3x Innovator Award Winner
GRO wins the 2022 Student Housing Business Innovator Award for Best Mobile Marketing Campaign for the third year in a row.
GRO Knows Student Housing
Digital marketing & creative Services
The hunt for the perfect student housing community can be an epic journey, often spanning weeks, even months. To win in this game, you need an omnipresent marketing force that ensures your community is the constant in their decision-making voyage. This is how we win and retain students.
Paid Search Advertising
Be present when students search for terms relevant to your company on search engines.
SEO
Climb the search engine rankings so you can be discovered by students and their parents.
Social Media Advertising
Using Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok to engage and influence students.
Programmatic Display
Generate awareness for your property via websites, apps and streaming services.
Geofence Advertising
Serve ads to students who physically dwell at competitor properties and University POIs, and track walk-in conversions. Addressable also available
Streaming Radio Advertising
Serve ads to students on Spotify and Pandora.
OTT / Connected TV
Serve ads via SmartTV through today's most popular streaming services like Hulu and more.
Website Development
Beautiful, mobile-friendly, search-optimized WordPress websites that drive conversions.
Creative Services
Turning your vision into reality. From branding to collateral, and everything in between.
Why go with GRO?
When it comes to driving results, GRO doesn’t just hit the mark, we set it. Our mastery in designing powerful digital marketing campaigns translates into tangible performance, consistently bringing high-quality leads that supercharge your lease rates. Besides performance, here are a few other reasons why the best owners and operators in the industry choose GRO.

Proactive

Responsive
Your success is our mission, and it doesn’t end with the sale. At GRO, we’re always there for you, whether it’s to answer a quick question or to address a challenge promptly. We ensure you feel supported and valued, every step of the way.

EducatioN
We’re not just experts in digital marketing – we’re educators, too. We demystify the complexities of digital marketing, explaining the “why” behind each tactic and how they will benefit your community. We believe in a collaborative approach, analyzing data together and making informed decisions that will drive your success.
Your data. Your time.
GRO believes you should always have full access to your data so you can have a clear understanding of the health of your marketing efforts. Our reporting software features a beautiful, customizable dashboard that displays the data that matters the most to you and your key stakeholders. Need to dive deeper? No problem. We have the ability to pull custom metrics from hundreds of different advertising, analytics and data sources.
Most popular data connectors: Google Analytics, Google Ads, Meta Ads, Snap Ads, TikTok Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Amazon Ads, Spotify Ads, YouTube Ads, Google My Business, SimpliFi, Basis, CallRail, Bing Ads, Salesforce, HubSpot
Our friends
Honored to work with the best in the student housing industry
Student Housing Marketing FAQ
It varies by market, but all branding and creative elements (logo, renderings, marketing collateral, fence signage, and website), should be launched three months before leasing begins. This will provide your new development enough time to generate awareness and build frequency with students and parents.
It all depends on the market. Some university leasing seasons begin in the late summer before classes begin where others begin the following January of the academic year. For most markets, brand awareness and SEO start in the summer and the full marketing program is launched in the fall. It’s very common for student housing communities to increase marketing spend and launch new marketing tactics in the spring semester as well as the summer semester to make a final push.
It is very common to reduce or pause investment and marketing tactics when a student housing community reaches 100% occupancy, but certain marketing channels should run continuously. Budget should always be allocated towards Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to improve or sustain your organic rankings, as it is highly likely that your competitors are continuing to perform SEO on their websites.
The most common student housing websites feature six pages including the following pages: Home, floorplans, amenities, gallery, FAQ and contact.
Any goal or event on your website where a prospect’s information is submitted should be tracked and labeled as a conversion. This includes form fills, click to calls, applications, tour schedules and live chats. Engagement events such as time on site, pages per visit and “get directions” link clicks are also important metrics to track, as they are all positive indicators that a conversion is probable in the future.
We recommend allocating a very small portion of your overall paid search advertising budget to target your property name (branded keywords) for the following reasons – being able to switch information such as availability and specials in your listings, having a presence while your new website organically climbs the Google rankings and defending from competitor properties.
GRO has several clients running successful TikTok campaigns, but this answer varies depending on the location of your community and target university. As of May 2023, TikTok’s minimum location targeting (DMA) is loose in comparison to Meta advertising, so prepare to invest more money to reach your target audience. In addition, TikTok’s minimum daily spend is $20, which is significantly higher than other social ad platforms. We recommend only investing in TikTok advertising if you have a healthy budget and are already investing in the other core digital tactics (paid search, SEO, Meta advertising, geofencing).
This has always been a bit of a controversial topic. To put it simply, if you have an amazing on-site leasing team in place that you have confidence in showing the value of the property, withholding that information could be of benefit (especially if your rates are high for the market). On the other hand, if your on-site leasing teams struggle with converting a prospect to a resident, putting pricing online can help with finding future residents who are ready to make an informed decision. Since not all students that are leasing these apartments are physically present, they are likely to rely on the information they find on the property’s website. If rates aren’t there, they may just move on.