What are your company goals regarding marketing spend on the ILS category over the next 12 months?

Hi, everyone! Doing a little research in preparation for a panel discussion, and would love input from the marketers in the group: What are your company goals regarding marketing spend on the ILS category over the next 12 months? Thank you!

Depending on the market, I sometimes use an ILS to compliment my PPC so that I’m not over spending unnecessarily. Overall in the past two years I’ve changed most of our plans to be driven solely on website performance. Your brand is the best brand to introduce yourself to prospects.

ILS companies spend the most in search optimization, making them a critical part of our marketing plan. Plus, no one types in “ABC apartments” when googling. If you’re going to try to show up at the top, you have to use broad keyword searches like “apartments in Orlando,” and everyone else, including the ILSs, are already spending money on those keywords. When everyone is trying to buy broad keyword searches like that, the price for your SEM gets driven upward.

Major problems in this industry are that we:
1. Don’t answer the phone
2. Don’t reply to leads effectively
3. Don’t follow up the way we should
Then we are like.... “why isn’t our advertising working?

The best and most truthful response.

Drive traffic to your website with SEO and PPC. Invest in your brand rather than driving traffic to an online directory (ILS) where all of your competition is.

It’s funny. When you look at a typical apartment property, you only need 6 or 8 new leases each month. Just go find them. One teacher, one nurse, one mid-level manager... Invest in your brand and your property.
ILS’s can be beneficial, but I feel they are a topical solution. If your property sucks and your staff sucks, your results will suck.

Yes! Too many people think the ILS should close the deal for them. That line of thinking doesn’t make any sense.
Our industry as a whole needs to look at the hospitality industry for guidance. Hotels show up everywhere and can be booked from almost any website. We are so far behind!

Your online brand( Ratings and Reviews) will suck, and that factor is now the first stop in the the prospect's sales process. Results follow brand - good or bad.

Yelp. I’ve subscribed to Yelp, the paid model. Most consumers trust Yelp reviews more so than any other. That’s what the Yelp person told me, he had some slick stats to back it up.

I love Yelp

One thing I have figured out a long time ago is this business is not nearly as complicated as people want it to be.

My goal is always to stay full, build waitlist, and not use the ILS. Going on about 4+ years of doing just that for two properties. I do realize that doesn't work for everyone but...

We know that over 40% of customers looking for an apartment end up on an ILS before the end of their search.
Even if you generate only one lease per month (you know you’ll generate more than one lease per month) your ILS has paid for itself. Yes, Full disclosure: I previously worked for a company that sold ILS to Multifamily so maybe I’ve been drinking the Kool Aid!!! Lol

I blocked Yelp's number. They cold called me and wanted me to drop everything to listen to their presentation, took me to a site showing some stats on the average yelp user/visit - emphasis on "most users make a purchase within hours" and "average income over 100k/year." First of all, almost no one in my market who makes over 100k a year is living in an apartment. That's well above the median income where I live and we're not a big metro area where your options are to live in an apartment or take an hour or more to get to anything. Second, the fact that a large percentage of users make a purchase quickly is obviously due to the fact that they're saying "I'm hungry, what's good to eat around here?" They also put a lot of emphasis on being able to showcase our pools when every apartment community in my market has a pool? At least do some research before you try to get my money.