Digital marketing for apartments tends to be the same. While there are some parts of multifamily digital marketing that are important to hit consistently, there are aspects of apartment marketing that can be more fun and creative. Both are equally important to getting your property’s name and website in front of prospects and creating lasting impressions with them. Let’s get into how content can help you in all aspects of your multifamily digital marketing plans.
Content and SEO
SEO is a vital part of every business’s digital marketing efforts. In fact, there are SEO strategy agencies out there that specialize in getting your business more online visibility and ranked higher on the results page. Your apartment content marketing needs to keep SEO in mind. How can you do that?
For starters, identify the keywords and phrases your prospects are using when they search for apartments. You can then create copy on your website, social media, and in your apartment advertising that includes these keywords. Whenever you write anything for your website, keeping these keywords in mind is a great way to get you ranked higher up in organic searches without having to pay a lot for ad space.
Apartment advertising ideas need to keep SEO in mind because the content in those ads needs to be targeting online prospects. Using keywords in your ads is a great way to use SEO tactics within your apartment marketing. This is also a great way to marry SEO and PPC marketing in your digital efforts. Focusing on both paid and organic searches will help you in the long term with keeping your search rankings high.
Content and Outreach
We’ve written a few blogs already about outreach marketing ideas for apartments and fun marketing ideas for apartments, but how can you tie those into your apartment content marketing?
Multi family outreach marketing can include email marketing and follow-up through text message cadences too. AI Leasing Assistants can help when it comes to email and text follow-up so that onsite teams can focus on qualified leads. PERQ’s AI Assistant goes further by using your brand colors and brand voice in the follow-up messaging. This helps make all your content cohesive and sound like it is all coming from your property and not a robot.
Other outreach ideas include events with the local community and businesses. These kinds of events are great for having a back log of content for your socials. With the summer season ahead of us, you can host pop ups outside of your property. Local shops can set up their own table and sell their goods. You can also host donation drives for local shelters and nonprofit organizations. Events are not only great for resident retention but it also is a great way to
Content and Social
Some fun marketing ideas for apartments include the content on your social media. From Instagram to Facebook and now even TikTok, social platforms are where content creators can really get the word out there about different brands and companies. This is an area where your property can really outshine the competition and get in front of prospects in a more fun way.
You can post photos of the units and the overall properties on these pages, but it’s more fun and engaging to post about the resident events you put on, meeting members of the staff, spotlighting residents, or doing a pet of the month post. Social media is a great place to show prospects and residents that your property is a community and that this neighborhood is a great place to call home.
Posting about the local businesses and events is also a great way to have content that is still related to life at your property but gives a bigger picture than just the units and amenities. After all, living at your property also means living in the town/city you are located in too. You aren’t just selling your units, you’re selling life in your community too.
Planning out your content with these three areas in mind will boost your digital marketing efforts and also make you stand out to online visitors. Content needs to be cohesive and unfortunately, a lot of content on multifamily websites and social pages are kind of all over the place. Creating a schedule of what you are going to post and when can help keep your online presence active. Using SEO and taking lots of photos and videos at events and of the community will give you a base for where you can build your content from. For more apartment marketing ideas or marketing ideas for apartment lease up and resident retention, go to perq.com/blog for all the latest tips and trends in multifamily.
It’s all anyone can talk about in multifamily these days. There’s a few different leasing AI out there and some of them promise things that seem too good to be true. As we come into budget season, multifamily properties are starting to figure out which AI Leasing Assistant, if any, they want to invest in for the upcoming year. Let’s dive into how an AI Leasing Agent can help and what criteria you should keep in mind when trying to pick one.
NATURAL LANGUAGE
Some AI Leasing Assistants, not all, have natural language chatbots while others have rule based chatbots. The big difference is that one is more conversational and can answer the prospect’s questions directly through a texting format and get them serviced quicker while the other makes the prospect follow prompts that hopefully answer their questions. Leasing AI that continues to learn from the data and questions that prospects ask will only make your multifamily property stand out more and that kind of AI Leasing Agent will give customer service you can trust.
Rule-based leasing AI takes a longer time to answer prospect’s questions and has more of a chance of not being able to answer all of them. This is why a natural language AI Leasing Agent is a better investment and more convenient for prospects. This kind of AI Leasing Assistant can give the onsite teams better and more personalized data for online prospects which will only help the team be more prepared and give better service to prospects who are ready to talk.
While we are accustomed to talking to robots on sites, natural language multifamily chatbots have the ability to answer more questions and are less frustrating for prospects as they are able to have their questions answered 24/7. They won’t have to wait for the leasing office to be open and the AI Leasing Assistant won’t hand off the lead until they are ready to talk, tour, or lease. This saves leasing specialists so much time as they won’t be stuck answering every question a prospect has and focus on qualified leads who are ready to continue onward in the leasing journey.
AUTOMATION
An AI Leasing Assistant can also help with automating the leasing journey. We’ve already mentioned how they can answer prospects’ questions 24/7 but they can also handle the follow-up conversations and even help connect other marketing channels, like an ILS, with your site for a more connected experience.
