Successfully marketing a community to prospective residents is an important and complex task. However, many communities, and by extension their property management and leasing staff, do not have the time, budget, or personnel to check every marketing box, from ILS platforms to social media campaigns to conducting in-person tours.
At the same time, these smaller marketing teams have the potential to dramatically increase their lead-to-lease conversions through understanding the most efficient and productive way of engaging with renters. In essence, marketing done by smaller in-house or off-site teams is a matter of quality over quantity.
Priorities: physical and digital
The first place smaller marketing teams should turn is a well-designed website, because that’s where many renters go with the intention making a leasing decision. The 2023 HubSpot report on marketing trends revealed that 29 percent of marketers use a search-optimized website as their primary method of engagement and lease closures.
Property websites must balance functionality with aesthetic appeal, and must fit within the limits of the team’s resources and capabilities. Alexandra Watson, chief marketing officer at GTMA, sees a well-designed website as a non-negotiable element of organic engagement, no matter the budget. “Having a responsive website, making sure that you have key information, quality photography, video tours and interactive content is really the cost of entry these days,” she said.
At the same time, Watson recognizes that many teams might not be able to afford top-of-the-line web design software, which can often cost more than $15,000 in development and maintenance costs, or be able to hire professional photographers to showcase their communities.
Where functionality is concerned, smaller teams would do well to outsource. If a team is taking the template route, there are options from some sites such webflow that go as low as $49, as well as free options from Canva and Wix, which can integrate high-quality images.
The inclusion of high-quality images on an apartment website is a must, even if resources toward producing them are in short supply. “If you cannot afford to have a full suite of professional photography of the property, at least employ professional editing services for the photography that you have, so that the community can put its best foot forward online,” Watson said.
In addition to visual appeal, property websites must be functional and user-friendly. Billy Wilkinson, CEO of Threshold, feels that how a website is built directly correlates with its ability to generate more leases. The complexity of this aspect should not be underestimated. “
Social media’s visual versatility
Equally important for marketing teams short on resources is their use of social media, which often represents the beginning of a prospect’s journey. Most social media business profiles are entirely free to build and maintain, giving them the highest ROI of any marketing platform. “Users are searching on Google, they are scrolling through Instagram and they are using TikTok as a search engine,” noted Aaron Metzger, founder & head of strategy at Genius Digital Marketing.
For marketing teams, video content and visual social media platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and TikTok give renters the ability to see the living experience that a community offers from a more grounded perspective. Furthermore, those platforms’ users account for some of the highest engagement of any digital medium. Combined, the three have more than 5 billion active users, with YouTube becoming the world’s second most popular search engine, according to data from Search Engine Journal.
“Marketing does not have to be expensive. It just has to be considerate.”
Aaron Metzger, Founder & Head of Strategy, Genius Digital Marketing
Data from the HubSpot report shows that short-form video content in particular accounts for the marketing trend with the highest ROI. With its cost-free creation and maintenance capabilities, smaller teams can do well to take advantage of this. “Even with (just) a stabilizer with an iPhone, you can do a walkthrough showing the amenity spaces,” Metzger noted.
Like the resident referrals, short-form videos can help prospective renters can get a deeper look into the actual experience of living at a community, a task that comes at virtually no cost. “It’s a way for people to understand more about your community,” Hermeling said. “What is it like to live there? What events are they having? What are the amenities that are available?” Such questions can certainly be answered on a website, but the real-time acts of walking through them as if one were in the building gives the communities a more curated, personal appeal. “A lot of that is aesthetics, comfort and safety, and much of that can be shown with simple photography and video,” Metzger said.
Outsourcing automation
Alongside trends in video marketing and organic lead generation, automation and artificial intelligence is a budget-friendly tool. From its ability to create unique marketing content, to conducting outreach to leads, AI has become a fixture of many digital marketing platforms.
For smaller teams, AI’s utility lies not only in its assistance with the above, but in its ability to allow people to focus on higher-level tasks. “If you have a smaller budget, that allows you to perform the work that would otherwise have to be done by humans,” Hermeling said. Such tasks include answering basic questions about a development’s features, as well as tour scheduling and some copywriting, he said.
Metzger sees the content-creation role as particularly prominent, with chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT generating copy such as neighborhood guides instantaneously. “We plug in some links, and we essentially get search engine optimized content for some of our biggest properties,” he detailed.
In the same vein, Metzger sees a similar role for visual content, with ChatGPT’s sister program, DALL-E capable of generating unique, stylish imagery for both website and social media use. “Having a subscription is less expensive than some stock photography websites,” he said. “You can create your own imagery not found anywhere in the world, and it takes seconds.”
Still, despite the temptation that smaller marketing teams may have to delegate all their tasks to automation, they should view automation as an assistant tool, not as a way to replace their own ideas and directions. After all, tools such as ChatGPT and Jasper AI are built on generative data models, and are prone to inaccuracies, with ChatGPT providing inaccuracies in up to 15 percent of its answers.
Watson recognizes this and sees automation as more of an assistant to marketing teams for number-crunching-related tasks. GTMA uses AI for personalization and targeted ad content, with the goal of making sure that their advertisements reach their targeted audience. Where optimizing ads is concerned, GTMA uses AI based algorithms to track its most engaging content.
No matter what, there always needs to be a high degree of human direction and input. “AI is not going to be creative by nature,” Watson cautioned. “It’s not going to give you something fully original and new,” she said.
Metzger added that the platforms should be used to an end of accomplishing more trivial tasks. “It’s a shortcut for some of the tasks that you would give to interns, but realistically good work is always going to require good people,” he said.
Read the July 2023 issue of MHN.
