August 29, 2024 • 47 mins
Ever wondered how the top multifamily properties keep their vacancy rates low and renewal rates high? Tune in to the latest episode of The POMCAST, as we unravel the secrets behind effective multifamily paid media lead generation. Discover the advantages and challenges of marketing individual properties directly versus leveraging Internet Listing Services (ILS) like apartments.com and Zillow. We’ll also reveal why controlling your traffic through platforms like Google and Microsoft ads can provide you with better-quality leads and how a hybrid approach combining direct marketing and ILS can supercharge your efforts.
Explore the most effective apartment lead generation channels with us, where we discuss the balance between SEO and paid media. Learn why Google search ads, especially call-only ads for mobile users, are game-changers in driving valuable traffic. We'll also share insights on why YouTube advertising with custom intent lists can be a cost-effective method to engage potential renters and how Bing could be your secret weapon for cost-efficient search marketing. We delve into the limitations of display advertising and the often overlooked potential of Bing as a complement to your Google strategies.
Lastly, we dive into the nuts and bolts of optimizing Google Ads for multifamily properties, from smart keyword strategies to effective remarketing campaigns. Hear about the best practices for managing campaigns for different apartment types and the crucial KPIs for optimizing your property marketing. With practical tips on video content creation and targeting, this episode is packed with actionable insights designed to elevate your apartment marketing game. Don't miss out on mastering the strategies that can help you maintain optimal occupancy while attracting high-quality leads!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Shaun Raines (00:01):
Welcome back to the Palmcast.
How's it going, mike?
Good to be here?
Of course it's good to be here.
It wouldn't really be aPalmcast yet unless you're here,
mike, you're the star of theshow.
Mike Shaug (00:14):
You're the best.
Shaun Raines (00:15):
POMCAST episode four.
People are really loving thiscontent because the audience
already knows this, it's watchedthe first, even if they're
watching the short clips thathave come out of the first three
episodes.
Finally, somebody's makingcontent that isn't just laying
on the surface.
And today we're actually gonnamake some of those multifamily
(00:35):
folks even happier, becausetoday's episode primarily
focuses on multifamily paidmedia lead generation and we've
broken it up into severalsections.
So for the audience listeningand or watching the first place,
what are kind of the primarygoals, for those that maybe are
(01:08):
new or need a refresher in theprimary goals of apartment
marketing, Absolutely.
Mike Shaug (01:13):
But you have obviously apartment communities,
townhomes build to rentcommunities all have the same
goal they want to lease theircommunity and be full as they as
they can.
They want to lease theircommunity and be full as they
can.
Typically the occupancy targetthat most properties try to go
for is 94% to 96% and then whenthey are at that level they can
(01:35):
increase rental rates and kindof increase the profitability of
the community In terms ofapartment marketing goals.
Pretty straightforward we wantto have as low of a vacancy rate
as possible and we want to havea high renewal rate.
But on average, about 40 to 50%of any tenants that live at any
apartment communities they moveon, they go somewhere else.
(01:57):
So you are at any given timetrying to refill half of the
building or half of thecommunity.
So that's why marketing is soimportant.
The goal obviously is to driveas many leads so the onsite
teams can convert them intoleases.
Shaun Raines (02:12):
Very interesting.
I want to go also intoindividual property versus
internet listing service.
There's obviously some thingsthat people need to know there,
so could you break that down alittle bit in terms of the
difference there?
Mike Shaug (02:26):
Absolutely so.
A lot of different apartmentcommunities, especially like
independent single mom and popshop owned apartment communities
, leverage systems like ILSs,which is, you know, in the
automotive world we have autotrader.
In the apartment world we haveapartmentscom, zillow, and
basically the sales tactic isthe same.
It's hey, give us a bunch ofyour money and we will do a much
(02:51):
better job of marketing anddriving traffic to our website,
and then we're going to farmthose leads back to you.
Obviously, that's a strategythat has been around for a very
long time.
Back when we worked together,about 15 years, auto trader was
like the biggest thing and nowit's not.
So this is something that isstill a pretty strong investment
(03:12):
for a lot of communities andsometimes it makes sense to
invest somewhat in apartmentscom.
But for most apartmentcommunities you can absolutely
market for yourself throughGoogle ads, through Microsoft
ads, youtube.
The whole gambit and the benefitof going direct to yourself
versus ILS is that at least youare controlling the traffic.
It's coming to your website,it's going into your system,
(03:34):
your CRM, and you're notdependent on a third party that
can essentially shut off yourtraffic or leads at any time.
The other benefit is you canremarket to that traffic.
If you're driving trafficstraight to your website, you
can follow up with them withbanners or video remarketing.
So that's why, if you're goingto make an investment of, say,
$1,000 and you're choosing, hey,do I just give this to
apartmentscom and they can drivetraffic and leases for me, or
(03:57):
do I drive traffic directly tomy website through Google ads,
facebook, for through SEO, youdefinitely want to drive that
traffic directly to yourself andthe reason why is, say,
apartmentscom driving traffic totheir website for any
properties in the Austin area.
You're not going to be the onlyproperty there, so you don't
want to be spending money topromote your competitors
(04:20):
projects, which is essentiallywhat these types of internet
listing services do.
Shaun Raines (04:33):
Are there thoughts around doing a hybrid, where
you're doing a little bit ofboth, or is it sometimes one or
the other?
I know you've referenced alittle bit of like auto traders
an example in the automotiveindustry on this side and
multifamily.
How common is it that peopleare actually combining both of
these?
Mike Shaug (04:46):
I would say it's pretty common to do a bit of
both, and that's fine.
I, of course, am very biased asa digital marketing guy.
I think that all the resourceswould be better spent with us,
but in some markets it makessense to do a little bit of both
.
It's kind of like a media buythrough a website where people
are looking for apartments.
So it's not like the traffic isnot valuable, but in terms of
(05:07):
traffic quality, the traffic youdrive to your own website for
someone looking for aone-bedroom apartment downtown
Austin is going to be far morevaluable than a visit that I get
from apartmentscom or Zillowafter they've seen a bunch of
different competitors andwhatnot.
Shaun Raines (05:24):
Very interesting.
So there has to obviously besome maybe preferable you might
use the word best, but certainlymost ones that you might
recommend or things that peopleneed to be aware of around
marketing channels specificallyfor multifamily lead generation.
(05:44):
Would love for you to kind ofmaybe explore a little bit of
some of those channels that arethat you find to be more
effective, and then perhaps evendetail a little bit of why you
think they're successful.
Mike Shaug (05:51):
Yeah for sure.
In terms I, the way I thinkabout driving traffic is where
can I drive the highest qualitytraffic in the most controllable
way?
So the highest quality trafficthat any website is going to get
is organic traffic, whicheither comes through a Google
business profile, through thesearch results yeah, that's just
the highest quality of traffic.
It tends to convert about 3xbetter than everything else.
(06:11):
So that is a very importantchannel for driving leads.
But obviously SEO takes time.
It takes time to build momentum.
There's a ton of competition.
You have everyone trying torank for the exact same keywords
, including those ILS websitesthat people give so much money
to, so they can compete with youfrom an SEO perspective as well
.
Because of that, obviously,it's good to have both SEO and
(06:35):
paid media.
So on the paid media side, Iwould say that the most valuable
traffic that you can drive andthere's a lot of different
campaign types and traffic typesyou can go with definitely
Google search would be numberone.
You can still not beat thevalue of someone going directly
into Google and saying, hey, I'mlooking for a one bedroom
apartment in Midland, texas ordowntown Austin.
That's someone that's raisingtheir hand.
(06:56):
They're saying, hey, I'm here,I'm looking for this now, and
obviously you have the abilityto control the keywords that
you're selecting.
You can go super general and gofor someone that's very vague
in their search, like apartmentsnear me, or you can actually
spend your budget investing inthe keywords that are closely
aligned with your product, forinstance, luxury one bedroom
apartment downtown Austin orsomething like that.
(07:17):
After Google search and it'skind of another ad format, you
have the standard search ads.
After Google search and it'skind of another ad format, you
have the standard search ads.
Then what we really like to useis call only.
Call only is a really awesomechannel that we've been using
ever since launch of the companyand basically it gives the
customer the ability to call andthat's the primary call to
(07:39):
action.
It's a big phone number.
It only targets you if you'reon a cell phone and you can also
visit the website, but mostpeople click to call and the
reason why that's superimportant is the number one
source for lead generation.
For pretty much any industry wework with is the phone, much
more so than it is the form.
So if you're giving the personthe opportunity to just go
(08:00):
straight to the action thatthey're going to take anyway and
73% of apartment traffic ismobile, so obviously a phone
call is the most naturalconversion event to happen, so
call only is an awesomecomplement to standard search
campaigns.
After that, I would say the nextlevel that we'd love to use is
YouTube, and what's really coolabout YouTube is you can target
(08:21):
YouTube with keywords now.
So, for instance, in the pastYouTube was really thought of as
just very top of funnelawareness only, not super value
from an actual ROI standpoint.
But that's really changed overthe last few years.
Google has enacted somethingcalled custom intent lists,
where you can take your topperforming keywords and target
(08:42):
people on YouTube that just didthat search.
About 75% of people don't clickon ads in any given search, so
that means that most of the timethree quarters of the time you
are losing that opportunity toengage with them if they don't
click on your ad or if you'renot ranking for that keyword
that they look for.
So a way to stay in front ofthem at a very low cost is to
(09:05):
target those keywords to YouTube.
So if they don't click on yourads and they continue their
search, the next time they do acat video watching session your
ads can be present.
So it's a super relevant way togo after someone.
It's much better to leveragethe keyword data that is coming
from the customer, potentialcustomer, live than to go with
an audience signal like hey, Ithink they like.
(09:27):
I think they're foodies ormovie people or whatever.
There are a lot of differentways you can target your
audience.
Keyword targeting is stilldefinitely one of the top
categories and then, of course,you can layer in all of these
other cool audience types likeremarketing or similar audiences
in YouTube.
So there's a lot of really coolstuff.
But the reason why I'm talkingabout it so much is CPCs.
(09:52):
For Google search and call onlygo up about to 22% every year
and they have been reliably forthe last six years.
Youtube CPCs are substantiallylower.
