2-Step Apartment Marketing for People Who Care About Quality
Digital changed all of that. In the past, you were only able to buy newspaper ads or placement in print guides of the apartments available in your area. Today, you can specifically target prospects looking for anything from pet-friendly apartments to brand new luxury units.
In this post, we want to share a simple two-part strategy for making your marketing more efficient so your leasing team spends more time speaking with engaged prospects and less time with people who are never going to sign a lease.
Phone Leads > Email Leads
The sight of a full inbox can make you feel like things are going well, right?
Through years of research, we have discovered that prospects who email rather than call, typically know less about the community, are less interested in your specific property, and are therefore, less likely to lease.
Why are email leads so cold?
Most email leads come from an ILS, and those prospects are finding you and all your closest competitors’ contact information. Worse still, they’re finding all of you on a site that makes it very hard to distinguish one community from another. Naturally, when these people email your community, they have less information. Most likely they’re simply emailing their way through a list and you’re just one of several communities they plan to visit.
In contrast to this, phone leads typically come from your community website.
Why are phone leads better?
People who have looked at your website and then picked up the phone will be more engaged in your particular property. They have already seen what you offer and liked it enough to call the leasing office, which results in them being a much higher qualified lead. This, ultimately, should be an easier deal for your leasing staff to close.
Ultimately, with leads, you should care about quality, not quantity.
Focus on a Defined Group
No community appeals to every renter in the area. Every property has fixed qualities that make them desirable to some people and undesirable or inaccessible to others.
Rental rates, location, types of properties, pet policies, and more are deal breakers for many prospective renters..And they all play a major role in defining who is more likely to rent from you and who is less likely.
For this reason, it’s worth taking the time to sit down and understand who your perfect prospects are. Then you can design a marketing strategy to target those people. NOTE: Please review fair housing laws and have a solid understanding of the legalities before creating any marketing campaigns. Reach out to an advisor if you have any questions.
For example, “apartments in Lincoln, NE” is a broad keyword that is going to attract a lot of low-quality traffic. “Luxury apartments near downtown Lincoln, NE” is far more targeted. By identifying the keywords that reach your best prospects, you can make your marketing far more efficient.
Conclusion
Efficient marketing systems do a couple of things for your community.
First, they’re often more affordable because they require less traffic to lease apartments.
Second, they make life easier on your leasing team because they are giving tours to higher quality leads.
In other words, efficient marketing helps your bottom line and it helps your team. Given all that, why wouldn’t you focus more on lead quality and worry less about quantity?
Source: RentVision.com
Accessibility