How Can You Advertise an Apartment for Rent
Everything you need to know about Advertising Apartments.
In today’s world, advertising apartments and multifamily communities has changed significantly. Marketing and advertising as industries themselves are constantly adapting to shifting markets and consumer wants and needs. Advertising apartments is exactly how it sounds, advertising an apartment or multifamily community to get occupancy numbers up and bring awareness of your community to prospects.
Without a plan in place, your marketing and advertising efforts for your community won’t produce the results you are looking for. Having a plan in place with the right tools will help everyone from higher management to the onsite leasing team stay on the same page.
Prospects first impression of your apartment community will be from your website. Your website is a great place to attract prospects and answer any of their questions before they decide to tour. Having high traffic on your website is great but if those shoppers don’t convert to a tour, then what was it all for? Consistent messaging is important to keeping a prospect’s attention and keeping them on your site longer.
From the kinds of content you advertise and create to the different technology you invest in, advertising apartments is one facet of an overall marketing plan to get higher occupancy and conversion numbers. Prospects want to engage with your apartment community online, both on your website and on your social media. They want to know what it’s like to live in your apartment community while sitting on their couch. Let’s go deeper into how advertising apartments can and should look like.
Outreach Marketing ideas for apartments
Multifamily professionals have heard lots of different ways they can up their advertising efforts. In this section we are going to specifically look at one approach – outreach. Outreach marketing ideas for apartments is about being proactive. Your goal is to get a prospect in the door, tour a unit, and sign a lease. This is where outreach marketing can help bridge the gap.
Outreach is focused on actively seeking out prospects instead of creating content, like your website, and waiting for prospects to reach out to you. SEO and keywords are amazing long-term marketing tactics that help pull in prospects. However, those results tend to take some time to come in. There are times when units open up unexpectedly and you need to get them filled sooner rather than later.
Outreach marketing ideas for apartments need to hit one of the following areas:
- Local Community
- Events
- Social Media
Your outreach marketing efforts for your multifamily community need to have investment in the local community. After all, your apartment building is home to people who are a part of the community and contribute in many ways to the livelihood of the neighborhood.
Team up with local business and community centers for discounts or fun events to promote to residents. Create brochures, stickers, or small info cards that can be found at the checkout counter of local businesses or on a community board. People from surrounding areas who are shopping in your apartment neighborhood can casually look at your brochure or take home an info card.
For more community-based partnerships, have the leasing team or encourage residents to take part in a local community garden or local donation drives. Putting your apartment’s name out in the community for visitors and locals alike to see is a great way to proactively get in front of them in a unique way.
A mix of community and events can be an apartment yard sale — if you have the outdoor space to do so. Garage sales are great for homeowners to sell some old furniture and clothes but it also gets people into their neighborhood and casually looking at the houses and the development.
An apartment yard sale can be set up in an outdoor space and residents can have their own table where they sell whatever it is they would like to sell. This is a resident event that also works as outreach to prospects as attendees can be local people in the community or visitors from surrounding neighborhoods.
Resident events are great for creating a connection with the property to current residents. The more a resident likes living at your apartment, the higher the chance they will recommend it to friends, family, and people online through reviews and social media. Doing at least one resident event a month is ideally where you want to be.
Some resident event ideas include themed happy hour, game night, wrapping presents, etc. Resident events can also be done virtually if for some reason an in-person event is unable to happen. A virtual trivia night or happy hour can be done through platforms like Zoom.
The last outreach marketing idea for apartments is one that you’ve heard a lot about at this point, social media — specifically social media advertising. Running a paid ad on Instagram, Facebook, or Pinterest is a one of the most cost-effective forms of outreach marketing. Both Instagram and Facebook give you in-depth insights at the audience your ads can reach, their demographics, who clicked on the ad, who skipped, who came to your profile, etc.
This allows you to build an effective and targeted ad. Your ad will be on the feeds of the renters who are looking into moving to where your apartment is located or share similar interests to what can be found at your property.
Outreach marketing is important to have in your overall marketing plan for your apartment or multifamily community. It gets your property in front of prospects that you might not have been able to reach with more internal or traditional methods. Outreach also helps build your reputation within the community your property is located in which will make local businesses and people want to have you as their neighbor.
The power of word of mouth is still impressive and having the locals on your side, promoting your community to friends and family is effective and easy on the budget. Social media advertising can be as low as $5 a day on some platforms and you can run ads that promote special offers or showcase your units in an interactive way. Outreach marketing is crucial and these ideas are to get you started with advertising your apartment community in more unique but still effective ways.
Marketing Apartments
There are lots of different ways marketing apartments can go. Outreach marketing has already been covered, but what else can you and your team do? There are lots of different ideas for marketing apartments but at the end of the day whatever ideas you choose to go with, they need to get more prospects in the door and more leases signed.
