Crystal Tolen has been around the block with marketing tools that promise to generate qualified renter leads, and she knows the effort it takes to drive online traffic to her properties.

Four years ago, she was recruited by Tulsa-based property management company Case & Associates to help ramp up its digital marketing efforts; they wanted to tap her social media and content marketing experience.

“Our new leadership was really interested in innovating and tackling the beast of digital marketing,” Tolen recalled.

Today, she leads Case & Associates’ marketing and property performance, overseeing 90 properties in five states and directly managing the operations of 20 properties in three states.

When Tolen first joined Case & Associates, there wasn’t a digital marketing strategy in place. As she started to create one, she met with vendors who offered lead generation services, social media guidance or general marketing expertise, but no single solution or strategy to bring it all together.

“We knew where we wanted to go, we just didn’t have the technology to take us there,” Tolen explained.

Instant gratification

A year ago, Tolen was faced with a flood of vacancies all at once. Leases were beginning to expire a year after The Reserve at Elm — one of Case & Associates’ new properties — opened, but occupancy was already low at around 80 percent. To top it off, it was all happening during the rental off-season: November through February.

Tolen had heard of Zillow Group Rentals and reached out to see how the website could help her generate results as quickly as possible. Her business consultant told her about its recently launched Boost advertising program, which offers premium ad placement for properties looking to accelerate leads. For the price, Tolen found it to be affordable and worth a look.

“I want qualified traffic, and I want it now — I mean yesterday,” Tolen asserted. “After I tried Boost, the property’s on-site staff called me immediately saying, ‘I don’t know what we did, but…’ Instant results!”

Today, The Reserve at Elm’s occupancy is near 98 percent. Tolen credits her Zillow Group Rentals investment with making a significant difference in the property’s performance.

“Typically, we don’t turn over more than 5 to 6 percent of the property per month, but we got bit,” she admitted. “That’s why we were sold on Zillow Group in the beginning: I saw the instant results. Boost helped stabilize that community.”

Quality versus quantity

Tolen noted a key difference in the renters who connected with Case & Associates communities through Boost-generated traffic: They were ready to sign leases immediately.

“Some people go to Zillow to browse and might not be ready to rent,” Tolen pointed out. “We lease more of the Boost leads because Zillow filters out the browsers and sends us qualified renters.”

Numbers don’t lie

When Zillow Group Rentals later launched Boost with Precision Targeting — which pinpoints renters on Facebook with messaging based on their Zillow, Trulia and HotPads search behavior — Tolen decided to try it.

“I’m a huge believer in social media and we see a lot of results from it,” she noted. “Zillow Group already sent us highly qualified traffic, so when they added social media retargeting, we decided to see how it worked.”

For a 30-day trial run, Tolen chose The Remington, a community in Wichita, KS that struggled for qualified traffic to boost its occupancy rate of 89 percent. When she evaluated the results at the end of the month, Tolen found that Precision Targeting generated 20 percent of the property’s overall website traffic through the Facebook ads — and the per-lead cost was notably less than what she paid for other pay-per-click lead generation tools.

“I was initially a little hesitant because of the price,” Tolen admitted. “But when I looked at the analytics, the numbers don’t lie. It worked for us.”

Most recently, Tolen opted to reshuffle her marketing dollars to conduct another 30-day experiment. This time, she wanted to see how two properties — one a lease-up and one stabilized — would perform using Zillow Group exclusively.

“We were never going to know unless we tried, so we pulled off every other ILS but Zillow for these two communities,” Tolen explained. “Our success with Zillow is proven, so we thought, ‘Let’s pick a few properties and try it.’”

Her sales executive created a custom URL referral report on Google Analytics so Case & Associates could better track its Zillow Group investment and Tolen could take a deep dive into her performance metrics.

Before the Zillow Group experiment, Scissortail Crossing, the lease-up property located in Broken Arrow, OK was 18.6 percent occupied with 65.7 percent availability. After the experiment, which included Boost with Precision Targeting, the occupancy rate more than doubled to 39.6 percent and availability decreased to 44.3 percent.

The second property in the Zillow Group experiment — Tuscany Hills at Nickel Creek in Tulsa, the stabilized property — was 95.3 percent occupied. After 30 days of exclusive Precision Targeting (Tolen did not apply Boost at Tuscany Hills), occupancy reached 98.1 percent.

According to Tolen’s Google Analytics source/medium report for the experiments at Scissortail Crossing and Tuscany Hills, Case & Associates URLs were the top three most visited sites followed by Zillow Group, which generated what Tolen categorized as high-quality leads.

“We’re saving money and improving occupancy, and we haven’t even done a Boost at Tuscany Hills, so that’s kind of cool,” Tolen remarked. “They’re both doing wonderfully.”

Tolen’s goal is to have a single ILS that aligns with her SEO and SEM efforts. When she started the experiment, the Google Analytics source/medium reports for all 86 Case & Associates properties revealed that Zillow Group was consistently in the top five sources for quality leads — and always in the top three if Tolen used Boost, which she found “impressive and eye-opening.” The experiment confirmed that Precision Targeting could deliver the goods — and save money — as a single ILS.

“I look at Google Analytics, and I can see Precision Targeting working immediately,” Tolen observed. “So for lease-ups, we do it immediately and for several months until they’re full.”

Technology to take you there

For Case & Associates, one of Boost’s biggest advantages is the ability to turn it on when traffic is needed most, and off when occupancy goals are reached. When she first tried it at The Reserve at Elm and The Remington, Tolen saw instant results.

“I’m about to do another round of Boost with Precision Targeting at The Remington, because Wichita is kind of a soft market,” Tolen related. “But honestly, Boost is the first thing we do now when we have a property that’s suffering in any of our markets.”

Tolen has used Boost at more than 30 properties and is starting to test Precision Targeting elsewhere. Case & Associates currently lists 59 out of its 86 properties — more than 68 percent — on Zillow Group. While Boost isn’t the only lead generation tool she uses, it’s the most efficient and cost effective one in her arsenal.

“When a property is struggling, the on-site team comes to me and asks, ‘Can we get a Zillow Boost?’” she remarked. “It’s the first place we go now.”