Digital Marketing Apartment Leasing Tips
ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS FOR HIGH DIGITAL MARKETING PERFORMANCE
Marketing effectively for apartments looks quite different these days, thanks to fickle market conditions and new renter behaviors. As the multifamily landscape shifts under your feet, you’ve likely seen some past “best practices” fall flat, failing to produce the results they brought you in the past.
You’re in good company: No marketer can escape the need to reassess and revamp their digital marketing playbook to appeal to evolving renter expectations. Here are some apartment leasing tips (focused on digital marketing) to help you do just that.
“We are all designing [experiences] for a new kind of customer,” note researchers. Now accustomed to the “Amazon experience,” so to speak, today’s consumers demand instant access, on-demand personalized support, and cohesive experiences across channels in just about every aspect of life — including their research for a new apartment.
These new baseline expectations set a new bar for the renter’s journey and, consequently, your approach to digital marketing for apartments. In this resource, we’ll explore essential apartment leasing tips for a high-performing digital marketing plan for your multifamily properties.
LENGTHIER, SELF-LED RENTER JOURNEYS ARE NOW THE NORM
According to TrustRadius, nearly all consumers now favor self-led buying journeys. In 2022, just 1 in 4 surveyed consumers across all generations consulted a sales rep, generally saving those interactions for the tail end of their decision-making, after they’ve performed considerable research and narrowed their options.
That’s consistent with our own quarterly analysis of tens of thousands of property website sessions and prospect digital interactions. We’ve found most renters are beginning their property search early (typically 3+ months out, mostly online). Long before you know who they are, they’re weighing your apartment units against your competitors and making decisions about your properties.
If you don’t have a way to (a) provide a superior experience from the very first website visit, and (b) capture their contact info and preferences early in their search, you might never find out who those “stealth shoppers” are, and never get a chance to nurture and win them over.
Prospects are searching longer. A lot of people are searching a year or six months in advance, but that person is still important and could up turning into a lease.”
Meagan Struve, Marketing Analyst, Mission Rock
TURNING FIRST IMPRESSIONS INTO REPEAT VISITS
Lead Capture: The Power of Interactive Tools & Instant Gratification
Though most prospects aren’t ready to engage with a leasing agent as they begin their apartment search, they’re often willing to share personal info in exchange for valuable information or access.
With that in mind, first-time visitors to your apartment website shouldn’t be strangers for long. You can begin customizing interactions from the very first visit with interactive tools like quizzes, cost calculators, automated tour scheduling, video tours, and natural language chatbots that can answer questions instantly. Not only do those interactive experiences satisfy their craving for instant gratification and access, they also enable you to capture valuable prospect contacts.
From there, leads can automatically populate your CRM with prospect information and behavioral insights, which in turns enable you to nurture those leads with relevant, personalized messaging.
Lead Nurture: Personalization as an Engagement Accelerator
Having capture those website leads, it’s time to turn up engagement, build rapport, and “warm them up” for leasing agents. This is where automated, personalized nurture comes in.
It’s worth noting that one of the ways consumer expectations have shifted is a growing demand for white-glove, personalized support, when and where they want it. We’re inching closer to a new reality where hyper-personalized care — or “the care of one,” as McKinsey calls it — becomes the standard across all industries. In the age of Amazon, Apple and Netflix, the research firm found 71% of consumers expect personalized experiences and 76% get frustrated when this doesn’t happen. “If consumers don’t like the experience they received, it’s easier than ever for them to choose something different,” the report reads.
The stakes of getting personalized support right (or wrong) are multiplying, say researchers.
Organizations able to activate that capability at scale can put customer value on a new trajectory, driving double-digit revenue growth, superior retention, and richer, more nurturing long-term relationships.
McKinsey
To make that possible, multifamily marketing automations should draw from all info prospects have shared during previous website sessions, plus tracked digital behaviors to adapt communications to individual preferences, past actions across channels, and where they are in their search journey.
By the time leasing agents speak with a prospect, that prospect should have been “warmed up” by automated nurture messages, and agents should have rich information on how to best engage them, such as preferred floor plans, budget, move-in timeline, and other considerations. Integration between your website, interactive tools, CRM and other connected platforms (e.g. internet listings, email, text) makes all of this possible and running on autopilot in the background.
Personalization is a present-day requirement. Our prospects have come to expect it. If you have anything less than a personalized experience, people become distrustful of your brand.
Christopher Bartlett, Director of Marketing, CA Ventures
LETTING DATA DRIVE YOUR MARKETING EFFORTS AND INVESTMENTS
The age of letting hunches, personal preferences or anecdotal evidence drive marketing decisions is long gone. In modern multifamily marketing, profitable decisions are data-driven decisions. How else would you be able to tell, with mathematical certainty, with of your marketing dollars are wasted, and which hold the most potential?
Whatever your technology stack looks like, it should enable the following:
- Data should be clear, comprehensive and actionable, helping you discern what prospective renters want, factors impacting their decisions, and what elements are converting (or not) on your website, in real time.