So if you have an average costper click in New York for a one
bedroom apartment, you can getthat same traffic for a dollar
or half of the cost.
So you're driving a lot oftraffic.
And I would also say if someonewatches a 15 second video and
then goes to your website,that's someone that's really
(10:12):
engaged.
I feel really much more engagedthrough video than I do through
a standard text ad, even thoughtext ads drive the most ROI,
the value of that impressionthrough video is super high, so
that's why we really likeYouTube.
We like remarketing as well.
Something that we don't do a lotof right now is display, which
is banners targeted againstaudiences that you think would
(10:35):
convert well for you, everyonethat is interested in real
estate in a 20-mile radius or10-mile radius.
The reason why we don't likedoing that very much is because
there's a tremendous amount ofbot traffic on the display
network right now.
So when we do banneradvertising, we really like to
leverage remarketing data frompeople that have been to the
website.
Let's stay in front of themwith a banner.
(10:55):
You can obviously do thatthrough YouTube as well, but
those would be the topcategories of traffic.
The next one on the list wouldbe Bing.
It's cheaper than Google.
There's still about 17 to 20%of search volume is happening on
Bing, so it's definitely aworthy I wouldn't say it's a
worthy competitor to Google, butit's a worthy compliment.
(11:16):
It's another place where youcan get basically the same ROI,
much lower CPCs, and a lot ofcompetitors are not adopting
Bing, so it's another greatplace for apartment communities
to drive leads.
Shaun Raines (11:27):
So clearly what you're saying.
There is Bing can be acompetitive advantage because
not everyone's using it, butwould you also say that's
probably for people that havebudgets that are robust enough
that you can actually play withthese additional channels?
So prioritizing you alreadymentioned with Google and your
(11:49):
favorability of call-only ads,which is great, and great
insights on YouTube as well,obviously when you can have
access to the acquisition oftraffic at a lower cost, but
obviously YouTube owned byGoogle.
It's so many of the same peopletraveling in between those
sites that are extremelyvaluable.
(12:10):
So Bing, great piece as anadditional.
It can be a very competitive,nice competitive advantage, but
also one where, if you have alimited budget, you may not
introduce Bing Great question.
Mike Shaug (12:22):
I would say that the threshold where Bing I would
consider would be propertiesthat have a budget greater than
$5,000.
You want to.
What you don't want to do isspread your budget too thinly
across a lot of platforms.
That's what we see a lot ofpeople doing.
A lot of our competitors willhave kind of all-in-one packages
that'll get you a little bit ofFacebook, a little bit of
(12:42):
Google and some Bing, but mostof the lead performance tends to
come from the search campaignson Google and Bing.
But the problem is, if you havea small budget and you're
splitting it in so manydifferent directions, you're not
going to be able to have enoughcampaigns to effectively drive
the type of traffic you need.
You're probably going to havelike just a few campaigns.
And the other thing is yourdaily active budget is going to
(13:04):
be too low.
So if you take, let's say youknow, a $1,000 budget and you
split it three ways, divided by30 days, that's not a whole lot
of money.
You'd be much better.
You're much better off kind ofgetting to a good level of spend
.
So you have, like you know, onthe low end, $30 a day to
(13:27):
ideally like $150 a day onGoogle, and the reason why is
the data that you're going toget is going to be a lot more
continuous.
Because your uptime is going tobe much more continuous, You're
going to get campaigns thatoptimize much better.
Not surprisingly, the Googleplatform likes larger budgets.
Smaller budgets sometimes canstruggle a little bit on Google
in terms of managing thatairtime all the way throughout
(13:48):
the month.
So I definitely recommend formost communities, if you have a
small budget let's say anythingunder $5,000, keep it all
focused on maybe 2 platforms atthe most.
Do not focus on Google andmaybe a bit of social and wait
on Bing or YouTube until youhave maximized that investment
and maybe have a little bit moreto go.
Shaun Raines (14:11):
What would your recommendation be in that same
part of the conversation interms of budget and let's just
stay with, you've got a, rightnow, $5,000 monthly budget.
Would you advise somebody to gowith the?
Let's just say they chooseGoogle as their primary search
engine based on yourrecommendation and they're going
to do maybe that secondarychannel in that budget.
(14:31):
Would you say that they shouldprobably allocate um part of
that budget then into social, oris that where you guys would go
?
Or would you say YouTube beforesocial?
Mike Shaug (14:42):
In my opinion, I favor the Google platforms much
more than Meta's platforms, andit's nothing against Meta.
They just really had atremendous amount of scrutiny
put on them for basically thelast four years, where
essentially, it was alleged thatevil foreign actors influenced
our election through Facebookand, as a result, basically
(15:03):
every administration has goneafter their targeting abilities.
On Meta, we used to be able totarget people based on the
office that they were in, likein a building or in densely
populated areas.
We could target by income level, gender, all of these other
things, and you can't do any ofthat now.
You can target remarketing topeople that have been to the
website, which tends to performthe best on social, and we do
(15:25):
like it.
If you have a larger budget, Iwould definitely say do some
lead gen ads on Facebook.
But the issue is and again, I'mnot talking against Facebook I
wish we had some of our, I wishwe had some better targeting and
I hope that we get some bettertargeting back for housing.
But currently, right now withinFacebook, there are some very
restricted audiences that youcan go after and if they catch
(15:47):
you using something like firstparty data or something like
that, they will actuallyrestrict your account.
So there's just a tremendousamount of restriction right now
in the targeting and withindigital marketing.
It's so important, especiallywithin apartments where you have
two people doing a search, forone person is looking for a
$1,000 studio and one person'slooking for a $5,000 studio, so
(16:11):
they're both gonna search forapartments near me.
So you need to be able toleverage audience exclusions and
all sorts of other things tobasically tell Google hey, this
search is more of what we wantbased on the product that we
have to offer, and you justdon't have that ability with
Bing as much as you do withGoogle with YouTube.
Bing Meta is just a lot morerestricted.
(16:32):
Hopefully that changes.
We like it a lot more for autoand for other channels where
there are less restrictions, butthe restrictions are definitely
an issue.
Shaun Raines (16:42):
Thanks for sharing .
On that, I'm similar.
But moving a little bit intoYouTube, what kind of targeting
capabilities exist there?
Can you speak a little bit towhat they can be looking forward
to and the abilities withinYouTube?
And then also I'd like to knowyour thoughts on content
creation, because I'm sure thatthere are people that are
(17:03):
thinking, okay, well, how, who'sgoing to make it?
What type of content?
should we be making if we'regoing to go into the YouTube
environment, but there's ahandful of different ways that
you can advertise inside ofYouTube, so love it if you could
share a little bit about that.
Mike Shaug (17:18):
Right.
I mean you can buy banner spacewithin YouTube.
That's great.
I don't.
That's not what I wouldrecommend doing.
I would recommend doing pre-rollvideo, 15 to 32nd videos and
just kind of touching on contentfirst, because it is so
important.
There's a couple of differentoptions.
There's the good option, whichis we hire a company, pay them
(17:38):
three to $5,000 to do a shoot ofthe building, the amenities
floor, the gym, the grill area,the rooftop deck, all the
reasons why someone would wantto be there.
Shoot a few floor plans thatare staged.
That's always great too.
And then you have this big,basically reel of footage that
you can slice and dice intodifferent short mini commercials
(17:59):
.
So you can take a piece of thatrooftop deck, add it with kind
of a front card of a specificprice concession that the
community has, and then justsome lifestyle shots with
voiceover or something.
That's the best case scenariowhere you have footage to
basically edit into minicommercials.
The less good option for peoplethat don't have the ability to
(18:21):
do that kind of video is toleverage YouTube video builder
or there are many other toolswhere you can put basically
certain slides in for the textyou want to say.
You can do voiceovers or, youknow, have some kind of
narration you can put in music.
Usually it's a little limitedin what you can go with, but you
can kind of make a reel ofimages that kind of looks like a
(18:41):
video and it works.
It's nice, but it's obviouslybetter to have higher quality
shooting In terms of targetingand this is just kind of Google
targeting as an option.
Targeting lever number one iskeywords.
That's the highest level ofintent.
It's I'm looking for this thing.
So for YouTube you have keywordtargeting.
(19:01):
That tends to be the best.
The other one is remarketing.
I've been to the website beforeand you created a remarketing
audience for everyone thatlooked at the two bedroom floor
plan page or the townhomes pageand we're remarketing to that
person and following them aroundwith videos across the web or
banners.
Then you have interests, right,and that.
(19:23):
This is where it gets superjust vague, and this is where it
tends to not work out as well.
It's where people that areinterested in housing,
architecture, foodies, film andart, like all that stuff we all
that that is all of us in somedegree right.
So it's very imprecise thattype of targeting for interest
targeting or contextualtargeting, where you're
(19:44):
targeting people that are on,say, a specific lifestyle page
for a specific publication,you're just guessing a lot about
what that person's intentionsand upcoming buying behavior is
going to be, so it doesn't workas well.
However, that is a huge audiencethat is leverageable in display
(20:05):
and in YouTube, and that's whatwe tend to recommend.
We recommend that you maximizethe better audience targeting
features before you go overthere, because there's so much
search volume and there's somany people that have been to
your website that if you opt tonot remarket to someone so you
can target people that areinterested in politics, you're
(20:26):
really leaving that low hangingfruit to kind of die and you're
not going to be able to captureit because you're focusing at
the top of the funnel instead ofthe bottom of the funnel.
Shaun Raines (20:35):
Yeah, that makes sense.
One last bit on contentcreation.
Obviously you guys are morethan capable and your bread and
butter is around the advertisingpiece campaign setup management
, getting all the best resultspossible.
Do you guys also offerassistance to clients that need
help with content creation?
Mike Shaug (20:55):
So we don't do shooting but we will do the
editing.
Typically, clients that havevideo have the footage and once
we agree with what we want themini commercial to look like, we
can kind of splice it together.
But we don't have teams that goon site, unfortunately.
Shaun Raines (21:11):
So if they need to capture, you guys probably make
a recommendation like, hey,these guys can help you and then
if you guys need to help editand cut.
OK, that's great.
That's good to know, becausesome people they might know how
to actually get a shoot done.
If not knowing that, you guyscould make a recommendation of
like here's how you get thatdone.
