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New Update: Boost Social Proof with Reviews & Automation
Stacey Corrin
Stacey Corrin
John Turner
John Turner
Finding new and exciting apartment marketing ideas is a real struggle. With so many online channels ripe for promoting your business, there are tons of opportunities. But the key is choosing the right strategy.
In this article, we’ll share the best online apartment marketing ideas that are guaranteed to attract new renters today.
The clear benefit of apartment marketing is that you can reach a broader audience. Many people probably know your company exists or that you have multiple apartments on the market.
Marketing your properties through various channels increases awareness, which can ultimately lead to more leads, sales, and happy clients.
Before we dive in, make sure you have a clear idea of who your audience is. Without defining your ideal audience, you won’t be able to reach them on their preferred online platforms.
One of the best ways to define your audience is to create a buyer persona. A buyer persona is a fictional person who represents your ideal customer. It’s an effective way to get a clear idea of the people you’re marketing to. Until you get that right, you can’t really be sure your marketing efforts will be successful.
Here’s an idea of the areas to address in your buyer persona:
The more detail you add to your buyer personas, the easier it is to pinpoint the best ways to reach your audience.
Now that you know who your ideal audience is and where they’re likely to hang out online, the next step is to reach them with the right messaging.
Below we share a variety of apartment marketing ideas, sure to excite and engage your audience.
Running a giveaway on Instagram is an excellent way to get people involved with your business. Everyone loves a freebie, and when you combine your giveaway with these proven contest promotion ideas, you’re sure to raise awareness of your business and attract tons of entries.
Since Instagram is a highly visual platform, it’s the perfect way to showcase your apartments in all their glory. You can also encourage your current residents to involve their families to boost awareness of your giveaway.
One of the easiest ways to run a giveaway is with RafflePress, the best WordPress giveaway plugin. RafflePress makes it easy to run any kind of giveaway. Plus, it gives you everything you need to accomplish your marketing goals, such as growing your email list, increasing your followers on Instagram, and more.
Even better, the ready-made Instagram giveaway template helps you get up and running in minutes.
Are you not sure where to start? Our guide to running a successful Instagram giveaway has 10 easy steps.
Pinterest is the perfect social media network for highlighting your best properties. Many people use Pinterest to look for home and garden inspiration, so if you’re looking for marketing ideas that make a visual impact, it’s worth jumping on the Pinterest bandwagon.
Here are some ideas for what to post on Pinterest:
Just be sure all the images you add to Pinterest link back to your property listings or blog posts so that visitors can find further information.
You can even run a Pinterest contest to drive more interest.
Facebook Events is a tool that’s often overlooked by marketers. Through Facebook Events, you can invite people to both in-person and virtual events through the Facebook platform.
This is the perfect apartment marketing idea for promoting open houses in your community. Simply add the event to your Facebook page and encourage people to attend by offering a discount on their application fees to the first 10 people to RSVP.
You can even add extra incentives for people to share the event with their circle of friends, like an entry into a giveaway. This will add a sense of urgency and excitement to your event and increase attendance.
Related: 11 Must-Have Facebook Marketing Tools
Twitter polls are another way to engage your followers and support your marketing efforts. Try to create polls that are highly relevant to your business and audience and provide several answers users can choose from. Then, round off your poll with a great call to action (CTA) to encourage people to share your poll with their followers.
Make sure your poll question stimulates conversations that encourage users to share. Then, you can use the answers as market research to improve your business.
Here are some questions to spark conversation for your polls:
Answering your community’s questions is crucial for ensuring the happiness of your renters. But it’s not always easy to offer a venue that’s accessible to everyone. To make it easier to connect with your community, consider hosting a live question-and-answer session on Facebook.
Before you go live, ask your community to submit their most pressing questions, and then you can answer them in a live stream and ask followers to tune in. Being able to see you face-to-face helps instill confidence in your residents and shows potential renters you care about what they have to say.
As we just highlighted, a happy community can improve your business’s reputation. So why not build an online community for your renters using Facebook Groups?
