6 Steps to Master Your Multifamily Marketing Budget

Managing a marketing budget for multifamily properties is often challenging, with marketing expenses often being the first to face cuts during budget reviews. This means it’s crucial to understand your expenses and the results achieved so you can advocate for your budget as an expert.

While there are more platforms than ever for getting the word out about your properties, there are also more competing voices. Property management companies (PMCs) are getting savvier with their marketing each day.

Should you spend big on Google PPC or on Facebook ads? What about social media? Should you create videos? Post on every internet listing service (ILS) you can find? That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

It’s time to create a multifamily budget plan that is strategic with spending and focused on what’s driving real results for your properties. Otherwise, you’ll likely watch others gain a stronger foothold in your local market.

6 Steps to Building and Optimizing Your Multifamily Marketing Spend

Let’s discuss how to create a budget, how to spend it effectively, and how to optimize for future campaigns.

1. Review Historical Data

The first step to creating an effective multifamily budget is to understand what’s worked and what hasn’t. What have you tried in the past that filled your properties quickly? Where did you spend money that didn’t produce results?

Of course, your best analysis will happen if you have accurate spend and results reporting. Here are a few ways to piece together the most complete data about your past marketing efforts:

  1. Review the Data – Look over the attribution data in your CRM to find where most of your residents found the community.
  2. Check the ILSs you’ve used – These sites will have data you can review to see if they’re worth continuing to use. Focus on metrics like cost per lease to determine their effectiveness.
  3. Check your Ad Accounts – Work with your PPC provider to see which Facebook and Google keywords have produced the most clicks.
  4. Speak to the Team – Meet with the onsite team to discuss any previously attended events or housing fairs and see if they’re an effective use of marketing spend.

Your properties don’t exist in a vacuum, meaning they’re impacted by economic conditions and competition.

Conditions like a new hospital opening up nearby, high interest rates, or community renovations may increase the demand for rentals in the market. Your response may be to change your ad spend mid-year.

Or, perhaps a brand-new luxury apartment complex is going up a few blocks from you. This may be a golden opportunity to increase ad spend to ensure that people are aware of the benefits that your multifamily building has to offer.

Dynamic multifamily budgeting requires that you stay apprised of new construction projects to make proactively informed marketing decisions. You can do this by creating Google Alerts, consistently browsing apartment listing sites, and keeping an eye out when driving around town.

3. Optimize Your Marketing Spend

With so many marketing options and a limited budget, how do you maximize your ROI on ad spend?

One of your best multifamily budgeting strategies is to reach the same people on multiple platforms. The multifamily building you’re advertising will be at the top of their minds because they constantly see you.

Here are a few ways to do that:

  • Use Google Business Profiles – Set up and optimize your profile to improve your local SEO and increase lead generation.
  • Nurture your Leads – Email and SMS messages can create long-term, automated sequences that provide frequent touchpoints to both your residents and prospects.
  • Retarget Leads on Facebook & Google – Both platforms allow you to show ads to prospects who’ve interacted with your business before. You can also upload a list of emails and have those platforms advertise to only those people. Advertising can be complicated, but multifamily PPC management services can build and optimize campaigns for you.
  • Use Budgeting Tools – Budgeting software can help optimize spend and allocate funds effectively. Online calculators can determine your cost per lead and lease based on your desired marketing channels and overall spend.

Of course, there are plenty of other ways to find and nurture leads, but these can hopefully get your creative juices flowing.

4. Leverage Digital Marketing Tools

You might already be well-versed in different lead-generation and conversion strategies that have worked decently for your communities. However, new technologies leverage automation to save time and improve efficiency, reducing manual tasks for the marketing team, and helping to trim your multifamily budget.

Here are a few tools that you should consider using for better results on your multifamily marketing strategy:

  • Conversational AI – Allow your prospects to get answers immediately so the onsite team can focus on more critical tasks for the community.
  • Tour Scheduling – This technology can handle scheduling, rescheduling, reminders, and prospect nurturing. Appointments will appear on your property management software’s calendar without any work on your end. 
  • PPC Advertising – Utilize targeted pay-per-click campaigns to reach potential renters at the right moment, driving high-quality traffic to your property.
  • Website Lead Capture – Optimize your website to capture leads efficiently, allowing you to continue marketing to them.
  • Social Media Management Tools – Platforms like Hootsuite or Buffer can help schedule posts, engage with audiences, and analyze performance.