When it's done, you can sendover raw clips to us or raw
(21:31):
files to us.
We can help you guys get thatall put together.
I think that's incrediblyimportant.
Obviously, within the YouTubeenvironment, content is still
king.
Isn't that a crazy thing, mike,after all these years?
Mike Shaug (21:44):
I know.
Micro content seems to be mansince TikTok, Following our
evaporating attention spans,yeah.
Shaun Raines (21:53):
I know, literally killing all of our attention
spans in the effort of I don'tknow what, but as it relates to
businesses and in the case ofmultifamily, of trying to
utilize all these differentadvertising channels and
opportunities.
There's something to be saidfor the short form stuff as well
as the long form, and whenthey're looking for you know
(22:15):
solutions or people that canprovide them.
That's why I wanted to find outwhat you guys would recommend
on that.
Yeah, go ahead.
Mike Shaug (22:24):
Just kind of a last topic on that.
Like it's good to havedifferent lengths running,
because typically you're goingto get the best first engagement
with a shorter form piece ofcontent.
And what you can do withinYouTube that I also love is
something called sequences.
So, for instance, let's say youhave three different versions
of the same video, one's 15second instance, let's say you
have three different versions ofthe same video, one's 15 second
(22:44):
teaser, one's 30 seconds, andthen the other one is like two
minutes long.
What you can do is leverage thefirst wave of creative for the
short form against everyone andthe people that watch it all the
way through or engage in anyway.
Then you serve them the secondone or the third.
Typically people tend to skipafter about 20 seconds, no
matter what.
(23:05):
So you want to make sure thatmost of your footage is below
that threshold If possible.
It's going to convert a lotbetter.
Shaun Raines (23:12):
Okay, good, good to know.
I want to also circle back.
You mentioned a few minutesback on keyword and intent and
intent categories.
A few minutes back on keywordand intent and intent categories
, I wondered if you would speaka little bit more and break down
.
I know that there are multiplecategories and within the
apartment world and multifamilyworld I'm sure it's similar to
(23:35):
other industries that you guysserve as well.
But I think it would be helpfulto kind of hear that breakdown
of where those categories areand perhaps, maybe, if you would
recommend that $5,000 budget,how much they should play If
they have bigger budgets,smaller budgets, how that
factors in of what you guyswould recommend in terms of
(23:58):
those categories.
Mike Shaug (23:59):
Yeah, absolutely so.
This is kind of more to Googlesearch, microsoft ads, seo.
As it relates to apartmentcommunities.
There are five keyword typesand four that every community
really needs to focus on, andI'll start kind of top of funnel
and work my way down.
The first is what we considerthe apartments general or
(24:20):
generic category, which isapartment Dallas or apartment
near me or new apartment or newcommunity?
Super vague that says whatcategorically but it doesn't
really tell us what kind offloor plan they're looking for,
doesn't usually tell us wherethey're looking for near me.
I mean, that's just a veryvague sort of search.
(24:41):
That's where the vast majorityof search volume is.
It's at that broad level.
It's people that are juststarting their search.
They're kind of throwing Googlea prayer and saying, hey, show
me, show me what you know, whatI want, so apartments near me,
and then hopefully the searchengine results answers your
question satisfactorily.
We tend to see that at that toptier level.
(25:02):
It's awesome if you can rank awebsite organically for that
level of keywords because it'ssuper competitive.
Typically, ilss are whatdominate that.
However, because Google forlocal business categories
prefers to rank local businessesover ILSs, in the apartment
(25:23):
category you can absolutely rankfor apartment near me over an
ILS for sure if the user is nearto you.
So from an SEO standpoint it'sgood to invest some effort there
, but we don't like to spend alot of our paid budgets there.
We tend to prefer to work on thenext three categories which?
The next one is apartments, georight, which is one bedroom
(25:45):
apartment, dallas Texas.
One bedroom apartment Highlandpark.
You know it's the product, it'sit's what and where,
essentially right.
And the next category and itkind of it kind of intermingles.
You have the floor planskeywords, which is the next
category.
That's the product keyword youwant to go with.
You have the floor planskeywords, which is the next
category.
That's the product keyword youwant to go with.
(26:06):
You always want to have a mixof keywords that are floor plan
specific plus the geo area.
Adding in the geo indication orthe neighborhood where the
property is located or near tojust is a massive increaser of
intent.
So that brings them a littlelower in that.
Funnel Apartments plus geoDallas apartments.
It's much better than thatgeneric category.
It's much more focused.
(26:27):
The next one down would befloor plans and then finally,
the last one is brand and wedon't spend a lot of money on
brand because you want to have alittle bit of brand defense.
Typically, 5% to 10% of yourpaid media investment will go to
brand, because when you spendmoney on your own brand traffic,
the CPCs for your competitorsthat are poaching your traffic
(26:49):
go up.
So even if just to make it moredifficult for people to eat
your lunch, it's wise to investsome money in brand.
And then, of course, this onecomes up all the time People
always talk about well, whatabout apartments with a lagoon,
which we actually manage, acommunity in Florida that has
the largest man-made lagoon in,I think, the country or the
(27:11):
world, so that would be a nicheterm apartments with sky roof,
or basically stuff that mostcommunities don't have like
super high end luxury features.
Apartments with indoorbasketball court, apartments
with saltwater pool, apartmentswith west-facing views and all
of those are amenities at onecommunity that we manage in
(27:33):
Manhattan that they're veryparticular about and some people
do look for it.
Usually not that many peopleare looking there.
So we tend to focus people moreon the floor plans and
apartments, plus geo keywordcategories, as being a much
better driver of the volume oftraffic that you need and
conversions.
But every community isdifferent, so you need to
structure the budget and thecampaign around what they are
(27:56):
specifically offering, aroundtheir specific floor plans and
whatever the specific nicheterms might be.
Shaun Raines (28:13):
Does the?
I'm kind of fascinated by the,these niche terms that would,
you know, obviously be appealingto people who are looking for
things that are like just alittle different.
Does that have any relationshipto, then, how the targeting
gets done at all?
Do you change things up alittle bit, or is there not
really much of a relationshipbetween the two?
Mike Shaug (28:30):
So you know, the more someone geo-indicates, the
less restrictive I have to getwith their targeting.
We typically are very tightlytargeted around our communities
because we find that about 70%of the leads in a normal leasing
season come from within like a10 mile radius.
(28:50):
Typically, that is typical.
That's 70% of people.
The other 30% are people thatare moving from out of town.
That massively skewed for ashort period of time.
After COVID, where literally theentire country basically
relocated twice, a ton of peoplecame to Austin.
They moved into one building,then they moved into the one
that they're going to be stayingin for a few years.
So in that you definitely wantto be open to targeting people
(29:14):
that are outside of your area,but what you want to do, what
you don't want to do, is have anational targeting that
basically says hey, if you're inthe United States and you're
bidding on the keywordapartments near me, we want to
show up for you.
That is so stupid, you willwaste so much money.
However, if someone is in LAand they're searching for you
know, hell's Kitchen two bedroomapartment, then my client in
(29:38):
Hell's Kitchen would love toshow up for that search.
So there's a right way to do itand a wrong way to do it.
However, I will say this andthis is kind of a funny
situation and a lot of peopledon't know that there are, I
think, seven or 11 cities in thecountry named Houston.
One of them is in outside ofWarner Robins in Georgia.
There's one in New Mexico.
That's crazy to think about,but that's an actual.
(30:01):
That one is less of a problemthan, say, del Rio.
We have 23 Del Rios.
There are so many differentcity names where you'll have a
main city like Chicago inIllinois, and then you have
Chicago in other parts of thecountry.
And here's the problem If youhave a national targeting and
you have a community that, say,is in Del Rio in Texas and you
(30:26):
have a national target, you'regoing to show up in the other 22
cities.
So you have to be very careful.
It's always important to look athow many cities or how many
other communities have the samename.
That's another problem is, alot of times community owners
are not the most creative people.
I have worked with eightwindermere at preserves.
(30:47):
I don't know what a windermereis preserving or whatever, but
I've worked with eight differentcommunities.
The last one was inPhiladelphia and you know
Vornado, vortex, like all ofthese different, like very
strange, very specific names,and there's like five different
communities in different Statesthat have the same name.
So you just have to be aware ofthat.
You've got to look for what'sthe geo I'm in.
(31:09):
How could Google confuse thiswith another city?
Because they want to, becausethey want to spend your money?
And how many other cities doesthis property have?
A really great example would bea community that we had in
Maryland I'm not going to saythe name because they had a huge
issue with rodents, infestation, insects, and it was
interesting because we actuallyhad another property that had
(31:31):
the same name in a verydifferent part of the country,
and Google would auto fill likeXYZ apartments, you know, rat
infestation or whatever.
So it's it's super importantthat you try to make sure that
Google focuses your spendallocation as close to the
property as you can and that youdo everything that you can to
try to think ahead of all theother places where Google could
(31:54):
waste your money.
Shaun Raines (31:57):
Yeah, wow, that's.
That's quite the story rightthere.
Mike Shaug (32:03):
We've seen it all here at.
Shaun Raines (32:05):
Premier, I can imagine, before I leave some of
these areas around targeting.
I don't know if you have anythoughts there on segmentation.
I know you've been talking alittle bit about that.
You've also mentionedretargeting here, perhaps
personalization strategies.
But before I move on fromtargeting, any other thoughts
(32:28):
there that you think areimportant, maybe that are maybe
best practice related.
Mike Shaug (32:29):
Yeah, there's a guy named Joseph Dane from Client
Boost and he popularized a termcalled the iceberg effect and
basically what that means iswhen you have all of these
different types of targetingaudiences, income levels, when
you have too much of it and it'snot focused, it can kind of be
a huge problem.
And you'll think that it's thisvery small part of the problem.
(32:50):
It's really all of these otherthings.
So segmentation and correctsetup is super.
A great example of something Isee done wrong 90% of the time
with our competitors is theywill have a floor plans campaign
that has the keywords forstudio bedroom apartments, one
bedroom and two bedroom and theproblem with that is that Google
is going to go after all ofthose people, but most of the
(33:13):
time the studios and one bedroomapartments lease up really
quickly and because you're youknow, but you'll still have one
bedrooms, you'll still havestudios and you need to always
market for them because you havethat turnover, you want to make
sure that you have all thekeyword product types or floor
plan types separated into theirown campaigns so you can say,
hey, I want to spend $1,000 ontwo bedrooms this month and 500
(33:33):
over here.
