3 Digital Multifamily Marketing Fundamentals You Need to Focus on Today

Digital multifamily marketing is constantly evolving. To keep up, you need a solid foundation and the capacity to think critically, act independently, and be relentlessly creative.

There are three main facets of digital multifamily marketing that businesses should focus on — social media, multifamily SEO, and paid search.

Below, we’ve highlighted those three facets and steps you can take to launch a successful digital multifamily marketing strategy.

1. Kickstart your digital multifamily marketing strategy with social media.

Of course, we are all too aware of Facebook and Instagram, but why should a multifamily marketer really care about social media? Audience accessibility.

Companies can interact directly with their customers for free, and in a way that others can easily view. Social media is a great way to get your multifamily organization’s name out — be it through giveaways, funny interactions with anyone who reaches out to your company or posting videos or photos.

Start by researching which platforms your resident buyer persona(s) use on a daily basis. Are you targeting commercial real estate professionals? Then, LinkedIn and Facebook might be your go-to digital multifamily marketing channels. Is your audience younger millennials who work in an apartment leasing office? Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest might be more in your lane.

Need a little help with your persona development? Our CEO Jon Simpson breaks down the basics in this helpful video:

After researching your target audience, create your preferred social accounts and fill in all the About Us details. It’s important not just to slap your tagline and phone number on your social media pages, then forget about it. Add details about your services, business hours, and more.

Next, start strategizing your social media postings. Create a calendar that details what you will be posting and when to help keep yourself accountable and organized.

Create a free Buffer account or use Hootsuite to schedule your posts a week at a time easily; that way, you won’t have to remember to publish content each day.

2. Multifamily SEO is the way to go.

Now for the more technology-focused digital multifamily marketing options — SEO and paid search.

The technical way to explain multifamily SEO is that programmers optimize the coding of your website to help it appear higher on organic search results on search engines. 

Let’s say you are Googling apartment communities in Dallas, and you see that the link to your company’s website is on the third page of search results. Do you really want that to happen? No! So, you call up your friends at Criterion.B and ask for help. With some magical clicks on our keyboards, we optimize your website so — POOF! — it appears in the top results.

What’s awesome is that if your website appears in the top results, searchers are 31.7% more likely to click on it. This means that people are 31.7% more likely to learn about your company and definitely fall in love with your multifamily product or service. Additionally, if your page is the No. 1 organic result, it’s 10 times more likely to receive a click as compared with a result in the No. 10 spot.

Beyond the expert work of Criterion.B, there are several simple steps you can take yourself to enhance your multifamily SEO. Here are a few tips we recommend to get started:

• Optimize Your Blog Titles — The optimal length for blog headlines is 8 to 14 words, and they should include one H1 tag and a main long-tail keyword that your blog is targeting.
• Add Alt Tags, a Title Tag, and Meta Description to All Pages — Implementing these three portions to your blog images and pages can significantly boost your web optimization.
• Target Two Long-Tail Keywords Per Blog — 50% of search queries contain four or more words.
• Increase Your Word Count to Increase Your SEO — Sometimes, the key to ranking higher in search results is upping your word count to increase your keyword usage without being flagged for keyword stuffing.

For an in-depth look at multifamily SEO and common mistakes multifamily marketers make, check out this blog.

3. See results pour in with multifamily PPC (pay per click).

Paid search, or pay per click (PPC), is kind of like SEO in that both want a link to your company’s multifamily website in the first few results on search engines. However, the main difference with multifamily PPC is that you pay for your link’s spot in targeted organic searches.

Strategy-wise, this is absolutely brilliant because you can pay for a link to your company’s multifamily website to appear when someone searches for your competitor. You can also have it appear when someone searches for something related to your complex. 

So, say you own an apartment complex with an outdoor pool area. You can pay for a link to your website to appear when someone searches “downtown apartments Dallas” or “apartments with a pool in Dallas.”

Digital Multifamily Marketing Made Simple

Congrats! Now that you are officially no longer an online marketing beginner, get out there and educate the world with your newfound knowledge. Maybe you can show off some of your new social media knowledge and tweet about it. The key to success with digital multifamily marketing is to have an integrated strategy that speaks to your customer in ways they want.

Live Streaming, Chatbots, and Drones … Oh My!

The multifamily market has been a mixed bag, especially given the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic impact. These fluctuations mean that multifamily marketing is imperative for companies to edge out competitors.

Consider the following multifamily marketing trends as they should show positive returns for your company.

1. Let live streaming take center stage.

It’s a game-changing year for multifamily marketing, especially regarding how to reach prospective buyers in your area. Until now, the marketing landscape has remained more or less the same, with social media claiming the throne in every corner of influence. However, we are now seeing increasingly fast-paced developments in the form of new and updated features such as live streaming and instant messaging.

The way it functions within Facebook has made live streaming a growing trend, besides the capability to engage in real-time with clients. Facebook allows you to prioritize updates from friends and family rather than pages you like or follow.

What does this mean for multifamily marketing? Put simply, it means that content will have to be creative and engaging to gain more activity online. The update ranks content that receives the most activity and shares it closer to the top of the feed. A multifamily marketing team with experience in social media content will optimize results. And since live video is currently the most preferred type of content among Facebook users, it is an area in which marketers will naturally place additional creative efforts.

