As an owner or manager of a rental property, you know better than anyone the efforts neededto lease up a new property or maintain budgeted occupancy levels for existing communities.Given the high growth rate of new residential property construction and repositioning of exist-ing assets, hitting your potential renter at the right time is critical to the overall success ofyour marketing plan.

Even just five years ago, maintaining a robust digital marketing campaign outside of typicalinternet listing services (ILS’s) was a secondary, or tertiary, or even nonexistent, tactic in anoverall marketing strategy. Renters tended to rely on those ILS sites and/or print or out-of-home marketing collateral to discover your property. With today’s explosion of smart devicesin nearly everyone’s hands, the years of information scarcity has been replaced with inform-ation abundance. The question now is, “how do you reach your potential renter given theabundance of distractions that currently consume them”?

So, you want to create more leads and convert them into leases?Here are some tips to get you headed in the right direction.

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So, hiring an expert in digital media has become anecessity for developers and property managers.

Hiring the right partner is only the start.Here’s what you need to know to ensure you’ve made the right choice.

WHAT TO LOOK FOR WHEN SEARCHINGFOR THE RIGHT MARKETING PARTNER:

Demonstrated experiencein designing strategies that

convert quality leads toleases using sophisticateddigital tools and processes.

Minimum 10 yearsof experience in

residential marketing.

Has an online tool thatallows you to understand

the success of yourcampaigns any timeyou want to 24/7.

When building your campaigns, from creating strategic ads to measurable digital media buys,there are three important steps to take to ensure greater success. In this guide, we’ll sharethe basics of creating campaigns that:

When you accomplish the above, you’re able to focus time on managing your communitiesrather than trying to create and manage campaigns that are possibly wasting time and money.

Reaching consumers has become complex.

Drive ahigher click

throughratio

Reducecost per

acquisition

Increaseclosingratios

Resultin higher

occupancy+ + +

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There are three steps to becoming moresuccessful with your lead generating campaigns:

The first step in creating successful campaigns is defining your audience. Who are the peoplethat make up your community? Where do they work/shop/play? What are their top motivatingfactors in choosing to rent vs buy? There are a number of questions to answer and the moreyou know about them the better you’ll be able to target them at the right moment with theright message.

All residential communities, whether student housing or senior living, have varying paths thatprospects take to “convert” from lead to lease.

As the diagram below shows, the varied paths can be overwhelming when you don’t knowwho your audience is. The first step is to do an analysis from your websites analytics to helpyou determine if your audience is predominantly male or female? Young or old? Local ormoving to town?

Analytics play a key role in helping you define a community’s audience. Once you have re-viewed your analytics, a dive into what people are searching for in terms of housing furtherdefines your campaigns. Google has great tools available to identify top keyword searchesand what budgets to set for your digital campaigns.

1. KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE

SIGNED LEASE

Converting Leads to Leases

PROSPECTS

SEO

Mobile

On-Site Tour

Pay Per Click Advertising

Social Media

On-Site Branding

Website

Online Reviews & Reputation

Print Advertising

Online Directories

Sponsorships (Campus or other)

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2. KNOW HOW TO REACH YOUR AUDIENCE

Understand the power of digital media.

Digital marketing has become the number one method to reach those searching for a placeto live. Creating a strategy today is very different from five years ago, and it is still evolving.From online reputation to Google and Yelp optimizations, there are a number of differentfunnels to consider.

A recent study by J Turner Research surveyed over 25,000 residents living in over 500communities nationwide asking them to reveal their method of finding a place to live.

Understanding where your customers are coming from and what “funnels” they find you with,is key. Are they coming from desktop or tablet? Are they finding you using smartphones whilein transit? Are they finding you through organic searches, blog sites, reviews sites, displayadvertising, social media, etc.? You need to know this, or you will never get the chance to“shake hands” to tell them about your property.

Learn how people find you.

“

”

Google (or straight organic searches for places to live) jumped from 10% in2012 to over 23% in 2017. That doubling of people searching for housing using

organic searches is now on pace to surpass the typical Internet Listing Services (ILSs) very soon. In fact, many respondents indicated that Google is one of the

most trusted sources of unbiased information about properties.

Over 52% cited online reviews as one of their top three items to review (next to location and price). In fact, 78% of the respondents indicated that online reviews

and reputation were a top factor when choosing a place to live.

Finally, before jumping into the different channels, nearly 60% of respondents preferred to search for their place to stay using a desktop/laptop computer,

while just 20% jumped straight to their

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The most commonly used methods:

Google Paid Search Campaigns

Google Retargeting Campaigns

Google Display Campaigns

Google Geotargeting Campaigns

Keyword rich campaigns that target people searching for those specific terms. This strategyis a keystone to any online digital strategy because it targets people actively looking forhousing. The ads are text-based ads found above all of the organic results and can be ex-panded to include much more information than what was previously allowed.

