The point here is, I think that prospects group like product together with like product, and therefore, unless you have some hidden feature, the prospect knows your product offering pretty well before they ever arrive to your leasing office. Our UrbaneApts.com web site is loaded with pictures, so they can see, our apartment features without us telling them about them, or at least, not solely focusing on Apartment Features during the Tour / Showing.
Although our Urbane Product differs significantly from our competitors, product differentiation will only carry you so far. What it seems that prospects really have a keen interest in knowing are things about the neighborhood, where are the cool bars, who has the best burger, and where is the best dry cleaner.
Providing great Hyper Local Information can be another differentiation to help set your brand apart. We are just starting to experiment with this concept here at the Urbane Lab, but we are seeing some interesting trends. Mike Brewer recently also posted on the value of understanding and selling the local neighborhood, and we think he is right on target.
Maps, Maps, Maps
We blogged about the recent survey by the folks over at Lifehacker Blog, who conducted a survey titled The Five Best Apartment Search Tools. Of the five recommendations, only one is a Major ILS (Internet Listing Service) The most compelling piece of the article was that three of the five effectively used Maps.
On that map hunch, we quickly changed our UrbaneApts.com web site around, and added additional code to the Walk Score widgets we had previously installed, so that when you clicked on the page for a specific apartment community, the Walk Score for that community comes up automatically, and you can expand it to show everything in the neighborhood.
Now Comes Hyper Local
With that little task behind us at the Lab, our Urbane prospects can now easily see whats around, what they can walk to, and close they are to things. Now, lets add real value, like,
- What are the coolest bars
- Who has the best burger
- Who are the great merchants
When you stay at a hotel the concierge knows the best places to dine, shop and all things local, right, well so should you. We have set out with our Flip Video and we are setting up, by community page six to nine Urbane Best Picks, so our prospects don't have to guess.
We will have a single video with all six to nine venues per community on that community page, and we will do a like video for each community and surrounding venues. We are also embedding the venues logo on that community page, with a link to a single page mini web site that we set up that will provide a more detailed description of the venue, also laced with rich keywords and key search phrases. (Note to any ILS executive reading this, YES, We are letting the prospect leave our web site for a link to the local burger joint, but betting we just credited enough value with the prospect to cement the relationship, and be the prospects apartment comunity of choice by Not Gating them in)
We expect to be able to ad significant content to our web site, and thus enhance the SEO performance of our site. The point here is, what if your apartment started showing up on a Google Search for Best Burgers in (Your Town) Will you garnish more rentals, we think so, but think about the extended Brand Recognition, But mostly, you become the Hyper Local Expert for your Prospects and Residents, which is priceless,
