by threshold | Jul 20, 2021 | Digital Marketing, Marketing, Tech/Web, Thought Leadership
Identifying key audiences is critical to any marketing campaign, and that is even more important when you are attempting to drive foot traffic and the right audience to your website. That’s why real estate marketers are constantly innovating around digital targeting tactics in an attempt to maximize your reach without wasting ad spend on unqualified leads and impressions. Addressable marketing is one of the most cutting edge advancements in audience targeting because it allows apartment marketers to target their audience on a household-by-household basis, achieving a granularity that was previously unheard of in location-based marketing.
If you’re new to addressable marketing and unsure if it’s right for your real estate asset, this post can help you understand what addressable marketing is, how it works, and how it can add to your real estate marketing plan.
What is Addressable Marketing?
Addressable marketing campaigns allow ads and other media to be served to individual households across a number of personal devices—Connected TVs, smartphones, personal computers, etc. These ads can target prospects based on household location, age, income level, home equity information, number of household members, and a variety of interests, resulting in highly qualified online and offline traffic from prospects who are more likely to convert.
Because it targets your audience household-by-household, this tactic shares many of the benefits of a direct mailer while also saving on design and printing costs and allowing you the flexibility to target your audience with data aggregation tools rather than requiring you to have a list of addresses ready at hand. Think of it like the direct mailer for the digital age.
How Does Addressable Marketing Work?
It used to be that location-based targeting was relatively limited in terms of the specificity it could achieve, but nowadays, it is possible to use GPS data combined with IP information and plat line data to specifically target on a household-by-household level. This image from Simpli.Fi, one of Threshold’s vendor partners, shows the evolution of available technology.
When creating an addressable marketing campaign, you start by defining the audience you’re hoping to reach across factors like household location, interests, and other demographic information such as age, income level, etc. Then, through data aggregation tools, micro-geofences are drawn around each physical address that meets those data requirements. Next, a conversion zone is drawn around a specific location where you want to measure foot traffic (e.g. your leasing office).
When a prospect enters your micro-geofenced locations (e.g. physical home address), they will be targeted with your ads on their mobile and desktop devices for a set amount of time (30 days is typical). When the customer enters the conversion zone (e.g. leasing office) with their mobile device after being served your ad, the conversion zone recognizes the prospect and attributes their visit as an offline conversion. OR, if a prospect converts online by filling out a contact form, that action is measured as an online conversion.
Who Should Be Using Addressable Marketing Campaigns?
Addressable Marketing tactics can be useful for any real estate vertical, whether it be student housing, multi-family, senior living, or commercial. But in general, the more time your audience spends at home (or at the geofenced location), the more opportunity you have to engage them with Addressable Marketing campaigns. This makes it a great option for multi-family communities with a target audience that includes work-from-home professionals. It also makes addressable marketing a particularly lucrative choice for senior living brands.
In fact, since the COVID-19 pandemic changed how we work, live, and relax, the emergence of addressable marketing as the next frontier of digital real estate marketing has only been bolstered. Targeting users while they are at home has become especially important during a time when going out is no longer the norm. In fact, with fewer prospects visiting leasing offices, addressable marketing is one way to off-set the reduced in-person marketing opportunities.
Simpli.Fi, a leading provider of addressable marketing services, put it this way:
As the COVID-19 outbreak continues and social distancing becomes the new normal, people are spending more and more of their time at home. It is essential for businesses to be able to effectively reach consumers in their homes in order to increase online sales.
Furthermore, because addressable marketing is emerging as the direct mailer for the digital age, it is regarded as a particularly excellent choice when marking housing to seniors. Because addressable marketing campaigns use data aggregation tools and fine-tuned targeting factors like age, home equity, and interests, they are able to hone in on senior prospects who may be ready to move, like empty nesters looking to downsize, for example. For more advertising tactics for senior living, check out our post on the Top Digital Marketing Strategies for Senior Housing.
Ready to see addressable marketing in action? You can see how an addressable marketing campaign contributed to 165 online conversions for one senior living property by checking out this Senior Living Case Study. And when you’re ready to try it for yourself, you can always reach out for a free consultation on our contact page.
by threshold | Jan 12, 2021 | Digital Marketing, Marketing, Tech/Web
With COVID-19’s disproportionately high impact on older generations, it goes without saying that the senior living industry has likewise felt the brunt of this pandemic. As we keep our eyes on industry trends, we’ve compiled a few takeaways for our senior living clients and their competitors as they navigate the effects of the pandemic on their brand reputation, lead traffic, and ultimately lease rates. These challenges aren’t felt universally or with the same severity for all communities within the senior living industry, but they may have long-lasting ramifications for brands in this vertical.
