Why Bing? Why Now?

The Bing search engine has plenty of eyeballs searching for apartments. While it’s not as dominant as Google, they still give you a free business listing that shares all your key information in search results, voice, and on their maps. Therefore, you’ll need a well-optimized listing for your property, and Bing Places is where to start.

How to quickly set up your Bing Places listing using the GMB Import:

Bing will automatically import all your data from your Google My Business listing. Follow these simple steps:

Step 1:  Claim your listing by going to bingplaces.com. Click the “New User” button.

Step 2: Click the “Import from Google My Business Now” button.

Step 3: Check the box “I want to sync my business data with Google My Business at regular intervals.” Also, check the box of how often you want to sync—weekly, biweekly, monthly.

Important note: You need to use the same email you use to log in to your Google My Business listing.

Step 4: Once the import is complete, you’ll be shown a Google My Business import summary—this shows that your community was successfully imported.

Step 5: All Done!  At this point, you can click the “Go To Dashboard” button, where you’ll be shown your property information on the left side along with Bing Places options on the right.

If you pay attention to the green boxes at the top of your dashboard, you’ll have a notification message that says, “Your listing is currently being reviewed and will be published on [date].”  I recommend you check back on that date to make sure your listing is live.

The post How To Set Up Your Property on Bing Places Using the GMB Import appeared first on Resident360.

Testing these forms and seeing how the agents at your communities respond to an inquiry can either be an enlightening or a disheartening experience. Your focus should be on the impression left on the prospect—their experience with your community.

Start with your community website. Fill out the Check Availability, Schedule a Tour, or whatever type of contact form you have, and see how the follow-up process unfolds.

Pay particular attention to the following: 

• How immediate was the follow-up?
• Did you receive only an email?
• Did you get a phone call and email?
• How was the actual response? (Great email, great phone call, or less than stellar?)
• How persistent was the follow-up? If you didn’t respond, did someone check back in with you?
• Was the follow-up consistent with what you’re requesting? For example, if you filled out a Schedule a Tour form, did the agent specifically acknowledge that?

If you think you are having problems with leads, use the above questions in your next follow-up test. 

The post What’s Your Follow-Up Experience Like From Your Website Forms? appeared first on Resident360.

While there are several factors to take into account, the simple answer is 12 months out.

To start, the most important thing that needs to be considered is the asset name. What is the new community going to be called? This can take up to two months to finalize.

While searching for the “Right Name,” it’s super important that you’re also searching for the right domain name that matches or compliments it.

Once the community name has been established, you can start getting the brand strategy including the property logo together. I would factor in two months to get this finalized.

With both the name and logo now finished, we’re already four months into that 12-month window.  The remaining eight months should be used for marketing the property.

Here’s a quick breakdown of some of the more important items you’ll want to be doing over these eight months:

• Get a landing page up, so you can begin building an email list of interested prospects.
• Get signage around the development pointing people to your landing page URL for more info.
• Begin email marketing campaigns to keep your new development top of mind with interested prospects.
• Create professional renderings, floor plans, and virtual tours to add to your landing page and full website.
• Claim social listings including Google My Business.
• Begin digital marketing campaigns— Google, Facebook, ILS.
• Create leasing material and collateral.
• Begin working on a full-featured website.

While I’m just scratching the surface here on what’s involved in marketing a new construction lease-up, here’s a handy checklist of the majority of things you should be thinking about.

Giving yourself at least a 12-month window will ensure you have enough time to get everything completed for making the lease-up a successful one.

The post When Should I Start The Branding For a New Development? appeared first on Resident360.

If your property is new, chances are the domain was just purchased as well. When this website launches, Google is not quite sure how to rank it in its results. The main reason is that there is no history.

The Fix: This usually works itself out over a few weeks and the apartment website starts showing up when the name is searched. If not, let’s look at factor #2.

If the community name is broad (meaning lots of other communities/businesses share that same name), you’re probably going to be showing up on page 2 or 3 of Google search results.

The Fix: Make sure you have claimed, and more importantly, optimized your GMB listing (Google My Business). Double-check that your apartment website is included in your GMB profile. Google likes to show relevant GMB listings next to search results. In this case, there’s a very good chance your property could start showing up. If not, let’s move to factor #3.

