I remember my Archie Bunker father rambling about how that would never work, and that women would never pump their own gas. Well Pop’s, they do, and they and everyone else did pretty quickly. 

 It is fascinating that in a snap, what was tried and true all changed. “Service Stations” also know as “Gas Stations” become Connivence Stores, and Self Serve, Pump Your Own Gas became common place for all of us, including girls. What were the triggers, price as I recall. It sure wasn’t about Enhancing the Customer Experience

Being BORING is a Choice

We are nearing five years now into our Go Solo Leasing Program, and it may be the singularly most profitable change we have ever implemented  as well as the most adored by our prospects looking for an apartment. So many things have spawned from that which help us further differentiate and Break From the Pack of Apartment Commodity.  

WHAT! NOT TOURING WITH THE PROSPECT, YOU CAN’T DO THAT!
We are sending prospects out on their own to tour our apartments. In our trek to enhance the concept of a Centralized Leasing Center at Urbane, we are testing a new way to tour apartments and we have coined it “GO SOLO”. It works like this; The prospect meets at Urbane Underground first to go over their living space needs. For folks who have never experienced the Urbane Underground it is pretty “Interesting and Entertaining” and sets the tone for a fun encounter.

Opinions GONE Wild

And criticized we were, the industry pun dents came out in full force to tell us how wrong the idea was, and all the reasons why it wouldn’t work. It just isn’t good service was the main theme. I am fine with opinions, I have plenty, but I find it interesting that folks were against the idea even after we could prove the result, and no one said why it might work. To that I reply, most businesses, including property managers haven’t a true clue what the customer really wants anyway, so whatever YOU think customer service IS, likely doesn’t align with the prospects expectations, yet folks abound act like experts at knowing what the rental prospect wants. News Flash, They Don’t. 

Research Shows 90% of Businesses Have NO CLUE What the Customer Wants 

Smith’s company analyzed more than 150 customer surveys to learn why customers buy particular products or services from particular companies. It’s an essential practice for any business owner during any economic cycle, Smith says, but most don’t do it. Her analysis of 10 years of double-blind customer market research for more than 100 businesses revealed that, 90 percent of the time, most businesses do not know their customers’ top values. They are often shocked to learn what is at the top of the customers’ value list.

The feedback we received from our leasing prospects OVERWHELMING confirmed we had landed a Golden Nugget with the Go Solo Leasing Program! Everyone LOVED It This isn’t a new idea. The car dealers stopped riding around with you for a test drive years ago. Then, the test drive turned into; Take the car for the afternoon! Why is that?

Salespeople get in the way and it is uncomfortable.

Going Alone allows the prospect to sit on the floor. Come back later in the day, or the next day. Bring over a friend, their mom or dad, boyfriend or girlfriend. They can measure for furniture, and just plain “test” the new space they will be calling home soon. ZERO Pressure! Multifamily Consultants seem to have a unanimous opinion that properly trained leasing professionals need to lead the prospect around. That makes sense, as it supports their leasing better programs that they sell. I would guess that Brick and Mortar Shoe Stores had a similar opinion Pre ZAPPO’s. Just another example of disconnect between what we think the prospect wants verses what they see as value. To be clear, we aren’t saying the leasing profesional doesn’t add value, we are saying, get them out of the way.

Unintended Consequences  

What we learned from the Go Solo Experiment is that we reduced our Cost per Lease by (1) Leasing Person annualized salary. To put that into perspective for a (300) unit apartment community that needs to rent (150) units per year, and an average leasing labor at $35,000 per year, is a cost savings of $230 per lease/$35,000 annualized. The other thing that happened is that Follow-Up, INCREASED because our leasing team had a  significant increase in TIME. The third thing that happened is, we no longer ever have more than one leasing person in the leasing center at one given time. From that we took the same amount of leasing hours per week, and stretched them. Eliminating overlap allowed us to extend the hours we are open to 8:00 AM to 8:00PM, which our prospects find great value in. 

So our Go Solo Leasing Program has given us an edge our competitors do not have, and we have Enhanced the Prospects Experience on multiple touch points, and we have lowered our costs. Get out of your comfort zone and try something new, leasing apartments doesn’t need to be BORING, you are making it that way.