Retargeting is a common method of online advertising because it allows communities tocontinually target people who have previously visited their website, resulting in higher click-through rates and more intelligent data. These are typically visual ads that highlight keybenefits of the community coupled with property photography.

Display campaigns are designed to target individuals based on demographic / psychographicand socioeconomic tools. While they typically have a lower click-through ratio, they serve agood purpose in extending brand awareness online with a limited budget.

Geotargeting campaigns target individuals based upon specific locations. Display ads areserved while users are online typically to other competitors, employers and entertainmentvenues.

GeoFencing Campaigns

Just like Google Geotargeting campaigns, these allow you to target people via specific loc-ations, GeoFencing provides a more sophisticated method of targeting and tracking successrates of those campaigns.

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There are a number of new media channels to consider in your overall online advertisingstrategy, including:

● Gmail advertising targeting users based upon their emails within Gmail.

● Look-a-like Campaigns targeting users based upon information you may already have,for example email addresses of your residents. These campaigns enable you to reach otherpeople who have similar profiles as your target resident but have otherwise been forgotten.

● Video Campaigns on YouTube and other channels based upon video can be other greatmethods of reaching a more connected demographic.

Much like a physical property, a fence is constructed – virtual fences allow someone to drawlines around any designated address or vicinity in order to serve ads to their residents. Forexample, you could draw fences around your property to serve ads to your tenants and runa renewal campaign to encourage them to resign their lease. This allows you to track walk-intraffic into the leasing center from those campaigns whether the recipient clicked on the ador simply viewed it.

Reputation Management

Given the explosive growth in importance of online reviews, your community’s online reput-ation is critical in converting online traffic to qualified leads and leases. Engaging with res-idents, past, present and future requires valued time, but is an area that can make or breakany other digital campaign. Did you know that 78% of people are using online reviews togather information on properties? If the information is incorrect or the reviews are bad, orno one has responded, prospective residents will move on to the next property.

Social Media

While just 13% of respondents felt that social media was an important factor in selecting aplace to live, current residents mention Facebook, followed by Instagram and LinkedIn asimportant tools while they are residents. You should review how your social media pages arebeing used, and by whom, in order to determine whether this channel is best used for newor existing resident outreach.

Other Channels

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3. MEASURING YOUR RESULTS AND CONTINUING TO OPTIMIZE.

The final step in ensuring your digital campaigns are operating at maximum power is to en-sure you are measuring results and optimizing them on a regular basis. Too often, solutionsare a “set it and forget it” approach. While it can take a significant amount of time andexpertise to set up a campaign, once it is running, you need to continually tweak its perform-ance in order to ensure long term growth and success.

“A/B testing” is a great way to test various approaches to the campaign art, message andaudience. These tests help your campaigns improve over time, thereby increasing click-through ratios and reducing the cost per acquisition. An example of an A/B test is when youhave two campaigns that may use different images and/or copy/calls-to-action targeting thesame group. You are then able to see which of the campaigns performs better and moveforward with that campaign to target a larger audience.

You should also set an expectation of results. If you’ve done this before, then you may havehistoric information to help define what success should look like. If this is your first endeavorinto online marketing, reach out to colleagues or search for industry averages to see whatyour goals should be.

Once you have set your goals and/or expectations, ensure that you are generating or beingprovided with key performance indicators and metrics on the campaign results. You shouldanalyze the following pieces of data:

CostPerClick

Top Performing Keywords

Top Performing Ads(Search and Display)

ClickThroughRatio (CTR)

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

Total Acquisitions

ViewThrough orClickThrough Traffic GeoFencing

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Expect the process of measuring results to be a large task. Reviewing results through variousonline tools can be tedious and time consuming. You might find it a better use of your timeto hire a marketing partner to help you with this important task.

We leave you with one consideration when you’re ready to move forward with a marketing plan:

At Threshold/Carve, we provide our clients with decades of strategic and insightful marketingadvice – specifically in the apartment rental industry. We offer clients access to our prop-rietary digital dashboard, ThreshBOARDTM, which is an online digital marketing tool for providingfull visibility to every aspect of your digital campaign. ThreshBOARDTM provides Key Perform-ance Indicators and market averages for the data points mentioned in this whitepaper.

Threshold/Carve has over 30 communications professionals – from creative to media todevelopment to digital. If you have a new or existing property you need to lease up, why notcollaborate with one of North America’s leading residential marketing agencies? We’re readyto make great things happen, together.

For more information, email connect@thresholdcarve.com

© Copyright 2018 Threshold/Carve

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Main US Phone: 512-375-3169

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Main Can. Phone: 519-954-8020