If it’s been a few months and your property still isn’t ranking for your community name, then you need to look at the on-page SEO.

The Fix: Make sure your community name and the specific location of the property is used as a keyword throughout your website. This means using it in title tags, meta descriptions, H1 tags, some alt tags, and the website text. You also want to have a sitemap submitted to Google on their Search Console.

To increase your visibility, consider setting up profiles on various social media properties and include a link back to your website.

Want to learn even more? Check out this full article on SEO I published that covers this topic in more detail.

The post Why Doesn’t My Website Show Up on the First Page of Google When I Search My Community Name? appeared first on Resident360.

You can visualize the most popular (hot) and unpopular (cold) elements of a webpage using colors on a scale from red to blue.

Some heat mapping software even allows for the live recording of users on your website. So you can watch a video of how they interact with it—which is super useful.

For example, I installed a heatmap on Resident360.com because I want to see how far people are scrolling down on the homepage. I found out that 80% of the people weren’t scrolling past the top hero image. Therefore, I need to have my most important messaging at the very top of the website.

We’ve installed heatmaps on several apartment websites when we notice a conversion problem. The website might be getting lots of traffic but not many leads. The heatmap helps us to see exactly what the user is clicking on and where the roadblocks are happening.

Of all the heat mapping resources I’ve used over the years, I think Hotjar is the tool I like most. There’s a free and paid version, but I think the free version is plenty to get an idea of what’s happening on your website.

To wrap up, if you want to see how a group of users interact with your website—install a heatmap. It may have you rethink the way you design your next website.

The post Visualize Your Property Website Activity With Heatmaps appeared first on Resident360.

Multifamily clients often ask if they should be using Google Ads or search engine optimization (SEO) for apartment marketing. If budget allows, we always recommend doing both Google Ads and SEO simultaneously.

However, that’s not always practical. What’s right for one community may not be the smart choice for another. Here are five situations where Google Ads may be the right choice for your community.

With Google Ads, you can have a campaign generating leads in as little as 24 hours. While SEO is often highly effective, a search engine optimization campaign will take time (several months to over a year, depending on the level of competition). When you need leads right away, running a smart Google Ads campaign is the way to go.

Running a Google Ads campaign can be a great way to get valuable keyword data that can help to prioritize the most important keywords in your SEO efforts.

Google offers a type of ad called “Call Ads” where instead of visiting your website, the user calls your property. For communities that prefer call-style leads over website forms, this can be a great way to generate more phone call leads quickly.

If you have specific keywords that you want your property to show up for on Google that you may not be able to capture via SEO, Google Ads is your go-to. For example, if you want to capture traffic for those looking for “Apartments near” like “Apartments Near Century City” or “Apartments Near USC.”  You may also want to target a specific geo-area for where your ads display. This is known as Geotargeting.

If you Google your community name and it doesn’t show up at the top of the search results, you more than likely have on-page SEO issues.  A quick fix is to run branded search campaigns around your community name with Google Ads. This will ensure your property stays on top of Google search results until you address your on-page SEO issues.

The post Google Ads vs. SEO—When Is Paid Search Better Than SEO for Your Property? appeared first on Resident360.

The strategy is to start using Ad Schedules, which allows you to set the days/times that your ads will show versus Google just choosing the times for you.

Here’s how it works…

Looking at both of these reports, you want to look for trends of when your ads are getting the most conversions. Look at a minimum of the last 60 days of data to get the best picture of trends.

Focusing more heavily on the hour’s portion, you may see that you get a lot of conversions between 3 pm and 6 pm. So why not put more budget toward those times by simply pausing all other hours of the day?

This will essentially become your new Ad Schedule.

You are basically reallocating your budget on the days/times that give you the best ROI while pausing the other times.

Now you’re no longer wasting your budget on junk clicks. You’re truly focusing on the best times for conversions.

The post One Quick Way to Save Budget & Improve ROI With Google Ads appeared first on Resident360.

The key to getting a review removed from Google My Business is to have a Google Policy to back up your request!