So that is definitely a bestpractice.
The other one is when,especially with remarketing and
this one frustrates me so much,especially with remarketing, and
this one frustrates me so muchis when I look into an account
and I see all users and that'sit.
All users is going into theremarketing campaign.
I'm like what the hell is this?
Usually what it is.
It's anyone that's been to thewebsite.
(33:54):
It's people that have bouncedimmediately.
It's everyone.
It's not bucketed into audiencebuckets.
So the best practice foraudience remarketing audiences
is hey, let's have all users,but let's have that's.
That's the catch-all.
We're not going to use it, it'sjust going to sit there.
The one we're actually going touse, if it's all users, is all
users that have been on thewebsite.
(34:14):
For our website standard time onsite or more, which is
typically about a minute and ahalf.
So meaning you're not going toremarket to people that just
left the website.
You could set a much lowerthreshold, maybe 30 seconds.
Some of us search websitesreally quick, but you want to
have a time threshold in therethat says we only want to stay
in front of people that havebeen on the website for 30
seconds or more.
So that's one area ofqualification and that would be
(34:37):
massively helpful.
But you're going to also wantto create an audience for
converters Anyone that fills outa form, a chat or clicks on a
phone call.
You want to make a bucket forconverters because you can
import that into your Google adsaccount and you can basically
take that audience and say hey,google, other people that are
like this converter category, wewant you to find more of them.
(34:58):
So that's a super valuableaudience signal that comes from
your traffic.
Find more of them.
So that's a super valuableaudience signal that comes from
your traffic.
And then the other one isdefinitely segment your
audiences into yes, have a floorplans, all catch all audience,
but have a one bedroom, twobedroom studio audience.
Individually, the audiencesizes will be small, but if you
can have basically an evergreenretargeting campaign for
(35:20):
everyone that is interested instudios and you're hitting them
with really high quality,creative and a great offer,
that's far more valuable thanhey, we're Windermere, something
or other.
We have floor plans, we haveone through three bedroom floor
plans.
It's like no one cares aboutwhat they're not interested in.
They want to be remarketed tovery precisely.
(35:41):
And in other industries, likeretail apparel.
The remarketing is what youlooked at, it's the car you
looked at.
It's the shoes you looked atthat are following you around.
But in apartment marketing it'ssuper broad, it's hey, you came
and spent one second on ourwebsite.
We'll show you all of thisstuff.
And it's just not veryeffective and it doesn't work
(36:01):
very well.
And the reason why thatfrustrates me is people don't
believe in it.
We have a lot of customersthat'll come on board and
they'll say hey, we don't wantto do YouTube.
Youtube is trash because itwasn't implemented correctly.
They think that ILSs are betterthan Google because no one sets
up their Google ad accounts theright way.
So yeah, I think that answeredthat question.
Shaun Raines (36:25):
Yep, I think so.
Yeah, that's fascinating.
So I want to ask you a littlebit about KPIs, for I guess
property managers or people in amultifamily you know what ones
would you say they should befocusing on when they're
evaluating how well paid mediais going for them or which ones
they even care about.
Mike Shaug (36:41):
So focusing, I guess , primarily on, like Google ads
and Microsoft ads.
You're going to want to have aCPC, ideally focused, not higher
than $3.50.
Ideally you're going to want tobe in the $2 to $2.50 range and
that's for search.
When you add in display trafficit completely muddies that.
(37:03):
So we really just do our CPCbenchmarks on search keywords.
So definitely want to be inthat sub $3.50 area, regardless
of where you are in the country.
The next one is you want tohave a CTR of like 8% or higher
Industry standard, I think, orthe national benchmark right now
(37:24):
is like 4%.
You want to target well abovethat because obviously if you
write more relevant ads they'regoing to convert better, you're
going to get more leads andleases.
So that would be the CTRbenchmark.
On the other kind of comparativemetrics, I mean there are a lot
of other KPIs that we talkabout, like impression share.
Most properties have a 10%impression share and that's all
(37:47):
they can afford, because if theywanted to get it to a 50%
impression share they would haveto spend $50,000.
So impression share issomething we report on but it's
not something that we reallybenchmark to.
But it's a good thing tocorrelate because sometimes we
can find out what the impressionshare is of a competitor.
So that's where it will bevaluable.
But the other main metrics thatwe really hang our hat on are
(38:10):
cost per conversion andconversion rate.
The industry benchmark rightnow for cost per lead for Google
ads is about 70 bucks.
We try to be under 40, um, andreally try to be under 30 as
much as we can.
And then the conversion rate.
You want to have a conversionrate of 10% or higher.
That would be.
Uh, those would be the KPIsthat we tend to look for.
(38:31):
Uh.
Shaun Raines (38:33):
I like that and I think it's important.
Even, um, you know, when you'retalking about reporting on
impression share, that has to bereally critical for helping set
expectations, with people to itor they don't realize some of
those key performance indicatorsthat should matter to them.
(38:59):
That just kind of helps set thetone, if you will, when you
realize a highly competitiveespecially, I suppose, for
people who are in larger markets, more metro markets, yeah, um,
where it gets even morecompetitive that I see an LA are
way more expensive than Naples,florida or Saratoga.
Mike Shaug (39:23):
The tier one markets Miami, chicago, la, new York
City, philadelphia, boston.
Those are very competitivemarkets and you can see CPCs
creep up really, really quickly.
Shaun Raines (39:35):
So that's why you want to kind of have that $3.50
rule how would you tell peopleto balance that need for quick
(39:59):
you know occupancy whilemaintaining, you know, a rent at
the level that you want youknow, obviously, if you're in a
business where you want thatrent as high as you can get it.
But how do you balance thatneed for quick occupancy and
keeping the rents where you needthem to be and want them to be?
Mike Shaug (40:10):
Right?
Yeah, that's a great question,cause a lot of times what
communities will do?
They will have rents,especially when the lease up is
happening.
They need to fill the building.
They need to get some revenueto meet debt service.
That's the thing is there's abank and there's a mortgage on
that property and you got to paythat mortgage within a certain
amount of time.
So you need to fill thebuilding.
(40:31):
You need something.
But the part with apartmentsthat is complicated is pricing
varies all the time and you needto make sure that you are
competitively priced for theproduct that you have to offer.
If your apartment has a lot ofawesome features, like a gym
that they would have to pay $50to $100 to go to, but you have
it on premise, you can chargemore.
(40:51):
If you have onsite parking orgarages, you can charge more.
But the worst case scenario isa community that wants to charge
top of market rents and theydon't have the product to back
it up.
But in a lot of lease upsituations a lot of communities
will just get as many people inthere as quickly as possible and
they'll double the rents nextyear.
But the problem that thatcreates is you basically have
(41:13):
two lease ups, you first got allthe people in and then you're
having to replace them.
So having you definitely it's avery fine balance.
You want to price ascompetitively as you can without
shocking people when theirrenewals come around.
So for like, basically therethere's two different stages of
property.
Right, you have occupied, whichis where they're 90% plus full,
(41:36):
and then you have a lease upphase and they have different
rules.
In the lease up phase youshould be spending a lot of
money to fill that building asquickly as possible.
Every two bedroom unit that youdon't have full is $5,000 or
$4,000 that you're not gettingthat month.
You are losing it that monthbecause you still have that debt
service.
So what we recommend is to gopretty aggressive in the lease
(41:59):
up phase.
You definitely don't want to bethe most expensive product in
the market.
Try to get your pricing as wellas you can get your rental
concessions in there.
That goes a long way,especially when the market is
kind of squeezed like it isright now.
But yeah, so a lot moremarketing upfront on the
lease-up side.
Once you hit that occupancynumber, you can massively reduce
(42:20):
your investment.
So if you have a lease-upbudget of, say, like $8,000, you
can probably bring it down tothree and that'll give you
enough traffic.
And what the hope is, if you,when you started your marketing,
you did the right thing and youdid SEO as well.
You invested in your backlinks,you invested in content for the
keyword you want to show up for, you invested in technical SEO
(42:43):
and you got your website as fastas that CMS allows, you are
going to have this very slowlybuilding amount of traffic and
hopefully, by the time you hitthe end of release up season,
organically you're getting 3000visits a month for free and that
will obvious that, becauseorganic traffic converts about
three X better than search,google search, paid traffic, you
(43:07):
want to make sure that you'reinvesting there and that you
always invest there.
The way I like to contextualizethe value of organic traffic is
it's about like every organicvisit is about 3x the value of
what your CPC is.
So if the average CPC for onebedroom apartment is $4 in
(43:27):
Manhattan, then every organicvisit is like $12, because
they're going to convert at amuch higher rate.
Yeah, so it's definitely superimportant to invest in SEO, but
the way we like to talk aboutSEO and SEM is SEM is hunting.
You always need it.
You always need to get specifictypes of traffic.
You are always going to have tofill the stubborn two-bedroom
(43:49):
units that won't lease up aseasily as the studios and the
one bedrooms, because they'remore expensive.
And that's where paid searchcomes in.
It's fast, it's hunting.
Seo is farming.
You plant the seed, you waterit, you pray to the Google gods,
you read all of the bullshitthat they put out about their
algorithm updates, you decidewhat you believe and what you
discard, and then you'reconstantly iterating.
(44:11):
You're constantly massagingcopy on the website, you're
getting links, you're gettingmore citations and hopefully
that collection of effort willbuild you up to a level of
traffic that can help with yourlease replacement next year.
So come on with properties atall levels.
We do a ton of lease ups and wealso do a lot of stabilized
(44:32):
properties, and there'sdefinitely SEO is a valuable
strategy for any property of anysize.
Essentially, what that'llguarantee is that you can reduce
and control your Google adspend and your other marketing
channels by having a lot oforganic traffic that's coming to
your website for your brandterms.
So that's kind of the hybridapproach.
(44:52):
That's the best case scenariowhere you have both types of
traffic running for you.
Shaun Raines (44:58):
Another fantastic episode, mike.
Really really great insightsshared here for the multifamily
industry Listen audience we have.
