate brands are beginning to understand that they’re not getting as much bang for their buck this way. While ILSs do bring in leads, brands are likely to pay a much higher cost per lead than they would on other digital marketing strategies like paid search or retargeting ads. Not only that, but ILSs could be delivering less qualified leads, resulting in fewer lead conversions, which brings us to our next point….
Internet Listing Services Can’t Verify Conversions
In other words, ILSs can’t prove their worth or provide you with analytics that help you make smart decisions about your marketing spend. That’s because when a user lands on an ILS after searching for housing, your property appears along with competing properties in the area, and users often click through several listings as they peruse their options. That means that ILSs attempting to track conversion rates by either a first-click or last-click attribution model can easily provide an inaccurate or incomplete report of your conversions from their site.
So, unless these prospects take a tour, start an application, or otherwise reach out to property staff, you may never get a chance to verify where that lead came from and how much value ILSs are really adding to your marketing strategy. And with unclear analytics, you miss out on the opportunity to evaluate and optimize your strategy along the way.
Relying Solely on ILSs Means Missing A Big Opportunity for Growth
In addition to missing out on the opportunity for continuous optimization, relying solely on an ILS for your digital marketing means limiting your brand’s marketing potential in other ways.
One of the shortcomings of ILSs is that they don’t do a good job of making your property stand out from the competition. Instead, they lump you in with your competitors and provide easy opportunities for your prospects to shift their attention to properties other than your own as they search. Other digital marketing strategies like PPC ads and SEO give you more opportunity to stand out from your competition and make a strong first (or second, or third) impression.
Speaking of making more than one impression, another shortcoming of ILSs is that they only allow you to intervene at one step of your audience’s buyer journey. Every prospect goes through a number of different stages as they search for housing, and using an ILS tends to be one of the earlier stages in the digital buyer journey. Being able to reach your audience early in their journey is great, but reaching them more than once is better. If you limit your digital marketing to just ILSs, you’ll miss out on opportunities to stay top-of-mind and catch your prospects at later stages of their journey when they might be more likely to convert.
Another way ILSs fall short is that they tend not to create strongly qualified leads when used alone. Again, that’s because the ILS user experience places your property alongside your competitors’ and limits your opportunity to wow your audience. Spending your marketing dollars to instead create a website experience that is both conversion- and search-optimized allows you the opportunity to connect with your prospects through compelling branding, provide your audience with reasons to trust, and deliver all the information a prospect needs to convert.
So What’s the Answer?
We actually don’t recommend that you stop using ILSs entirely. ILSs are currently a useful way to reach prospects at a key part of their housing search. However, there’s a lot more you could be doing.
That’s why we recommend diversifying your marketing mix. Keep ILSs in that mix if they’re helping you, but consider allocating some of the spend you’d normally put toward an ILS to other digital strategies that are cost-effective and provide more opportunities to reach your prospects and stand out from the competition.
Creating a conversion-optimized website with strong SEO is a fantastic start. Consider also launching search ads through Google Ads as well as retargeting display ads that help you stay top-of-mind for prospects who have already encountered your property through their online housing search.
If this is sounding like a lot, we get it. You can’t become a digital marketing expert overnight, and many folks in the real estate world simply don’t have the time to devote to it. Still, there’s a cost-effective way to incorporate better marketing strategies into your budget. Can you guess what we’re going to say?
If you guessed, “work with a marketing agency,” you’d be correct. Better yet, work with Threshold! We specialize in the real estate industry and we have experience working within your budget to create great marketing results. Best of all, we’ve got a team of expert digital strategists who can help you launch effective marketing strategies and optimize them as you go, so you’re always getting the most effective marketing for your spend.
If you want to learn more about digital marketing with Threshold, chat with a team member today! We’d love to get you started.
by threshold | Apr 6, 2017 | All, Marketing
Reasons to Rebrand
We get a lot of requests for rebrand projects from new property owners, especially those who’ve bought older properties. If you’re an owner taking over a property, you might want that property’s branding to fall more in line with the other communities you own. A rebrand makes a statement to the surrounding community that your property is serious about its image.
Recent renovations also cause property owners to come to Threshold for marketing ideas for apartments in the midst of a rebrand. The big payoff for big renovations is the ability to promote them. When you make renovations, and do a rebrand, you can promote your property in a whole new way to a whole new audience.
Finally, poor reputations can also cause owners to consider rebranding. Past a certain point, your property’s reputation cannot be saved, no matter how much time you dedicate to reputation management. If that’s the case, a rebrand can give your property a fresh start.
