In what felt like the same time a typical TikTok video lasts, the hugely popular social media app went from being banned in the U.S. to being back online (for now).
The public's reaction throughout the saga went from 'doom and gloom' and 'What am I going to do?' to 'Was this the greatest marketing play of all time?!' after news broke the app was being restored.
There are a lot of lessons multifamily marketers can take away from the (almost) TikTok ban, but the main one is this: It's always risky to rely on just one or two channels in your community's marketing strategy.
What happened with TikTok makes the case for apartment marketers using multiple platforms in their strategies clear.
For some communities, prioritizing a highly active and visible presence on TikTok may have been a valuable way to grow their awareness and engage with prospective renters. But what is the backup plan? What if any source begins to produce less traffic and leads?
This is why an omnichannel apartment marketing strategy is safer.
The Case for an Omnichannel Apartment Marketing Strategy
Imagine you're meeting a financial advisor with $50,000 to invest. They give you two options:
- Put all your money into one or two 'can't-miss' stocks.
- Spread your investment across index funds.
The smart choice? Today, more investors would choose Option B. It's less risky, provides better long-term returns, and allows for flexibility in adjusting based on performance, helping your money go further.
Many apartment marketing strategies today resemble option A: putting most of the budget and efforts into one or two platforms and hoping for sustainable results.
And, no, we're not just talking about TikTok. You could easily insert Internet Listing Services into that scenario, and the point remains—fewer channels equals more significant risk.
Like before, your preferred ILS may eventually be bought out by a larger competitor, or new regulations may change how you target advertisements to prospective residents. Marketing tactics and tools will always continue to change, and you cannot control it.
With an omnichannel apartment marketing strategy, however, you can prevent those changes from drastically impacting performance. Here are three reasons why this approach works:
Reason 1: Over-relying on one or two marketing platforms, such as an ILS, is a true opportunity cost.
Opportunity costs value the 'what-ifs'—the monetary, time, or experience costs of choosing one option over another.
What did I lose by putting $50,000 into one stock versus the what-if I had invested into an index fund instead? What if I had spent the last hour going for a walk instead of doom-scrolling social media? You get the picture.
Opportunity costs are everywhere in apartment marketing, especially when relying too heavily on ILSs for leads and leases.
One marketing director for a multifamily property management company in Florida understood this concept.
He said they spent $95,000 one year on just one ILS platform highlighting their apartment communities. The opportunity cost of that decision was that they could have better controlled their marketing strategy and lead quality by investing in pay-per-click digital advertising platforms like Google or Meta instead.
“From just an outside perspective, I was like, ‘Why are we spending so much money to be right next to our biggest competitors?’" the marketing director said. "We can drop our budget and put it in for more things that we can track."
The marketing director chose RentVision's Predictive Advertising solution for his communities' Google and Meta Ads. This decision and expanding to more of an omnichannel apartment marketing setup with a lesser focus on ILSs dramatically improved the portfolio's occupancy.
Reason #2: Omnichannel apartment marketing gives more insights into renter behavior.
When searching for their next apartment, renters may use various sources, including Google Search, Google Maps, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bing, and even Generative AI search tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity.
For most apartment communities, being visible across most (if not all) of those widely used platforms is critical to meeting renter expectations and staying competitive. For marketers, however, the benefits go further than that.
The more platforms you put money behind to target prospects, the more unique data points you gather about how prospects discover and engage with your apartments. The more you see where and how renters connect with your apartments, the more informed you are on how to market your apartments effectively.
Just think about how much more information the marketing director from the previous section likely learned after implementing Google and Meta Ads to target prospects and increase his apartments' online visibility on other platforms.
For example, he could now answer critical questions such as:
- Which platform drives more traffic to their website?
- What keywords are our ads popping up for?
- Which ad group or campaign is getting the most clicks?
- What combination of imagery and/or messaging works?
- How often do website visitors from ads convert?
This level of insight was simply impossible when his company mainly relied on ILSs. Now, he can track progress and engagement on platforms like Facebook News Feed, Instagram, YouTube, and others by putting some of the marketing budget into Google and Meta Ads.
Removing a bottleneck in a couple of ILSs was a pivotal turning point in his company's portfolio performance.
However, this next part is very important: Investing in more platforms doesn't always equal better performance.
Some marketers wrongfully assume that if they 'pay to be everywhere,' their situation will instantly improve. But there's a delicate balance, especially if you're not actively analyzing each platform's performance (which we'll dive into next).
Without this, you'd be placing as much risk into how many returns your money delivers as if you only invested it into one or two platforms.
The fundamental purpose of utilizing an omnichannel approach is to narrow your marketing investment to the platforms proven to produce the most lead-to-lease conversions.
Reason #3: Using more marketing platforms empowers you to make better decisions about how you're using your budget.
When the strategy primarily relied on ILSs, the marketing director could only measure basic metrics like listing views, leads generated, and overall costs. While these metrics were helpful, he had no baseline to determine if his marketing dollars were working as hard as they could without other platforms for comparison.
Only after adding Google and Meta Ads to the mix could the marketing director understand that their previous ILS-centric approach was indeed not delivering enough timely traffic, leads, or leases
When it soon became apparent that the PPC platforms generated better results, he could reallocate more of his marketing budget—and the rest followed.
This is why utilizing multiple multifamily marketing platforms is so powerful: it gives you the information you need to make smarter decisions.
Now, let’s return to the analogy from the introduction. Imagine that $50,000 represents your marketing investment for the next year for one apartment community. Do you:
- Put 90% into ILSs and 10% into some Google Ads?
- Or allocate 10% to one ILS, 10% to another, 60% to Google Ads, and 20% to Meta?
Both are oversimplified, but you can see why the second option is better. By spreading your budget across multiple platforms, you gather data about which sources drive the most traffic, leads, and leases. More importantly, you can dynamically adjust your spending based on performance metrics.
Option A is static: “Here’s my budget for the year. Let’s hope it works.”
Option B is dynamic: “Here’s my budget for the year. Let’s make it go to work.”
A multi-platform strategy empowers you to measure, adapt, and optimize. It ensures that your budget is allocated where it delivers the most value, helping you achieve your leasing goals more effectively and avoiding the risk of wasted marketing spend that produces less desirable results.
Conclusion
The (almost) TikTok ban is a valuable lesson for multifamily marketers: Overrelying on one or two platforms for traffic and leads is riskier than developing an omnichannel apartment marketing strategy.
By spreading your budget across more platforms where prospective renters connect and engage with apartments, you can measure which is best at generating leads who lease and adapt your strategy accordingly. More channels ultimately give you greater control over performance.
And when a sudden increase in vacancies occurs, you don't want to rely on hope—you want to rely on certainty. That's only possible when you have more insights into which platforms to pour more into because they work and which platforms to decrease your investment in.