Once again, we found a goodhome for this episode to rest.
So we appreciate your comments,your questions.
We appreciate your feedback, soplease feel free to share it,
(45:20):
especially if you're consumingthis over on YouTube.
Drop a comment.
You can actually reach out andlet us know what you think of
this episode in ways that giveus insights and kind of our
feedback loop, of the thingsthat resonate with you and that
you want to know more about.
So don't hesitate to engagewith the content and let us know
what you're thinking.
If you're over there on YouTube, like and subscribe to the
(45:43):
channel and so you'll know whenwe're dropping new episodes and
other micro pieces of content.
And thank you for tuning in tothe POMCAST.
We'll be back real soon withanother episode.
Thanks, john, thank you, mike.
Welcome back to the Palmcast.
How's it going, mike?
Good to be here?
Of course it's good to be here.
It wouldn't really be aPalmcast yet unless you're here,
mike, you're the star of theshow.
Mike Shaug (00:14):
You're the best.
Shaun Raines (00:15):
POMCAST episode four.
People are really loving thiscontent because the audience
already knows this, it's watchedthe first, even if they're
watching the short clips thathave come out of the first three
episodes.
Finally, somebody's makingcontent that isn't just laying
on the surface.
And today we're actually gonnamake some of those multifamily
(00:35):
folks even happier, becausetoday's episode primarily
focuses on multifamily paidmedia lead generation and we've
broken it up into severalsections.
So for the audience listeningand or watching the first place,
what are kind of the primarygoals, for those that maybe are
(01:08):
new or need a refresher in theprimary goals of apartment
marketing, Absolutely.
Mike Shaug (01:13):
But you have obviously apartment communities,
townhomes build to rentcommunities all have the same
goal they want to lease theircommunity and be full as they as
they can.
They want to lease theircommunity and be full as they
can.
Typically the occupancy targetthat most properties try to go
for is 94% to 96% and then whenthey are at that level they can
(01:35):
increase rental rates and kindof increase the profitability of
the community In terms ofapartment marketing goals.
Pretty straightforward we wantto have as low of a vacancy rate
as possible and we want to havea high renewal rate.
But on average, about 40 to 50%of any tenants that live at any
apartment communities they moveon, they go somewhere else.
(01:57):
So you are at any given timetrying to refill half of the
building or half of thecommunity.
So that's why marketing is soimportant.
The goal obviously is to driveas many leads so the onsite
teams can convert them intoleases.
Shaun Raines (02:12):
Very interesting.
I want to go also intoindividual property versus
internet listing service.
There's obviously some thingsthat people need to know there,
so could you break that down alittle bit in terms of the
difference there?
Mike Shaug (02:26):
Absolutely so.
A lot of different apartmentcommunities, especially like
independent single mom and popshop owned apartment communities
, leverage systems like ILSs,which is, you know, in the
automotive world we have autotrader.
In the apartment world we haveapartmentscom, zillow, and
basically the sales tactic isthe same.
It's hey, give us a bunch ofyour money and we will do a much
(02:51):
better job of marketing anddriving traffic to our website,
and then we're going to farmthose leads back to you.
Obviously, that's a strategythat has been around for a very
long time.
Back when we worked together,about 15 years, auto trader was
like the biggest thing and nowit's not.
So this is something that isstill a pretty strong investment
(03:12):
for a lot of communities andsometimes it makes sense to
invest somewhat in apartmentscom.
But for most apartmentcommunities you can absolutely
market for yourself throughGoogle ads, through Microsoft
ads, youtube.
The whole gambit and the benefitof going direct to yourself
versus ILS is that at least youare controlling the traffic.
It's coming to your website,it's going into your system,
(03:34):
your CRM, and you're notdependent on a third party that
can essentially shut off yourtraffic or leads at any time.
The other benefit is you canremarket to that traffic.
If you're driving trafficstraight to your website, you
can follow up with them withbanners or video remarketing.
So that's why, if you're goingto make an investment of, say,
$1,000 and you're choosing, hey,do I just give this to
apartmentscom and they can drivetraffic and leases for me, or
(03:57):
do I drive traffic directly tomy website through Google ads,
facebook, for through SEO, youdefinitely want to drive that
traffic directly to yourself andthe reason why is, say,
apartmentscom driving traffic totheir website for any
properties in the Austin area.
You're not going to be the onlyproperty there, so you don't
want to be spending money topromote your competitors
(04:20):
projects, which is essentiallywhat these types of internet
listing services do.
Shaun Raines (04:33):
Are there thoughts around doing a hybrid, where
you're doing a little bit ofboth, or is it sometimes one or
the other?
I know you've referenced alittle bit of like auto traders
an example in the automotiveindustry on this side and
multifamily.
How common is it that peopleare actually combining both of
these?
Mike Shaug (04:46):
I would say it's pretty common to do a bit of
both, and that's fine.
I, of course, am very biased asa digital marketing guy.
I think that all the resourceswould be better spent with us,
but in some markets it makessense to do a little bit of both
.
It's kind of like a media buythrough a website where people
are looking for apartments.
So it's not like the traffic isnot valuable, but in terms of
(05:07):
traffic quality, the traffic youdrive to your own website for
someone looking for aone-bedroom apartment downtown
Austin is going to be far morevaluable than a visit that I get
from apartmentscom or Zillowafter they've seen a bunch of
different competitors andwhatnot.
Shaun Raines (05:24):
Very interesting.
So there has to obviously besome maybe preferable you might
use the word best, but certainlymost ones that you might
recommend or things that peopleneed to be aware of around
marketing channels specificallyfor multifamily lead generation.
(05:44):
Would love for you to kind ofmaybe explore a little bit of
some of those channels that arethat you find to be more
effective, and then perhaps evendetail a little bit of why you
think they're successful.
Mike Shaug (05:51):
Yeah for sure.
In terms I, the way I thinkabout driving traffic is where
can I drive the highest qualitytraffic in the most controllable
way?
So the highest quality trafficthat any website is going to get
is organic traffic, whicheither comes through a Google
business profile, through thesearch results yeah, that's just
the highest quality of traffic.
It tends to convert about 3xbetter than everything else.
(06:11):
So that is a very importantchannel for driving leads.
But obviously SEO takes time.
It takes time to build momentum.
There's a ton of competition.
You have everyone trying torank for the exact same keywords
, including those ILS websitesthat people give so much money
to, so they can compete with youfrom an SEO perspective as well
.
Because of that, obviously,it's good to have both SEO and
(06:35):
paid media.
So on the paid media side, Iwould say that the most valuable
traffic that you can drive andthere's a lot of different
campaign types and traffic typesyou can go with definitely
Google search would be numberone.
You can still not beat thevalue of someone going directly
into Google and saying, hey, I'mlooking for a one bedroom
apartment in Midland, texas ordowntown Austin.
That's someone that's raisingtheir hand.
(06:56):
They're saying, hey, I'm here,I'm looking for this now, and
obviously you have the abilityto control the keywords that
you're selecting.
You can go super general and gofor someone that's very vague
in their search, like apartmentsnear me, or you can actually
spend your budget investing inthe keywords that are closely
aligned with your product, forinstance, luxury one bedroom
apartment downtown Austin orsomething like that.
(07:17):
After Google search and it'skind of another ad format, you
have the standard search ads.
After Google search and it'skind of another ad format, you
have the standard search ads.
Then what we really like to useis call only.
Call only is a really awesomechannel that we've been using
ever since launch of the companyand basically it gives the
customer the ability to call andthat's the primary call to
(07:39):
action.
It's a big phone number.
It only targets you if you'reon a cell phone and you can also
visit the website, but mostpeople click to call and the
reason why that's superimportant is the number one
source for lead generation.
For pretty much any industry wework with is the phone, much
more so than it is the form.
So if you're giving the personthe opportunity to just go
(08:00):
straight to the action thatthey're going to take anyway and
73% of apartment traffic ismobile, so obviously a phone
call is the most naturalconversion event to happen, so
call only is an awesomecomplement to standard search
campaigns.
After that, I would say the nextlevel that we'd love to use is
YouTube, and what's really coolabout YouTube is you can target
(08:21):
YouTube with keywords now.
So, for instance, in the pastYouTube was really thought of as
just very top of funnelawareness only, not super value
from an actual ROI standpoint.
But that's really changed overthe last few years.
Google has enacted somethingcalled custom intent lists,
where you can take your topperforming keywords and target
(08:42):
people on YouTube that just didthat search.
About 75% of people don't clickon ads in any given search, so
that means that most of the timethree quarters of the time you
are losing that opportunity toengage with them if they don't
click on your ad or if you'renot ranking for that keyword
that they look for.
So a way to stay in front ofthem at a very low cost is to
(09:05):
target those keywords to YouTube.
So if they don't click on yourads and they continue their
search, the next time they do acat video watching session your
ads can be present.
So it's a super relevant way togo after someone.
It's much better to leveragethe keyword data that is coming
from the customer, potentialcustomer, live than to go with
an audience signal like hey, Ithink they like.
(09:27):
I think they're foodies ormovie people or whatever.
There are a lot of differentways you can target your
audience.
Keyword targeting is stilldefinitely one of the top
categories and then, of course,you can layer in all of these
other cool audience types likeremarketing or similar audiences
in YouTube.
So there's a lot of really coolstuff.
But the reason why I'm talkingabout it so much is CPCs.
(09:52):
For Google search and call onlygo up about to 22% every year
and they have been reliably forthe last six years.
Youtube CPCs are substantiallylower.
So if you have an average costper click in New York for a one
bedroom apartment, you can getthat same traffic for a dollar
or half of the cost.
So you're driving a lot oftraffic.
And I would also say if someonewatches a 15 second video and
then goes to your website,that's someone that's really
(10:12):
engaged.
I feel really much more engagedthrough video than I do through
a standard text ad, even thoughtext ads drive the most ROI,
the value of that impressionthrough video is super high, so
that's why we really likeYouTube.
We like remarketing as well.
Something that we don't do a lotof right now is display, which
is banners targeted againstaudiences that you think would
(10:35):
convert well for you, everyonethat is interested in real
estate in a 20-mile radius or10-mile radius.
The reason why we don't likedoing that very much is because
there's a tremendous amount ofbot traffic on the display
network right now.
