Apartment Marketing Ideas Blog

Four things you need to know for Twitter apartment marketing

Posted by Jake Meador on June 18, 2013 / Posted in Twitter for Apartments

If you have the right personnel, Twitter could be a great way to be active online. If you don’t, it may not have much to offer.

For obvious reasons, social media has become a major point of interest for apartment marketers in recent years. On paper, marketing on social media makes a ton of sense because of the enormous number of users and the fact that users are often pretty engaged. However, before you start expecting hundreds of leads to flood in from social media, it’s important to understand a few things about how social media works.

Today we want to discuss Twitter apartment marketing in particular and what value the popular social network might offer to apartment communities. So here are the four things you need to know before you start using Twitter to marketing apartments:

1. The shelf-life of a tweet is crazy short.

We’ve talked about this point before with Craigslist postings. When you post on a popular site, it doesn’t take long for that post to get buried. That’s true in an especially heightened way on Craigslist. On our corporate account, for instance, we are following 497 people. And in 30 minutes, we got 31 new tweets on our timeline. So even when we’re following a relatively small number, we’re getting around a tweet per minute. Point being, when you send out a tweet, it won’t take long for that tweet to get buried in your followers’ timelines.

Mobile apartment websites keep you relevant

Posted by Jake Meador on June 17, 2013 / Posted in Mobile Apartment Websites

The ubiquity of smartphones means that you must have a mobile-friendly apartment website.

Who uses mobile?

Over the past four years, we’ve worked with over 600 apartment communities and looked at thousands of apartment community websites. One of the most common themes during that time has been the lack of solid, user-friendly mobile apartment websites.

This is a huge deal because mobile is an increasingly important aspect of a company’s web presence. In fact, recent data found that nine out of ten members of Generation Y have a smartphone. As The Atlantic put it, “For Gen Y, a smartphone isn’t a luxury–it’s a necessity.” The apartment industry isn’t alone on this, however. Many industries fail to provide useful mobile content, however.

What industries use mobile well? (Answer: Not many…)

Magnet Media reported in January of 2013 that only six percent of the auto industry had mobile friendly sites and only eight percent of the travel industry had mobile friendly sites. Indeed, mobile usability is one of the biggest challenges facing most industries. Given the many difficulties associated with going mobile, you might wonder “does mobile really matter that much? Can I get away with a ‘there-I-fixed-it’ type solution?” Unfortunately, you can’t. Here’s a few stats on mobile devices that explain why it’s so essential that you have a mobile friendly site for prospective residents to browse. Read More

Today in office pranks

Posted by Jake Meador on June 14, 2013 / Posted in Uncategorized

So, like many people in the industry, we’re headed to the National Apartment Association national conference next week. And one of our marketing promotions for the conference is going to be a contest to win a free iPad mini. So last Wednesday our big promotional banner arrived, pictured below:

However, our business developer, Lucas, who had basically headed up the entire process and proofed the final image before it went off to the printer was in Kansas City when the poster arrived. So the poster arrived, we set it up, and one of our employees took a picture on his iPhone to send to Lucas so he could see the final product.

Apartment marketing round-up, June 14, 2013

Posted by Jake Meador on June 14, 2013 / Posted in Weekly Apartment Marketing Round-Up

Marketing

Desktop ad spending will peak in 2014. Do you have a mobile advertising strategy?

Getting picked isn’t a plan.

The marketing agency of the future will care more about their client’s web presence than their own. (That sounds familiar…)

Multifamily industry

MFE has tips for making smart choices about green building. Read More

Mobile apartment websites can be cost-efficient

Posted by Jake Meador on June 13, 2013 / Posted in Mobile Apartment Websites

Mobile apartment websites can be extremely cost-effective.

Whenever we talk about cost, it’s always important to assess the full picture. Simply looking at the cost of doing something isn’t enough. You also need to look at the cost of not doing something.

So, for example, if you’re sitting at 95% occupancy and your marketing director wants to raise your PPC spend by $500, the instinctive response might be to say “No, we don’t need to spend an extra $500, we’re doing fine.” But if spending that extra $500 per month can get you up to 98% occupancy and six more leased communities, it’s worth it. You spent $500, but you made back an extra $4,500 (if you lease out six units at $750 per month).