Marketing apartments includes the written copy in your listings on internet listing services (ILS). Generic apartment listings are boring. Prospects have seen dozens of the same description for numerous apartments. Yes, you need to have amenities, features, square footage, and all the details that a prospect needs to determine if your apartments fit their needs, but it doesn’t mean you can’t add some personality to it. Prospects are looking for their next home, a generic listing they’ve already seen won’t make your multifamily community stand out. Make them entertaining and fun, it’ll make your apartment community more memorable than your competitors.
Speaking of written copy, starting a blog on your website is a great way to build your reputation and trust with prospects. Businesses with blogs see 67% more leads monthly and get 55% more website visitors than businesses that don’t have a blog.
The multifamily property industry relies heavily on blogs written by marketing and leasing experts to learn about up and coming trends, new technology solutions, and discover unique ways to increase tours and leases. These industry experts recognize blogging as an influential and cost-effective tool in digital marketing for apartments to reach their target audience and build credible authority.
Why do we read multifamily and apartment industry blogs? They’re helpful, insightful and you likely only read content by industry influencers who show up on the first page of your search engine results. Why not post a regular blog on your apartment website? Your apartment community can provide similarly helpful advice to prospects, residents, other industry professionals and improve your search engine ranking while increasing organic traffic onto your apartment website.
“There are several benefits to this,” says Corey Egan, Co-Founder and Director of Business Development at LeasingKC, which posts bimonthly blogs on its website and promotes the content through their social media. “Creating and engaging with an audience is an important function of blogging for a multifamily community. Keeping this audience engaged with fresh, creative content will reinforce your brand,” Egan says. “Also, this becomes important when trying to boost the SEO of your property website.”
Blogging on your own apartment website isn’t the only way you can blog. You can write guest posts for local blogs highlighting a resident event or some of the other outreach events your multifamily community has done.
Guest posting on industry blogs is another way to boost your reputation and credibility. The more visible your blog content is the more visible your apartment website will be and your SEO will improve greatly.
Your apartment website can also include a neighborhood/city guide. Marketing apartments means marketing the community your apartment is in as well. Create a page on your website as a dedicated hub of information of local bars, restaurants, shops and community events! You can include a map of where everything is located with your apartment’s location highlighted too to give online prospects a visual of the area before coming in.
Including a neighborhood/city guide will boost your local search traffic and SEO rankings as well. You can include local businesses from this guide in blog posts reviewing/spotlighting them. For example, if your apartment is near a lot of nightlife, you could write up a piece on the top 5 bars in your neighborhood. You can open it up to more than just your leasing team and ask residents if they want to submit a piece for the apartment blog.
Resident pieces are great for retention and give prospects who are on your website more than just a testimonial, it gives them an inside look at life in your multifamily community. Marketing apartments is where you and your team can be fun and creative.
The end goal is attracting prospects and increasing your lead conversion numbers. All of this can be done through the ideas mentioned above and through a focus on SEO and targeted ads. SEO is a little more technical in comparison to blogs and social media content but is the way most digital marketing happens now.
Marketing for Apartment Communities
A new study from Millennial Homeownership Report shows that 18% of Millennials believe they will always be renting — a 6% increase from the previous year. That’s a significant number of people who plan on always being a renter. That means that they will go through a lot of different apartment communities and multifamily properties in their time. How can your community stand out to prospects that have seen it all? Let’s take a deep dive into some creative ways marketing for apartment communities can take.
- Optimize Your Website for SEO
- Creative Content for Your Website
- Re-think Staged Units
Optimizing your website for higher search rankings through an SEO plan is an essential part of digital marketing for apartment communities in today’s virtual world. Identifying the keywords that your target demographic is typically using in organic searches is the first step. Don’t settle for 5 keywords, keep a list of a few dozen that you or an outside SEO strategy partner can keep track of.
These keywords need to be present on the copy of your website. Your primary keyword needs to be in the header/headings of the main page with the secondary keywords scattered throughout. This is how prospects will find your apartment community, through organic online searches. Your apartment community needs to be higher up on the search engine results in order to remain relevant amongst competitors who are high up on the page. Outside of the website, using these keywords in your paid advertising and other digital marketing pieces will help boost your search rankings as well.
You’ve got the prospect on your website but you don’t want them to find it boring or similar to every other apartment website they’ve seen. You want them to stay on your website for a while, making a lasting impression of your community. From blogs to a video series to multifamily podcasts, your website can be where prospects, residents, and multifamily professionals go to for apartment content.
Businesses that blog are more visible online and in searches than businesses that don’t. Apartment blogs have always done really well because prospects and professionals alike love to read about all the fun ways they can decorate and make their rental space feel like home.