That said, the article Top 3 Trends Apartment Marketers Should Not Ignore caught my attention, specifically The Convergence of POSE Media. Writer Lea Lashley articulates the definition of POSE well; 

 The convergence of paid-owned-shared-earned (POSE) media is completely disrupting how marketers … market. Those who do not integrate and align their POSE are now at a disadvantage.

What do we mean by POSE? Paid is brand content enabled through payment (includes paid search, sponsored content, promotions, advertising, etc.); owned is brand content published on a brand’s channel (includes websites, social media channels, blogs, apps); shared is consumer content enabled by a third party (includes organic search, forums, user-generated content, “likes” and retweets or comments, etc.); and earned is consumer content enabled by a third party (media coverage, etc.).

Paid media by itself no longer works. Brands must leverage paid and owned in order to scale. In our world, the goal is amplification—spreading messages to connect with customers and leveraging POSE to drive effectiveness, achieve authenticity, cultivate ideas, and cut through the noise.

The article was refreshing. We have chanted about Branded Media and Be The Advertiser for several years at the Urbane Lab. It works, and is an extremely effective edge for LOWERING Apartment Marketing Costs. The dirty little secret is, that Apartment Marketing Costs continue to decrease over time as you build your Content Arsenal. As your Digital Footprint expands year over year with creative, useful content, your SEO benefit expands accordingly. The average apartment operators number of units to rent is static year over year and doesn’t expand unless there is a Lease Up.

The key here is USEFUL Content, useful to your prospect, NOT you or your company. Hence the reason blog posts aren’t so interesting now, marketers have turned content into noise, mostly designed to enhance SEO. There is however significant value to businesses and brands that effectively craft meaningful, helpful, fun, entertaining content. 

Do Apartment Operators Understand the Value of Media

As long as Apartment Marketers continue to primarily spend their marketing budgets on ILS Ads, they aren’t very serious about ANY type of Media Marketing. Some have done Paid Search, but that is the extent of their Media Marketing. There Paid Search has mostly been ineffective. The irony is that if they were to pursue Paid Media, Owned Media, Shared Media or Earned Media they would realize that their biggest competitor isn’t the apartment community across the street, it is their ILS Partners. By and large the ILS’s OWN the search market and they will outspend most apartment marketers. However, with diligence, the savvy Apartment Marketer can level things up with Local Content and Partnership Marketing, which fuels a well oiled Local Search Campaign.

Take Your Hand Out of the Cookie Jar   

It is tempting to just continue to pay the ILS Fees each month in exchange for a limited number of Leasing Leads consistent with keeping vacancy at an acceptable level. The system does work, but at a price. Perhaps tolerance is the issue. We don’t complain about gas prices much until they near the $4.00 per gallon mark, then the market pushes back and gas prices somehow mysteriously fall away and never exceed the high water mark. Put into perspective, as long as our Apartment Marketing Costs fall under $200 per unit per year, all is right with the world. Well, what if $200 per unit per year is 30% higher than what you should spend for Apartment Marketing, or 50% higher than what you could be spending. This business is, and has always been about the nickels and the dimes, and apartment marketing gets squeezed, down to that $200 per unit per year mark. If you are spending most of that marketing budget on the ILS Game, and your hand is in their cookie jar, there isn’t much left for any meaningful media marketing campaigns. 

Help Bridge the Gap with Partnership Marketing 

Partnership Marketing is an excellent strategy to bridge the gap between starting your Branded Media Campaign and garnishing enough website traffic to self sustain enough Leasing Leads to keep your Apartment Community full. The Urbane Lab has long been a supporter of Hitching Your Wagon to Someone Else’s Wagon when appropriately aligned. Our Boutique Apartment Brand, Urbane Apartments has successfully alined and partnered with both Local and National Brands, such as Vitamin Water, where we have a Branded Vitamin Water Cooler in our Leasing Center. We have had Sharpie Draw on the Walls Contest at a Grand Opening of one of our Apartment Communities with over (250) guests!

