Native Advertising for 55+ Communities
Native Advertising is a type of paid advertising that matches the look and feel of a publisher’s website. The intention is to look natural, organic, and, well, native.
We ran Native Advertising for a pre-leasing 55+ community-based in Florida from February 1, 2023-September 30, 2023. With Senior Living Communities, we often see avid news and long-form content readers as our top audience, so Native Articles are a strategic way to reach this audience.
We’ll dive into what Native advertising is, the strategy involved, both creative copywriting and the results achieved, and how to implement Native Advertising into your upper funnel marketing strategy.
Native Advertising for Apartment Marketing
At Digible, we run Native Advertising Articles, which appear as traditional banner ads on any given website. Once clicked, the banner ad takes you to a content landing page full of information about your property. Think brand storytelling to educate, engage, and explore features of your property and appeal to its location.
There are various reasons to add Native Advertising to your marketing mix, depending on your goals.
- Leasing Cycle Goals
- Pre-leasing/Lease-up properties
- New Builds/Renovations
- Rebranding
- Unique Selling Community Features
- Ultra Luxury Properties, Single Family Rentals, and 55+ Communities
- Desirable locations and/or historic features
- Non-Traditional Properties
- Co-working spaces
- Regional Properties (2-3 properties in a given city)
- Parent Property Management Company or Corporate Branding
Our team can curate Native Advertising articles depending on your goals to increase brand awareness and highlight the location and points of interest. The article is also available for the property to have on their website in the form of a blog to support SEO initiatives and organic search, which is why there may be backlinks in your article.
Learn more about Native Advertising for Multifamily in our Vlog.
Creative Ad Copy
We run Native Advertising for 90 days and then evaluate performance, and goals, refresh creative copy for relevance, and recommend whether to continue Native Advertising for 90 more days. With any creative services, brand storytelling is crucial to developing brand loyalty, trust, and awareness among future residents.
Senior Living Community Content
Our Native Advertisements are displayed as long-form articles (sponsored content) on various publication sites. Best practices include the article being 500-600 words, and clean copy with bullets, subheads, images, and/or video. Our copy strategy for our targeted audience, to attract renters on platforms where they are the most active included:
Highlighting unique features of the property and location.
Accessibility, such as showers with grab bars.
Resident events and activities.
Headlines and Performance
Headlines are crucial to be in favor of the algorithm that prioritizes top-performing headlines. Having around 10-11 headlines in various forms and 8 words or less. The headlines that evoke emotion and connect authentically with the reader have found great success.
Native Article Performance
2/1/2023-9/30/2023
Click Through Rate | Call To Action Rate | Average Time on Content | |
55+ Article | 0.34% | 8.90% | 32 seconds |
Digible’s Average | 0.38% | 8.94% | 73 seconds |
All Industry Average | 0.35-45% | 1.75-2.05% | 35-45 seconds |
Implementing Native Advertising
After running the Native Article for 6 months for a pre-leasing 55+ community we saw a high call to action rate, above industry average benchmark, and while the average time on content was in line with industry average, videos and high-quality assets can increase time on content.
Consider Adding Video
Video is a great way to engage your audience and showcase your property, thus increasing the audience’s time on content for your Native article.
Time Frame Running Native Advertising
While Native Advertising is a form of Paid Media, it does support organic search and does take time to establish brand awareness, hence our recommendation of running the article for a minimum of 6 months. Read more on how Paid and Organic Media Meet to Drive Engagement.
The Native Article demonstrated an above-average call-to-action rate of 8.90%, thus seeing a substantial increase in users visiting the website, supporting organic search, and branded search volume.
Supports Organic Search and Branded Search Volume
The article can also be repurposed on your website or other outlets, such as social media to increase search and website traffic.
Native Advertising: The Golden Era
Whether your community is 55+ or Single Family Rentals, Native Advertising is an excellent paid marketing initiative to add to your upper funnel marketing strategy, not only to create brand awareness but to complement other services, such as website content strategy, and SEO and organic search efforts.
Ready to get started with Native Advertising for your rental property? Get in touch with us!