Apartment Marketing; Your Blog Content

Good Morning Apartment Marketing Friends!
I like Saturday mornings a lot, as it provides time for thinking and pondering new ideas. I thought that the conversation over on #AptChat yesterday was pretty interesting. How quickly the conversation has shifted from social media won't scale for apartment operators, to now everyone, or at least most in the chat seemed in agreement of the value of blogs for apartment communities.

Will It Scale
Just as recently as a few months ago we were getting significant push back from the apartment marketing consultant pundits when we hailed Social Media WILL Scale for Your Apartment Community. That is the wonderful thing about basing your direction on results as opposed to theory. We have tested lots and lots of different ideas and Apartment Marketing Experiments here in the Urbane Lab, first on our own apartment portfolio before taking ideas to the market.

Change The Conversation
So, the one point that struck me so from the #AptChat, was the focus on blog content type, meaning original verses repurposed content. This subject draws a lot emotional from folks. I received multiple DM's during the chat from a variety of viewpoints regarding content type ranging from words like "fake", "disrespectful to the industry", "totally disappointed", all of which are pretty afar the mark, and are what happens when folks insert more theory than fact, or actual experience.

My colleague Todd Dubner at NCI, the parent company behind behind the Digital Sherpa Products, Community Sherpa, Design Sherpa and CRE Sherpa, sent an email yesterday that is spot on, and well articulates a solid blogging strategy,

We have an opportunity to change the language. What we do is content curation – it is neither editorial nor is it repurposing. Curation involves a process of selecting and then making content relevant to our community of interest. We are not “bloggers” in the traditional sense, composing original thoughts and posts. We should start sewing the language into the market discussion wherever possible.

This Content Curation topic will take on a whole new meaning as the Apple iPad unfolds, and we all start to consume media in new and different ways. Steve Baker has an interesting post this week about how the Huffington Post got 410 million page view last month.

At the media panel at the Webtrends conference this week, Huffington Post's chief technology officer, Paul Berry, described some of the methods. Every hour, editors see how the traffic that hour compared to the same hour a week ago. The site is a laboratory for so-called A/B testing, where stories are played against each other to see which draws more traffic--and how long each story should stay on the front page.

The Apartment Marketing Takeaway
It isn't about where or how your blog content originates and aggregates to your blog site. It is about providing content relevant to Your Community of Interest, meaning your Residents. That really isn't a new concept either, providing something of value to your Residents, shouldn't that be the core of our Apartment Marketing Campaigns?

We would love to hear your thoughts on this content debate,

Apartment Marketing: Increased Web Traffic = Increased Rentals

Good Morning Apartment Friends!

I wanted to get back to a conversation that began to develop around web site conversion ratios for marketing apartments, Does Increased Web Traffic Result in Increased Rentals, and how that relates to Renting More Apartments. One thing that is pretty clear, there doesn't seem to be an agreed upon set of metrics, but I sense the issue is broader than that.

I spend a fair amount of time with Internet marketing folks, unrelated to the apartment business, that specialize in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) That group has a completely different paradigm of what a web site is used for and how they should operate.

It seems that most folks conducting apartment marketing don't really put much emphasis on web site traffic, and more specific, the direct correlation between increased web site traffic and physical traffic / guest cards. Is it just an electronic brochure?

Your Web Site IS Your Electronic Leasing Center

A lot of apartment marketing folks and property management folks put a lot of effort into their presentation. Be it corporate ensembles, brochures, groomed tour routes, and even cookies out on the counter.

But what if your leasing center was actually the 2nd or 3rd interaction with your prospect, not the 1st? Because it likely is, irrespective of if you believe it. Prospects shopping and buying habits have and continue to change. And IF you would focus more on your digital presentations, and expanding your digital footprint, you would also see a direct correlation to increased web traffic and increased physical traffic / guest cards.

How to Measure Web Site Conversion for Apartment Marketing

While this will likely be a series in of itself, we are going to start posting some basic, rudimentary web stats, and attempt to create some benchmarks metrics and ratios. Here is our starting list. We welcome constructive feedback on how you are measuring web site conversion for your apartment marketing campaign.

1. Total Web Traffic per month
2. Total Guest Cards per month
3. Delineate and separate Walk In Traffic and Phone Traffic from Total Guest Cards, which should roughly equal web traffic verses physical traffic metric and conversion factors.

While we recognize this is a broad brush approach, it will start to establish some basic benchmarks for measuring and increasing web site conversion.

We welcome your comments, and how you may be measuring web traffic,

Apartment Marketing: Paragon Properties Moves the Google Needle

Welcome to Episode #3 of the series on our interviews with Paragon Properties, a regional property management company, managing what was 4,500 units in SE Michigan that has now grown to 7,500 units

Paragon Properties has entered the Apartment Social Media Marketing space in a big way. (Full Disclosure; Paragon Properties is a client) We will be checking in with the folks at Paragon with a bi monthly series for a candid conversation about what is going right and what isn't going so well on their Social Media quest.

Just so folks know what our promise to Paragon was when we took this project;

Our target and performance goals for 2010 for Paragon Properties:
• Increase Web Traffic by 60%
• Increase Physical Traffic, (Guest Cards) by 20%
• Decrease Market Costs by 30%

How Are We Doing
In checking on our progress with Google Analytics for the Paragon Properties Web Site, we are pretty excited about our results so far. We launched the Paragon Life Blog and the Paragon Patio.