In Facebook Groups, you can address questions as they arise, share news and events, and learn about what matters most to your renters. It also offers the perfect opportunity for renters to build relationships with their neighbors and help each other with more everyday situations, like carpooling, budgeting, and local attractions.
Once your group becomes a bustling community, users are likely to recommend it to others, helping you to attract more clients.
Related: How WPForms Got 11K+ Facebook Group Members with RafflePress
Facebook offers plenty of advertising opportunities to help you reach your ideal audience. And the wealth of customization available lets you tweak them to match specific business goals.
For example, here are some of the ad campaigns you could run:
When running Facebook ads, it’s best to start small to see what works and avoid spending too much money. Then, you can experiment with different customizations to improve the outcomes.
YouTube has a bustling community of people eager to watch the latest videos. This makes it the ideal place to implement your creative apartment marketing ideas.
If you have the time, you can create DIY videos for renters to improve their homes, then add them to your YouTube Channel to raise awareness of your business. Videos educating renters about the real estate industry will also go down a treat.
But if time is limited, you can embed popular YouTube videos on your website to add value to your visitors. You can even display them in a stunning YouTube feed that users can interact with without leaving your site.
Offering site visitors valuable information they can relate to has the potential to attract quality leads.
A social media takeover is a great way to expose your business to a whole new, relevant audience. It works by giving a user limited access to your social media accounts for a set period. During that time, the host engages with your audience in how they see fit, offering value and excitement to your social media feeds.
You can take advantage of social media takeovers by hosting them for your residents. Each week you can ask a different resident to join in and discuss what it’s like living in one of your properties, what the local attractions are like, or even give your followers an apartment tour.
Not only does this engage your audience, but it also lets you tap into your resident’s audience, too, increasing your reach beyond your circle of influence.
Coming up with a branded hashtag for your business is an online apartment marketing idea with massive potential. Branded hashtags help improve the visibility of your business and provide a rallying point for your followers to gather around.
Here are some tips for getting the most out of your branded hashtags:
Once your branded hashtag is memorable, you can use it to collect user-generated content (UGC) in the form of property images, customer reviews, and more. This is free advertising from your fans, which you can use to promote your business elsewhere.
People use Facebook Check-ins to show off the places they’ve been to recently. And chances are, when you see a check-in post, you’ll want to learn more about it yourself.
Why not use Facebook Check-ins as an apartment marketing idea with an incentive to sweeten the deal?
For example, you could offer a discount on application fees to people checking in to one of your apartments for a viewing. Alternatively, you can offer coupons for local attractions and restaurants.
That way, if people choose not to rent one of your properties, they’re still rewarded for taking the time to check you out.
Writing city guides for your blog is the perfect way to attract organic traffic to your website. Organic traffic is people who land on your website after searching the internet for the information they’re after.
For example, someone searching for “palm beach guides” might land on your visitor guide to palm beach articles.
City guides are ideal for helping people learn about the world around your properties. They can offer ideas for what to do on days out, the best places to eat, and the local nightlife.
Write local guides for all your different property locations and publish them on your blog, accompanied by property listings for that area. That way, people interested in the area have the opportunity to see what it might be like to live there.
You can also use your website to review businesses local to your properties. That way, you can support your local economy while promoting your properties in the same area.
Consider teaming up with local businesses to offer discounts and promotions alongside your reviews. You could even run a blog giveaway for a free ticket to a local attraction or a day living in one of your properties to give potential renters an idea of what living there might be like.
Chances are, many people will leave your website without taking any action. For you, that’s a wasted opportunity. After all, you put tons of effort into attracting the right types of visitors, right? So why let those visitors leave so quickly?
One way to capture the attention of potential customers is to trigger a popup just as they’re about to leave. The popup can then ask them to take action, turning them into leads.
Here are a few ideas to include in your exit popup:
It’s easy to create an Exit popup using software like OptinMonster. Its drag-and-drop popup builder lets you use pre-built templates to design and customize your popups in minutes.
With powerful targeting options, you can trigger your popup to launch at just the right moment before visitors abandon your website.
