2022 wrap-up: To Spend or not to spend, and other year-end recommendations

So what should you do to market your property at this time of year? Let’s explore two options.

1. Spend more on advertising to try and get more exposure and conversions from the prospects that are still looking for an apartment.

2. Lower ad spend to improve cost-per-lease over the final quarter of the year since you probably would see a diminishing amount of returns for your advertising investments in the early winter slow season.

As always, it’s on a case-by-case basis. It might just depend on your current occupancy. Getting leads in your pipeline might still be essential, but if you are pretty set with 90-day occupancy exposure, getting a lot of new leads might not be as necessary.

Having data on LTV / CAC (Lifetime Value / Cost-Per-Customer) analysis can be a go-to for making these decisions. Even though your Cost-Per-Lease might be higher during these slower months, if you can keep that metric healthy enough during the year overall, it is still recommended to keep a healthy marketing budget to sustain leads based on your current occupancy needs. Our Kyzen Analytics software is a great tool for tracking and measuring cost-per-lease data. You can learn more about that from this previous post.

Dyverse is a big believer that “It’s all connected”, so reviewing your entire marketing funnel, from traffic generation to resident retention is recommended to make it through to the end of 2022 and into 2023 with the most healthy marketing and sales results possible.

Whether you decide to increase, maintain or lower advertising investments during the last months of the year, here are a few items you can be focusing on to maximize marketing lead generation, conversion and retention.

• Review your reputation scores and reviews to improve your prospect conversion rate, as well as resident retention rate. Reputation on listings such as Google Business Profile is a huge factor in conversion rates for potential prospects considering if they should become a resident of your community.
• Analyze your resident retention rate. If you have been losing occupancy out the “back door”, take a look at the reasons that might be happening. Resident survey data and market pricing surveys are recommended to do deep dives into why residents might be moving out at higher rates than anticipated.
• Reach out to existing contacts through lead nurturing campaigns and direct sales follow-ups. There are great tools and systems out there for lead nurturing and first-party contact list segmenting that Dyverse can recommend if needed.
• Review your website funnel and leasing conversion process. Do you have a quality traffic generation issue, or is there something wrong with the website or leasing conversion process? Benchmarking website conversion rates and lead-to-lease conversion rates is a great way to analyze this.
• Examine your 2022 budget vs actual spend to see if you can be more efficient next year. Continuous improvement of Return-on-Investment should be the goal and reviewing your budget vs actual reporting is a great place to see what worked during the year and find opportunities for improvement.

Dyverse wishes you a very happy holiday season as we close out 2022. Leasing results are always a high priority but don’t forget to take time to enjoy this wonderful time of year. As always we are here if you need any advice or solutions.