More apartment marketers are turning to pay-per-click digital advertising as their communities' top source of traffic and leads.
Of course, reaching interested renters with one of your apartments' ads on widely visible platforms like Google, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube is undoubtedly appealing.
However, there is more value in utilizing PPC in your apartment marketing strategy than just optimal online visibility and precision targeting.
PPC addresses a multifamily marketer's primary need: the ability to proactively adjust their strategy to account for seasonal changes in leasing demand.
This article will focus on understanding PPC's role in helping multifamily properties sustain higher occupancy year-round.
One minute, your occupancy is strong. The next, you've got four new notices.
Such is the nature of the multifamily housing market. Your community's available units (supply) and interest (demand) change daily—an ever-shifting status commonly called seasonality.
Thankfully, much of the timing of when these changes occur is somewhat predictable:
Yet even if seasonality is understood, you cannot assume that a 'hands-off' marketing strategy perfectly addresses those frequent changes in demand.
That's because every community's seasonality is unique and dependent on varying factors such as property class, unit count, location, rent, and more.
Your primary objective is to develop a multifamily marketing plan that will best position you to consistently fulfill your communities' unique leasing needs through seasonal demand's ups and downs.
But to fulfill that objective, you must advertise and highlight your community, units, amenities, and offerings to your intended audience in the right places and at the right time.
That's what PPC advertising can do for you. More on that later.
After studying your seasonality, you will discover that most channels you use in your community's marketing strategy don't help address your urgent needs.
The primary culprit of this is the Internet Listing Service.
While ILSs can help create visibility for your apartments early in a prospective renter's search, their advertising model limits you from making adjustments based on your community’s unique seasonality and locks you into 12-month contracts.
It's like turning up the furnace to heat your house in the winter and refusing to dial it down in the dog days of July. Essentially, you're paying for something when you no longer need it.
When you know you will need to generate more demand (or experience a sudden uptick in vacancies), manually switching your ILS package and hoping for more visibility and traffic becomes an expensive headache.
For example, an Internet Listing Service typically provides a single page for your community. Though it's helpful to feature the best photos or videos of your community and create awareness of all your varying floorplans, amenities, rent prices, and availability in one platform, you cannot necessarily be specific about generating interest for the part of your community that has the most pressing need.
Apartments.com can let you show every available unit, but if most of your current and upcoming vacancies are condensed to a particular floorplan, isn’t it better to prioritize that floorplan first?
These limitations are symptoms of static apartment marketing.
Pay-per-click advertising is rising in usage among multifamily marketers because it directly contrasts static sources like the ILS. Now they are capable of overcoming those limitations and more effectively addressing vacancies at their apartment communities.
Pay-per-click advertising is a powerful apartment marketing tool that delivers immediate, measurable, and scalable results.
PPC's precision targeting and adaptability make it a better choice than traditional marketing sources, especially for apartment communities looking to quickly improve their web traffic and leasing.
Two dynamic levers multifamily marketers gain control of when utilizing PPC include the ability to make real-time adjustments and flexible spending—essential for addressing seasonal demand changes.
When you're hit with that scenario where everything is in order one minute and the next you've got a flood of new notices, you can immediately remedy the situation by utilizing pay-per-click ads.
You can choose which campaigns to feature and increase spending on them.
"A couple of our 2-bedroom units are on notice. Let's dial up that floorplan campaign and start generating traffic now."
You can choose which ad platform to prioritize depending on their performance in generating qualified traffic.
"It looks like we're not getting as much paid traffic from our Google Ads. Let's reallocate some of the budget to Facebook for more help."
The other advantage of faster adjustments is that what you highlight in your PPC advertising campaigns (and how much you spend) aligns more with your current and upcoming leasing needs.
By adjusting your Facebook and Google campaigns to push that floorplan's availability toward a targeted audience of individuals looking for your apartments or ones like yours with that floorplan, you're also supporting more urgent responses and, as a result of that urgency and relevancy, more highly qualified leads.
The value of making dynamic, real-time adjustments as demand changes is something no other marketing source besides PPC can offer.
When you're stuck with static marketing sources, you're forced to pay for leads when you don't need them. As was already alluded to with PPC, you regain control of your marketing spending.
Knowing that there will be periods throughout the year when leasing activity will be higher, and more demand is necessary, you can budget ahead of time to prepare to increase spending.
Then, when leasing activity cools, you can lower or stop spending on PPC and save money that would've otherwise been wasted.
What other apartment marketing source is designed to help you save money?
With the busy leasing season fast approaching and an occupancy well below target expectations, the marketing team for a 600+ unit apartment complex in Dallas was worried.
At that point, their strategy relied only on getting website traffic from ILSs and organic SEO. But they could tell that, with such a large community, consistently getting the same amount of leads wouldn't be enough to meet their upcoming leasing needs when demand ramped up.
Implementing PPC advertising to the community's marketing plan immediately changed their situation as it maneuvered the busy leasing season flawlessly.
In just 39 days after beginning advertising their community in Google Ads and Meta Ads, the community saw its website traffic increase 161%, resulting in 31 new leases—a speedy improvement that increased the community's occupancy to 98%, or five percentage points higher than the Greater Dallas Market.
You can view the complete multifamily PPC case study here.
Property management companies should consider whether they can successfully adjust their ads in-house or outsource these efforts to a multifamily-specific PPC vendor with expertise in managing daily ad changes and coordinating budgets for multiple apartment communities simultaneously.
But when you get your PPC strategy right, it can completely transform how you market your apartments and your communities' overall performance. Instead of static marketing, you get static occupancy year-round.
If you need help, Predictive Advertising by RentVision is the most advanced multifamily PPC solution available. Using your unique supply and demand information from integration with your property management software, our PPC algorithms automatically adjust your ads and allocate your budgets within and across platforms daily to deliver highly-qualified traffic before vacancies hit.