Partnership Marketing helps you get noticed, and when you get noticed by the National Media, only good things happen. Our Urbane Media Digital Marketing Strategies have had the good fortune to land articles in Bloomberg Businessweek Magazine and Entrepreneur  Magazine. The New York Times had this to say about our Partnership Marketing effort; 

Urbane Apartments has served as the media partner for a local festival and a restaurant association’s Restaurant Week, as well as the sponsor of a successful Ladies’ Night Out organized by a merchants’ association. For the Restaurant Week promotion, Mr. Brown featured short  videos on his Web site that received 3,000 views over three weeks. He is now in discussion with 35 restaurant owners to do cross-promotion for free product offers on hisFacebook page.

“We hitch our wagon to others’ wagons to build our brand,” he said. “For example, most women at the Ladies’ Night Out event weren’t renters, but they have sons or daughters or nieces or nephews or friends who might be. These types of events can get them talking about us. It’s a win-win for everyone because it gets more people in our partners’ doors, too. We’ve taken partnership marketing to the next level.”

Get in the game, content creation takes a while.  

It’s feeling a lot like 2007 in the corporate communications world. 

That’s about the time social media tools reached their tipping points and organizations got serious about embracing them. As a result, serious-minded people argued over whether it was a fad, while quick-thinking entrepreneurs established themselves as “experts” in the nascent field. Executives furrowed their brows. 

In 2013, the new social media is content marketing. 

Sure, the basic concept has been around for years—decades even—but a confluence of things has made it a top strategy among PR and marketing folks. 

Content marketing, also known as brand journalism (or its close relative native advertising), is the practice of organizations’ creating their own media outlets. Companies such as Dell, Coca-Cola, and IBM are creating what looks like—and in many ways is—a journalistic product. 

In case you’re still undecided, here are five signs content marketing is the new hot thing: 

1. Major PR firms are embracing it. 

A number of small and mid-size PR and marketing agencies are producing high-quality content for brands, but this year, two giants of PR—Edelman and Weber Shandwick—joined the content marketing game. 

Last week, Weber Shandwick announced the creation of Mediaco, a unit dedicated to content marketing. In November, Edelman named Steve Rubel to the newly formed position of chief content strategist. Basically, he’s the company’s czar of content strategy, responsible for overseeing programs such as media partnerships that “blend paid, earned and owned disciplines.” 

2. Major media companies are relying on it for new sources of revenue. 

As the power of traditional advertising—think banner ads and pop-ups—fades, old and new media companies alike are looking for new ways to make money. At the same time, companies embracing content marketing need someone to feed the content beast with fresh and entertaining media. 

You can probably see where this is going: Companies are hiring media outlets to create content. For example, General Electric works with BuzzFeed to create custom-branded content for the site. These highly shareable articles appear as regular stories on BuzzFeed, except the byline indicates it is sponsored content. One branded story features “timeless G.E. ads.” 

Another darling of the Internet, Gawker, has created sponsored articles for years, while old-media companies such as Forbes and The Washington Post are allowing branded content on their websites. The Onion has also gotten into the act, helping major brands such as Clorox and Ford create original content. 

3. Fortune 500 companies are launching content marketing sites. 

For the past several years, major companies have launched websites that produce high-quality content and mirror that of a journalistic product. For instance, in November, Coca-Cola relaunched its corporate website Coca-ColaCompany.com, under the guise of brand journalism. America Airlines Cargo won a PR Daily Digital PR and Social Media Award for its content marketing site, Business Insights. 

4. One startup specializing in content marketing is getting major funding. 

Contently, which began as a service that matches freelancers with media companies, received nearly $2 million in funding as it shifts focus to content marketing, according to Advertising Age. The startup is offering freelancers to companies hungry for content. Contently is working with a number of organizations and provides content for American Express’s popular blog, Open Forum. 

5. Reporters are leaving journalism for content marketing jobs. 

As the media upheaval continues, journalists continue to move from newsrooms to creative firms in increasing numbers. Instead of taking on traditional media relations roles, they’re forming newsrooms for brands. Nissan, for instance, staffs a newsroom with a number of former reportersand treats the endeavor as journalism. 

Meanwhile, top journalists from Fortune magazine, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, and others have taken jobs with non-media organizations to create content. Last week, Dan Lyons, former Newsweek columnist and editor of ReadWrite, joined the online marketing firm HubSpot.