- Your data should also reveal lead sources that drive the most qualified leads at the lowest cost.
- Data should capture trends and identify opportunities specific to your target audience. It should also information your SEO and content strategy.
- Your data should enable you to track the ROI of all your digital marketing spend so no efforts or dollars are wasted.
AUTOMATION CONSIDERATIONS
The capabilities we’ve covered so far hinge on technology automation, so let’s talk about some aspects of automation that may not be readily obvious, or that are important to keep in mind.
From renters’ perspective, automation enables instant gratification, support and answers — even when they’re surfing your property website at 2 a.m. If you’re making people wait or contact your leasing office for answers, you’re going to lose them to a competing website that can satisfy their desire for speed and anytime access.
From your team’s perspective, automation puts recurring tasks on autopilot so they spend less time on repetitive activities that are best handled by technology and focus instead on higher-impact activities like closing leases, servicing residents, networking with community partners, or refining strategies. Put another way, automation eases their workload and reduces the likelihood for burnout so they can do the parts of the job they enjoy most, and that are more likely to impact revenue and performance goals.
When it comes to selecting an automation solution, not all providers and approaches are created equal, of course. Even the naming of automation solutions varies widely: chatbots, leasing assistants, nurture technologies, lead management platforms, demand gen solutions, and so on.
How do you decide, then? Well, it depends. Clarifying what results and experiences you want the technology to deliver is a crucial starting point when you’re evaluating your options. That said, it helps to know what’s possible and what automation capabilities your fellow apartment marketers often choose or prioritize.
In our experience, popular automation uses in apartment marketing include the following:
- Ability to deliver instant answers to prospective renters in real time, 24/7.
- Eliminating or supplementing lead generation forms, making it easier both for prospects and for your leasing team to capture prospect intel.
- On-demand scheduling of property tours, so prospects don’t have to take extra steps like call the office or wait for a response while agents are unavailable.
- Engaging cold leads and warming them up for leasing agents.
- Delivering automated, personalized support to less qualified or lower-priority leads so your team can focus on high-intent prospects.
- Delivering consistent follow-up and lead nurture so no message or prospect ever falls through the cracks while your team tends to other priorities.
- Shortening the sales cycle, accelerating conversions.
- Keeping your sales pipeline full and leads engaged over time to maintain high occupancy.
- Answering phone calls and automating responses to FAQs.
- Capturing prospect data and syncing it with your CRM.
- Tracking lead source performance through the entire renter’s journey so you can pinpoint which investments to increase, maintain, decrease or ditch.
- Extracting more value from connected technologies like your CRM, video/virtual tour content, and internet listings.
That’s a long list, yes. Though there are many moving parts to all this automation, integration and personalization, new advances in artificial intelligence help those systems work together in ways that are easy for all end users, from website visitors to your marketing team and leasing agents.
“Ease” is now a foundational ingredient for profitable experiences, and AI has emerged as a must-have component for consumers who increasingly demand digital-first, gimme-now, made-for-me experiences.
VETTING TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS
While the information we’ve covered this far might sound daunting, multifamily marketers tell us they’re shockingly easy to implement and manage, saving their teams many hours each month.
There’s no need to reinvent the wheel, hire more tech-savvy staff, or sink time into areas where your team lacks expertise. Instead, multifamily has a wide spectrum of reputable technology partners who can do the heavy-lifting for you. Your technology partner can also illuminate pitfalls, opportunities, and best use cases you may not have known otherwise.
How do you choose?
As the saying goes, the proof is in the pudding. Your chosen technology partner(s) should demonstrate three essential attributes:
- A strong record of helping other multifamily marketers solve the same challenges that are holding you back.
- Solid support beyond the sale, continuously offering guidance on how to improve your results.
- Offers a no-cost pilot period so you get a chance to test out the product and experience results before signing a contract.
The bullet list of automation capabilities shared above is a helpful checklist as you consider tech solutions. We also recommend you aim for the following:
- One connected platform: If the goal is efficiency, the last thing you need is inconsistent data and disconnected systems. Your chosen technologies should integrate (e.g., lead nurture automation, PMS and CRM systems, online traffic sources and more) so your data is unified, complete, clean, easy to access without having to log into a bunch of separate dashboards.
- Simple implementation: You want the learning curve to be as minimal as possible for your team. And with the speed of change in the market, you want a platform that’s easy to adapt to your needs as they chance, without having to hire specialized talent to activate or manage it.
Looking ahead, the reality is that the tools, tactics, and know-how that got you this far are aging, fast. Though your competitors might see these apartment leasing tips as roadblocks, they’re in fact opportunities to stand out, wow prospective renters, and bring them to your doorsteps.
Relevant Resources
Multifamily Quarterly Reports
Multifamily Marketing Webinars
7 Multifamily Marketers Share How They’re Driving Conversions