Lead Generation vs. Awareness in Multifamily Marketing

One of the most important considerations for ALL marketers is lead-generation (performance marketing) vs. awareness or brand-building. In an ideal world, you'd only spend money where you're GUARANTEED a return on your investment. That is one reason why pay-per-lease is so popular among marketers in the multifamily industry; you only pay for signed leases. But as marketers, we don't live in an ideal world. We live in, perhaps, the messiest of worlds when it comes to attribution and following the prospect journey. In this post, I'm going to detail some of my thoughts on this tightrope.

Does Awareness Marketing Work in Multifamily?

Yes? I don't know... does it work for Coca-Cola? Does it work for Apple or Ford? We know that people can't make a decision to buy something they don't know about. And if people aren't aware your property exists, then of course they won't be leasing from you. But the question isn't whether people need to be aware of your property. It's whether awareness based campaigns that fail from a performance standpoint (cost per lead, cost per show, cost per lease etc.,) actually have a hidden positive impact on your performance metrics.

Here's an example: We've ran Meta ads through an agency. We've ran Meta ads in-house. We've tested awareness campaigns, lead-gen campaigns, remarketing campaigns, carousel ads, short-form video, long-form video, and the ROI is not there.

If you were purely operating off of performance metrics, you may determine that advertising on Meta is not worth it. But that's the ideal world I mentioned early. We know that Meta has massive reach and it's an incredibly success advertising platform with great engagement. So to write off Meta entirely isn't probably wise. Now the question becomes how much of your marketing dollars do you allocate to a platform that isn't targeting in-market renters? This is the predicament we're all in together. We know there is value but HOW MUCH?

Does Lead-Generation Work in Multifamily?

Yes, of course. This is super straight-forward. We know when we target renters based on their search query related to apartments that we're likely capturing a lead that is of value. We know when we advertise with the ILS that the majority of their traffic is people interested in living in an apartment either now or within a few months.

Now does generating awareness before someone is in-market, through a Meta ad, a comedy show at your property, or an influencer campaign ultimately reduce your cost-per-lease when it's all said and done?

I'm going to give you the best answer ANYONE has for this. Maybe. Because the truth is the prospect journey in multifamily is so long, bizarre, and even spontaneous that we may never truly know whether our awareness campaigns are doing what we want them to do.

Here's an example I'll give you to. In the last startup I worked for, I was working in business development (among many other hats). We went hard on influencer campaigns and nailed attribution so much so that we knew exactly where our leads were coming from. When I hopped on the phone and asked the prospect how they heard about us, 80% gave a different response to what we had on file. Now these were cold-hard links and we weren't doing enough stuff for them to find out about us in many other ways. It just goes to show that people themselves can hardly remember their journey into our clubhouse.

So if your leasing teams ask the prospect how they found us, my guess is you'll get a boilerplate answer like Apartments.com or Zillow. But you don't know 1) Whether that was first, second, third, fiftieth touch, or last touch. 2) If they even remember the actual ILS they used.

Bottom line: My rule of thumb is awareness or branding campaigns should be about 20% of the budget for our properties that can be branded. Your garden-style C-class property probably can live off of lead-generation campaigns.

If you want to learn more about multifamily marketing strategies and how to consider lead-generation vs. awareness platforms, you will love my Multifamily Marketing Course designed to help you understand and optimize your marketing for success.

Any comments below are welcome!