Sometimes the Problem Isn’t Your Marketing Budget. It’s Your Positioning.

Case Study

When an apartment community is struggling with traffic, the first instinct is often to spend more money. Increase the PPC budget. Upgrade the ILS package. Add another advertising source. Launch another campaign.

Sometimes that’s exactly what’s needed.

But sometimes you don’t have a traffic-spend problem. You have a positioning problem.

And spending more money without recognizing that can mean paying to send even more prospects into a confusing customer journey.

I saw this firsthand with a Class A high-rise in Dallas.

I worked with a client whose beautiful Class A high-rise was struggling to generate the level of traffic we expected.

The property itself wasn’t the problem. The location wasn’t the problem. And before simply recommending additional advertising dollars, I started looking at the prospect journey.

That’s when something interesting became apparent.

The community had been named after a popular nearby Dallas destination.

From a branding perspective, the name sounded great.

From a search perspective, it created a problem.

There was nothing in the name that clearly identified the property as an apartment community. So imagine being a prospect who heard about the property and later searched for it online.

Instead of Google immediately understanding:

“This person is looking for an apartment community.”

the search could lead to an assortment of results associated with the destination itself—recreation, restaurants, other businesses and even competing apartment communities with similar names.

We had created friction before the prospect ever reached the property website.

We didn't need to change the brand. We needed to clarify it.

My recommendation was relatively simple.

We updated the property's DBA to include language that clearly identified it as an apartment community. The identity remained intact, but we gave both consumers and search engines more context about what the business actually was.

Then we addressed paid search.

Normally, I don't want an excessive portion of a property's CPC budget spent bidding on its own name. If someone already knows your property and searches for it specifically, I'd much rather have strong organic visibility capture that traffic for free.

But this wasn't a normal situation.

We had a brand-recognition problem.

So temporarily, we allocated a larger-than-usual portion of the CPC budget to branded keywords around the apartment community's name.

In essence, we used paid search not simply to generate clicks, but to teach the market—and reinforce in search—what this name represented.

An apartment community.

The impact was immediate.

Traffic increased.

More importantly, prospects searching for the community were much more likely to reach the destination they were actually looking for.

Over the following months, the property continued gaining momentum and ultimately reached its occupancy goal.

And the lesson has stayed with me.

Marketing isn't always about adding more.

Sometimes it's about identifying what's getting in the way.

Before increasing a property's advertising budget, I want to know:

Can prospects find us easily?

Does our name clearly communicate who or what we are?

What appears when someone searches for us?

Are competitors intercepting searches intended for our property?

Does our positioning make sense to Google as well as to a human being?

Is there friction between awareness and conversion that additional advertising won't solve?

Because if the answer to any of those questions reveals a problem, another $1,000 in advertising may simply make an inefficient system more expensive.

That's why I believe marketing leaders need to look beyond individual advertising channels.

Positioning, branding, search behavior, technology, customer experience and paid media don't operate independently. They are parts of the same customer journey.

Sometimes the best marketing decision is to spend more.

Sometimes it's to spend differently.

And sometimes the most valuable thing a marketer can do is recognize that the problem was never the budget in the first place.