As a property manager, marketing your building can seem overwhelming. But with the power of the internet, it’s never been more accessible. Apartment digital marketing is all about reaching and connecting with ideal prospects. After all, having great tenants makes your job all the easier.
Your apartment marketing plan template doesn’t have to be too complex. With a few best practices, you’ll generate traffic to your apartment community with relative ease.
In this guide, we break down six different strategies you can implement to market your apartment building online. We’ll tell you what you need to do first and the priorities you should keep in mind.
Here are six expert multifamily digital marketing tips:
- Build an efficient website
- Pay for search engine digital multifamily marketing
- Implement search engine optimization
- Utilize social media
- Optimize for mobile devices
- List your property effectively
1. Build an efficient website
Before you can expand anywhere else online, your apartment digital marketing strategy starts with creating a website. WordPress and Squarespace are popular website hosting platforms because they’re relatively easy to use and are endlessly customizable.
If you manage multiple apartment buildings, you can still market them through a single website. For example, you can differentiate each location by creating different pages for each building on the same website.
Don’t worry: We’ll go over why this is a good idea when we discuss search engine optimization.
When building your website you should:
- Identify what makes your property unique. What sets your property apart from other buildings in the area? Think of the building’s unique features. For instance, highlight its state-of-the-art access control system or its swimming pool. Are you pet friendly? If so, mention that clearly!
- Include lots of pictures and videos. Ultimately, prospects want to visualize where their next home will be. There’s no such thing as too many pictures; just make sure they’re professionally taken. What’s more, offering virtual tours is a big selling point.
- Highlight the neighborhood. How close is your building to public transportation, restaurants, parks, and schools? The surrounding neighborhood and its offerings can all be important deciding factors for prospects when choosing your property as their next home.
You’ll reiterate these selling points through other avenues of apartment digital marketing. But your website is the first place many prospects will look when searching for apartments. As such, it should be the home base for critical information on your property. On websites, you can go into as much detail as you want — take advantage of that.
Website design
When designing your property’s website, make sure its layout is well organized. You should prioritize the structure of its pages and ensure the site is easy to navigate.
For example, prospects shouldn’t have to spend much time searching for an application form — it should be readily available.
Your website should feature:
- A blog. This is where the majority of your written content will live. You’ll be able to optimize your site for SEO through your blog and draw in prospective residents from all search engines.
- Reviews. Publish positive testimonials from former and current residents. They’re a big selling point!
- A list of vacancies. Similar to an application form, this list will keep prospects informed about available units.
- A contact form & summary of the application process. Let prospects know exactly what the application process entails and how they can reach out with any questions or concerns.
2. Pay for search engine digital multifamily marketing
Search engine marketing (SEM) involves marketing through paid advertisements. This is a proven, though pricey, method of advertising your apartment.
These digital ads will appear throughout the Google search index, including search engine result pages, YouTube, and Gmail. Your paid advertising campaign’s success often correlates with how much money you put into it.
When creating your ads, it’s important to:
- Stay local. Someone searching for apartments two cities away shouldn’t see your advertisement come up. For example, a good apartment advertisement example for search engines would specifically highlight your property’s neighborhood, such as Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
- Be short and sweet. The keywords you use in your ad need to be direct but also impactful. Tell your prospects what they want to hear, such as concession offerings and amenity perks.
When using SEM, it’s important to set goals. Whatever amount of money you’re spending on ads, you should know the expected impact to justify the cost. Before spending a single cent, conduct extensive research on your competitors and what’s standard in your local market.
Watch how ButterflyMX improves the resident experience:
3. Implement search engine optimization strategies
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a highly effective strategy for generating website traffic and improving your ranking on Google.
For instance:
If somebody googles “apartment with access control in Columbus, Ohio,” your building’s website can be one of the top search results if it’s well optimized.
Apartment SEO is highly effective for highlighting specific keywords about your property — such as “luxury apartments” — that you’re trying to rank for in search engines.
Here are three major ways to optimize SEO:
- Content. Your best bet is to write high-quality blog posts on your website. These will be your bread and butter when it comes to ranking on Google. As such, implement keywords that link back to other pages on your website and highlight the unique features of your multifamily building.
- Technical. Everything from your website’s speed to its security settings factors into SEO. In short, the technical, back-end components of your website need to be done correctly.
- Internal. This includes everything on your website in addition to blogs, as well as how your website appears on Google. For example, internal structures such as header titles, meta descriptions, and image tags all come into consideration here.
In short, SEO requires a great deal of effort, which is why you should consider outsourcing search engine marketing to trained professionals. SEO specialists are trained to spruce up websites and create specialized content that boosts visibility. Lastly, keep in mind that your site needs periodic updates to maintain that visibility.
4. Utilize social media
Social media is your digital multifamily marketing best friend. If you use social media to your advantage, it can be a free boost to your property’s digital presence.
For starters, your building should have its own account on each social media platform you use. When it comes to picking a social media platform to market your apartment, Facebook is probably going to be your best outlet. However, platforms like Instagram and Twitter increase your property’s branding and visibility to younger generations.
In addition to creating a page for your building on Facebook, starting a Facebook group for your building can allow your residents to form a community.
Within the group, residents can:
- Interact with one another
- Sell items
- Discuss neighborhood and building-sponsored events
Additionally, Facebook groups can be a great avenue for marketing vacant units. Current residents can spread the word by sharing those posts on their personal pages.
While you should advertise available apartments through your social media pages, also post other types of content. Posting general information about your building is a great start and builds a solid foundation for your followers.
Apartment social media post ideas include:
- Posts about local events and sports teams in the area.
- Polls about features people might like to see added to your building. You can also poll about unrelated events (such as said local sports teams) to engage with your audience.
- Review highlights from residents and media outlets.
- Memes related to your building or local area.
5. Optimize for mobile devices
The key consideration for digital marketing is that there are 294 million smartphone users in the United States. That’s almost the entire country!
As such, the vast majority of visitors to your website will view it on mobile devices. Of course, your website and other digital advertising assets were probably created on a laptop or desktop computer. This can lead to several issues — such as small font sizes and poor image formatting — for a visitor looking at your website on a mobile device.
This is why you should always view your apartment digital marketing assets on a smartphone and fix any elements that appear off or too small to read.
When creating content for mobile devices, consider readers’ attention spans. For example, the average person is going to spend only a few seconds looking at your advertisement or post.
Brevity is key for digital marketing: You want to concisely say what you need to say as fast as possible while keeping it memorable.
So, create a marketing slogan for your multifamily property that’s short and catchy. A great example is: “Live lavishly at low costs.” You have total creative license here. Funny comparisons, alliteration, and puns can all be memorable slogans. Make sure to splatter this slogan across your social media platforms and website.
6. List your property effectively
Your best resources for apartment digital marketing (and the easiest to exploit) are rental property listing websites. The vast majority of people searching for new apartments use rental listing sites.
Some of the best rental listing sites include:
- Zillow
- Craigslist
- Apartments.com
- Zumper
- Facebook Marketplace
- Avail
- People With Pets
When posting your listing, use the best content from your website and optimize it for the platform you choose. In addition to plenty of photos, include as much information as possible about your building’s amenities and unique features. List virtually every benefit residents gain by living at your property. But keep in mind that your post must be easy to read — use bullet point lists whenever possible.
Takeaways
Short, simple, and memorable content is the key to successful apartment digital marketing. Highlighting everything about your building that sets it apart from all of the other buildings in your location should be your main strategy.
With a little charm, these digital multifamily marketing methods will have new residents queuing up to live at your property.