Earlier, we talked about UGC and how you can use it as an apartment marketing idea to improve your business’s reputation. One way to do that is to showcase positive reviews from residents on your property listing pages.
Reviews work as positive social proof, where if visitors see residents talking about your property services in a positive light, it can give them the confidence they need to give your business a try.
There are several ways to display reviews on your website. One way is to show them in a social media feed, which you can do with Smash Balloon. The suite of social media feed plugins from Smash Balloon lets you quickly show feeds of content gathered from your social media profiles.
For example, you could show a feed of property reviews from Instagram using the Instagram Feed Pro plugin. To keep the content relevant, you could filter the feed to display posts containing your branded hashtag.
Then, you can show it in the sidebar of your property listing page to boost social proof.
Following our previous point, you must always ask for customer reviews. That way, you’ll always have material to use in your marketing promotions.
Plus, reviews help you identify areas where you can improve your business. And you can address common issues to ensure renters have the best possible experience.
For example, a review might draw attention to the fact that a neighbor is causing too much noise. To fix it, you can talk to those residents and work out a solution.
For tips on how to get more reviews, take a look at this guide.
Calls to action encourage people to carry out a specific task on your website. So, creating the perfect call to action is essential for ensuring your visitors take action where you want them to.
Optimizing your CTAs can also increase conversions, such as more people filling in your contact form or leaving a review.
Here are a few ideas to optimize your CTAs:
Remember the last time you researched a product? How many times did you then see that product show up in ads on other websites? Well, that is an example of website retargeting in action.
Retargeting is an effective way to re-engage people who’ve recently visited your website, and with carefully tailored retargeting ads, you turn those people into qualified leads and customers.
Let’s say a visitor arrived on your site after searching for properties to rent. Maybe they got distracted and left without taking action. With a retargeting strategy in place, you can serve ads to that person, reminding them to book a viewing of the property they were looking at. Then, the ball’s in your court to persuade them to rent from your business.
There are many ways to use retargeting on your website. If you’re running a giveaway with RafflePress, you can easily add retargeting scripts in the giveaway widget settings. Then, your ads will fire as soon as people enter the contest.
Customer service also goes a long way to securing new customers. And chatbots offer the perfect opportunity to ensure potential renters have all their questions answered before they commit to leasing your property.
So, adding a chatbot or live chat widget to your website offers visitors the chance to ask questions. Plus, it helps you understand your visitors’ pain points so that you can serve them better in the future.
To give you a hand in the right direction, here is the best live chat software for small businesses.
On a similar note, it’s also crucial that you make it easy for potential customers to contact you. Some questions might be too complex to ask over live chat and better suited to a contact form that offers room for more details.
You can create a contact form easily with WPForms, the best contact form plugin for WordPress. With over 2 million active users, it’s the most user-friendly form builder on the market.
With its drag-and-drop interface, you can create any kind of form in minutes. You can even create multi-step forms to make them easier for users to complete.
On the other hand, some customer queries might be personal and better suited to a phone call for a more human touch. For that situation, you can create a click-to-call link that visitors can click or tap from any device to get in touch.
Probably one of the most straightforward apartment marketing ideas is to create a referral program for residents to encourage friends and family to lease from your business.
Here’s how it would work.
For every person a resident successfully refers to your business as a new tenant, you’ll reward them with an incentive. That incentive could be anything from a small cash reward to discounts for home appliances or local businesses.
To take it a step further, you can create a leaderboard showcasing residents with the most referrals. This would encourage other residents to step up their referral game and ultimately win you more customers.
The great thing about a local community is that all businesses are trying to find new and exciting ways to land new customers. While you’re trying to rent more properties, the local garage is trying to attract more business from people needing their vehicles repaired.
You can tap into that need by guest posting on the blogs of local businesses and offering the same opportunity in return. That way, both companies get exposure to their desired audiences and can nurture relationships that can prove beneficial in the future.
And there you have it!
We hope this article helped you discover more online apartment marketing ideas to improve your rental rates and grow your business.
If you’re looking for great prizes to motivate your audience, consider these proven contest prize ideas.
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