Want to successfully advertise your apartment in 2020?
These top apartment marketing ideas will help you elevate your digital presence, leading to greater customer prospects and leases. Due to the influx of selling competition in the apartment and real estate industry, you need to be proactively searching for the best clients.
This means utilising the various digital marketing channels and social media platforms to connect with existing residents, while attracting the most suitable potential tenants. Luckily in 2020, there are many options to get you started below!
Google My Business – Local SEO
Local SEO is a powerful marketing strategy as many customers search for apartments within a local mile radius. Google My Business, along with other local listings such as Bing, Gumtree and Yelp, are prominent key players that prioritise the user’s location as the most important ranking signal. Hyper-localised search is extremely crucial in securing new leads!
This means that businesses should be using localised keywords such as city names, suburb names or streets, which can easily reach customers within a specific area. Through Google My Business, you can also monitor your reviews, add floor plans and apartment photos, share updates or special notices and gain important insights.
As many customers (91%) read reviews to understand the experiences of others in the apartment community, this is an excellent way to gain traction.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
The vast majority (57%) of internet web browsing is done through a mobile device. In fact, 77% of smartphone users are more likely to purchase from companies whose mobile sites or apps allow them to make purchases quickly.
So how does this relate to accelerated mobile pages? AMP was established by Google in 2015, which has revolutionised the overall performance of mobile web usage. The framework components are designed for a mobile-focused delivery.
If a website incorporates AMP, then it significantly enhances mobile friendliness and user experience, while optimising the mobile speed of the website. The pages load instantaneously and generate pages full of images — this will improve the customer’s apartment purchasing experience.
Google Actions – Voice Search
Google Actions is a development platform for Google Assistant, providing extended functionality and convenience for users. Since most web searches are becoming mobile voice searches, Google Actions is becoming progressively important for online apartment marketing.
Websites which have optimised voice search are able to connect better with their audience. By using voice search through Google Actions, the user can turn a basic web conversation into a conversation, thus making the purchasing-process much more personalised, engaging and intimate.
Google Actions can be easily formulated through Google Assistant, where actions can be created for apartment marketing. For example, this could include setting up the action of finding a “2 Bedroom Apartment in Melbourne” – this action would be tailored to what individuals would typically say during a voice search.
Schema Markup
Schema markup is a code that is placed on websites to help the search engines yield more informative results for users. When the schema markup is set up on the specific page, the page will then generate that information through SERP (search engine results page).
To demonstrate, when you search for apartments on the Internet, there is a basic SERP yet this description includes reviews (star ratings). Most of the time, you can also see the price for the apartment and a photo thumbnail attached.
Through schema markup, website content is visible for customers, which makes it much easier to navigate through the information and find relevant details. This makes the purchase decision more streamlined and urges them to click on your website.
Use Social Media
- Create Facebook Events for Open Houses – You can invite current followers to both in-person and virtual events through Facebook. This is an effective way of using open houses for apartment marketing and creating events for your community.
- Post your property photos on Pinterest – Pinterest is a great way of generating visual impact and appeal among your followers. You can post high quality photos of your apartment, while following industry trends and real-estate business news.
- Host an Instagram competition – If you want to get residents involved while also expanding to new markets, hosting an Instagram aesthetic competition will help your apartment marketing gain traction. You can invite residents to share photos of their decorated homes with a branded hashtag, while enabling them to like, share and tag their friends. Prizes can then be rewarded to the winner.
- YouTube Videos: Resident Testimonials – Posting videos from happy residents can help you understand your clientele and build media social presence. Video testimonials are the most effective type of video content and you can simply film, edit and upload resident reviews for the company.
- Use Real-time / Live Social Media – By actively interacting with followers through live Q&A sessions on Facebook Live, Snapchat Live Stories or Instagram Live Stories. Users and followers can tune in and submit their questions about the apartment community to you or your leasing agents
- Create Twitter Polls – You can form an interesting question that aligns with your apartment marketing objectives, which finishes off with a call-to-action that you can easily share. This will effectively stimulate online engagement
Interactive Content
With the Internet flooded with information overload, many customers want more interactive content and entertainment. Video marketing is a great example of grabbing the customer’s attention and making a long-lasting impact. Customers are able to visualise the experience of touring the apartment and admiring the furniture.
Interactive content can take on many other forms – this includes virtual tours and 3D renderings. With the advent of 360 degree video and augmented reality (AR) technology, apartment marketing can be made much more immersive and impactful.
Integrate Blogs into Your Website
Starting and managing a blog is a powerful way of marketing your apartment. It is easily shareable across social networks and can build your digital presence, which can connect existing residents or prospective customers. Blogging can establish one’s reputation as a reliable and knowledgeable member of the real estate industry.
Even one weekly post can dramatically increase traffic to the website. In fact, sites with blogs get 55% more traffic than those without. This means that your reach to possible customers will be much larger if you regularly post content related to your apartment.
Launch Local Google Ads Campaign – SEO
Apartment marketing can be made so much easier through Google Ads, which is an online pay-per-click advertising platform that enables businesses to strategically advertise through implementing relevant keywords searched by users.
Google Adwords is also budget-friendly, since businesses can establish how much they want to spend and you only pay when a user clicks on the ad. Creating a Google Adwords campaign involves a carefully planned strategy, where you must thoroughly research keywords associated with your brand, goals and objectives, audience and budget.
