Internet Listing Services (ILSs) have long been a major part of the marketing strategies of real estate brands, and it’s not hard to see why. These online listing sites like Apartments.com, Apartment Finder, and Zillow help real estate brands ensure their properties show up in Google search results, driving clicks and conversions while freeing up the property management to focus on concerns beyond digital marketing strategy.
However, ILSs may not be the best marketing option for real estate brands today, and a shift away from these services is already beginning within the real estate industry. There are a few key reasons for this, which we’ll discuss, but the main takeaway is this: internet listing services simply aren’t worth the money real estate brands spend on them—at least, not when relied on as heavily as they traditionally have been.
So what should real estate brands be doing instead? Well, the answer is complex, and we’ll get into it, but the short version is that these brands should be diversifying their digital marketing mix. Let’s talk about why and how.
Internet Listing Services Are Easy But Not Efficient
We’ve already touched on why real estate brands have been putting their marketing dollars into ILSs: it makes things simple. It is a truth universally acknowledged that most property managers have enough on their plate without worrying about how to optimize their digital marketing strategy. Many real estate brands choose to let ILSs worry about that stuff for them, knowing they can benefit from the strong SEO and SEM of established ILSs that prospects already recognize and use.
However, real estate brands are beginning to understand that they’re not getting as much bang for their buck this way. While ILSs do bring in leads, brands are likely to pay a much higher cost per lead than they would on other digital marketing strategies like paid search or retargeting ads. Not only that, but ILSs could be delivering less qualified leads, resulting in fewer lead conversions, which brings us to our next point….
Internet Listing Services Can’t Verify Conversions
In other words, ILSs can’t prove their worth or provide you with analytics that help you make smart decisions about your marketing spend. That’s because when a user lands on an ILS after searching for housing, your property appears along with competing properties in the area, and users often click through several listings as they peruse their options. That means that ILSs attempting to track conversion rates by either a first-click or last-click attribution model can easily provide an inaccurate or incomplete report of your conversions from their site.
So, unless these prospects take a tour, start an application, or otherwise reach out to property staff, you may never get a chance to verify where that lead came from and how much value ILSs are really adding to your marketing strategy. And with unclear analytics, you miss out on the opportunity to evaluate and optimize your strategy along the way.
Relying Solely on ILSs Means Missing A Big Opportunity for Growth
In addition to missing out on the opportunity for continuous optimization, relying solely on an ILS for your digital marketing means limiting your brand’s marketing potential in other ways.
One of the shortcomings of ILSs is that they don’t do a good job of making your property stand out from the competition. Instead, they lump you in with your competitors and provide easy opportunities for your prospects to shift their attention to properties other than your own as they search. Other digital marketing strategies like PPC ads and SEO give you more opportunity to stand out from your competition and make a strong first (or second, or third) impression.
Speaking of making more than one impression, another shortcoming of ILSs is that they only allow you to intervene at one step of your audience’s buyer journey. Every prospect goes through a number of different stages as they search for housing, and using an ILS tends to be one of the earlier stages in the digital buyer journey. Being able to reach your audience early in their journey is great, but reaching them more than once is better. If you limit your digital marketing to just ILSs, you’ll miss out on opportunities to stay top-of-mind and catch your prospects at later stages of their journey when they might be more likely to convert.
Another way ILSs fall short is that they tend not to create strongly qualified leads when used alone. Again, that’s because the ILS user experience places your property alongside your competitors’ and limits your opportunity to wow your audience. Spending your marketing dollars to instead create a website experience that is both conversion- and search-optimized allows you the opportunity to connect with your prospects through compelling branding, provide your audience with reasons to trust, and deliver all the information a prospect needs to convert.
So What’s the Answer?
We actually don’t recommend that you stop using ILSs entirely. ILSs are currently a useful way to reach prospects at a key part of their housing search. However, there’s a lot more you could be doing.
That’s why we recommend diversifying your marketing mix. Keep ILSs in that mix if they’re helping you, but consider allocating some of the spend you’d normally put toward an ILS to other digital strategies that are cost-effective and provide more opportunities to reach your prospects and stand out from the competition.
Creating a conversion-optimized website with strong SEO is a fantastic start. Consider also launching search ads through Google Ads as well as retargeting display ads that help you stay top-of-mind for prospects who have already encountered your property through their online housing search.
If this is sounding like a lot, we get it. You can’t become a digital marketing expert overnight, and many folks in the real estate world simply don’t have the time to devote to it. Still, there’s a cost-effective way to incorporate better marketing strategies into your budget. Can you guess what we’re going to say?
If you guessed, “work with a marketing agency,” you’d be correct. Better yet, work with Threshold! We specialize in the real estate industry and we have experience working within your budget to create great marketing results. Best of all, we’ve got a team of expert digital strategists who can help you launch effective marketing strategies and optimize them as you go, so you’re always getting the most effective marketing for your spend.