In 2013, our first of three new Start-Up’s, BuyMichLocal.com is out of the gate and starting to monetize. But now what, we need to understand how to sell the Listing Service to provide advertising value. 

The Idea Stage of a Start-Up is much safer than the actual Start-Up. We can vacillate for hours on end about this and that. It makes us feel good. It is exciting to talk about our ideas. Actually launching your idea is a bit scarier because the stakes are higher. It is no longer just verbal masturbation, you have likely plunked down some dough to get started, either yours or someone else’s.

But at some point, as Seth Godin coined the phrase, “You Have to Ship”. Stepping off the dock can be a tough one, particularly if you are pulling the plug and quitting your day job. Running your Start Up part time in the beginning is an excellent safety net until things are running smoothly and you have steady cash flow. Extend the Runway. You definitely do not want to Run Out of Money. 

Must Do Exercises 

One of our Must Do Exercises with our companies that we own and operate is to create a new value curve. We spend a lot of time on the following four questions:

1. Which factors should be reduced well below the industry standard
2. Which factors should be created that the industry has never offered
3. Which factors should be raised well above the industry standard
4. Which of the factors that the industry take for granted should be eliminated 

Create Your Niche

Getting really clear with the above four questions has helped us carve out niche businesses. Many times the things that separate one company or business from another are not large single items, but a series of small, but radically different, things. A great place to start is your policy and procedure manual. It is likely slam full of stuff that no longer apply or never worked well from the get-go.

Have You Answered Why?

This is a tricky one, we tend to race to What We Do. That is much easier to identify. We gravitate to How we do it. The question of Why we do it only gets answered by the remarkable brands. If we reverse the order, and start with why we are doing this and keep that at the core center of our culture, we are heads above the rest. Why People Buy People buy from companies because of why they do, not what they do. That is one of the explanations as to why great brands exponentially lead the pack. Many times their competitors actually have a better product. Many times the competition is better capitalized. Yet the company who best identifies what motivates them, and why they are doing what they are doing run circles around the pack. We suggest that you take some time to identify the Why, way before you get to the What and the How. Your result will be diametrically different.

For more inspiration on the same topic, check out Simon Sinek’s awesome TED Talk:

Trying NEW Things

What does this have to do with Corporate Outreach for Apartments, nothing really, except it has everything to do with trying new things, such as using a portion of our resources to TRY SOMETHING NEW. Some work, in our experience last year, four of the five projects we tried failed. One of the Five made it to market, and is now producing a steady stream of sales and cash. What does all that mean, well it is now another item we can test our marketing savvy on. It allows us, even if in a small way initailly to justify additional resources for our Marketing and Media Business, which in turn ultimately LOWERS our Apartment Marketing Costs for our Boutique Apartment Management Company, Urbane Apartments  and associated real estate portfolio.  

In late 2011, we decided to allocate 30% of our available resources to projects that we have ownership interest in. We aren’t the only ones thinking like this, Mills Apartments in St Louis have quietly launched a Boutique Digital Marketing Studio inside their corporate structure, seemingly first to support their own Branded Media, dubbed Real Life St Louis. Mike Brewer and his crew are doing a stand up job producing in house content to Enhance the Residents Experience, and drive leasing leads in a new and meaningful way. Point being, Mills is Trying Something New, and we suspect that will ultimately lead to Partnership Marketing opportunities for Mike and his groups new venture, Bravo Guys! 

We tried new Five Project Ideas  in 2012, Three of the Five made it to an LLC being created before imploding, and one made it to an actual product launch, and so we have the Street Eatzz Brand! Carving out a portion of our time and available resources to create something new will be an integral part 0f our overall business strategy every year going forward.

Carrying that strategy forward into 2013, We have hit some early “Pay Dirt”! 

Until Apartment Marketers put stock in their web site being as important as their leasing center, not much will change. Your apartment community web site is your digital leasing center. Once that begins to resonate with apartment operators, they will begin to see the value of increased web site traffic. 

The multifamily industry is experiencing a shift in thinking surrounding web site traffic, however it is not close to mainstream, nor is it changing as rapidly as prospects search habits. The apartment operator that has awakened to the digital world still may still be afar from the mark as the conversation transitions to conversion ratios. Simply put, Do you know at your apartment community how many Unique Visitors are required to produce one Guest Card?

