PPC Strategy For Your Apartment Community

Your building is in peak leasing season and you have occupancy goals to achieve. Of course you want your communities occupancy goals to be completed by your goal date. Enter PPC marketing.

Agency FIFTY3 helps communities across the country increase their occupancy to meet their leasing goals. To be successful, it’s essential to create brand awareness first and reach relevant people with the right messaging at the right time.

Here, we’ll help you strategize your community and set you up for success as soon as your apartments have occupancy that needs to be filled.

How To Market Your Community Using PPC Marketing

PPC advertising can be an effective way to market your community. PPC, or Pay-Per-Click, is a model of paid internet marketing in which advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked.

Effective PPC campaigns are crucial for driving consistent occupancy and attracting quality renters to your apartment community. Here’s a breakdown of key stages and strategies to consider.

1. Building Brand Visibility

The main goal of this phase is to get established with PPC services and generate brand awareness while your property is being built. To achieve these goals, we recommend a low-spending display campaign that allows you to serve images and text to relevant users.

Display ads with mock-up images of your apartment community and “Coming Soon” messaging would run in this stage, and these campaigns allow you to serve ads to specific audiences, like people who are currently renting the apartment they live in or people interested in hiring movers.

As people click on your ads and land on your apartment community website or landing page, you can also start building retargeting lists, which will factor in later.

2. Driving Qualified Leads

The main goal of this phase is to sign as many leases as possible. To do so, consider shifting from just a display campaign to both a search and a display remarketing campaign.

With a competitive ad budget, the search campaign will be able to generate a certain amount of clicks from people searching for things like “apartments near me” or “apartments [city].” Ad messaging that highlights your communities key features and benefits can help ensure you get quality leads and a better conversion rate.

In addition to bidding on pre-leasing related keywords, you can implement certain words and phrases as negative keywords. Negative keywords allow you to steer away from irrelevant searches. For more on that, check out Why You Need A Negative Keyword Strategy. At this stage, negative keywords for pre-leasing could include “immediate” or “move in ready.”

Additionally, to leverage the retargeting list we mentioned in stage one, you can add previous website visitors as an audience to both search and display campaigns. With website visitor audiences, you can bid a higher amount for your search ad to show on search engines. Similarly, previous website visitors can come across your display ad again—helping them realize they can now apply and sign a lease.

3. Maximizing Occupancy

The main goal of this third phase is to fill the units as fast as possible. To achieve this, we recommend updating the keyword and messaging strategy with a more aggressive ad budget.

Focus on driving immediate occupancy by targeting users searching for “apartments near [location]” or “immediate move-in apartments.” Utilize ad copy that emphasizes availability and encourages immediate action, such as “Move In Today” or “Available Now.” Update your display ads with current images of your property and available units.

4. Maintaining Consistent Occupancy

The main goal of this phase is to transition into a standard strategy related to spending, keywords, and messaging. Consider how many leads your on-site team needs per month to meet or maintain occupancy, and make that your goal.

Regularly analyze campaign performance and refine your strategy to optimize results and ensure consistent lead flow. The messaging would update to the standard “Tour Now” and “Call Us Today” phrase with other more specific keywords advertising your property’s most popular features.

PPC advertising offers flexibility to meet any changing needs for your community. Ad copy can be updated instantly to reflect a leasing special or website updates. You can even pause keywords for a specific floor plan that’s currently at 100% occupancy or adjust ads to feature an available floor plan.

Conclusion

A PPC strategy for your apartment community is an effective way to market your apartment community. With this type of online marketing, you can quickly shift strategies to match your budget with your current occupancy goals.

Begin by pushing brand awareness and ramp up your ad spend as soon as you’re ready to increase brand awareness. Then, shift your keyword and messaging strategy after you achieve desired brand awareness. Finally, move to a standard spending budget once the apartment community has stabilized and occupancy goals are met. And keep going! More and more, people are searching for their next homes and communities online, and PPC campaigns are some of the best ways to get in front of the right people and the right time.

Need Help With Your Apartment PPC Strategy?
Agency FIFTY3 helps manage PPC accounts for apartments in every phase. We’ll help guide your PPC strategy, starting with your brand awareness campaign to ongoing PPC management. We’re ready to work together anytime you are. Send us a note or schedule a call.