EdgeRank and Facebook Apartment Marketing

Posted by Jake Meador on June 12, 2013 / Posted in Facebook for Apartments

Facebook isn’t the be-all, end-all of your marketing. You shouldn’t ignore it, but you also shouldn’t exaggerate its importance.

The reason Facebook apartment marketing isn’t that effective comes down to two things: First, people don’t look for apartments on Facebook, as J Turner Research made clear in a study last year when they found that only 5% of apartment residents checked a community out on Facebook before signing a lease.

If you poke around a bit on the social media network, you’ll see this reality reflected in the shockingly low number of communities with active Facebook presences. For example, we did a Google Place search on apartments in Portland, OR, we listed the top 50 results we found, and then cross-checked those communities on Facebook to see how many “likes” the average community had. The answer: 27.
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Nine reasons you should use apartment video marketing

Posted by Jake Meador on June 11, 2013 / Posted in Apartment Videos

There are nine great reasons you should be using video to market your apartments.

We’ve written a fair amount about the importance of apartment videos for your apartment marketing strategy. We’ve even published an eBook on the topic, in fact. Sometimes, however, it’s best to step away from lengthy argumentation and simply lay out some hard data. So today we’re bringing you nine reasons you need to use apartment video marketing, all of which point back to statistical data that highlights video’s increased importance for marketers today.

1. Over 85% of the country’s internet users watched video online in September of 2012 alone.

This means that video is an increasingly common thing online and that internet users are extremely comfortable with the idea of watching video online. Indeed, they’re so comfortable with it that for most of them it is part of their monthly routine. When they come to your website, if you can greet them with a walkthrough video tour, they’ll watch it.

Three ways to wreck simple apartment websites

Posted by Jake Meador on June 10, 2013 / Posted in Apartment Website Strategy

When it comes to apartment community websites, your goal is more “simple and clean” than “Escher-lookalike.”

Creating an apartment community website that is an actual leasing tool and not just a “so then you’ll have it,” waste of money comes down to keeping your website simple. But as anyone who has ever made a website knows, simple is not as easy as you might first expect. Here are the top three things that destroy simple apartment websites.

Bad Page Design

There’s a few things you always want your home pages to have:

You want a phone number in the top right corner of the page because right side calls-to-action outperform CTAs on the left.
You want your visual content to be large and prominent.
You want a limited number of options for users so that the next step for visitors to be obvious–hence the prominent CTA in the top right.

When your home page isn’t well designed, new visitors can feel confused, overwhelmed, or even annoyed. If you had a leasing agent that routinely made visitors feel that way, they wouldn’t last long, but apartment communities regularly use websites that do those very things. Read More

Apartment marketing round-up, June 7, 2013

Posted by Jake Meador on June 07, 2013 / Posted in Weekly Apartment Marketing Round-Up

apartment marketing round-up Content marketing

Unbounce shared 15 phenomenal content marketing stats.

John Koetsier says that if Steve Jobs applied at Apple today, he wouldn’t get hired.

Via David Meerman Scott, creating content is not a marketing expense.

Hubspot compiled some great data on where marketers get their leads.

Dan Lyons profiles Elon Musk, the Paypal co-founder and Tesla CEO who is doing everything you’re not supposed to do in marketing. Read More

Why defensive apartment marketing shouldn’t be that difficult

Posted by Jake Meador on June 06, 2013 / Posted in Google AdWords for Apartments

This community is losing their leads to a competitor who bought an ad with a push to call button.

Imagine you’re driving around town and decide to drive past one of your properties to make sure everything looks good on the grounds. If you drove past and saw one of your competitors with a sign right in front of your door with a phone number and directions to their property, what would you do?

The magical button that is stealing your leads.

Here’s the bad news: If you aren’t doing defensive apartment marketing, this is happening to you already. Look at this screen capture for one apartment community we found online.

That top ad that begins “Call: …” is not an ad for the community being searched for on Google. And that’s not all. It’s an ad for a direct competitor in the same metro area. But stay with me, because it gets worse: it’s an ad for a direct competitor in the same metro area with a push to call button. (That’s what the button with a phone icon and the word “call” is.) It’s the equivalent to that sign on the front door of your property having some sort of magical button that would magically transfer a person off your front step directly to your competitor’s leasing office.
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