Sales and Marketing in the PBSA Industry

Promoting and selling your spaces

 

It is down to your teams to convey why students should choose your accommodation. What makes you unique, and what student experience will you be offering them?

You regularly need to think outside the box to help attract students and using peer-to-peer selling is a great tactic. You are always thinking of new ways to add value to the booking process. For example, include offering 'kitchen packs' to help students with their moving in process.

Your teams aspire to create a strong brand image that is backed up with happy students and full occupancy rates.

marketing and sales pbsa

Are you battling with these challenges?

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Quality of the website

Today's students are digitally savvy. They expect you to have a fantastic website where they can browse property adverts, view real-time availability, compare the latest prices and promotions, read property descriptions, look at quality pictures, see floor plans and even complete 360-degree virtual tours. Plus, they will expect an online application process so they don't need to manually fill in forms and they will want as much automation as possible. 

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Tracking sales

Making sales is the most important thing but if you can't track where they have came from then you won't know which sales and marketing efforts are working and which arn't. This could mean you are wasting time and money on some activities which aren't converting. 

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Repeat bookings

Repeat bookings are the secret to quick success in the purpose-built student accommodation market. A good student experience is extra important in your industry as you mostly attract 2nd, 3rd and 4th year students, whereas university halls mainly attract students in their 1st year. Therefore, repeat bookings by students are a huge potential that would help lower the cost per conversion, reducing sales and marketing spend.

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Negative user experience

If students have a negative user experience, this can affect how they feel about your brand. One of the biggest negative user experiences we tend to see is if the student website and booking engine don’t integrate. This regularly creates a slower application process, more manual tasks, and less automation which frequently results in a bad user experience for the student.

social selling

Social selling and recommendations

Having current students talk about how amazing your accommodation is, is key to success! Students will relate to their peers and trust their opinions, so this type of content is ultra-powerful. However, this isn't always easy to achieve. Students have busy lives so getting them to write reviews, take part in a testimonial video or share their positive experience on social media can be difficult.

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Legal changes

Due to some legislation changes, you can no longer charge admin fees for completing tenancy agreements. Many purpose-built student accommodation providers would have previously charged for this so this will affect many of your revenues.

Click the steps and explore our solutions for each step of the student journey...

Step 1

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Student Applications

Step 2

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Bedroom Allocations

Step 3

Student Experience Software

Student Contracts 

Step 4

Payments

Student Payments

Step 5

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Student Inductions

Step 6

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Student Requests

Step 7

Accessible data

Room Inspections

Step 8

parcel management system

Parcel Management

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