Obstacles to Overcome
Losing a name associated with negative reviews is great, but you’ll also lose plenty of equity in the community from people who’ve knew about your property’s old name. Online, you’ll have to take certain steps to combat the loss of domain and page authority that your website has built up over the years. At Threshold, we combat this by mapping your old URLs to similar pages on your new website.
There are a million moving parts to take care of when your property gets a new name, especially in today’s age of multiple online social media pages and apartment finder websites. It’s a complicated process to update every little detail, but it’s worth it—and entirely necessary— when launching a new brand into the market.
Your new site will have to build up trust with Google over time, no matter how much work your advertising agency does to combat the loss of SEO mojo from your old brand. However, property managers can drive traffic to their site right away by launching Google AdWords campaigns.
With AdWords, you can show up in search results right away because you’ve paid to be there. That will immediately drive traffic to your new site and speed up the trust-building process with Google.
Take Good Care of Your New Brand
As property managers know, renters care deeply about the lifestyle their chosen community projects. Sometimes, that projected lifestyle is even more important than the amenities or the square footage. Doing a rebrand can help your property show off an entirely different lifestyle than the old brand was putting out there. You can do all this without making major renovations.
We talked about changing the property’s social media pages to suit the new brand, but the voice and tone on social media should change as well. When we create new brands at Threshold, we don’t create them to be permanent. Instead, we develop brands that have the chance to grow and evolve as time goes on. We want our clients to be able to take ownership of their brand and wield it how they see fit. Social media is a perfect place to start trying out your new brand—your new voice.
A rebrand can involve anything from naming and a logo to a full-blown collateral update, including digital apartment marketing materials such as your website. We’re here with game-changing apartment marketing ideas when your property is ready for a rebrand. Whether you’ve just purchased a new property that needs to present a new face to the market, or you’re just sick of looking at a stagnant logo, Threshold can help.
by threshold | Mar 22, 2017 | All, Marketing
Why Combining Content Marketing and PR Strategies Is a Good Idea
To achieve business success in today’s digital environment, it’s always best to have content marketing and public relations help on staff.
Until very recently, both teams had similar agendas, yet worked separately from one another.
Things are very different now and content marketing and PR teams now seem to be working together more and more. Especially since most are remote workers, it’s easy for them to work together on modern approaches.
This makes sense since they both work in a similar fashion to achieve additional exposure online.
Each one of these teams can deliver the goods as far as online exposure is concerned. But when they work together, their efforts are magnified and together they achieve much greater heights.
Are you thinking about integrating your PR and content marketing teams?
We feel this is a no-brainer, but maybe you haven’t come to the same conclusion.
To help you better understand why these team should always work together from now on, we will share a few different reasons to help you finally see the light.
Putting Everyone’s Head Together Makes Idea Generation a Snap
Whether you’re trying to gain media attention for a hot new restaurant, an app, or a website focused on tech solutions, it’s never easy to come up with story placement ideas that meet the latest trends.
Separately, both of these teams had to find out precisely what bloggers and journalists wanted to publish online. And they also had to discover precisely what their target audience wanted to know more about.
Working together, both teams have the ability to stay far ahead of the curve. They can brainstorm ideas together, research together, and ultimately get better publication placements by working together as a group.
As each team figures out what to expect with placements, the content marketing side will achieve better results because they will target their audience correctly and share relevant content that everyone wants to read.
PR teams will also improve by working with content marketers because they can use all resources to find better placements, better story ideas, and keep the brand message consistent at all times.
Working Together Helps Amplify the Reach of Your Content
Content marketing is specifically focused on creating blog posts, webinars, articles, and other brand identification materials.
On the other hand, public relations work well because they have personal connections with the biggest influencers in your market.
By utilizing these connections, they can get better story placements and additional exposure during product launches and other times when they need an extra boost.
The combination of both of these teams creates an influential and powerful way to touch base with your target market. With every successful product launch they will be able to repeat the successes in a new mission.
But there is one other amazing benefit that you get when you combine PR and content marketing.
Sure, you’ll definitely find your target audience a lot faster. And that’s a great thing that everyone should strive for.
Guess what?
Combining PR and content marketing also makes it possible to reach a new, broader, hungrier audience as well.
Most companies are already investing in PR and content marketing.
By combining both of these avenues of outreach, you’ll have a better chance at increasing your ROI since both teams are already working toward the same objective.
Achieving Brand Message Consistency
Finally, having your PR and content marketing team working together means your brand message is always going to be on the same page.
Why is that?
Well, both teams always know what the other is doing.
By having access to this information, they can share similar stories and focus their content in a similar way so that their message is clear at all times.
