We are all adjusting to a new sense of normalcy, and businesses are forced to do the same. We must accept the situation we find ourselves in and use innovative and creative solutions to achieve our business goals. For Multifamily, this means rethinking your marketing mix so you are effectively communicating with your renters and potential renters in the new world they live in. Drive-bys, word of mouth, and some traditional ways prospects learned about your apartment community are not as reliable as they once were. Different digital advertising channels, such as social media advertising on Facebook and Instagram, offer valuable opportunities to reach your renters where they are spending their time – social media.
As the world closes, people have been turning to social media with their newfound free time. It is their source for news, staying connected, and possibly most important at a time like this, a great way to pass the time. The question becomes, how can apartment communities take advantage of this new social media usage to ensure their vacancies are filled? Additional posting on a community’s Facebook and Instagram page is a great solution, but this will largely be communication with current residents or those already familiar with the community. To find new renters through social media, you must run apartment advertising campaigns. These campaigns allow you to target users in your immediate area that have already shown interest in apartments and signing leases. The efficiency of social media ads – especially now – allows for substantial numbers of impressions and qualified clicks to your apartment website.
Respage has run apartment social media campaigns for Multifamily since the early stages of their relevance. In the last few weeks, we have seen some shocking results that have led us to recommend social media advertising to any apartment community with traffic needs. In the month of March 2020, we saw a 42% increase in impressions compared to February 2020. This means that while all other things remain equal (targeting, ad copy, etc.) the campaign was able to drive 42% more views of the ad while budget remained the same. This massive jump in the number of people seeing your ads can be explained by one change in the Facebook environment: there are exponentially more people using social media, so there are more ad placements to show apartment ads and less competition on those placements. With these large jumps in impressions, we are seeing similar jumps in qualified clicks to the apartment website. In the same time frame, March 2020 vs February 2020, we saw a 40% increase in clicks. This means that for the same ad budget spent, we were able to drive 40% more qualified clicks to the apartment website. Sudden large increases in performance like this are very rare and often present opportunities for apartment communities if they are able to properly execute on them.
Adapting to changing renter behavior is always a challenge for apartment communities, and during these unpredictable times it has only become more difficult. Respage has a number of solutions to help communities navigate through the COVID-19 pandemic, including the social advertising methods outlined above. No matter what’s happening in the world, you still need to get in front of renters and make every lead count. If you are interested in taking advantage of the great results currently being seen through social media advertising, reach out to Respage today.
