Many property management companies have learned that managing the digital ads of multiple apartment communities is really difficult and can lead to more wasted money and time.
Constrained by capacity and a lack of expertise, they often turn to an outside company to advertise their apartment communities more effectively online.
Handing over what is arguably the most dynamic and valuable multifamily marketing channel to an outside vendor can feel like a leap of faith.
Another critical element is ensuring that the company you select is best suited to addressing your apartment community's traffic and leasing needs while overseeing their digital ad campaigns on Google, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
This guide will help you make the best decision by reviewing what to look for when choosing a PPC vendor to run your digital ads and get better leads for your apartment communities.
Understanding the Role of a Multifamily PPC Company
The first question that likely comes to your mind is, "What exactly does a PPC company do?"
Any PPC company's role is to understand your goals and challenges and provide the expertise and capacity necessary to develop a successful digital ad strategy that addresses your needs.
The best cover these five areas:
- Keyword Targeting: A PPC company can help you research and establish a list of potential keywords (or optimize your current list) that match the search intent of your target renters.
- Budget Maintenance: PPC companies can recommend an optimal advertising budget according to your communities’ specific goals, make ongoing automatic or collaborative decisions on when to lower or raise your ad budget, and ensure that costs remain within your preferences.
- Implementation: A PPC company can assist in setting up your advertising accounts at scale, selecting which platforms are best for your needs, building campaigns, setting bids on keyword targets, and, in some cases, designing graphics or producing photos and video content for display ads.
- Optimization: PPC companies are responsible for the day-to-day adjustments necessary to ensure the efficacy of your digital advertising strategy in meeting your goals and budget.
- Reporting: PPC companies must prove the performance of their keyword targeting, budget maintenance, implementation, and optimization efforts by providing regular and understandable reporting featuring analytics like cost per click, impressions, website traffic, etc.
However, as you're seeking a PPC company to help you develop more qualified traffic and leads for your apartment communities, their role must also include intimate knowledge of the multifamily marketing model.
An apartment community's marketing needs and strategy are far more unique than what many PPC companies are accustomed to. You may have various marketing agencies near your area with excellent reputations that offer PPC services. Still, the reality is that the strategies they may use to run PPC ads for a dentist's office or a local sporting goods store aren't going to work successfully for your apartments.
Marketing apartments require a different approach because they are limited products (units) and are limited by location to a limited audience (prospective renters actively looking for an apartment community with specific features within a particular location).
The only option is to choose a PPC company that works exclusively with multifamily apartments to get the most out of outsourcing your communities' digital ads.
Qualities to Look For in a Multifamily PPC Company
Now that you understand a PPC company's role and the necessity of selecting one that works exclusively with multifamily apartments, the next step is to seek out these four qualities:
1. Industry experience
An excellent quality of a multifamily PPC company is its openness in showing how it helps its partners. From data-supported case studies explaining how they solved an apartment community's problem to social proof like customer success stories readily available on its website, the company should prove it has multifamily knowledge and legitimate field expertise in managing digital ads for apartments.
You should also check if the company is a certified Google Ads Premier Partner, a designation only given to the top 3% of all PPC companies with a proven track record of maintaining and maximizing campaign success for their clients in Google—the most prominent online advertising platform. Recognition like this is a critical separator between PPC companies, regardless of whether they're exclusive to multifamily.
2. Offers additional marketing services
Though this is not necessarily a deal breaker, it's worth acknowledging that digital advertising is a branch of a comprehensive apartment marketing strategy.
Suppose a company offers other multifamily marketing services, such as apartment website design (which, of course, critically impacts whether or not your ads end up producing phone calls or tours scheduled as those conversions occur on your community websites). In that case, it shows a higher understanding of the holistic marketing approach apartments need to improve property performance—and that level of multifamily expertise should grow your confidence in their advertising setup.
Now, something that should be considered a dealbreaker as you research various multifamily PPC companies is whether or not they offer integration to your property management software.
Your property management software is the source of truth for your apartment community's leasing needs, and supply and demand data are valuable for PPC companies to use as they implement and continually optimize your digital ads.