So when we do banneradvertising, we really like to
leverage remarketing data frompeople that have been to the
website.
Let's stay in front of themwith a banner.
(10:55):
You can obviously do thatthrough YouTube as well, but
those would be the topcategories of traffic.
The next one on the list wouldbe Bing.
It's cheaper than Google.
There's still about 17 to 20%of search volume is happening on
Bing, so it's definitely aworthy I wouldn't say it's a
worthy competitor to Google, butit's a worthy compliment.
(11:16):
It's another place where youcan get basically the same ROI,
much lower CPCs, and a lot ofcompetitors are not adopting
Bing, so it's another greatplace for apartment communities
to drive leads.
Shaun Raines (11:27):
So clearly what you're saying.
There is Bing can be acompetitive advantage because
not everyone's using it, butwould you also say that's
probably for people that havebudgets that are robust enough
that you can actually play withthese additional channels?
So prioritizing you alreadymentioned with Google and your
(11:49):
favorability of call-only ads,which is great, and great
insights on YouTube as well,obviously when you can have
access to the acquisition oftraffic at a lower cost, but
obviously YouTube owned byGoogle.
It's so many of the same peopletraveling in between those
sites that are extremelyvaluable.
(12:10):
So Bing, great piece as anadditional.
It can be a very competitive,nice competitive advantage, but
also one where, if you have alimited budget, you may not
introduce Bing Great question.
Mike Shaug (12:22):
I would say that the threshold where Bing I would
consider would be propertiesthat have a budget greater than
$5,000.
You want to.
What you don't want to do isspread your budget too thinly
across a lot of platforms.
That's what we see a lot ofpeople doing.
A lot of our competitors willhave kind of all-in-one packages
that'll get you a little bit ofFacebook, a little bit of
(12:42):
Google and some Bing, but mostof the lead performance tends to
come from the search campaignson Google and Bing.
But the problem is, if you havea small budget and you're
splitting it in so manydifferent directions, you're not
going to be able to have enoughcampaigns to effectively drive
the type of traffic you need.
You're probably going to havelike just a few campaigns.
And the other thing is yourdaily active budget is going to
(13:04):
be too low.
So if you take, let's say youknow, a $1,000 budget and you
split it three ways, divided by30 days, that's not a whole lot
of money.
You'd be much better.
You're much better off kind ofgetting to a good level of spend
.
So you have, like you know, onthe low end, $30 a day to
(13:27):
ideally like $150 a day onGoogle, and the reason why is
the data that you're going toget is going to be a lot more
continuous.
Because your uptime is going tobe much more continuous, You're
going to get campaigns thatoptimize much better.
Not surprisingly, the Googleplatform likes larger budgets.
Smaller budgets sometimes canstruggle a little bit on Google
in terms of managing thatairtime all the way throughout
(13:48):
the month.
So I definitely recommend formost communities, if you have a
small budget let's say anythingunder $5,000, keep it all
focused on maybe 2 platforms atthe most.
Do not focus on Google andmaybe a bit of social and wait
on Bing or YouTube until youhave maximized that investment
and maybe have a little bit moreto go.
Shaun Raines (14:11):
What would your recommendation be in that same
part of the conversation interms of budget and let's just
stay with, you've got a, rightnow, $5,000 monthly budget.
Would you advise somebody to gowith the?
Let's just say they chooseGoogle as their primary search
engine based on yourrecommendation and they're going
to do maybe that secondarychannel in that budget.
(14:31):
Would you say that they shouldprobably allocate um part of
that budget then into social, oris that where you guys would go
?
Or would you say YouTube beforesocial?
Mike Shaug (14:42):
In my opinion, I favor the Google platforms much
more than Meta's platforms, andit's nothing against Meta.
They just really had atremendous amount of scrutiny
put on them for basically thelast four years, where
essentially, it was alleged thatevil foreign actors influenced
our election through Facebookand, as a result, basically
(15:03):
every administration has goneafter their targeting abilities.
On Meta, we used to be able totarget people based on the
office that they were in, likein a building or in densely
populated areas.
We could target by income level, gender, all of these other
things, and you can't do any ofthat now.
You can target remarketing topeople that have been to the
website, which tends to performthe best on social, and we do
(15:25):
like it.
If you have a larger budget, Iwould definitely say do some
lead gen ads on Facebook.
But the issue is and again, I'mnot talking against Facebook I
wish we had some of our, I wishwe had some better targeting and
I hope that we get some bettertargeting back for housing.
But currently, right now withinFacebook, there are some very
restricted audiences that youcan go after and if they catch
(15:47):
you using something like firstparty data or something like
that, they will actuallyrestrict your account.
So there's just a tremendousamount of restriction right now
in the targeting and withindigital marketing.
It's so important, especiallywithin apartments where you have
two people doing a search, forone person is looking for a
$1,000 studio and one person'slooking for a $5,000 studio, so
(16:11):
they're both gonna search forapartments near me.
So you need to be able toleverage audience exclusions and
all sorts of other things tobasically tell Google hey, this
search is more of what we wantbased on the product that we
have to offer, and you justdon't have that ability with
Bing as much as you do withGoogle with YouTube.
Bing Meta is just a lot morerestricted.
(16:32):
Hopefully that changes.
We like it a lot more for autoand for other channels where
there are less restrictions, butthe restrictions are definitely
an issue.
Shaun Raines (16:42):
Thanks for sharing .
On that, I'm similar.
But moving a little bit intoYouTube, what kind of targeting
capabilities exist there?
Can you speak a little bit towhat they can be looking forward
to and the abilities withinYouTube?
And then also I'd like to knowyour thoughts on content
creation, because I'm sure thatthere are people that are
(17:03):
thinking, okay, well, how, who'sgoing to make it?
What type of content?
should we be making if we'regoing to go into the YouTube
environment, but there's ahandful of different ways that
you can advertise inside ofYouTube, so love it if you could
share a little bit about that.
Mike Shaug (17:18):
Right.
I mean you can buy banner spacewithin YouTube.
That's great.
I don't.
That's not what I wouldrecommend doing.
I would recommend doing pre-rollvideo, 15 to 32nd videos and
just kind of touching on contentfirst, because it is so
important.
There's a couple of differentoptions.
There's the good option, whichis we hire a company, pay them
(17:38):
three to $5,000 to do a shoot ofthe building, the amenities
floor, the gym, the grill area,the rooftop deck, all the
reasons why someone would wantto be there.
Shoot a few floor plans thatare staged.
That's always great too.
And then you have this big,basically reel of footage that
you can slice and dice intodifferent short mini commercials
(17:59):
.
So you can take a piece of thatrooftop deck, add it with kind
of a front card of a specificprice concession that the
community has, and then justsome lifestyle shots with
voiceover or something.
That's the best case scenariowhere you have footage to
basically edit into minicommercials.
The less good option for peoplethat don't have the ability to
(18:21):
do that kind of video is toleverage YouTube video builder
or there are many other toolswhere you can put basically
certain slides in for the textyou want to say.
You can do voiceovers or, youknow, have some kind of
narration you can put in music.
Usually it's a little limitedin what you can go with, but you
can kind of make a reel ofimages that kind of looks like a
(18:41):
video and it works.
It's nice, but it's obviouslybetter to have higher quality
shooting In terms of targetingand this is just kind of Google
targeting as an option.
Targeting lever number one iskeywords.
That's the highest level ofintent.
It's I'm looking for this thing.
So for YouTube you have keywordtargeting.
(19:01):
That tends to be the best.
The other one is remarketing.
I've been to the website beforeand you created a remarketing
audience for everyone thatlooked at the two bedroom floor
plan page or the townhomes pageand we're remarketing to that
person and following them aroundwith videos across the web or
banners.
Then you have interests, right,and that.
(19:23):
This is where it gets superjust vague, and this is where it
tends to not work out as well.
It's where people that areinterested in housing,
architecture, foodies, film andart, like all that stuff we all
that that is all of us in somedegree right.
So it's very imprecise thattype of targeting for interest
targeting or contextualtargeting, where you're
(19:44):
targeting people that are on,say, a specific lifestyle page
for a specific publication,you're just guessing a lot about
what that person's intentionsand upcoming buying behavior is
going to be, so it doesn't workas well.
However, that is a huge audiencethat is leverageable in display
(20:05):
and in YouTube, and that's whatwe tend to recommend.
We recommend that you maximizethe better audience targeting
features before you go overthere, because there's so much
search volume and there's somany people that have been to
your website that if you opt tonot remarket to someone so you
can target people that areinterested in politics, you're
(20:26):
really leaving that low hangingfruit to kind of die and you're
not going to be able to captureit because you're focusing at
the top of the funnel instead ofthe bottom of the funnel.
Shaun Raines (20:35):
Yeah, that makes sense.
One last bit on contentcreation.
Obviously you guys are morethan capable and your bread and
butter is around the advertisingpiece campaign setup management
, getting all the best resultspossible.
Do you guys also offerassistance to clients that need
help with content creation?
Mike Shaug (20:55):
So we don't do shooting but we will do the
editing.
Typically, clients that havevideo have the footage and once
we agree with what we want themini commercial to look like, we
can kind of splice it together.
But we don't have teams that goon site, unfortunately.
Shaun Raines (21:11):
So if they need to capture, you guys probably make
a recommendation like, hey,these guys can help you and then
if you guys need to help editand cut.
OK, that's great.
That's good to know, becausesome people they might know how
to actually get a shoot done.
If not knowing that, you guyscould make a recommendation of
like here's how you get thatdone.
When it's done, you can sendover raw clips to us or raw
(21:31):
files to us.
We can help you guys get thatall put together.
I think that's incrediblyimportant.
Obviously, within the YouTubeenvironment, content is still
king.
Isn't that a crazy thing, mike,after all these years?
Mike Shaug (21:44):
I know.
Micro content seems to be mansince TikTok, Following our
evaporating attention spans,yeah.
Shaun Raines (21:53):
I know, literally killing all of our attention
spans in the effort of I don'tknow what, but as it relates to
businesses and in the case ofmultifamily, of trying to
utilize all these differentadvertising channels and
opportunities.
There's something to be saidfor the short form stuff as well
as the long form, and whenthey're looking for you know
(22:15):
solutions or people that canprovide them.
