Using Facebook Remarketing Ads to Drive Apartment Tours

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As Facebook continues to move away from its organic feeds for business, Facebook remarketing ads are becoming more and more relevant for the apartment space.

The tricky part with most Facebook ads for apartments is that it can be hard to figure out exactly how to target prospective residents. Some leasing managers think they can target prospects by using lookalike audiences similar to their residents and including people who Facebook marks as “likely to move.” However, targeting people in these groups can waste your Facebook ad dollars as these aren’t strong indicators that someone is interested in your property at this time.

The strongest indicator that someone is interested in your property is if they visit your site, so you want to be able to advertise to those people who are researching apartments and have visited on your site. How do you do this? Using the Facebook pixel to create remarketing ads for your apartments.

How the Facebook Pixel Works

If you’re not familiar with the Facebook pixel, it’s a tiny bit of code that you put on your website that connects to Facebook. You can then use the code to track visitors on your website, send Facebook ads to visitors who visited certain pages or completed a form, and track conversions from Facebook ads.

You’ll need to set up your Facebook pixel through your Facebook Business Manager Account as an administrator to that account. From there you’ll create the pixel and follow the instructions for pasting the code onto your website. If you want detailed instructions on setting up the code, here’s an in-depth article on setting up the Facebook Pixel from Social Media Examiner.

A key part of creating and using your Facebook pixel to track visitors on your site is to know what the goal is for your campaign(s).

Why Scheduling Tours Should Be Your First Goal

One of our clients found that 50% of their prospects who came to their property and completed a tour went on to sign a lease. The trick for them was to make it easy for prospects to schedule the tour, whether online or offline.

One of the ways you can invite past website visitors to schedule a tour is by sending them remarketing Facebook ads inviting them to schedule a tour. They can then either schedule the tour by using a Facebook lead ad or have the ad linked to a form on your site. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for people interested in your property to schedule a tour.

Type of Remarketing Campaigns to Create

We recommend starting with three different Facebook remarketing campaigns you can use to target visitors to your site and invite them to schedule a tour.

3 Facebook Remarketing Campaigns for Apartments:

Campaign #1: Remarketing to those who visited your site and didn’t schedule a tour

Audience: Those who’ve visited your homepage, floor plans, etc, but didn’t fill out the schedule a tour form.
Creative: Ads with time-sensitive specials, deposit specials, or highlighting your property’s amenities

Campaign #2: Remarketing to those who viewed a floor plan

Audience: Those who’ve visited a category of floor plan such as studio, 1-bedroom, etc, but didn’t fill out the schedule a tour form.
Creative: Carousel ad showcasing other floor plans for your property that are in the same category (studio, 1-bedroom, etc.) that they visited on your website.

Campaign #3: Promoting similar sister properties when someone visits one of the sites

Audience: Those who visited your property within the past two weeks but haven’t scheduled a tour yet.
Creative: If you have sister properties nearby, showcase them in an ad and invite them to schedule a tour at another property.

Fine-tuning Your Ads

Once you’ve set up your ad(s), you can test them to improve their performance. Try different creative to see what version leads to the most tour sign-ups. Since your audience is dynamic and constantly changing, you won’t have to update your Facebook ads as often as with your other campaigns.

Want more Facebook Campaign Ideas?

If you’re looking for more Facebook remarketing ad ideas for your apartment, check out our Multifamily Funnel Guide. This guide shows you 5 Facebook campaign ideas and teaches you how to match your ads to where your prospect is in the buying cycle to get the most performance from your ads.

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How to Streamline Your Apartment’s Facebook Reputation Management

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Learning how to streamline your Facebook reputation management for your apartments is an important part of your social media strategy. Your Facebook page isn’t just a webpage. It’s a tool that prospects and current residents use to communicate with your staff.

Whether a visitor has questions about your property, or a resident is trying to leave a review, they expect you to engage with their posts and reviews.

Facebook reputation management includes moderating and responding to posts and reviews. This can be a time drain if you don’t have the right strategy and tools. If you’re moderating for more than one property, it can quickly feel overwhelming. By streamlining your reputation management and moderation you can ensure you’re responding to communications quickly and according to brand standards without getting sucked into the Facebook time drain.

Create a Facebook Reputation Management Strategy to Streamline Your Efforts

The first thing you need to do to gain control over your Facebook reputation management is to set up your strategy. You want to be able to be consistent and attend to your prospects’ needs while respecting your leasing agents’ time. Here are some decisions you’ll need to make when crafting your strategy.

Choose your channel(s)

Managing many social media channels is hard. The key to success is choosing one channel, such as Facebook, to start and then add others if needed. So ask yourself: where are your followers most active and where do you already have a presence? What channel is easiest for your leasing agents to respond in?

For many properties this channel may be Facebook, but for others it may be Instagram or Twitter.

Decide who’s the best person to respond to comments

Your prospects and residents probably want to talk to a leasing agent at the apartment. The risks are that leasing agents can get busy or may not be added to notifications of new responses. If you have a large company with many properties you may also be concerned that your leasing agents stay on brand and tone.

There’s three response approaches you can take. The first kind is a top-down approach where someone from corporate responds to messages and posts. The second type is a bottom-up approach where only local leasing agents respond. The final type is a hybrid where leasing agents respond but their responses have to be approved or from a specific template.

Set a notification and response strategy

It’s important to respond to private messages and comments in a timely manner. First, this creates a better experience for potential and current residents. Second, Facebook typically rewards business pages that have a quicker message response time.

