Whether you’re opening new apartments or taking over the management for an existing community, you need a marketing strategy that delivers what matters most to the success of your business: leases.
To do so, your marketing strategy should be designed to address the needs of interested renters. They want to both easily discover and engage with your apartments online so that they can feel 100% confident about living in one of them.
You can create a successful marketing strategy that consistently generates leases for your apartments in these 8 steps:
- Establish your community’s buyer persona.
- Hire a media professional with experience in apartments.
- Capture photos and videos of every floorplan.
- Develop a community website that includes pages about every floorplan.
- Run a defensive digital advertising campaign in Google.
- Get back in front of renters who visited your website with remarketing ads in Google and Facebook.
- Show both price and availability on your website.
- Give website visitors the option to apply for a lease or schedule a showing.
1. Establish your apartment’s buyer persona.
The first step of creating any marketing strategy is knowing who your target audience is, which is why you need to establish a buyer persona for your apartments. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional, generalized representation of prospective residents who are most likely to rent from you. A successful marketing strategy addresses your buyer persona’s specific goals, motivators, and challenges.
2. Hire a media professional with experience in apartments.
The next step towards creating your marketing strategy is to hire a media professional, especially one who has experience in working with apartment communities. Your visual content not only needs to be beautiful and well produced, but also informative. They need to understand how to capture photos and videos of your units and amenities so that they give prospective residents the fullest depiction of your community.
3. Get photos and videos of every floorplan.
The media specialist you hire needs to do more than just get a good exterior photo of your clubhouse and a few random things in a few of your units. That seems to have been the prototypical apartment marketing template for a while now, but prospective residents expect more. They want to see inside of the units in each specific floorplan. Getting photos and videos of every floorplan is an essential need, and it also changes what you’re able to do as a whole in your marketing strategy.
4. Develop a community website that includes pages about every floorplan.
Developing a community website with floorplan-specific pages is important for multiple reasons. One, simply having your own website brings needed authority to your apartments in Google. Two, it’s a dedicated online place to direct your apartments’ target audience to. Finally, it gives prospective residents the online apartment shopping experience they want. This is a great example of an apartment website that utilizes floorplan-specific content. When users are on it, they are able to go directly to the floorplan page that best fits their needs and see the inside of one of its units via a photo gallery and walkthrough video tour, as well as see other relevant information too.
5. Show both price and availability on your website.
The final missing piece of content to complete your apartments’ website is showing both price and availability of your units. Those two items are really important for prospective residents to know before they pursue further action. This article gives some great recommendations on how to show pricing and availability in a smart way on your apartments’ website.
6. Run defensive digital advertising campaigns in Google.
To direct your target audience to your website, you need to run defensive digital advertising campaigns that protect your apartment community’s name and identity against competing properties in Google. Doing so will ensure that when someone who’s actually interested in your apartments searches for you by name directly, the link to your website will be featured at the top of the search engine results page. Without utilizing defensive advertising, you’re allowing other apartments to swoop in on your most qualified leads.
7. Get back in front of renters who visited your website with remarketing ads in Google and Facebook.
In addition to defensive digital advertising, it’s also important to establish remarketing campaigns in Google and Facebook. Remarketing ads are targeted towards individuals who visited your website but didn’t take any specific action there. Exposing them to display ads after they’ve already visited your apartments’ website only increases their familiarity and trust in you. Remarketing campaigns give your apartments a huge competitive advantage during someone’s search.
8. Allow website visitors to apply for a lease or schedule a showing from your website.
The last ingredient you need to consistently earn leases are tools that allow website visitors to either apply for a lease or schedule an in-person showing from it. This conversion point serves as the final step in a prospective resident’s individual apartment hunt, and will produce more qualified leads coming to your leasing office.
Conclusion
Your apartments’ marketing strategy must be designed to address the needs of your target audience. They want to be able to easily search for, discover, and engage with your apartments online. This means capturing photos and videos of each of your floorplans and displaying that visual content on a website that features dedicated pages for each floorplan, too.
It also means making sure you’re directing interested prospective residents to that website, and keeping your apartments at the top of mind throughout their entire search by remarketing to them after they’ve visited your page.
Finally, you need to give website visitors the ability to raise their hand and declare themselves as interested in renting from you. This is an apartment marketing strategy that will ultimately accomplish the goal of consistently generating leases for your community.
