Top 3 Things to Know Before Advertising Your Multi-Unit Apartment Building
1. KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE
As a building owner, property manager or real estate investor, you know that tenants and new rental applications are the lifeblood of an apartment building. You know that your ultimate goal is to increase occupancy and attract new tenants. Easy, right? Not so much. The challenge is in discovering, understanding and measuring a consistent flow of rental prospects, lease applications, and new tenants
In 2020, there were approximately 43 million housing units occupied by renters in the US. This number has remained steady since 2014.
The first thing to know before any marketing or advertising campaign is who your audience is and where they’re located. When your product is an apartment, you inherently have different challenges than you would if you were selling a product like a television or a book or a piece of software. Instead of trying to target a very broad audience, the trick for successful apartment marketing is to whittle down your list to a very small number of people who are trying to rent your kind of apartment, in your city, right now. And that’s easier said than done.
In Seattle, for example, roughly 40.28% of households were renters
according to Census ACS data.
To help define your audience, here are some general behaviors, locations and interests of people with the intention to rent an apartment:
Searching Google & Google Maps for apartment buildings in the area
Searching rental & real estate mobile & web applications & listing sites like:
Zillow.com
Apartments.com
Rent.com
ApartmentList.com
Craigslist.org
ApartmentGuide.com
Currently located in or leasing a rental unit nearby
Scrolling amenities on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok & SnapChat mobile apps
Recently visited the city, a tourist attraction or local visitor website
Walking into leasing offices of apartment buildings nearby
Just graduated college or landed a new job, and are planning to move
Checking emails and replies from applications and other apartment listings
Future tenants and new rental applicants may have many qualities, interests and locations. Each apartment building will attract its own unique type of tenant. This targeted audience can be refined and extrapolated by using a current or past list of tenants. Or more technically, by retargeting those who have visited your website or filled out an online lease application in the past.
2. KNOW YOUR MESSAGING
Once you begin to understand and define your audience, you need to think about what matters to them. What do your renters care about? Do luxury amenities matter to a prospective tenant? What makes your building different from others? Do your tenants care about security, comfort, affordability, location, walkability, parking, fitness, or views?
If you have no idea where to start, here are several ways to jumpstart your messaging:
Talk to your current and prospective tenants. Getting feedback from your future, current or past tenants can be the most valuable feedback you can acquire. Asking a prospective renter after a tour of the building what they liked most about the tour, what they care about when looking for a new lease, or getting them to describe your brand messaging back to you is direct insights into how your messaging is resonating with people.
Build a loyal tenant persona. In order to know your tenants, you’ll want to understand them from their perspective. Put yourself in their shoes and be brutally honest and empathetic to their lifestyle, needs, and feelings. This doesn’t have to be perfect. Start by picking a real person, a real loyal tenant and describe their age, job, salary, material possessions, needs, frequently used amenities, clothing style, words they use, what they drink, hobbies, where they like to go out to eat or after work. This is extremely important in crafting your messaging and building your future audience targeting. One word of caution, DO NOT LIST TRAITS OR BEHAVIORS TO EXCLUDE as this feathers into fair housing laws and discriminatory practices. This persona exercise is to build interests and traits of your most loyal residents and should not discriminate against any sex, race, age, religion, or family status.
Stalk your competitors. Make a list of all your nearby competitors. Visit all their websites, social media profiles, click on all their ads and study them. With retargeting technology, you’ll most likely be served ads for them and apartments like them on google, apartment websites, facebook, instagram and youtube. By viewing your competitors ads, you’ll begin to understand how you’re different, what makes your community and building unique, and what messaging your prospects are hearing and comparing you too. Are your competitors using certain platforms, deals, amenities, technology, photos, videos, signage, gimmicks or advanced targeting to attract new renters? How can you do what they are doing, but do it better? How can you stand out? Are they not targeting your ideal renter?
Finally, take a look at your website. What is your current messaging compared to your competitors? What would your newfound loyal customer persona say about your website? What is the tenant journey and customer experience on your website? How quickly can they find what they are looking for? How relevant is your content to what your tenant’s care most about?
3. KNOW YOUR PLATFORMS & CHANNELS
Now that you better understand your audience and have an idea of your messaging, you’ll need to reach your potential renters through marketing channels and advertising platforms. As is often the case with property owners and managers, you’ll need to decide whether to focus first on promoting the brand name of your building management company or the branded buildings you manage. Most apartment or multifamily property management companies list their buildings on a main centralized website and this will be your primary platform.
The initial, and most impactful platform to focus on is your website and its search engine optimization (SEO). This is critical in a competitive vertical like apartment marketing, and it is a building block to most other tactics. This is the most important platform and all traffic from other advertising should be driven here. Why? Tracking codes, cookies and pixels embedded in your website allow for the general identification and pattern recognition of users throughout the site, and since you only have a hypothesis on your most loyal audience, you’ll begin to see what messaging is most relevant to them and what channels they’re coming from.
Apartment shoppers hear about your community in a lot of different ways that drive them to Google to search for your community by name for more information. Search Engine Optimization is the process of making your website more discoverable by search engines to drive organic traffic. Google makes over 500 changes a year to their search algorithm resulting in the need for ongoing diligent and artful management of best practices.
Apartment shoppers might hear about your community on an internet listing service (e.g., Craigslist, For Rent, or Apartment Guide), physical signs, or a resident referral; however, those sources of introduction typically do not provide much information about your community. So, people searching for your community by name are (more likely than not) your warmest leads, and you will want to make absolutely sure that you capture them. For example this potential tenant may search google for, “Community Name in City, State” or “Brand Name Apartments in City”.
SEO strategies take time to show results. Typical results start showing progress around 3 months and first page rankings can take up to 6-9 months. Which is why complementing this primary platform with paid marketing channels is a great idea and often leads to more immediate results. Here are a list of paid advertising channels you’ll want to consider:
Search Advertising: Google Ads & Google My Business
Social: Facebook & Instagram Ads
Video Ads: YouTube, TikTok, SnapChat, CTV
Outdoor Advertising: Billboards & Signage
Print Advertising: Travel, Visitor, University Publications, Postcards
Display Advertising: Retargeting, Geofencing Competitors, Programmatic
Email Marketing
Now that you have an idea of who your ideal tenant is, what messaging is likely to resonate with them, and where they can find what they care about most (your website), you’ll want to experiment with driving traffic from all the advertising channels above and double down on what works.