Social media features contain many great multifamily marketing opportunities, including the capability to broadcast a live house tour or announce real-time property events for clients or prospects. And the live features allow for specific market targeting across multiple platforms, such as Instagram and Snapchat.

2. Understanding the continued rise of IM and chatbots.

Connectivity is another great advantage of social media. The simple ease of using direct messaging functions makes it easier to engage with your audience. However, property managers now face the conundrum of responding quickly and accurately to prospective buyers.

Cue marketing automation bots, also known as chatbots.

Today’s consumers want to engage with a company when and where it’s most convenient. This could mean losing possible leads for real estate if we cannot respond to needs instantly. Chatbots seem to have cracked the code, quite literally, on instant communication. According to Botpress, a chatbot is “any software that performs an automated task … the most intuitive definition is that a bot is a software that can have a conversation with a human.”

In addition to being programmed to have realistic, human-like conversations with prospective clients, chatbots can also gather specific information relevant to the seller or the marketer.

In the context of multifamily, a chatbot can mean providing 24/7, instant responses that do not require an individual behind a screen scrambling to answer a question. Chatbots also provide a smoother user experience for the buyer, and user experience is always critical.

Social media features such as live streaming and instant messaging are powerful tools that benefit both sellers and buyers. Multifamily marketing trends are growing rapidly, and their influences within the industry are rising.

3. Let drones offer a bird’s eye view.

Drones are a defining piece of technology for multifamily and commercial real estate. Several years ago, hiring a professional photographer for aerial shots of a property was conventional. With drones, on the other hand, you can capture stunning images and breathtaking videos of your property with camera-equipped drones, all while cutting back on costs.

Drones can depict a great layout of the entire property, especially when recording video. For larger areas, drones’ unique benefit is navigation beyond the property and into the surrounding area. They can capture incredible bodies of water, beautiful landscapes, and nearby neighborhoods. This particular feature can be optimized if paired creatively with live streaming.

Drones also allow high-rise apartment complexes to capture images of the entire building and attractive neighboring hotspots. Drones are one trend guaranteed to set your multifamily marketing apart from competitors and will surely spread within the industry.

4. Take advantage of virtual and augmented reality.

Though we have seen impressive and usable trends for multifamily marketing, virtual and augmented reality takes the prize.

Virtual reality opens new doors for prospective clients by providing a behind-the-scenes look or digital tour of a property. As the real estate industry rapidly moves forward, embracing new technologies, virtual has already made it into many multifamily marketing plans. Companies now design 3D models through the power of virtual reality. Prospects can walk a unit and experience property amenities firsthand without being onsite. This trend took a significant leap at the pandemic’s start, when many properties had to shift to a virtual-only touring model. Today, virtual tours are offered at many properties in addition to in-person tours, offering prospects even more opportunities to sign a lease from the comfort of their couch.

Marketers and realtors are also using augmented reality to bring blueprints to life. With the aid of smartphone and tablet cameras, AR technology can render a 3D image of a building from a blueprint or a completely interactive layout. This tool will prove useful in all stages of development by allowing clients to visualize the entire project.

Augmented and VR technologies, drones, and social media make the customer experience more convenient and engaging. With these trends in mind, your renters will be brought smoothly through the sales funnel and to that final decision.

Twitter is an amazing place. With over 300 million active users, Twitter has an active community that all different types of people embrace.

Almost every type of industry has a community on Twitter, including engineers, marketers, fashion designers, and even realtors. But how can these industries use Twitter to their benefit and actually gain something positive out of a social network?

We’ve talked a lot about social media and how it benefits real estate, but let’s talk about one thing in specific that may be of interest to realtors, developers, and everyone alike: Tweetchats.

The Benefit of Tweetchats

Tweetchats are scheduled, moderated conversations about a specific topic. Any Twitter user is welcome to join any Tweetchat of their choice, but it’s a chance for users to connect with each other and converse over similar interests. For instance, a Tweetchat about community fitness will probably bring groups of social runners and yoga lovers together to talk about health and wellness in community settings.

How to Get Involved

Find a Tweetchat

This part is actually relatively easy for the real estate industry. There are several different types of Tweetchats, each catered to people interested in multifamily, apartment hunting, developments, or traveling. However, Tweetchats are scheduled at a certain time each week. Make sure to find out when exactly your chat is and add it to your calendar. There are a few websites out there that list almost every Tweetchat created and their time.

Questions & Answers

The format for a Tweetchat is fairly simple to understand: there’s usually a moderator from a single Twitter account that tweets out questions for other users to respond to. Using the form, “Q1” or “Q2”, moderators are able to let you know what question they’re on and you reply to those questions with “A1”, “A2”, or whichever number corresponds to the question. This makes it easy for other participants to easily understand what everyone is responding to and ultimately helps everything stay organized.

Engage With Others

So you’re answering the questions and you’re getting favorites on your Tweets and maybe a few replies. What do you do now? Engage with them! This is the time where you can interact with the rest of the community; reply to interesting answers you see, favorite some tweets that catch your attention. Overall, it’s your chance to get your name out there, grow your following, and make some connections.

While you may think Tweetchats won’t help people in the industry, it’s still important to know that a social presence is beneficial to all different types of professionals. With the digital age constantly evolving, it’s imperative that the real estate industry stays on their toes; engaging with the community through social media is one way to stay up-to-date.