The buzz surrounding Social Media Marketing seems to grow louder each day. It is almost as folks think it is something you can buy off the shelf, some wonder drug. There is MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn. Ning, and several more. Then there are the book marking sites, Delicious, Stumble Upon, Digg and many more of those too. Then, top things off with the various Rating Sites, Yelp and Get Satisfaction, it all gets kind of complicated to follow, or does it? It isn’t as confusing as it sounds or appears.
At Urbane Apartments we have used Social Media Marketing Concepts and Tools to market our apartments. In fact, starting in 2005 we dropped all traditional marketing efforts in exchange for an Urbane MySpace site, an Urbane Facebook site, an Urbane You Tube site and an Urbane flickr site. Urbane Apartments and Urbane employees twitter regularly. To further integrate we started a Social Network site the Urbane Lobby where residents can meet and greet, trade pictures and videos and socialize on line. We manage and power a blog aimed at our residents the Urbane Blog, all designed around our target demographic local brand recognition.
Our Goal; “To provide our residents with an experience and value with a high enough return to create enough Customer Evangelists within our core resident base that they self rent our apartments.” We are working hard to lead our resident Influencers within our core resident base, and have transitioned most of our marketing budget inward, to further focus on our existing residents. Only good things have happened from this move. Resident retention has significantly improved, and we have created a forum and a field for the Influencers to participate.
Here are our Rentals Results for 2008
2674 Guest Cards
612 Tours
151 Rentals
Maybe not much different than your results from a more traditional marketing approach. But what I do think is worthwhile studying is that our labor cost per lease is 50% lower, which has caused a spike in our NOI at the property level, and we have moved Resident Retention from a paltry 35% to 64%! Obviously, that too helps spike the NOI at the property level. Certainly not all of this is attributable to Social Media, perhaps we have just improved at Blocking and Tackling, as we have really tried to drill down into the basics over the last eighteen months.
So, for me personally, Social Media is fun, entertaining and I have met a wealth of friends and connections. For our boutique apartment management business, it has become our only form of marketing, and we intend to expand that approach in 2009.