Although the Blog Site just went live in late December, we have just under (100) posts up, with rich keywords and tags. Already, Paragon Properties are coming up high in Google Page Rankings, but the cool news is that month over month results from when we started the campaign in September, Paragon Properties Web Traffic is UP 70%!

Enjoy the Video, as Justin and I bang around ideas,

Apartment Marketing; Speaking at NAHB

Looking forward to heading to Las Vegas next week to participate in a panel at the International Builders Show, titled Social Networking Using Facebook, Blogs and New Media to Market Your Apartment and Condo Communities

Social Media Marketing is all the buzz. It works, and it is here to stay. Learn about the effective use of Blogs as a great way to create Engagement and Community with your customers.

Join me (Eric Brown), Jack Williams of Kairos Development, Michelle Betchner of Alliance Residential and Mitch Levinson of Relevance Marketing and PR for this hour long Social Media Marketing Seminar at the International Builder Show in Las Vegas Wednesday, January 20 – 9:00 – 10:00 a.m. at The Apartment and Condo Meeting Place, North 254, Level II

Follow Eric on twitter, facebook, LinkedIn

Eric also writes for Digital Sherpa Blog, Multifamily Insiders, Search Engine Guide

Apartment Marketing: Measuring web traffic conversion.

Over the past couple of weeks the conversation on Apartment Marketing Gone Digital, which is a weekly Pod Cast with a handful of us in the industry every Tuesday evening, has started to drill down into how we are, or how we aren't measuring web traffic conversion on our apartment community web sites. Our sense is most apartment operators have no clue what their conversion numbers are, or even where to start to establish what the metrics should be.

Do You Know Your Numbers

It seems like there is consistent industry agreement on a couple of key leasing ratios and conversions, those being;

1. Traffic to Tour Conversions
2. Tours to Rental Conversions

And, even if the data is wrong, most property management companies think they know where the source of where the traffic is coming from. So there you have it, to increase rentals, just buy up more stuff from the highest producing traffic sources right? We think there is a better way, by Moving the Google Needle, and Enhancing Your Google Page Ranking, Increase your web traffic, and leasing traffic will follow proportionately.

Your Web Site

But what about your web site, and maybe you have just launched a blog, and what if you are now active on twitter, and also have a facebook fan page, what are those numbers, and how do they fit into the metrics you need to measure.

Arguably your blog, twitter and facebook could

be deemed social media marketing, soft marketing, relationship marketing or whatever the buzzword of the day is. I suggest the follow view.

Lead Them Through the Tunnel

We view our Social Media Marketing efforts as a conduit to tunnel the prospect to our website. For us, nothing happens, meaning we aren't renting an apartment until we secure a Guest Card.

What Are Your Web Site Numbers

1. Are you paying much if any attention to your web site traffic?
2. Do you know your the basic web site numbers, Monthly Visitors and Monthly Page Views
3. How often do you check your web site analytics?
4. Do you know where you show up on a Google Page Rank?

Before we dive into the whole conversion conversation, these basic metrics must be established and maintained

Apartment Marketing; Free Shuttle Service for Residents

We have been talking about Partnership Marketing and the effects it will have in 2010 here at the Urbane Lab and want to provide our readers and following with examples of how it can work and the benefit it can provide to your apartment marketing program.

We just finalized a deal at Urbane Apartments with The Night Moves. The Night Move is a bus that runs on B20 biodiesel and is partnered withcarbonfund.org to balance out the remainder of their carbon footprint.

The bus runs every Friday and Saturday night from 6pm to 3am, and will make custom stops at (8) Urbane Apartment locations that are outside of the city of Royal Oak, and take Urbane Residents and their guests to Downtown Detroit, Downtown Royal Oak and Downtown Ferndale. As you can imagine, Urbane Residents are thrilled to be able to head to dinner, bars and nightlife entertainment and not have to drive.

Shoulder Your Marketing Costs
Custom pick up like this add a ton of value to the individual properties, however the costs associated are completely out of reach, right, well actually no. Partnership Marketing works because two or more businesses each have something of value for each other. Urbane, like lots of other apartment operators have something that restaurants and bar owners are looking for, customers.

When we made the link and connection between the bus operator, the apartment operator and the restaurant and bar operator, and leveraged our Urbane VIP relationships, we were able to provide a significant service to our residents, at NO Cost to the property.

It Has To Work For Everyone
The dedicated Urbane Bus, which will be completely wrapped with our logo and brand, will also include the logos of our Urbane VIP Sponsors of this program.

What bar owner wouldn't want a bus load of young professionals going out for the night dropped off in front of their venue? Win/Win

What apartment operator wouldn't want a fully wrapped bus with their logo all over it pulling up in front of the busiest bars and restaurants in town every weekend? Win/Win

Make Free Work For You

And, when coupled with several venues we were able to achieve an agreement satisfactory to all parties. We expect to have the program fully launched by March, and did we mention at no cost to the properties, or the residents!

Think Outside the Box
This is just one example of how Partnership Marketing can work for you and your apartment community, but you need to shed old ways of thinking. The marketing dollars of yesterday have evaporated from most operating budgets.

We will keep you posted on the results of this Urbane Lab Apartment Marketing initiative. We would love to hear your feedback and any new ideas you are trying.