There are thousands of apartment videos on YouTube that cover all sorts of apartment related content — apartment hunting, decor for small spaces, storage solutions, renter friendly DIYs, a day in the life, etc. Creating a video series will bring more traffic to your website and build trust with your video audience. This is a great tool to also build your online reputation as a leader in the community your property is located in. This will also give you a leg up on your competitors because not a lot of apartment communities are taking advantage of this opportunity.
You’ve got the online prospects at your website and now they are ready to come in for a tour (or take one virtually). Some apartment communities show empty units while others show staged units. Re-thinking how to stage your unit so your prospects can easily imagine living in it can be tricky.
For starters, no one wants to spend a bunch of money on staging furniture, but there are other ways to make it easier for prospects to picture life in the unit. On self-guided tours, stocking the fridge and pantry with sodas, drinks, chips, and other non-perishable snacks is one way to make prospects see what it would be like to sit on the couch and have a snack.
This concept can come into the in-person tour as well. Offer a drink to prospects and sit at the table or kitchen island/counter and talk to them about what it’s like living in this space. Talking while “breaking bread”, in this case a drink or a bag of chips, is more casual and more candid than taking the prospect room to room and giving them just the details and features of the unit.
The point of all of these ideas is to create a more candid conversation instead of the typical script leasing teams tend to follow. These prospects know the script now. They know what you are going to say but surprising them with more casual conversation starters, taking a second to sit down and chat over a snack in the unit, is more personable and gives that human touch that a basic script won’t. At the end of the day, you want to grab their attention online, keep it long enough to get them to come in and tour, and be wowed by the tour they sign a lease.
Multifamily marketing advertising Leasing
Leasing has and always will adapt to the times. Back in the day when carbon-copies were how we tackled maintenance requests and leases were done all on paper, marketing was a lot different. Now with virtual touring and leasing, online applications and requests, multifamily marketing advertising leasing has changed too.
Multifamily marketing and advertising is all geared to make sure your occupancy stays high and increases your lead conversion numbers. Online consumers today have higher expectations when it comes to quality of online content and are more informed than ever before. This means that you might need to seriously start thinking about finding a professional multifamily marketing agency so that your team can focus on nurturing leads and keeping residents happy. When looking for a multifamily marketing and advertising agency, some things to keep in mind are:
- Trends
- Personalization
- Scalability
Any marketing and advertising agency should be able to identify current and upcoming trends in the industry their clients are in. This includes an agency working for multifamily communities. In the multifamily sphere this could involve virtual leasing software, local SEO trends, what multifamily industry leaders are discussing in panels and webinars, and more. This will keep you ahead of your competition and up to date with what professionals in the multifamily industry are talking about.
From budget season to mental health in multifamily communities to virtual leasing, staying up to date on what is trending in the industry is crucial to having a credible brand and staying relevant with your competitors and others in the field.
Every multifamily and apartment community has its own nuances that make it unique. A good multifamily marketing and advertising agency should be able to create marketing and advertising plans that include strategies to meet your property’s individual needs. They need to be able to highlight what makes your property different and be able to find the selling point to keep conversion rates high.
Personalization will set you and your multifamily marketing apart from your competitors. Creating blog posts or videos that highlight specific amenities you offer or features in your units is a great way to personalize your website and make it stand out.
Scalability is important in any marketing plan for any business. You need to know when to push your efforts and when to take it back because it’s going to be a waste of funds. It’s hard to see past the highs and lows that come with multifamily leasing, it quite literally comes in waves. Leasing is very seasonal especially if your multifamily community is located in a college town. This means that your multifamily marketing strategies and advertising plan should be able to keep up with the seasonal aspect of leasing.
Knowing the trends, personalizing your marketing and advertising strategies, and understanding the scalability of your plan is key to digital marketing for businesses. Digital marketing for multifamily communities needs to still maintain their SEO efforts. A marketing agency that doesn’t prioritize should raise some eyebrows but luckily there are lots of SEO strategy companies that specialize in this.
Optimizing your website and advertising with primary keywords and ensuring that your search engine rankings are high will help you get in front of online prospects and on their own feeds. Understanding what your prospects are searching for will help you and whoever is working on your marketing and advertising create relevant ads and content.
Online consumers want what they are looking for. Providing content that specifically has what they were searching for will make it more convenient for them and make the first initial conversation with the leasing team more efficient.
Virtual leasing really kicked off in 2020 and it’s here to stay. While in-person tours are still the most popular, according to PERQ data, not offering a virtual leasing option is going to set you back. It will exclude a lot of prospects and send them to your competitors that offer virtual touring and leasing. These prospects could be out-of-state or have health conditions that make it hard for them to come in.
Multifamily marketing has come a long way and it’s becoming more efficient in getting lead conversion numbers up. Digital marketing is marketing today. While word of mouth and print can still be used they shouldn’t be the only thing you depend on, especially when virtual leasing has changed the game.
