Is Your Digital Advertising Smart?
You know you need digital advertising to drive traffic to your website, but do you know which channels to advertise on to generate the best leads? Not all channels are created equal – each serves a unique purpose and aligns to a different stage in the renter’s journey. If you want to maximize the effectiveness of your ad dollars you need to invest in property-specific digital advertising strategies that target prospects with the right message at the right time.
Why Property-Specific Strategies?
For those new to digital advertising, you may be wondering why it’s important that your strategies are property-specific – why can’t you just apply one strategy across your entire portfolio? You can, but it’s not smart. Smart digital advertising takes into account the lease-up status, asset class, and geography to determine which channels to advertise on, when.
Understanding the Digital Advertising Funnel
Digital advertising is highly effective at attracting qualified renters in apartment communities and, relative to other channels, requires minimal start-up costs and is easy to dial-up or down based on your need for new leads, seasonality, and budget constraints. Here’s how to align your digital advertising mix with your business goals.
Paid search ads to target renters searching for a new home – Paid search ads are the workhorses of digital advertising. They leverage high-converting keywords and geographic targeting rather than casting a wide net, allowing you to laser focus on the right prospects. These ads appear in Google and Bing search results, supplementing your organic search results by more effectively competing and prioritizing your ads ahead of others bidding on your keywords.
Social and display ads for brand awareness – With over three billion global users on Facebook alone, social advertising is vital to your marketing strategy. You can optimize display and social advertising to drive brand awareness and engagement. Using these types of ads allows you to utilize advanced audience targeting based on search and web browsing behavior. Display ads appear on topically relevant websites using contextual targeting.
Remarketing to close the deal – People spend a lot of time online conducting research, especially when researching apartments. Remarketing ads appear after a user has visited your website and works to re-engage non-converting users with image ads around the web. Remarketing ads deliver specific messages to remarketing audiences to nurture them down the sales funnel. Targeting renters’ online behavior is key for digital advertising growth.
For more information on how to drive demand with digital advertising, download this helpful guide from G5.