Below, we go over three ways to market your apartment for under $100!

Apartment managers have a lot on their plate. From troubleshooting and housekeeping for units in their community, to actually finding new residents and ensuring that occupancy stays high, the list of responsibilities for an apartment manager can seem daunting, even to the most dedicated! Now, picture a moment where you’re really put to the test: How can you attract community members to engage with the property to help build your brand and ensure you keep events packed and units occupied? Today, we explore three potential ways to draw traffic to events in the immediate area and build a loyal following through events. Don’t worry— the marketing budget for each of these ideas is no more than $100.00!

Spend Your Budget in the Social Sphere

As users look less frequently toward old media to make plans and manage their calendars, instead favoring their smartphones over flyers, posters, and leaflets, apartment managers can take some pretty critical steps to help build some notoriety around their building by leaning on the same spaces that their target market is already using.

If you don’t have a big fan base on Facebook, fear not: This tactic can still be astronomically effective at helping your site and your building gain some serious traction. Recent studies by Buffer’s blog, which focuses on social media and marketing suggest that one average user may have at least 140 friends on average. This means that with just four shares, one piece of content could potentially reach an audience of 2.7m!

Using Facebook to market and advertise events is pretty easy, even for the social network novice. Simply decide how you want to promote the event and what makes best sense for your overall marketing objectives. There are three fairly distinct options for marketing an event that apply within Facebook’s advertising options: Promoting a post about the event itself, promoting the Facebook Profile for more likes, or pointing people to click through to a call to action directly on your website. Facebook makes it pretty easy to get the process started:

Once you decide the mechanism of advertising that you want to use, setting up the ad itself is pretty intuitive. Set the geographic location to advertise only to your immediate area. Make the maximum use of your budget by selecting an age-range appropriate for your multifamily business. Go one step further by limiting the ad to display to only those with an occupation listed. Getting set up to advertise on Facebook is certainly a quick process, but it can pay massive dividends for a low budget. The average cost-per-click on Facebook is only about $0.80, which pales in comparison to costs from other marketing expenses. This means that with a budget of $100, you could potentially garner about 2,500 impressions and drive an extra 125 visits to your event page!

Total Budget: $100

Email Drip Campaigns: Simpler Than It Sounds!

The nuances and technical prowess for an email campaign can sound a little intimidating for those who haven’t run email marketing campaigns on their own in the past. However, once you build your email list, there are plenty of ways to help drive qualified leads from your website straight into their new apartment.

There are email solutions out there that allow you to manage and operate an email list of nearly 10,000 contacts for the small price of about $50.00 per month. Create emails to help better market your property, and try testing them to your growing email list. Try to tackle something that’s timely and relevant to your area, even if it’s not directly related to renting: For instance, if there is a local marathon, breast cancer awareness walk, or an event at a nearby park, try writing an email to show your support and lure current tenants, prospective renters, and others back into the funnel.

But better than that, monitor the success of each email and guide the next steps based on the end user’s reaction. For instance, target a second email only to those who have opened your original email asking them to visit the property for a virtual tour, or entice them by highlighting some of the amenities of your building and the selling points for your best units. Pull them back into the site by asking them to read and comment on a blog post. Take it a step further; by targeting future emails only to subscribers who have acted on previous emails, you can get a powerful sense of what might be important to your prospective renters. Cater your content to focus on what matters most to them, whether it be the distance to the nearest shopping center, or the gym in the building.

Total Budget: $50.00

Enhance Your Emails with Impressive Images

So you may not be a PhotoShop wizard, but this doesn’t mean your emails need to be text-only. Free online tools like Canva offer users the chance to create beautiful, custom images that can adorn email headers, Facebook Cover Photos, blog headlines and more. Take advantage of tools like these to create stunning typographic headlines or calls to action, and take your emails from plain to powerful in just mere minutes.

Total Budget: $50.00 (for Email Subscription), $0.00 – $1.00 per image

There are plenty of ways to market your apartment, whether your budget is mighty or meager. For more information on apartment marketing, digital apartment marketing, or multifamily marketing in general, contact LeaseLabs — we’re happy to help.