If you want to learn more about digital marketing with Threshold, chat with a team member today! We’d love to get you started.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, after asset management companies rushed to implement quick digital marketing solutions, Property Management Software have become more ubiquitous than ever, but so has the demand for strong agency/client marketing partnerships. With this surge in demand for digital real estate marketing, knowing the recipe for a great agency partnership is more important than ever. As real estate marketing agencies work to prove their worth, knowing these strategies for excellent partnerships is essential. Likewise, as asset management teams seek out ways to stand out from the crowd of competitors using the same PMS marketing tools they are, an agency partnership that honors their unique needs and goals can be particularly rewarding. For a timely comparison between Property Management Software marketing solutions and the advantages of a strong marketing agency partnership, check out the Pros and Cons of Relying on Property Management Software for Real Estate Marketing.
If you’ve read our blog post on How a Strong Agency/Client Relationship Can Make or Break Your Real Estate Marketing Plan, then you know just how important a healthy agency/client relationship is. Not only is a bad relationship unpleasant to deal with, it also impacts your bottom line (for both clients and agencies). But it’s easier to identify a bad relationship once it exists than to build a good relationship from the word go. What strategies can clients and agencies use to develop relationships that work for them?
Whether you’re a client looking for cost-effective marketing results or an agency looking to wow clients and encourage loyalty, today’s blog post will help you craft relationships that are mutually beneficial. So let’s get into it, shall we?
Emphasize Mutual Success
Your relationship isn’t just about contracting services and exchanging deliverables; it’s about partnership. As you make plans, launch campaigns, and review performance together, bear in mind that each party is made stronger by the other, and each party’s success is intertwined with the other’s. When you emphasize mutual success, you foster an attitude of working together (rather than simply performing transactions) that not only creates a better experience for everyone, but also creates better marketing results.
Acknowledge Uniqueness
Each client and each agency is unique—they are made up of unique individuals, have unique needs and areas of expertise, and experience unique challenges. A partnership works best when each party understands the other fully, and neither has a one-size-fits-all attitude toward working together. Cookie cutter strategies not only underperform due to their imperfect fit, they also communicate a lack of investment in the partner you’re working with.
Set Clear Expectations
When you don’t set clear expectations, needs go unmet and frustrations are inevitable. In order for work to get done together smoothly, everyone needs to know what is and is not expected of them, and when. Be honest and upfront about the limitations of what you can provide, and ask for clarification on what others need from you. Don’t wait until things are going wrong to have these conversations.
With clear expectations set, your projects will suffer from less scope creep, fewer disappointments, and a consistent plan that helps work get done on time and on budget.
Respect (And Take Advantage Of) Expertise
Neither the client nor the agency knows everything they need to know to create excellent marketing results—and that’s okay. In fact, it’s crucial to recognize where skills and access to information differ so that everyone can come together to inform your big-picture real estate marketing plan. That said, it’s not enough to ask for the input you think you need, you have to also put some trust in the expertise of the other party. Neither the client nor the agency should be—or even can be—dictating every single detail of the work you create together. Take advantage of your partner’s expertise and trust them to inform the areas where that expertise is relevant.
Establish Regular Communication
You’ve heard before that good communication is crucial to a healthy relationship, and that’s true for agency/client relationships as well. Calls and emails should happen on a regular cadence, not just when questions or issues arise (though they should happen then too). This ensures that all teams stay on the same page, issues are caught early, and a healthy rapport is maintained. All this translates to the marketing results you achieve together by encouraging steady progress through all your projects together, with fewer missteps along the way.
With these tips under your belt, you should be able to cultivate strong agency/client relationships that create mutual success as well as mutual happiness. If you’d like to learn more about agency/client relationships, or you’d like to start building a relationship with our team at Threshold, contact a Threshold team member today! We’d love to chat with you.
Emily takes apartment marketing ideas and turns them into apartment marketing masterpieces. She has been creating next-level multifamily marketing brochures, websites, and logos for Threshold for some time now, and we just want her to have her moment in the sun.
Get to know Emily below!
What are 3 words you would use to describe Threshold?
weird, friendly, evolving
If you had an office nickname, what would it be?
Office Daria
What is your favorite line from a movie?
Listen up, Fives. A Ten is speaking. — Jenna, 30 Rock
If you were stuck on an island, what three things would you bring?
coconut radio, a Kindle full of books, notebook & pens
What is the title of your autobiography?
Why Are These Fonts Not Syncing! The Emily Barker Story
What is/would be your motto or slogan?
You can’t have it all, but you can always have pizza.
When you think of someone figuring out a name for your property, don’t imagine a creative-type at an advertising agency sitting up late at night, waiting for that perfect name to pop into their head. When Threshold names properties —be it a new or old community— our approach is never to just sit around spouting out names until we hear one that sounds cool.
