Many of today’s renters only visit one apartment community before signing a lease. That’s because most of the decision-making process now occurs online. If you want your sales staff to be more efficient, you need to increase your speed-to-lead. Digital marketing drives the right renters to your website and then converts them by offering options that allow them to contact you on their terms – online tour scheduling, lead forms, or a floating phone number, for example. 

Smart Lead Gen: Know Where to Show Up Online

Most renters rely on research and reviews when choosing a new apartment home. To make sure you show up in their search, follow these three tips.

Optimize Your Search Presence

Gain leads at the lowest cost by optimizing your online search presence. You need a location-specific search strategy to show up in organic results when prospects are searching for an apartment nearby – search engines now place more emphasis on location searches than branded name searches. This strategy needs to include:

  • A claimed and up-to-date Google My Business profile with phone number, address, website, and office hours.
  • On-page SEO optimizations including relevant city, neighborhood, and regional keywords in your title tags, H1s, page URLs, content, and image alt-text. 
  • Reviews directly impact search ranking, which means you want happy renters to share their experience on your GMB, Yelp, and Facebook pages.
  • Citations, or instances where your business name, address, and web address appear on other websites, need to be consistent. Ensure your details are the same throughout the Internet.

Invest in Smart Digital Advertising

Although organic search is the most cost-effective tactic for driving high-quality leads, Digital advertising helps fill the gaps in your lead generation efforts and drives prospects down the sales funnel quickly and efficiently.

Start at the top of the funnel, in the awareness stage of the renter’s journey. Use Facebook’s global audience of 2.4 billion users to your advantage by advertising there. Google’s responsive display ads are another great option as they use machine learning to build the best performing ads for your brand. The result is a fresh creative campaign optimized to drive a particular action – like scheduling a tour. 

Paid search ads target renters searching for an apartment by leveraging geographic targeting to reach the desired audience. Use paid search to laser focus on the right prospects, those searching for an apartment nearby. 

Remarketing ads appear after a user has visited your website and encourage them to return with image ads that follow them around the web. The personalized messaging of these ads nurtures leads and encourages leases. 

When you partner with G5, your ads become even more effective with Dynamic Ads that integrate with your Property Management System (PMS) to display up-to-date pricing of floor plans directly in the ad text. These ads send pre-qualified traffic to your website and spend more efficiently by only showing ads and generating clicks from those interested in the units available at a specific price-point. Pre-qualified leads generated from Dynamic Ads accelerate the speed to lease.

Help Qualified Renters to Convert on Their Terms

After driving qualified renters to your website, you need to supply them with options so they can convert on their own terms. Users want to find what they are looking for on your website within one-to-two clicks. Here’s how to make it happen:

  1. Allow Customers to Schedule a Tour Immediately – A self-scheduling tool eliminates the need for manual follow-ups, confirmation reminders, and unnecessary human interaction. Users don’t want to wait hours or days for a response from your team – they want to hear from you RIGHT NOW. 
  2. Guide Prospects to Answers with Chatbots – Even with the most comprehensive website, renters will still have questions about your community. Make it easy for them to get answers by providing tools like chatbots that are optimized for tour conversions. The chatbot on your website should be seen as an extension of your leasing team. Chatbots can answer common questions and provide a path to self-schedule a tour once the user gets all of their questions answered. 
  3. Beyond Email – While email and phone calls may be the standard, properties that don’t take advantage of other options may be leaving leases on the table. Communicate with prospects through texting, chat, and social media. 
  4. Phone Numbers with Call Tracking – Call tracking helps you attribute which campaigns drove a specific phone call. Partnering with G5 takes it a step further by using that data to continually optimize your campaigns to target the best renters with our proprietary technology, Lead Insights. 
  5. Lead Forms with Quick Follow-Up – Accelerate your speed-to-lead by speeding up response times to lead forms. On average, anything under five minutes is great and anything over 30 minutes will hurt your conversion velocity. 

Prospective renters want convenience and options. Make it easy for those visiting your website to contact your leasing team and get answers to their questions. By engaging with users on their terms, like through texting, social media, or chatbots, you meet them where they are and give them the attention and information they need to make a decision.

Drive Qualified Traffic to Your Website with Smart Lead Gen

Want to know about how to accelerate your speed-to-lead? Download G5 and Knock’s ebook, Lead-to-Lease Velocity: The Secret to Reducing Exposure to learn more about increasing leasing efficiency.