3. Integrates with your property management software
Now, something that should be considered a dealbreaker as you research various multifamily PPC companies is whether or not they offer integration to your property management software.
Your property management software is the source of truth for your apartment community's leasing needs, and supply and demand data are valuable for PPC companies to use as they implement and continually optimize your digital ads.
4. Transparent reporting and communication
Though there are specific questions to ask potential apartment PPC companies before ultimately soliciting their services (which we'll dive into later), it is essential to determine in advance whether or not they possess the quality of transparent reporting and communication.
As they are tasked with an essential part of your apartment community's marketing strategy, you deserve their transparency and trust in their ability to address your needs actively.
The company should clarify the answers to the following questions both on its website and during a live demo:
- Do they offer clear and understandable analytics from the performance of their managed PPC campaigns?
- When are those analytics or reports accessible? Anytime or monthly?
- Do those analytics or performance metrics reflect the needs of your leasing?
- What is the frequency of their communication with you?
5. Expert strategy and implementation
While understanding the multifamily marketing model is a requirement, PPC companies must also have a well-established strategy for managing ad campaigns that meet your apartment community's needs.
Specifically, you want a company to focus not just on traffic quantity but on quality. Remember, you're trying to target a specific audience with your ads. So you don't need to target everyone, you're just aiming to find the right traffic that turns into quality leads for your community.
The company's strategy should address how it sets up its PPC campaigns to deliver higher-quality traffic, which is more impactful to leasing.
Simply getting a bunch of unqualified traffic to your website that never converts into phone calls is a waste of time and money. It also causes more frustrating work for your leasing staff and, unfortunately, subdues the effort you put into outsourcing this part of your marketing strategy in the first place.
After assessing the PPC company's strategy, the next step is to ask questions about how it works. As far as implementation goes, it would be crucial to know the answers to the following:
- What level of customization does the company allow for your community's PPC campaigns?
- Are you responsible for providing media content?
- Do they ask you for your budget, or do they provide a recommendation based on your community's unique needs, such as unit count, property class, or occupancy?
- How long is the onboarding process?
- When will you start to see the impact of PPC ads?
- How often are campaigns and budgets adjusted?
Other Questions to Ask Potential Multifamily PPC Companies
What is the size of the company?
Knowing this helps you understand more about the PPC company's capacity to serve your needs timely and effectively. It's not that employee count is a dealbreaker—there are pros and cons working with small and large companies—but it impacts you, the client.
Knowing that your day-to-day operations change frequently, you would benefit from outsourcing your digital ads to a company whose team and PPC product is equipped to do the same.
What is the onboarding process like?
The last thing anyone wants to deal with after taking all that time to research and select an apartment PPC company is waiting too long to launch for that company's services to kick in. No apartment community can withstand further changes in demand and seasonality as it waits for digital ads and any other services to get turned on.
In fact, most property management companies don't conclude they need to outsource their PPC until after a traffic, lead, or occupancy problem occurs, so an urgent onboarding process that takes just days would be more beneficial anyway.
Does the company offer a pilot for their PPC services?
There's a lot of general fatigue and risk involved in choosing and partnering with an apartment PPC company, so if the company offers a pilot program, you should always take that opportunity.
It's easy to roll out services to a few of your apartment communities and verify their performance at 3 to 5 of your properties to best determine whether the PPC company addresses your needs.
Conclusion
Choosing which PPC company to manage a major lead-generating channel in your apartment's marketing strategy can be a difficult process. It's clear that whomever you choose, the company must have an innate understanding of the multifamily advertising model and be equipped to make adjustments to your digital ad campaigns and budgets to keep up with your communities' needs.
Thankfully, you're already in the best spot to choose because Predictive Advertising by RentVision is the most advanced PPC strategy exclusively for multifamily. With automatic cross-platform budget allocation and adjustments to your campaigns occurring daily to address your apartment communities' future leasing needs now, you'll get the right amount of high-quality leads at the right time.