It’s important to use analytics platforms like Google Analytics to track campaign performance and website traffic. These platforms allow you to adjust strategies in real-time and ensure optimal multifamily budget allocation.

One top 20 multifamily PMC leveraged these tools to lower their ILS spend, increase speed to lease, and decrease vacancy losses, showcasing the tangible benefits of integrating these technologies.

Integrating these tools into your marketing strategy allows you to optimize your budget, improve efficiency, and ultimately drive better results for your multifamily property.

5. Evaluate Vendor Relationships

Part of optimizing your property management marketing budget and spending is examining the individual services and platforms you use. Each year, be sure to reevaluate the details of every partnership and contract to see if there’s room to save money or increase effectiveness.

If you’re like most in the industry, you’re spending a good chunk on ILSs. Ask yourself:

  • How much are you spending on ILSs?
  • What percent of your marketing spend goes towards ILSs?
  • What is your cost per lead and lease, broken down by ILS?

Now, you can begin to make decisions on both a macro and micro level. You should be able to identify ILSs that are underperforming or costly. Or, you might conclude that too much of your overall budget relies on a single channel.

A more varied blend of marketing strategies can help you be seen in more corners of the internet and avoid having too many eggs in one marketing basket, all while tightening your multifamily budget.

If you decide to pivot some of your dollars to new technology or advertising channels, analyze the property’s current data to verify a vendor’s past performance and use those analytics as a bargaining chip as you renew agreements for the coming year. Set performance incentives and seek trial periods for untested methods you may want to cancel or scale down as results roll in.

6. Involve Owners and Asset Managers

All of this sounds great until you have to justify your budget to the owners and asset managers. These people own or run multifamily buildings because they’re savvy with business and finances.

It’s worth the time to assemble compelling notes and summarize your findings directly in your budgeting tools. Ensure you can back your reasoning with compelling data or logic (where data isn’t available).

Showing that you plan to invest in better tools and reporting will also grab their interest—if you can convince them of the ROI. Lean on your vendors to help you formulate a compelling story by sharing valuable data points and insights.

By clearly presenting your strategy and demonstrating how it aligns with the owners’ and asset managers’ goals, you can build a strong case for your multifamily budget and gain their support for your initiatives.

BONUS STEP: Collaborate with Local Businesses

Consider partnering with local businesses and organizations to cross-promote each other’s offerings, share marketing costs, and reach new audiences. For example, you can collaborate with nearby gyms, restaurants, or retail stores to provide exclusive discounts or special offers to your residents.

These multifamily beneficial partnerships not only strengthen your community’s appeal but also allow you to tap into a wider audience without spending extensively on advertising.

Practical Budgeting Tips

Budgeting can be stressful—especially if you need to reduce costs—but it’s also a time for improvement.

Start with doing your best to gather data from previous years and turn that into a plan for the next year. What new marketing channels and technology can improve what you’ve already been doing?

Next, be sure there’s a feedback loop in place so you can stay continuously informed of your marketing results. That could mean using better reporting, checking ad spend more frequently, or having team members or vendors report back to you more often.

And finally, keep track of your marketing budget and adjust it based on the results you’re seeing. Use analytics tools to monitor the performance of your marketing campaigns continually. Identify which strategies are delivering the best results and focus your resources on those avenues. By eliminating or optimizing underperforming campaigns, you can allocate your budget more efficiently, saving on wasteful spending.

Remember, it’s not always about how much you spend, but how wisely you spend it that can make all the difference in the success of your property management marketing budget.

Ready to Optimize Your Multifamily Marketing Budget?

Discover how PERQ’s digital marketing platform can help you achieve higher occupancy with less work and cost. With tools for PPC advertising, website lead capture, cross-channel conversational AI, nurture automation, and multifamily’s only Google Business Profile tour scheduler, PERQ helps PMCs generate more high-quality leads from free sources.

Learn more about how PERQ can revolutionize your marketing strategy and maximize your budget. Contact us today to get started!