That's why I wanted to find outwhat you guys would recommend
on that.
Yeah, go ahead.
Mike Shaug (22:24):
Just kind of a last topic on that.
Like it's good to havedifferent lengths running,
because typically you're goingto get the best first engagement
with a shorter form piece ofcontent.
And what you can do withinYouTube that I also love is
something called sequences.
So, for instance, let's say youhave three different versions
of the same video, one's 15second instance, let's say you
have three different versions ofthe same video, one's 15 second
(22:44):
teaser, one's 30 seconds, andthen the other one is like two
minutes long.
What you can do is leverage thefirst wave of creative for the
short form against everyone andthe people that watch it all the
way through or engage in anyway.
Then you serve them the secondone or the third.
Typically people tend to skipafter about 20 seconds, no
matter what.
(23:05):
So you want to make sure thatmost of your footage is below
that threshold If possible.
It's going to convert a lotbetter.
Shaun Raines (23:12):
Okay, good, good to know.
I want to also circle back.
You mentioned a few minutesback on keyword and intent and
intent categories.
A few minutes back on keywordand intent and intent categories
, I wondered if you would speaka little bit more and break down
.
I know that there are multiplecategories and within the
apartment world and multifamilyworld I'm sure it's similar to
(23:35):
other industries that you guysserve as well.
But I think it would be helpfulto kind of hear that breakdown
of where those categories areand perhaps, maybe, if you would
recommend that $5,000 budget,how much they should play If
they have bigger budgets,smaller budgets, how that
factors in of what you guyswould recommend in terms of
(23:58):
those categories.
Mike Shaug (23:59):
Yeah, absolutely so.
This is kind of more to Googlesearch, microsoft ads, seo.
As it relates to apartmentcommunities.
There are five keyword typesand four that every community
really needs to focus on, andI'll start kind of top of funnel
and work my way down.
The first is what we considerthe apartments general or
(24:20):
generic category, which isapartment Dallas or apartment
near me or new apartment or newcommunity?
Super vague that says whatcategorically but it doesn't
really tell us what kind offloor plan they're looking for,
doesn't usually tell us wherethey're looking for near me.
I mean, that's just a veryvague sort of search.
(24:41):
That's where the vast majorityof search volume is.
It's at that broad level.
It's people that are juststarting their search.
They're kind of throwing Googlea prayer and saying, hey, show
me, show me what you know, whatI want, so apartments near me,
and then hopefully the searchengine results answers your
question satisfactorily.
We tend to see that at that toptier level.
(25:02):
It's awesome if you can rank awebsite organically for that
level of keywords because it'ssuper competitive.
Typically, ilss are whatdominate that.
However, because Google forlocal business categories
prefers to rank local businessesover ILSs, in the apartment
(25:23):
category you can absolutely rankfor apartment near me over an
ILS for sure if the user is nearto you.
So from an SEO standpoint it'sgood to invest some effort there
, but we don't like to spend alot of our paid budgets there.
We tend to prefer to work on thenext three categories which?
The next one is apartments, georight, which is one bedroom
(25:45):
apartment, dallas Texas.
One bedroom apartment Highlandpark.
You know it's the product, it'sit's what and where,
essentially right.
And the next category and itkind of it kind of intermingles.
You have the floor planskeywords, which is the next
category.
That's the product keyword youwant to go with.
You have the floor planskeywords, which is the next
category.
That's the product keyword youwant to go with.
(26:06):
You always want to have a mixof keywords that are floor plan
specific plus the geo area.
Adding in the geo indication orthe neighborhood where the
property is located or near tojust is a massive increaser of
intent.
So that brings them a littlelower in that.
Funnel Apartments plus geoDallas apartments.
It's much better than thatgeneric category.
It's much more focused.
(26:27):
The next one down would befloor plans and then finally,
the last one is brand and wedon't spend a lot of money on
brand because you want to have alittle bit of brand defense.
Typically, 5% to 10% of yourpaid media investment will go to
brand, because when you spendmoney on your own brand traffic,
the CPCs for your competitorsthat are poaching your traffic
(26:49):
go up.
So even if just to make it moredifficult for people to eat
your lunch, it's wise to investsome money in brand.
And then, of course, this onecomes up all the time People
always talk about well, whatabout apartments with a lagoon,
which we actually manage, acommunity in Florida that has
the largest man-made lagoon in,I think, the country or the
(27:11):
world, so that would be a nicheterm apartments with sky roof,
or basically stuff that mostcommunities don't have like
super high end luxury features.
Apartments with indoorbasketball court, apartments
with saltwater pool, apartmentswith west-facing views and all
of those are amenities at onecommunity that we manage in
(27:33):
Manhattan that they're veryparticular about and some people
do look for it.
Usually not that many peopleare looking there.
So we tend to focus people moreon the floor plans and
apartments, plus geo keywordcategories, as being a much
better driver of the volume oftraffic that you need and
conversions.
But every community isdifferent, so you need to
structure the budget and thecampaign around what they are
(27:56):
specifically offering, aroundtheir specific floor plans and
whatever the specific nicheterms might be.
Shaun Raines (28:13):
Does the?
I'm kind of fascinated by the,these niche terms that would,
you know, obviously be appealingto people who are looking for
things that are like just alittle different.
Does that have any relationshipto, then, how the targeting
gets done at all?
Do you change things up alittle bit, or is there not
really much of a relationshipbetween the two?
Mike Shaug (28:30):
So you know, the more someone geo-indicates, the
less restrictive I have to getwith their targeting.
We typically are very tightlytargeted around our communities
because we find that about 70%of the leads in a normal leasing
season come from within like a10 mile radius.
(28:50):
Typically, that is typical.
That's 70% of people.
The other 30% are people thatare moving from out of town.
That massively skewed for ashort period of time.
After COVID, where literally theentire country basically
relocated twice, a ton of peoplecame to Austin.
They moved into one building,then they moved into the one
that they're going to be stayingin for a few years.
So in that you definitely wantto be open to targeting people
(29:14):
that are outside of your area,but what you want to do, what
you don't want to do, is have anational targeting that
basically says hey, if you're inthe United States and you're
bidding on the keywordapartments near me, we want to
show up for you.
That is so stupid, you willwaste so much money.
However, if someone is in LAand they're searching for you
know, hell's Kitchen two bedroomapartment, then my client in
(29:38):
Hell's Kitchen would love toshow up for that search.
So there's a right way to do itand a wrong way to do it.
However, I will say this andthis is kind of a funny
situation and a lot of peopledon't know that there are, I
think, seven or 11 cities in thecountry named Houston.
One of them is in outside ofWarner Robins in Georgia.
There's one in New Mexico.
That's crazy to think about,but that's an actual.
(30:01):
That one is less of a problemthan, say, del Rio.
We have 23 Del Rios.
There are so many differentcity names where you'll have a
main city like Chicago inIllinois, and then you have
Chicago in other parts of thecountry.
And here's the problem If youhave a national targeting and
you have a community that, say,is in Del Rio in Texas and you
(30:26):
have a national target, you'regoing to show up in the other 22
cities.
So you have to be very careful.
It's always important to look athow many cities or how many
other communities have the samename.
That's another problem is, alot of times community owners
are not the most creative people.
I have worked with eightwindermere at preserves.
(30:47):
I don't know what a windermereis preserving or whatever, but
I've worked with eight differentcommunities.
The last one was inPhiladelphia and you know
Vornado, vortex, like all ofthese different, like very
strange, very specific names,and there's like five different
communities in different Statesthat have the same name.
So you just have to be aware ofthat.
You've got to look for what'sthe geo I'm in.
(31:09):
How could Google confuse thiswith another city?
Because they want to, becausethey want to spend your money?
And how many other cities doesthis property have?
A really great example would bea community that we had in
Maryland I'm not going to saythe name because they had a huge
issue with rodents, infestation, insects, and it was
interesting because we actuallyhad another property that had
(31:31):
the same name in a verydifferent part of the country,
and Google would auto fill likeXYZ apartments, you know, rat
infestation or whatever.
So it's it's super importantthat you try to make sure that
Google focuses your spendallocation as close to the
property as you can and that youdo everything that you can to
try to think ahead of all theother places where Google could
(31:54):
waste your money.
Shaun Raines (31:57):
Yeah, wow, that's.
That's quite the story rightthere.
Mike Shaug (32:03):
We've seen it all here at.
Shaun Raines (32:05):
Premier, I can imagine, before I leave some of
these areas around targeting.
I don't know if you have anythoughts there on segmentation.
I know you've been talking alittle bit about that.
You've also mentionedretargeting here, perhaps
personalization strategies.
But before I move on fromtargeting, any other thoughts
(32:28):
there that you think areimportant, maybe that are maybe
best practice related.
Mike Shaug (32:29):
Yeah, there's a guy named Joseph Dane from Client
Boost and he popularized a termcalled the iceberg effect and
basically what that means iswhen you have all of these
different types of targetingaudiences, income levels, when
you have too much of it and it'snot focused, it can kind of be
a huge problem.
And you'll think that it's thisvery small part of the problem.
(32:50):
It's really all of these otherthings.
So segmentation and correctsetup is super.
A great example of something Isee done wrong 90% of the time
with our competitors is theywill have a floor plans campaign
that has the keywords forstudio bedroom apartments, one
bedroom and two bedroom and theproblem with that is that Google
is going to go after all ofthose people, but most of the
(33:13):
time the studios and one bedroomapartments lease up really
quickly and because you're youknow, but you'll still have one
bedrooms, you'll still havestudios and you need to always
market for them because you havethat turnover, you want to make
sure that you have all thekeyword product types or floor
plan types separated into theirown campaigns so you can say,
hey, I want to spend $1,000 ontwo bedrooms this month and 500
(33:33):
over here.
So that is definitely a bestpractice.
The other one is when,especially with remarketing and
this one frustrates me so much,especially with remarketing, and
this one frustrates me so muchis when I look into an account
and I see all users and that'sit.
All users is going into theremarketing campaign.
I'm like what the hell is this?
Usually what it is.
It's anyone that's been to thewebsite.
(33:54):
It's people that have bouncedimmediately.
It's everyone.
It's not bucketed into audiencebuckets.