Do You Know Your Numbers

Website Numbers; 

How much web site traffic does it take to produce one Guest Card? At Urbane Apartments, we need to drive just under (50) Unique Visitors to produce (1) Guest Card. That is a web traffic conversion rate of 2.13%. Similarly, we need to drive (650) Unique Visitors to produce (1) Rental. 

Why Does It Matter?

It matters because over 80% of your leasing prospects type something into a search box before starting their apartment hunt. If you can get them to land on your web site first, and capture a Guest Card, absent other ILS (Internet Listing Services) marketing options  your marketing expenses go down. What gets measured gets attention. Start paying attention to your web site numbers, only good things will happen.

Social Outreach Numbers

 Commonly referred to as a your Digital Footprint, it merely means, what is your reach, said differently, how many Friends, Followers, Fans and Subscribers does your brand have. Note to self, anything less than several thousand has little leverage. At The Urbane Life, we get (65,000) Page Views per month and we sport over (13,000) Facebook Fans, just shy of (13,000) Twitter Followers, Listed by (311) different folks and a bit over (30,000) email subscribers. 

Why Does It Matter

It matters because that is where our prospects are hanging out. Not participating in Social Media today is akin to boarding up your clubhouse windows and doors. And Bigger IS Better, More is Better than Less when it comes to Friends, Followers and Fans. If your apartment community has less than a few thousand fans, you have little to no social leverage. Perhaps the social media wonks disagree, and chirp about Listening and Engagement first. Yes, those are ever so important, however until you have built a fairly substantial digital base, there is no leverage or velocity. 

Social Search 

When Facebook rolls out their Social Graph, business with the most Fans, Likes and Check-In’s will have a distinct advantage. In the simplest terms, the Facebook Graph is a database of everything anyone has done on Facebook – what they liked, where they’ve been, who they’ve connected with, etc. Graph Search allows you to tap into that database, and find information that is uniquely relevant to you and your friends. This means the same search will provide different results for every user.

Graph Search results are driven by what users do on Facebook: liking, commenting, tagging, sharing, etc. This is a fairly vague concept, but seeing how it actually works starts to create some very big implications for business – particularly location-based businesses.

Let’s say I’m thinking of traveling, and I want to see what hotels my friends are recommending on Facebook – this is determined by which hotels they’ve liked and interacted with. The simple query “Hotels my friends like” yields over 100 results for me, showing key information about the hotels, linking to the hotel Facebook page, allowing me to like the pages, view photos and videos, and more.

This my friends should be enough of a reason to grow the numbers, Social Search is The Next Big Thing. Start today, Build Your Digita Footprint, it isn’t that hard. 

Brands Are Becoming Newsrooms

We talk a lot about Create Your Own Branded Media here at the Urbane Lab, where ideas are tested on our own businesses first, so we know what works and what doesn’t. We have deployed our own capital on testing ideas first, before introducing them to clients. Big brands are way ahead of the Branded Media game. Many have organized news rooms. Brands are Becoming Publishers. Small business should step up to the plate as well. You can lower your marketing costs and increase leads.

What Is Branded Media

Branded Media is a marketing term referring broadly to the development, production and delivery of media (print, digital, audio, video, events) designed to strengthen the relationship between the business and their audience or prospects. It is also called custom media, customer media, member media, content marketing, and custom publishing. In-flight magazines, sponsored by airlines, were one of the first custom media. 

Branded Media is designed to reach a tightly focused audience of customers, members, alumni or other constituency. Branded Media can be produced “in-house” by organizations. The best and most wildly successful example is Red Bull Media. One of the earliest forms of Branded Media content is the eight part BMW film series The Hire starring Clive Owen from 2002. All eight films featured popular filmmakers from across the globe, starred Clive Owen as the driver and highlighted the performance aspects of various BMW automobiles. Viewed 11 million times in four months on BMW’s site, according to BMW Blog. What’s most amazing about this campaign was that this was pre-YouTube.