Yet you don’t want your staff spending all day with Facebook open waiting for comments. What you can do is set up notifications for new comments or reviews. Then decide how quickly you want your staff to respond to those comments. You can set up a contingency plan for who will respond to comments if the main leasing agent is busy or not at the office.

Design automated responses

The final way to streamline your posts, especially if you have multiple properties, is to set up templates for recurring questions and comments. Did someone give one of your properties a 5-star review? Get a notification and have an automated response. Is someone asking a generic question about your amenities? Have an automated response. This way you can keep your responses consistent and save your team time.

As part of your strategy, decide when to use automated responses and when to customize your responses to questions.

Finding Tools for Apartment Facebook Reputation Management

Once you have your strategy mapped out, it’s time to decide which tools you’ll use.

Facebook

You can manage your reputation management and moderation directly through Facebook. If you have many properties and pages, you’ll want to sign up for Facebook Locations so you can manage them from one interface.

Although Facebook offers its tools for free, there are some drawbacks. Notifications can be difficult to set up and receive. Permissions at the local and corporate level can be tricky to maintain. 

While you can send one general post to all of your properties, you can’t customize the post for each property. You also will need to go into the properties one by one to respond to comments or private messages.

Paid Software Solutions

There are paid software solutions such as our own Spark Social and other programs that let you moderate Facebook and other social media platforms from one interface.

With these platforms you can:

  • Customize moderation permission and access per property
  • Have one interface at the corporate level to see all comments and reviews from every property and respond to them all from one page. You can filter posts and reviews, which saves you hours of time.
  • Set up templates to quickly respond to posts
  • Get notifications for certain comments or reviews such as if someone posts a review less than 3 stars or someone has sent you a private message.

Start Streamlining Your Apartment’s Facebook Reputation Management Today

Managing your apartment’s Facebook reputation management doesn’t have to eat up your time or frustrate you. If you set up the right strategy and use the right tools, you can communicate right where you clients want you to be.

If you want help setting up your social media strategy or want to try out Spark Social, give us a call today at 317-934-2242 or fill out the form below for a free consultation.

What do you need help with?

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How To Run Multiple Apartment Social Media Accounts

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For apartment management companies, building a personal relationship on social media is a great way to convert prospects into leases and maintain a good renewal rate. Usually when a company has to manage Facebook for dozens of unique apartment communities, they’re stuck with one of two choices:

 

1 – Dedicate several hours to creating unique, engaging social media content for each location.

Or

2 – Miss out on connecting with potential prospects or current residents who might renew leases or refer you.

 

Both of those sound pretty awful, right? Fortunately, there are ways to approach multilocation social media that’s not a rock or a hard place. Here’s what to keep in mind when you have to run apartment social media on a large scale.

Use the Tools at Your Disposal

If you’re logging into each Facebook business profile separately to post social media updates, you’ve already lost the battle. In addition to the time you’re spending writing everything out for each location, you’re wasting time logging in and out of multiple accounts, and planning out each content schedule. That’s easily several hours each week depending on the number of properties you have.

Enlist the help of social media automation software. Services like Hootsuite, LavaSurf, and Buffer can eliminate that timesink, letting you manage all content scheduling from one central location. Say you want the same post published at roughly the same time to every apartment page – those tools can easily do so, in a fraction of the time it would take to do manually.

Any social media automation tool will have its own benefits and drawbacks. The one that best fits your company will depend on how many properties you have, the type of content you want to share, and how involved you want apartment managers to be. Figuring out that last one is an entirely different question unto itself.

Figure Out How Involved Individual Apartment Communities Should Be

For companies managing multiple apartment properties, there are basically 3 ways to manage social media:

  1. All social media is handled at the top, (i.e. “corporate”).
  2. All social media is handled by individual apartments.
  3. Both the individual apartment and corporate are involved.

There’s potential benefit to each choice. With social media handled at the corporate level, you can guarantee consistent voice, on-brand language, and scheduled content. Handled at the individual apartment level, you can guarantee truly unique and local content, and a better chance of engagement.

For the majority of apartment management firms, option 3 offers the biggest upside, but it needs some structure. Take the time to answer these questions:

  • Are the people submitting social media content at the individual apartment level familiar with company branding and messaging?
  • Will all individual apartment teams have the same access to publishing content?
  • Do you trust each team equally in their ability to push out regular, high quality social media content?

Depending on your answer to these, you’ll want to either increase or decrease certain employees’ involvement on social media. Using one of those software tools, you can set permission levels for users to vary how much input they have.

Vary That Content!

Creating unique and engaging content on social media is what helps build a relationship with prospects and current residents. If apartment managers are posting to social media, you’ll already have a steady stream of unique content. But if those managers aren’t involved, or they’re too busy with day-to-day work, it’s up to you.

Again, this is where a social media automation tool comes into play. More sophisticated tools like our own Spark Social will let you vary the copy, image, attached URLs, timing, and more on mass scheduled posts for multiple social accounts, giving the appearance of uniquely created posts. What’s more, varying the content across your properties can let you test out certain modifiers over time. That will let you figure out what imagery, words, and calls to action best resonate with specific audiences.

If this all seems like a lot of work, that’s because it is. But Resident Spark can help make that work easier, less time-consuming, and more productive. Schedule a demo today to see how.

Demo Resident Spark Today