Executives of small-to-mid-sized apartment companies face unique challenges when trying to improve their online marketing. Recognizing the success larger REITs have in this arena, smaller companies often don’t have the budget or manpower to achieve the same success.
The Apartment Internet Marketing Conference (AIM) delivers expert insights geared towards REIT-level marketers, as well as part-time marketers and any one-person marketing “teams” looking for ways to bring more leads through the door. Presenters describe proven, effective methods they employ to improve their online reach and efficiency.
For more insightful strategies on Internet marketing, be sure to attend the 2011 AIM Conference, May 2-4, at the Hyatt Regency Resort and Spa in Huntington Beach, Calif. Visit www.aimconf.com.
As a preview of what attendees will learn at AIM, here are a few tips for successful Internet marketing strategies:
Renewal Marketing: 30 Days Doesn’t Cut It
Industry practice is to send a 30-day renewal notice to residents before their lease agreement expires. Larger companies are experiencing more than 10 percent jumps in renewals—at market rents—by creating automated programs to deliver renewal offers 90 days out. This targeted, deadline-specific renewal offer provides some urgency and a reason to renew. By centralizing these efforts and using robust Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems to keep track of residents and prospects, it becomes easier to create offers and manage responses. Unfortunately, the days of free online CRM systems are over.
However, there are lightweight, low-cost CRM solutions available for about $30 a month from SugarCRM, MagnaCRM, HighriseHQ and even Salesforce.com. Or, if your portfolio is small enough, you can just set up rules and groups in your e-mail program to track what you send and what you get back.
Resident Reviews Are Here to Stay—Embrace Them
The content on many review sites is often integrated into search engine results, including Google’s business listings. Pick one review site and leverage it for your own good by paying to participate and taking 20 minutes a week to actively respond to reviews. Encourage satisfied residents to post a review in exchange for a gift card. Be diligent and monitor other review sites monthly to make sure you’re not missing an opportunity to solve a problem. Sites to consider include your local Better Business Bureau site, Yelp.com, ApartmentRatings.com, ApartmentReviews.net and DoNotRent.com. (RentWiki.com and ApartmentGrade.com also have user-generated content, but they are moderated and not subject to rants and raves by anonymous posters.)
Pictures Really Are Worth a Thousand Words
Spend money to have great photography of your community every other year and share it widely online. Stunning property images create a sense of “home,” helping to further qualify a prospect’s interest and drive them to your community.
Be sure to not only show photos, but also provide complete captions with website links, phone and e-mail contact information. Search engines work by indexing content and delivering the results when relevant, so add the location of each property to the photo’s metadata, which then allows it to be easily added to a search-engine map, including Google Maps. Along with placing keywords, these simple actions improve the likelihood the image will be found during a prospect’s generic location search.
Imagery can be shared and reused in dozens of ways. One tip from savvy marketers is to neatly and carefully upload a complete set of photos of a property to a free Flickr.com account. This central repository can save hours a year in sharing photos for use in different marketing channels.
Take it a step further and create a 30- to 60-second video slideshow using your images with Animoto.com or with desktop software such as Windows Movie Maker or iMovie for Mac. Skip the music track background and provide a short narrative about the community. Upload to YouTube with captions, keywords and contact information and share the link in your Craigslist ads.
Social Networking: Retention Tool, Not Lead Driver
Social networks such as Facebook seem to work primarily for communicating with existing residents and building retention strategies. Stop worrying about trying to use them to generate new leases. Prospects just aren’t looking for apartments on Facebook or Twitter. Establish a Facebook page or actively use Twitter to interact with residents. Use it like a radio show and broadcast local content and offers. Keep residents up-to-date on happenings around the community, run contests through the site or even seek residents’ feedback on community issues.
Like Mama Always Said, ‘Nothing in Life Is Free’
Large REITs have the budget to hire graphic designers and website gurus to set up property sites. With limited budgets, smaller owner/operators don’t have this luxury and often seek out free services to design their property websites. The biggest problem with these so-called “free” sites is that they cost time and can be a headache to figure out. Posterous.com is a great way to quickly create an easy-to-customize, general-purpose Web page for free. Users simply sign in, pick one of 32 themes and start posting content. You can be up and running in five minutes with your custom landing page or provisional website for the new property you just acquired. Upload multiple photos at once and Posterous automatically creates a beautiful image gallery. Insert a link to a YouTube video and it immediately presents the video to visitors. You can even update your site by sending an e-mail from your phone.
Oh Goodness, Google!
Google recently announced the site is withdrawing from the real estate listings
business and will stop supporting its real estate products. However, there are still several small business tools that can assist the small-portfolio marketer.
• Google Places (Google.com/places) provides a verified business listing to assist online visibility, particularly from searches on Google Maps. For a $10 fee, you can create an apartment community listing that appears in Google results. The listing can even contain time-sensitive special offers or promotions to help keep it fresh. Although this is a great service, be aware this is a gateway product intended to encourage users to buy additional advertising presence such as featured spots on Google Maps and in search listings.
• Google Alerts (Google.com/alerts) is one of the best free things Google provides. This alert service allows users to set up a continuous search of the public Internet for keywords such as “Broadmoor Apartments” or “Steve Lefkovits.” Whenever the targeted keywords are published online, Google Alerts sends the user an email notice with an embedded link. It’s a great way to monitor your company and property names in almost real-time to see what is being published on review sites and other places. Also, it can alert you to trademark infringements or the use of overlapping brand keywords that may diminish the ability for your community to be found through a search.
• Google Analytics (Google.com/analytics) can be used if a professional lead tracking service isn’t in your budget. It provides a great basic lead tracking service that is amazingly sophisticated—and free. By cutting and pasting snippets of code into the Web pages you want tracked, the service details where your web traffic comes from, how many users bounce off your site without digging deeper, what search terms they used to find you and how long they are visiting the site.
Savvy users employ analytics to test different versions of websites to determine whether changes in layout, presentation, information or offers affect conversion. It’s a great tool for taking the guesswork out of whether your web presence is working as intended.
• Google Translate (Google.com/translate) is an experimental tool for translating between English and more than 50 different languages.
While we can’t vouch for correct rendering of idioms, it’s an interesting way to broaden the potential audience for a community in areas with pronounced immigration—or even for advertising overseas.
Google Translate also works with YouTube videos to translate captions. So the slideshow videos you create with new photos can now be shared online with captions in Spanish, French and Slovak (to name a few).
Consider expanding your prospect audience with advertisements on Craigslist in other languages. The best news is that if you have the response e-mails sent to your Gmail account, foreign language inquiries can be translated from within Gmail or even Google Chat as well.
Stephen Lefkovits is Executive Producer of Apartment Internet Marketing Conference and Principal of Joshua Tree Internet Media LLC and Joshua Tree Consulting.