You Need to Take a Look at Your Apartment Website
We know that the majority of prospects start their apartment search journey on an ILS (Internet Listing Service) such as Apartments.com or Zillow or on other apartment marketing websites. It can be really hard to make your ILS listing all that much different from the other ones on there. You can have high-quality photos and a really informative description, but that’s kind of it. The design of multifamily websites tends to be boring and most of these sites look very similar
From an ILS, the next step prospects take is to go to the property company website or the apartment website. This is one of the only opportunities you have to show what is different and unique about your property through your multifamily website design. Daniel Paulino, Vice President of Digital Marketing at Bozzuto, says that the website is your chance to tell the prospects the story of who you are.
“Consumers have an obsession these days with floor plans,” Paulino says from his experience with his own property management group’s websites. He saw that apartment rental website design with the best floor plan experience captured the attention of prospects and they stay longer than the property management websites that didn’t. It doesn’t mean that you have to get a 3D floor plan of each unit, but showing how many available units per floor, having high-quality images and detailed information about each floor plan is crucial. Marketing ideas for apartments tend to include more outward reaching tips and don’t always touch on how important multifamily website design is when it comes to the digital marketing of your apartment community.
Tech Stack
When you’ve got prospects on your property management websites, it’s important to keep them on there as long as possible and to be effectively gathering data on what floor plan they are looking at, pricing, move-in timeline, etc which can be done through your multifamily website design. When it comes to the property management software you decide to invest in for your tech stack to help keep the prospect on your website longer and gather data, Paulino says, “Bottom line, there’s two main driving points that are extremely important; what does the prospect need, what is important to them, and what is your business actually trying to address this in the prospects journey.”
When it comes to figuring out what tools in your tech stack that live on your website are worth keeping and which ones need to be cut, Paulino emphasized the importance of A/B testing. A/B testing is when there are two versions of your page with two different variants. While this test runs, online users will see one or the other at random and continue on the page as normal. It’s the clearest way to show what the tool is actually doing when it comes to driving traffic to certain buttons, converting leads to tours, and what journey the prospect ends up taking on your site. This is an important aspect of multifamily digital marketing. Testing our different versions of your multifamily website design to see which has more impact is how you can understand if your tools are working for or against you.
Paulino also points out that you can’t just test one metric to see if a tool has value. Leads to lease conversion is an important metric and should always be looked at since that is the bottom line of what your efforts are trying to do. That doesn’t mean you should ignore other metrics like keyword rankings, cost per lead, bounce rate, etc. You won’t understand if your multifamily digital marketing is working and making the impact it should be making if you don’t look at all the key performance metrics. Apartment marketing companies are also a great resource for help if you see that your multifamily website design isn’t performing as well as you want it to.
Leveraging AI Technology
There are lots of AI technology options for multifamily out there to help boost our multifamily website design performance, but not all of them are worth the money. The multifamily property software you invest in needs to help the leasing team work more efficiently by collecting better data and make your apartment website stand out from competitors. If all they do is add clutter to your apartment rental website design and hand off leads regardless of whether or not they are qualified then those tools need to go. It can be hard to tell if a tool will help you, but with Paulino’s advice you can know whether or not your investment was worth it and you can feel more secure in your multifamily website design.
An AI platform is a great solution to keep online visitors engaged, collect better data, and create a more interactive website. Check out how PERQ can work for your portfolio.
PERQ integrates with your existing website and lead sources to engage, nurture and convert every lead, improving the multifamily leasing journey for everyone. Request a demo to learn more!