Apartment Advertising Ideas
There are many apartment advertising ideas that are cost-effective, increase the number of qualified leads coming to your onsite team and increase your lead conversion numbers. Apartment advertising has its own unique aspects from the overall marketing plan for your apartment community. For example, advertising means buying ad space on social media or through Google but the ads you make need to have keywords.
Keywords are an essential part of any digital marketing and advertising plan for any business. Once you’ve identified the main keywords that your target audience is searching, incorporating them as part of your SEO strategy in your marketing plan will improve your online traffic and search engine rankings.
When you begin putting together your apartment advertising ideas, you need to know what you want to get from the advertising. Is it more leads, a higher conversion rate, all of the above? All of the content you make for advertising, and in general, needs to have a purpose.
Investing in paid advertisements is a great way to get your apartment community on the feeds of online prospects. Choosing the right keywords is important in whether or not your ads will grab prospects attention enough to click on them. Once you’ve sat down and identified the keywords you need to hit, the ads that you make need to have those keywords in the copy.
Where will the ad lead the prospect once they click on it? Are you going to send them to your apartment website or blog? This is where pay-per-click (PPC) advertising comes into play. You can have the ads redirect back to your homepage or the page that showcases your different floor plans. Or there is another option, a landing page. Landing pages live on your website but can only be accessed through a specific ad.
A landing page that is about the specific keywords the ad was targeting is an effective way to help guide your online prospects through your site. In the way a blog helps build your apartment’s reputation and credibility, the landing pages have the same effect. It’s giving the prospect the content they are searching for and it’s on your website. It’s a great way to turn an organic search into one that is informative and gives the prospect everything they were looking for.
Social media advertising has taken off in the last few years with Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest being great platforms for apartment advertising. It costs as little as $5 a day to run ads on these platforms and you can still reach thousands with it.
Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest are all platforms where people share their homes, decorations, and talk about what design features they wish to have in their homes. Social media advertising gives you a lot of insight into who your targeted audience is and allows you to cater the audience to your preferences. You can choose specific hashtags and topics, such as #multifamily or #apartmentliving, and target online users that follow or frequent those tags.
It’s an easy to use and cost-effective tool that can boost your online presence and put you in front of online prospects in a more candid and casual way. With social media advertising, your actual social media feeds need to be active.
Create a content plan for what and when to post on your apartment community’s social media pages. Post non-sponsored posts in the hashtags and topics your advertising is targeting to stay relevant in them and increase your visibility in those tags. You can build your apartment community’s brand through social media. An identifiable and consistent brand is advertising within itself. When a prospect can pick out your posts and style of content specifically, it means your advertising is working.
Apartment advertising is where you can really get creative and technical at the same time. Through blogs, social media, and SEO you can create a plan with strategies that work and produce the results you want to see for your apartment and multifamily communities.
How PERQ can help you with advertising apartments
PERQ’s AI Leasing Assistant helps with advertising apartments. The AI Leasing Assistant automates the human driven leasing process while offering an interactive chatbot, lead conversion widgets, and follow-up assistance while seamlessly integrating on your property website and working with other add-ons.
PERQ’s AI Leasing Assistant improves operational efficiency and profitability by increasing lead conversion, saving leasing specialists hours of work, and collecting better data in the leasing process. This is done through combining a chatbot, lead conversion widgets, and automated follow-up to give properties a complete omni-channel solution that is easy to implement with no technology or process change.
What makes PERQ’s AI Leasing Assistant different from other chatbot or follow-up choices is that our solution is an “all in one” platform. By combining single-point solutions, the AI Leasing Assistant platform cohesively addresses all phases of the leasing journey to increase overall results and deliver a better renting experience that is much more cost effective to the community.
Don’t just take our word for it. One of our clients, Jamin Harkness, EVP at The Management Group, has said, “we love PERQ because you help convert people. With your AI Bot, my favorite part is because we use CRM, when there’s a chat on the AI Bot, all that information goes into our CRM as a guest card. That gives us context of what was asked before we reengage with that prospect again.”
It works with advertising apartments as it centralizes all the data it collected from the online prospects journey on your website. It uses that data for cleaner follow-up that is timed to be released with the given move-in timeline and allows for leasing teams to make better decisions around messaging, amenities, and marketing channels. PERQ’s AI Leasing Assistant will give you a 2x – 4x increase on qualified leads and a 40% increase on tours and lead-to-tour conversion.
Want to request a demo or talk to someone about adding PERQ to your tech stack?
Related Links
Apartment Marketing Blogs: Getting Started
Building Your Apartment Complex’s Brand on Instagram
Empowering Your Leasing Team: A Guide to Effective Digital Leasing