In this post, we’ll be breaking down what effects we’re seeing in the industry, what’s causing these effects, what can be done to mitigate them, and what we can expect moving forward. Looking for senior living marketing tips to help your community respond to the pandemic? You’ve come to the right place. Let’s get into it.
The Effects of COVID-19 On the Senior Living Industry
When it comes to the top Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) we use to measure marketing success for the real estate industry, the impact of the pandemic on senior living communities is similar to that seen by other segments of the housing industry: occupancy is down, costs are up, and brand reputation is less stable.
But these are the short-term effects of COVID-19. It remains to be seen how these shifts will ripple into the future. Senior living brands enjoy some security in the simple fact that aging is inevitable and the next wave of seniors will still need assisted living and memory care. However, at the present moment, long-term care facilities have been hit hardest by COVID’s effects, followed by assisted living communities. In Q2 of 2020, the National Investment Center for Seniors Housing & Care reported that the average occupancy rate for senior housing properties dropped to a historic low of 84.9%.
Less clear is how the pandemic will effect the Active Living industry. The good news for this segment of senior living is that their KPIs have been less impacted than their assisted living and memory care counterparts. Occupancy at active/independent communities has remained relatively stable. Regardless, we may begin to see an increased effort among Active Living communities to distance themselves from the term “Senior Living” in order to skirt the perception of senior communities as risky places to live right now.
What’s Causing These Effects?
In addition to the direct, human impact of the coronavirus, the pandemic also impacts the senior living industry in indirect ways. For example, press coverage focusing on outbreaks or the risk of outbreak in these communities compounds the perception of all such facilities as unsafe places to live (or for one’s parents to live). This negative perception can extend even to those communities that have strong safety measures and have not suffered an outbreak.
After all, while we’ve all seen the headlines about outbreaks at senior care communities, the average person is less likely to look beyond the headline to fully ascertain the factors that are most likely to lead to outbreaks. This contributes to an imperfect understanding of the true level of risk, which is only exacerbated by the fact that scientists and the press alike have been playing catch up to understand how this virus spreads and impacts the body. All that uncertainty makes it hard for seniors and their adult children to feel confident in their housing choices, resulting in fewer leads and leases.
Furthermore, the recession kicked off by the pandemic is still building. Its impact will continue well beyond the current moment, likely for years to come. Since many seniors looking for independent or active living must sell their homes before making a move into a senior living community, a recession may inspire this group to delay this transition for as long as they’re able. In other words, this demographic may choose to age in place a bit longer, resulting in less demand for independent living.
As for memory care and assisted living, the recession may impact these sectors as well, although in different ways. It may impact how much seniors or their families are able to spend on their care. It will also likely mean that some families opt to (or are forced to) care for their senior family members themselves rather than paying for the extra care provided by an assisted living or memory care facility.
In addition, costs are up for senior living communities as they hire more specialized staff, buy more protective gear, and contend with increased demand for the supplies they need to serve their community. Additionally, while senior living has often relied on in-person tours and marketing, the pandemic has required communities to move more of their leasing efforts into the digital space, resulting in additional expenditures on technology like virtual tours, live chat bots, and more. Not only that, but seniors currently residing at these communities are looking for ways to stay connected with their families who may be unable to visit in person, so some communities are accommodating that with added digital amenities, resulting in additional up-front tech costs.
What Can We Do?
We’ve published a number of guides that can empower senior living brands with better marketing during the pandemic, including our blog post on How To Adapt Your Real Estate Marketing During COVID-19.
Additionally, we highly recommend our more recent guides covering Digital Apartment Marketing Tips During COVID and a Tour Guide Playbook with best practices for tours and lead nurturing during COVID.
In addition to what you’ll find in these guides, we have a few recommendations to add specifically for the senior living industry. The first is to explore Addressable Marketing campaigns using geofencing technology. Campaigns like these have the ability to target users at their household—like a direct mailer for the digital age—and can reach audiences based on factors like age, the number of members in their household, and a variety of interests.
Finally, your messaging around COVID is of paramount importance when it comes to nurturing the leads that do come in. This is likely to remain top-of-mind for a while, especially for the senior living industry, so any prospect who is unable to easily find information regarding COVID-19 on your website, GMB page, or by email is likely to take their search elsewhere. Be as transparent as you can about your respond to COVID-19. Make this information easy to find throughout your digital presence, including your website, GMB, and social accounts. Show that you are taking concrete measures to promote social distancing and minimize the risk of outbreaks.
Being up-front with this information may seem like it’s calling attention to the risk the pandemic has created, but that ship has already sailed; your prospects are thinking about COVID when they decide where to live, regardless of whether you bring up the topic yourself. The best you can do is help assuage their concerns by making it crystal clear that you are doing everything you can to keep seniors and their loved ones safe.