Conclusion
As you can see, having content marketing and PR teams working together is definitely a great idea. If you haven’t tried it yet, you should give it a shot and see the amazing results for yourself.
Author Bio
Wendy Dessler
Title: Super-Connector at OutreachMama
Wendy is a super-connector with OutreachMama and Towering SEO who helps businesses find their audience online through outreach, partnerships, and networking. She frequently writes about the latest advancements in digital marketing and focuses her efforts on developing customized blogger outreach plans depending on the industry and competition.
by threshold | Mar 13, 2017 | All, Culture
Name: Haley McCarley
Title: Digital Marketing Specialist
Haley takes apartment marketing ideas and turns them into dynamic social media campaigns, effective PPC ads and a whole lot more. Her student housing marketing knowledge helps the entire digital team get a leg up on the competition, keeping CTRs high and spirits even higher.
Get to know Haley below!
What are 3 words you would use to describe Threshold?
Organized, Excited, Inventive
If you had an office nickname, what would it be?
“The lone female on the digital team”
What is your favorite line from a movie?
“Remember Red, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”
If you were stuck on an island, what three things would you bring?
Paddleboard, Dos Equis, and The Harry Potter series
What is the title of your autobiography?
How Haley Got Her Groove Back
What is/would be your motto or slogan?
Hook ’em horns m/
If you had a superpower, what would it be?
Flying, so I wouldn’t ever have to drive or park in Austin again
What is your hidden talent?
I am pretty awesome at doing makeup, even though I rarely wear it ;P
If you were famous, what would it be for?
Longest Netflix binge in the world
Favorite Austin eats?
Homeslice Pizza and Hopdoddy Burger Bar
by threshold | Feb 15, 2017 | All, Marketing
The demand for creative residential marketing ideas for apartments is higher than ever in this saturated market. After all, the seven year luxury apartment boom may finally be ending. U.S. apartment rental rates have increased 26% since 2010, however, rents only grew by 3.8% in 2016 compared to 5.6% growth in 2015. Furthermore, the Commerce Department has released figures that suggest fewer newly-constructed apartments being rented out this year than last year. In short, rent prices have stopped skyrocketing and new developments are slowing down.
Differentiation is more important than ever in a saturated market. In Threshold’s many years of experience in residential marketing, however, we’ve learned that differentiation is an easily misunderstood concept. Differentiation is not just a unique amenity or industry-first service offering. Differentiation is answering the question, “Why would your ideal resident choose your property over the property down the street?”
Some communities try to differentiate by offering services like bike repair, tanning beds, and even dog washing areas. While the overall service and amenity offering is important at any apartment community, it’s unlikely than any one amenity will convince someone to choose your property over the competition.
Differentiation is as much about identifying your target audience as it is about having a unique marketing message. Here at Threshold, we work with many different residential industry clients and as a result, we end up creating marketing collateral for many different audiences.
When crafting a marketing strategy for senior living communities, we must consider both the potential resident and their child who is often the final decision maker. The same holds true for student housing, though the audiences are obviously vastly different. It’s vitally important in that industry to create messaging that speaks to Generation Z students, but to not do so in such a manner that we alienate the parents who are actually paying the student’s rent.
Multifamily housing presents a different challenge altogether. In that case, the potential resident is also the decision maker, but that person could be anywhere between 22 and 70 years old. Marketing to millennials is just as important as marketing to empty-nesters, and we often have to accomplish both using the same messaging, design and marketing collateral. Advancements in apartment digital marketing tools have helped target specific audiences, but market research and understanding the client’s property is still just as important.
Differentiation doesn’t happen just because your property has the biggest pool in the market or the lowest rent. Differentiation happens when your property is properly positioned—through strategic messaging and design — to fill a gap in the market. Threshold has positioned over 3,300 properties during our combined 242 years of residential experience. Here are a few examples of positioning the client’s property as filling a gap in the market:
- The no-frills, affordable apartment that still offers a hint of luxury.
- The place to gather for a diverse community of young professionals
- The rustic living space in an urban environment
- The senior living community that helps residents maintain an active lifestyle
- The student housing community closest to campus
- The student housing community that doesn’t feel like student housing
As you can see, positioning can be as simple as a location or as complex as a lifestyle promise. Of course, each of these positioning statements requires many hours of research and competitive analysis. In the end, by identifying the target audience and comparing the client’s property to the competition, we’re able to find the differentiation opportunity. It then becomes a matter of crafting the messaging, digital campaigns and residential marketing collateral that best speaks to the primary differences between your property the one down the road.