So the best practice foraudience remarketing audiences
is hey, let's have all users,but let's have that's.
That's the catch-all.
We're not going to use it, it'sjust going to sit there.
The one we're actually going touse, if it's all users, is all
users that have been on thewebsite.
(34:14):
For our website standard time onsite or more, which is
typically about a minute and ahalf.
So meaning you're not going toremarket to people that just
left the website.
You could set a much lowerthreshold, maybe 30 seconds.
Some of us search websitesreally quick, but you want to
have a time threshold in therethat says we only want to stay
in front of people that havebeen on the website for 30
seconds or more.
So that's one area ofqualification and that would be
(34:37):
massively helpful.
But you're going to also wantto create an audience for
converters Anyone that fills outa form, a chat or clicks on a
phone call.
You want to make a bucket forconverters because you can
import that into your Google adsaccount and you can basically
take that audience and say hey,google, other people that are
like this converter category, wewant you to find more of them.
(34:58):
So that's a super valuableaudience signal that comes from
your traffic.
Find more of them.
So that's a super valuableaudience signal that comes from
your traffic.
And then the other one isdefinitely segment your
audiences into yes, have a floorplans, all catch all audience,
but have a one bedroom, twobedroom studio audience.
Individually, the audiencesizes will be small, but if you
can have basically an evergreenretargeting campaign for
(35:20):
everyone that is interested instudios and you're hitting them
with really high quality,creative and a great offer,
that's far more valuable thanhey, we're Windermere, something
or other.
We have floor plans, we haveone through three bedroom floor
plans.
It's like no one cares aboutwhat they're not interested in.
They want to be remarketed tovery precisely.
(35:41):
And in other industries, likeretail apparel.
The remarketing is what youlooked at, it's the car you
looked at.
It's the shoes you looked atthat are following you around.
But in apartment marketing it'ssuper broad, it's hey, you came
and spent one second on ourwebsite.
We'll show you all of thisstuff.
And it's just not veryeffective and it doesn't work
(36:01):
very well.
And the reason why thatfrustrates me is people don't
believe in it.
We have a lot of customersthat'll come on board and
they'll say hey, we don't wantto do YouTube.
Youtube is trash because itwasn't implemented correctly.
They think that ILSs are betterthan Google because no one sets
up their Google ad accounts theright way.
So yeah, I think that answeredthat question.
Shaun Raines (36:25):
Yep, I think so.
Yeah, that's fascinating.
So I want to ask you a littlebit about KPIs, for I guess
property managers or people in amultifamily you know what ones
would you say they should befocusing on when they're
evaluating how well paid mediais going for them or which ones
they even care about.
Mike Shaug (36:41):
So focusing, I guess , primarily on, like Google ads
and Microsoft ads.
You're going to want to have aCPC, ideally focused, not higher
than $3.50.
Ideally you're going to want tobe in the $2 to $2.50 range and
that's for search.
When you add in display trafficit completely muddies that.
(37:03):
So we really just do our CPCbenchmarks on search keywords.
So definitely want to be inthat sub $3.50 area, regardless
of where you are in the country.
The next one is you want tohave a CTR of like 8% or higher
Industry standard, I think, orthe national benchmark right now
(37:24):
is like 4%.
You want to target well abovethat because obviously if you
write more relevant ads they'regoing to convert better, you're
going to get more leads andleases.
So that would be the CTRbenchmark.
On the other kind of comparativemetrics, I mean there are a lot
of other KPIs that we talkabout, like impression share.
Most properties have a 10%impression share and that's all
(37:47):
they can afford, because if theywanted to get it to a 50%
impression share they would haveto spend $50,000.
So impression share issomething we report on but it's
not something that we reallybenchmark to.
But it's a good thing tocorrelate because sometimes we
can find out what the impressionshare is of a competitor.
So that's where it will bevaluable.
But the other main metrics thatwe really hang our hat on are
(38:10):
cost per conversion andconversion rate.
The industry benchmark rightnow for cost per lead for Google
ads is about 70 bucks.
We try to be under 40, um, andreally try to be under 30 as
much as we can.
And then the conversion rate.
You want to have a conversionrate of 10% or higher.
That would be.
Uh, those would be the KPIsthat we tend to look for.
(38:31):
Uh.
Shaun Raines (38:33):
I like that and I think it's important.
Even, um, you know, when you'retalking about reporting on
impression share, that has to bereally critical for helping set
expectations, with people to itor they don't realize some of
those key performance indicatorsthat should matter to them.
(38:59):
That just kind of helps set thetone, if you will, when you
realize a highly competitiveespecially, I suppose, for
people who are in larger markets, more metro markets, yeah, um,
where it gets even morecompetitive that I see an LA are
way more expensive than Naples,florida or Saratoga.
Mike Shaug (39:23):
The tier one markets Miami, chicago, la, new York
City, philadelphia, boston.
Those are very competitivemarkets and you can see CPCs
creep up really, really quickly.
Shaun Raines (39:35):
So that's why you want to kind of have that $3.50
rule how would you tell peopleto balance that need for quick
(39:59):
you know occupancy whilemaintaining, you know, a rent at
the level that you want youknow, obviously, if you're in a
business where you want thatrent as high as you can get it.
But how do you balance thatneed for quick occupancy and
keeping the rents where you needthem to be and want them to be?
Mike Shaug (40:10):
Right?
Yeah, that's a great question,cause a lot of times what
communities will do?
They will have rents,especially when the lease up is
happening.
They need to fill the building.
They need to get some revenueto meet debt service.
That's the thing is there's abank and there's a mortgage on
that property and you got to paythat mortgage within a certain
amount of time.
So you need to fill thebuilding.
(40:31):
You need something.
But the part with apartmentsthat is complicated is pricing
varies all the time and you needto make sure that you are
competitively priced for theproduct that you have to offer.
If your apartment has a lot ofawesome features, like a gym
that they would have to pay $50to $100 to go to, but you have
it on premise, you can chargemore.
(40:51):
If you have onsite parking orgarages, you can charge more.
But the worst case scenario isa community that wants to charge
top of market rents and theydon't have the product to back
it up.
But in a lot of lease upsituations a lot of communities
will just get as many people inthere as quickly as possible and
they'll double the rents nextyear.
But the problem that thatcreates is you basically have
(41:13):
two lease ups, you first got allthe people in and then you're
having to replace them.
So having you definitely it's avery fine balance.
You want to price ascompetitively as you can without
shocking people when theirrenewals come around.
So for like, basically therethere's two different stages of
property.
Right, you have occupied, whichis where they're 90% plus full,
(41:36):
and then you have a lease upphase and they have different
rules.
In the lease up phase youshould be spending a lot of
money to fill that building asquickly as possible.
Every two bedroom unit that youdon't have full is $5,000 or
$4,000 that you're not gettingthat month.
You are losing it that monthbecause you still have that debt
service.
So what we recommend is to gopretty aggressive in the lease
(41:59):
up phase.
You definitely don't want to bethe most expensive product in
the market.
Try to get your pricing as wellas you can get your rental
concessions in there.
That goes a long way,especially when the market is
kind of squeezed like it isright now.
But yeah, so a lot moremarketing upfront on the
lease-up side.
Once you hit that occupancynumber, you can massively reduce
(42:20):
your investment.
So if you have a lease-upbudget of, say, like $8,000, you
can probably bring it down tothree and that'll give you
enough traffic.
And what the hope is, if you,when you started your marketing,
you did the right thing and youdid SEO as well.
You invested in your backlinks,you invested in content for the
keyword you want to show up for, you invested in technical SEO
(42:43):
and you got your website as fastas that CMS allows, you are
going to have this very slowlybuilding amount of traffic and
hopefully, by the time you hitthe end of release up season,
organically you're getting 3000visits a month for free and that
will obvious that, becauseorganic traffic converts about
three X better than search,google search, paid traffic, you
(43:07):
want to make sure that you'reinvesting there and that you
always invest there.
The way I like to contextualizethe value of organic traffic is
it's about like every organicvisit is about 3x the value of
what your CPC is.
So if the average CPC for onebedroom apartment is $4 in
(43:27):
Manhattan, then every organicvisit is like $12, because
they're going to convert at amuch higher rate.
Yeah, so it's definitely superimportant to invest in SEO, but
the way we like to talk aboutSEO and SEM is SEM is hunting.
You always need it.
You always need to get specifictypes of traffic.
You are always going to have tofill the stubborn two-bedroom
(43:49):
units that won't lease up aseasily as the studios and the
one bedrooms, because they'remore expensive.
And that's where paid searchcomes in.
It's fast, it's hunting.
Seo is farming.
You plant the seed, you waterit, you pray to the Google gods,
you read all of the bullshitthat they put out about their
algorithm updates, you decidewhat you believe and what you
discard, and then you'reconstantly iterating.
(44:11):
You're constantly massagingcopy on the website, you're
getting links, you're gettingmore citations and hopefully
that collection of effort willbuild you up to a level of
traffic that can help with yourlease replacement next year.
So come on with properties atall levels.
We do a ton of lease ups and wealso do a lot of stabilized
(44:32):
properties, and there'sdefinitely SEO is a valuable
strategy for any property of anysize.
Essentially, what that'llguarantee is that you can reduce
and control your Google adspend and your other marketing
channels by having a lot oforganic traffic that's coming to
your website for your brandterms.
So that's kind of the hybridapproach.
(44:52):
That's the best case scenariowhere you have both types of
traffic running for you.
Shaun Raines (44:58):
Another fantastic episode, mike.
Really really great insightsshared here for the multifamily
industry Listen audience we have.
Once again, we found a goodhome for this episode to rest.
So we appreciate your comments,your questions.
We appreciate your feedback, soplease feel free to share it,
(45:20):
especially if you're consumingthis over on YouTube.
Drop a comment.
You can actually reach out andlet us know what you think of
this episode in ways that giveus insights and kind of our
feedback loop, of the thingsthat resonate with you and that
you want to know more about.
So don't hesitate to engagewith the content and let us know
what you're thinking.
If you're over there on YouTube, like and subscribe to the
(45:43):
channel and so you'll know whenwe're dropping new episodes and
other micro pieces of content.
And thank you for tuning in tothe POMCAST.
We'll be back real soon withanother episode.
Thanks, john, thank you, mike.
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