Remember, Google is all about the user experience and providing accurate information. So, if you bring something to their attention, it has to interfere with one of those two.

There are about 10 different policies regarding content on Google that applies to Reviews, Photos, and Videos. Reference one of them in your request to help get a review removed.

In our case, there was a negative review left on Community A about their experience at Community B. 

The first step was to go on the back end and “Flag as Inappropriate.” From there, you get a list of options as to why you are reporting it.

We selected Off-topic; the review was not about their experience at Community A.

Once that was submitted, we reached out to Google My Business Support. You always want to submit your request before you reach out—that way, it’s already in the system.

In our reasoning for reaching out for support, we stated the following:

“We are requesting to remove a negative review made by John Doe. Their review violates two policies: It is Off-topic as it does not relate to that specific business location, and it is Spam as it is not reflecting the genuine experience at this specific location and was posted to manipulate ratings.”

We stated Google’s policies and used their verbiage to back up our request, which ultimately helped us get the review removed within 48 hours!

Now it’s your turn…  If you have negative reviews that possibly go against Google’s policies, flag and report them. Then make sure and follow up with Google Support stating your case.

The post How to Get a Negative Review Removed on Google My Business appeared first on Resident360.

This is the “ideal” way to set up a photo gallery on your apartment website!

The photo gallery should not be viewed as simply an afterthought, but another excellent opportunity to take a prospect on a tour of your community.

So instead of just putting up a mixed bag of property photos, let’s put some thought into how to best portray your community in pictures.

Here’s what I recommend:

#1 – Start by showing your interior photos first. Starting with kitchens, living rooms, then moving to bedrooms & bathrooms. Just like you’re giving an in-person tour of a unit.

#2 – Next, amenity photos—start with the pool photo (if you have one), and then arrange your best/most used amenities after that while still trying to follow a tour route order as much as possible.

One more thing to consider is adding photo filters to the top of your page if you’re showing a ton of pictures. This can lead to a better user experience as they can now pick the category of photos they want to see.

The post The Ideal Way to Setup Your Apartment Website Photo Gallery appeared first on Resident360.

Let’s share a strategy called “TLC“ that we use here at Resident360!

TLC stands for Traffic, Leads, and Customers and it helps me quickly identify areas where I need to improve my marketing each month. It’s super easy to follow (always a plus), and I am confident you will see the value as well.

T – Traffic

For example:

• If Google/Facebook Ads are one of your top sources, consider increasing your ad budget over the short term if you need more traffic.
• If Facebook Marketplace/Craigslist or another free listing source is on your list, consider posting ads more often.
• If organic traffic is a top source, consider spending more time optimizing your website by focusing on the on-page SEO elements.

Make it a habit to look at the sources every month and see what you can do to maximize that traffic. Consider having a Digital Dashboard to visually show you what’s happening.

A second part of the traffic model is to identify one or two additional traffic sources you’re not utilizing but should test.

L – Leads

This is a question I ask myself and the Resident360 team all the time. We have a ton of traffic, but at times it appears we’re not getting all that many leads. So I focus on the following:

• My ad copy and what’s actually being shown on my website when someone comes from those ads.
• Reviewing website copy frequently to make sure my messaging is on point.
• Carefully reviewing email forms, especially looking at the copy that’s on the actual forms. Asking myself: Does the person know exactly what to do when they go to this form? Am I asking too much information or too little?
• I review Live Chat conversations to make sure what we’re saying is correct, and we’re not missing opportunities for what we could have said.

C – Customers

Review your leasing process, making sure you have a step-by-step plan that covers the time frame from when you receive the email, phone call, or walk-in lead all the way to converting them into a resident. Then examine each step of your process to see if you can improve it. Some ideas to try:

• Can you add video messages to your email follow-up?
• Can you improve your phone/conversational skills?
• Can you follow up in a shorter period of time?
• Can you improve response time on leads?
• Can you offer more options for apartment viewing/tours?

One final tip: Start treating prospects like residents before money changes hands. Demonstrate your willingness to provide service and assistance. It just may provide the incentive they need to make the leap to a resident.

The post The “TLC” Strategy for Improving Your Apartment Marketing appeared first on Resident360.