That approach might work for startup tech companies, but naming ideas and marketing ideas for apartments emerge from a more nuanced approach. When property owners and developers come to us for a new naming project, they’re not only looking for a name. We certainly start with the name, but that name evolves into a color scheme, which evolves into a logo, which turns into tagline, messaging and whatever other apartment marketing collateral the property needs.
How a Name is Born
Before we can do any of that, our team needs to gather information about the property. The most important piece of information is the target market demographic. The property name must be geared precisely towards the target audience, because they’ll be seeing, saying and writing the name most often. Think about it; you wouldn’t assign a name to someone’s house without first considering who they are, what they like and where they work.
After we determine the characteristics of the community’s target resident, we consider the property’s other characteristics such as location, amenities, building style, and whether it will be considered a luxury apartment complex, a student housing community, or another kind of property. A name is only one or two words, but those words must be whittled down from a huge amount of information.
Of course, we don’t just collect information ourselves. We always sit down with property owners to talk about their vision for the property. At the end of the day, the client chooses from a list of names that Threshold provides. That’s why it’s so important to listen to the client’s ideas and incorporate them into the final naming considerations.
Be Unique. Don’t Be Weird.
Once we’ve compiled all the preliminary information, the creative naming process can begin. We look to bring out names that are unique, but not just for uniqueness sake. We’ll always consider the competition names, and avoid names that bear any similarity to other properties in the area. We want the name to stand out, but we also want it to make sense. Prospective residents should see the name and know exactly what their life will be like if they live there, or at least be intrigued by what their life might be like.
There’s no rule of thumb about whether your property name should be made up or be a real word. Each property is different, and each naming process requires a thorough investigation into which names will attract the most residents. There are rules about properties that are undergoing a rebrand, however. If your property is being rebranded, it’s probably for good reason. You don’t want to make the mistake of keeping certain parts of your old property name. A renaming effort requires total commitment to the new brand. That way, you’ll be able to attract people who are new to the market without any extra baggage that may have been associated with the previous property name.
Those are all the secret marketing ideas for apartments that we’re able to divulge today. When your property is ready for a new name, or if you’ve recently purchased a new property in need of an identity, Threshold has you covered with innovative apartment marketing ideas. We don’t do cookie-cutter and we don’t do boring —unless that’s what your target audience wants.
We get a lot of requests for rebrand projects from new property owners, especially those who’ve bought older properties. If you’re an owner taking over a property, you might want that property’s branding to fall more in line with the other communities you own. A rebrand makes a statement to the surrounding community that your property is serious about its image.
Recent renovations also cause property owners to come to Threshold for marketing ideas for apartments in the midst of a rebrand. The big payoff for big renovations is the ability to promote them. When you make renovations, and do a rebrand, you can promote your property in a whole new way to a whole new audience.
Finally, poor reputations can also cause owners to consider rebranding. Past a certain point, your property’s reputation cannot be saved, no matter how much time you dedicate to reputation management. If that’s the case, a rebrand can give your property a fresh start.
Obstacles to Overcome
Losing a name associated with negative reviews is great, but you’ll also lose plenty of equity in the community from people who’ve knew about your property’s old name. Online, you’ll have to take certain steps to combat the loss of domain and page authority that your website has built up over the years. At Threshold, we combat this by mapping your old URLs to similar pages on your new website.
There are a million moving parts to take care of when your property gets a new name, especially in today’s age of multiple online social media pages and apartment finder websites. It’s a complicated process to update every little detail, but it’s worth it—and entirely necessary— when launching a new brand into the market.
Your new site will have to build up trust with Google over time, no matter how much work your advertising agency does to combat the loss of SEO mojo from your old brand. However, property managers can drive traffic to their site right away by launching Google AdWords campaigns.
With AdWords, you can show up in search results right away because you’ve paid to be there. That will immediately drive traffic to your new site and speed up the trust-building process with Google.
Take Good Care of Your New Brand
As property managers know, renters care deeply about the lifestyle their chosen community projects. Sometimes, that projected lifestyle is even more important than the amenities or the square footage. Doing a rebrand can help your property show off an entirely different lifestyle than the old brand was putting out there. You can do all this without making major renovations.
We talked about changing the property’s social media pages to suit the new brand, but the voice and tone on social media should change as well. When we create new brands at Threshold, we don’t create them to be permanent. Instead, we develop brands that have the chance to grow and evolve as time goes on. We want our clients to be able to take ownership of their brand and wield it how they see fit. Social media is a perfect place to start trying out your new brand—your new voice.
A rebrand can involve anything from naming and a logo to a full-blown collateral update, including digital apartment marketing materials such as your website. We’re here with game-changing apartment marketing ideas when your property is ready for a rebrand. Whether you’ve just purchased a new property that needs to present a new face to the market, or you’re just sick of looking at a stagnant logo, Threshold can help.