AI Leasing Agents, like the one at PERQ, follows-up with prospects through their preferred mode of communication and sends messages based on their move-in timeline. Too many messages can be off putting to prospects, especially when those messages sound robotic and almost like spam. A unique part of leasing AI, is that it also knows when to pull back and not send a message so the prospect is not annoyed by having their inbox blow up with constant messages.
This also is great for leasing specialists as an AI Leasing Assistant can help them manage their pipeline and take care of responding to prospects throughout their move-in time frame and will hand them off to the leasing team once they are ready to speak to a person. The leasing team will also have access to the personalized data the AI Leasing Agent has kept track of in the prospect’s guest card so they know exactly what the prospect is looking for and when. A unique feature of PERQ’s leasing AI is that it also personalizes follow-up messages from a brand perspective. Using that multifamily property’s brand colors and voice, follow-up messages from PERQ’s AI Leasing Assistant feel more human, less spam. Using your own brand voice, leasing AI helps make your automated follow-up sound like it is coming from the leasing office and not an AI Leasing Agent.
AI Leasing Assistants make your leasing team stronger and more knowledgable by giving them the time to focus on qualified leads, knowing that they aren’t forgetting about follow-up because the AI Leasing Agent has it covered, and gives them all the details they need to know about a prospect before the first initial conversation or tour. With automated follow-up and connected channel experiences, leasing AI is the way forward in leasing and will only help your onsite and marketing teams evolve and work more efficiently.
Digital marketing is and always will be evolving with the latest tech and innovative tools. No business in today’s world can survive long term without an active digital marketing plan. What does that look like for property management companies and multifamily communities?
Daniel Paulino, VP of Digital Marketing at Bozzuto, sat down with Muhammad Yasin, our EVP of Marketing, to take a deep dive into the world of digital marketing for mutlifamiy communities. From how to invest your digital dollars wisely, to how to help integrate tools that help the onsite teams, there’s a lot digital marketing can do for multifamily properties.
During this Sofa Seminar, they chatted through a wide range of topics including:
The Prospect’s Journey
Apartment Websites
Investing in your Tech Stack
Using Metrics to Measure Value
When it came to advice on how to look at your digital marketing efforts, Paulino said, “Bottom line there’s two main driving points that are extremely important; what does the prospect need and how is your business addressing that.”
Stand Out from the Crowd
Paulino noted how many prospects begin their journey on an ILS before getting to your property’s website. This means that they know a lot about pricing and amenities but they don’t know your property’s story. Your website should showcase who you are and what makes you different from other properties.
“Consumers have an obsession these days with floor plans,” Paulino continued to say. Your website needs to have high quality and informative floor plans. Whether they are 2D or 3D, interactive floorplans keep prospects interested and according to Paulino, he’s seen an increase in time spent on property websites that have quality floor plans.
He also made sure to emphasize that when you look at your tech stack and each individual tool, you can’t just look at one metric. Look at the prospect’s journey, what tools they interacted with and the data that was collected from them. While you need to look at multiple metrics, the most important data point Paulino wants multifamily communities to look at is the lead to lease conversion rate.
The chat between these two brilliant digital marketers is one to look back on for advice when you’re in a marketing rut and to make your properties stand out from the rest of the crowd.
We talk a lot about apartment marketing on our blog. A lot of it includes aspects of digital marketing. While that is important and shouldn’t be neglected, there are some outreach marketing ideas to help make your multifamily and apartment community a permanent fixture in the local neighborhood.
Some ways you can do this include:
Partnering up with local businesses
Resident events
Working with volunteer organizations
Local Businesses
In another blog post we discussed how creating a neighborhood/city guide on your website was a great way of making your website the hub of information for what’s what in your community and increase your local online search visibility. Partnering up with local businesses is also a great way to do some outreach marketing to the locals in your community and build good relationships within the community.
You can work a deal with them where residents get a discount at their store or restaurant. On certain “National” holidays like “National Beer Day” or “National Cookie Day”, giving residents a taste of some of the local beer or offering cookies from the local bakery/coffee shop. You can even blog about these events and reviews of the businesses to add to your website to help prospective renters, especially out-of-town ones, visualize the neighborhood and what it is like in your community.
Resident Events
This is a mix of partnering up with local businesses and working on resident satisfaction. When you have a resident event, work with a local business to have a pop up at the event. They can set up a table of their products, clothes, or whatever else they sell during the event. It’s a great way to give them some exposure and give residents a unique experience.
Be sure to take photos/videos to promote the event on your social media and as a recap. This will help add variety to your feed and make your profile stand out from other multifamily communities.
Volunteer Organizations
Being a part of the community means helping keep it clean and giving back. Encourage your leasing team and residents to sign up for community clean ups or joining a community garden. It’s a great way to give back, meet others in the community, and build relationships with residents outside of the property.
Another way to give back is doing donation drives to local charities or during back to school season. Outreach marketing will help build trust between your property and the locals. Establishing yourselves as a fixture of the community will help your reputation both on and offline. With warmer weather on the way, there’s lots of opportunities for different forms of outreach.
