Entrata Industry Principal, Virginia Love recently sat down with Mike Whaling, founder of 30 Lines and the RentPress Apartment Marketing platform, to discuss trends in digital marketing for the multifamily industry as part of our Resident Experts Series. Below are some of the key highlights of their conversation.

Where should we be focusing our marketing efforts?

Whaling says our North Star should always be the customer. Do your due diligence and find out the different ways they are shopping, the questions they are asking, what’s getting them excited. You shouldn’t just be looking at what other multifamily businesses are doing. Look outside to see where other businesses are innovating and what you can do to incorporate those tactics into your overall marketing strategy.

What does efficiency in marketing look like?

The way that most property portfolios are set up doesn’t lend itself to efficient marketing and selling to residents. If you have four properties in an area, you likely have four separate listings. In most cases the resident isn’t going to be familiar with your brand, but if you package your properties in a way that makes them feel more connected it will be easy for you to both familiarize prospects with what you have to offer, while also eliminating the competition both for eyes and marketing dollars between your individual properties.

The key to making this work is moving from a decentralized model with separate marketing budgets for each property to something more centralized. How people shop for apartments is different from how they shop for other things. They’re not focused on a particular brand, so implementing a centralized marketing and leasing program would make it possible to cross sell to other properties in the portfolio that might be better fits for the resident who might be lost to other communities otherwise. Having a consolidated leasing/marketing team would mean a consolidated marketing budget which means you wouldn't be competing with one another for residents and enables you to be more efficient with your spend and accelerates the renter’s journey.

One solution that Whaling’s clients often ask for is to create a mini ILS that shows all the available options you have in a neighborhood or specific geographic location inside of your portfolio, which is how initial searches for apartments are going to happen. This removes the friction of prospects having to fill out multiple applications and results in less friction, a better experience for residents, and higher occupancy rates across your entire portfolio.

The secret to efficient digital marketing

This might sound obvious, but the key to efficient marketing is speed. How fast can you get the prospect through the resident journey to a signed lease? The problem many multifamily businesses run into in this area is they’re focused on the wrong thing. They’re worried about increasing their lead volume when they should be focused on improving the quality of leads.

When the quality of leads increases so does conversion rates, which is a more important metric to be focused on improving than lead quantity. Doubling conversion rates will have a much greater impact on the growth of your business than doubling the number of leads you have coming in.

Whaling says the best way to improve your conversion rates is taking a back to basic approach. Start by answering the phone, texts, chats as soon as possible, and once you’ve got them on the hook, keep them on the hook through targeted, personalized nurture campaigns. Additionally, it’s important to incorporate softer calls to actions on your website beyond your phone number or “schedule a tour” button on your website. Prospects are going to want to have as much information as possible before they take the leap and come on site. Once they’ve made that decision, there’s a high likelihood that they’ll sign a lease.

“Make it easier for them to either request information or schedule a tour on their own time or even do things like sign up for a price alert, give me an update on what's happening,” said Whaling. “[When you do that], I promise you will have a far lesser need at the top of the funnel to go and create more traffic and go get more eyeballs [on your site].”

Finally, he suggests businesses focus on strategies that will result in higher organic traffic. Organic traffic is more valuable than pumping money into google ads and other online advertising, so before just throwing money at the problem to get more leads, find ways to improve organic traffic to see if that gets you enough leads to meet your leasing goals.

Tips for leasing season

Now that we’re in the thick of leasing season, it’s time to do a gut check. You spent a lot of time planning and preparing in Q1. Were your assumptions correct or do you need to make some small adjustments to get your campaigns more dialed in?

For example, are prospects asking different questions than they were the previous season? If they are, then it should be easy to make slight tweaks on the fly to your website and other campaign messaging to better address those new inquiries. To check out the full conversation of Love and Whaling click here to watch now.