You’ve heard it many times before because it’s true — your website is your biggest asset. Prospects start their next apartment search online and your website will most likely be the first impression they have of your community. When it comes to apartment marketing, the way your multifamily website design looks can turn your website into your own marketer. Here are 3 ideas to make your apartment website stand out from the crowd:
Create a Blog
Video Series
Neighborhood/City Guide
Blogging
Did you know businesses that have a blog see 67% more leads monthly than businesses that don’t? It’s true. Not only do they see more leads, but they also 55% more visitors than businesses without a blog. Most property management companies don’t have their own blog incorporated into their multifamily website design. This means that property management companies and multifamily websites are losing out on potential leads and increasing their online visibility.
Apartment blogs are great for other multifamily professionals as this is where people in this industry go for the newest trends, tips on how to increase their lead conversion numbers, and stay up to date on the newest technology. They’re also great for prospects and residents. It builds trust and makes your apartment seem like a reputable and credible source. Blogging needs to be incorporated into your multifamily digital marketing plan and strategy because it’s a simple and effective way to getting property management companies and multifamily websites ranked higher in organic searches.
When it comes to content for apartment marketing websites and for apartment website design in general, there is a lot that you can do and create. You can even ask residents to submit blog posts about what they think about their unit, a day in the life in your community, or anything that is relevant to apartment content. Testimonials are great, but a few blog posts written by residents are more authentic and will be a more candid conversation.
Video Series
Content that should also be included in your multifamily digital marketing plan are videos. You can create videos all about apartment decorating, moving tips, daily life in the community, reviewing local businesses, and more. These videos don’t need to have a lot of production. A steady hand on the camera with good lighting is really all you need. Adding video elements to your apartment website design will make your multifamily websites more engaging to prospects and they’ll spend more time on your site.
Apartment videos are popular on YouTube and TikTok. Having your apartment in that category will boost your online reputation and make you stand out to prospects. These videos are more authentic and relatable than just a regular old pre-recorded tour of an empty or staged unit. You can do a video on small space decorating ideas or best ways to arrange your furniture for the best flow, etc. Apartment related videos on these platforms have billions of views collectively. While it’s dense and saturated, prospects are constantly craving for more apartment content. Your multifamily websites and multifamily website design need to be visible in these categories.
Neighborhood/City Guide
Apartment marketing includes marketing the neighborhood/city your apartment is located in too. Make your multifamily websites the hub of information for what is happening in the local community. List the businesses nearby and include a map that shows your property and the businesses around. This will help boost your property management companies and multifamily websites in local online searches and improve your SEO rankings as well.
This can even be incorporated into blog pieces that are neighborhood specific that are found on this page. If there’s a local festival that happens once a year, write up a blog post about what it’s like to attend and be sure to include pictures. If your property is close to a lot of nightlife, write up a piece on the best bars near you. Multifamily digital marketing needs to be more than just highlighting the property and units, it needs to include all aspects of what living at your community looks like. Renting has an emotional aspect to it as well and that can get lost in a lot of multifamily website designs. Creating pages and content that focus on life in your community is a great way to market to and appeal to the emotional side of renting.
There’s a lot of creativity in how you can do the marketing for apartment communities and property management companies. Rethinking the content on your multifamily websites is a good place to start.
One of the best things to come out of 2020 was having multiple tour scheduling options. From self-guided to virtual to pre-recorded videos, the ways prospects could tour a unit adapted to a less physical and socially distanced world.
With all of these options, in-person tours still rank as the most popular tour option according to PERQ data. How do we go back to in-person tours in a way that is healthy for both prospects and the leasing team? We’ve got 3 tips to help your leasing team meet prospects expectations with health guidelines and quality of the tour.
Know the Guidelines
It is so important to know what your state’s health guidelines are. While they typically aren’t more than 2 people who show up to tour an apartment, there are states that are hit much harder than others when it comes to COVID cases.
Be sure to stand the recommended 6 feet apart from prospects as they walk around the unit. For a smaller unit where this might not be possible, consider leaving the door open during the tour and standing near it.
Masks and Sanitizer
Requiring prospects to wear a mask during the entire time they are at your property and on the tour is a highly effective way of keeping the leasing agent and the prospects safe. Offer hand sanitizer to them when they first show up and offer it again when they leave.
Some prospects might forget to bring their masks with them. Having some disposable masks on hand to give them is a great way to show how your property is taking safety seriously and allows the prospect to still go on the tour and not have to reschedule.
Clean Common Surfaces
After each tour, be sure to clean the surfaces that prospects touched. Most common surfaces are door handles, cabinet knobs and pulls, and appliances. This seems like it can be a lot of extra work but it keeps the touring unit clean and reduces the chances of spread.
This will make it much safer on days where there are a lot of tours stacked up. Give yourself 10 – 15 minutes between tours to disinfect these common surfaces to ensure that everyone is safe. We have a whole list of resources for multifamily communities centered on COVID-19. You can check them out here.