Shift From Buying Advertising to Being the Advertiser 

Some companies sell advertising space within their custom publications to third parties; this subsizes the cost of publication; creates a more authentic editorial environment; and allows third parties to purchase and publicizes an association with the businesses audience, (e.g. food suppliers may purchase advertising space within a supermarket’s custom media). This drives down the expnding cost of advertising. We have advertisers at our Urbane Life online Magazine that pay us for banner ads and sponsored stories. What was an expense to the parent company, slowly shifts toward a revenue stream.    

Branded Media aims to build a relationship of trust and loyalty with the sponsor’s customers, so they regard the sponsor as the vendor of choice when they make purchases. This is accomplished by providing information and, often, advice, that meets the needs and suits the preferences of the sponsor’s target market. It serves the interests of the audience, rather than overtly plugging products and services the way ads do.^[

At Urbane we have been working at Branded Media for a number of years and we have developed a significant following, friends and fan base across several of our digital platforms. You must Extend Your Social Reach. This last week I received a call from a local event marketer, Jon Witz, whom Urbane has partnered with several times. Our Urbane Life Brand has served as a  Media Partner for an array of local events, averaging eight to ten a year. We have redefined Partnership Marketing, which has crated significant opportunity for us. There are some people that you always take there calls, this guy is one of them. He is the guy that Roger Penske tapped to coordinate the Super Bowl when it came to Detroit, he organized things for the NCAA basketball Final Four when they were in Detroit. 

Jon was calling top see if we were in as a Media Partner for his upcoming Winter Blast in downtown Detroit next month, and to check in about his ever popular Arts, Beats and Eats event that garners in excess of 500,000 people over the Labor Day weekend. What he said though made me smile, that our social outreach was of significant, measurable value, even more so than some of the traditional media outlets. We like that, a lot. 

Remember friends, we are just a small boutique apartment apartment operator, turned Branded Media Company. We choose to not be a commodity and have built a social outreach on par with the local news and media companies.  Do we have the same outreach, not exactly, but we have enough to be in the game, and to get folks talking about our brand, and you can to. Start today building your own Branded Media. You can do it, and will find the investment pays back compound dividends. 

The New Year is here, and with that the gyms are flooded with wannabe exercisers who likely will slip aside within weeks or days of joining. I know, I have fallen prey to that myself more than once.

Another reoccurring theme, I Should Blog More, and again, like regular exercise, writing regularly is a discipline that can easily get set a side by greater priorities. Our apartment marketing friend Mark Juleen recently posted about Consistent Blogging, and I think that Mark hit on something regarding the content that many of us have written about the past few years;

 When social media was fresh and new tech online or in mobile seemed to be flying at me from every direction I felt like I had lots to talk about.  While I believe tech is still evolving, I’m not afraid to say that it’s pretty dull lately.  Maybe I just don’t get as excited anymore, but I also read so much on networks like Mashable or Techcrunch that I don’t feel like I should reinvent the wheel.

The point is that we have been writing more about the tools than the result. That surely isn’t a new statement or concept. The blogosphere has babbled about it isn’t about the tools many times,  but it makes the point, how many of us are really using the tools and technology available? The bigger question is why not? Is it because businesses don’t believe or just don’t know or just don’t change? Or is it, that they really Just Don’t Care.

Get Them Talking

One of our past and much missed Urbane Media  staff writers, the very talented Erica Moss, who relocated to the Big Apple last year, and doing a bang up job there now as an inbound marketer for   @GUOnlineNursing  summed things up in a recent article on the ever popular blog site Spin Sucks, titled What Warby Parker Teaches Us About Brand Loyalty . 

My name is Erica, and I’m a Warby-holic.

As in, Warby Parker.

And it’s all their fault.

They started by offering a trendy product that I wanted: Hipster chic glasses for just $95.

Then they made me swoon with a clean, user-friendly site design.

Then they upped the ante with a winning combination of social media savvy and in-person events.

And for every pair of glasses they sell, they donate a pair to someone in need. But that’s not all.

Perhaps the coolest piece of this article is the manor and way in which Warby Parker took the time to respond. There are a variety of ways to thank someone that never go out of style, such as handwritten notes, but this personalized video connects in a thoughtful manor, making their response into  another marketing gem

As you can see below, the fine folks at Warby Parker Cared Enough to Engage, and they did it in a way that screams we are different. 

So jump in, and Just Do It, it isn’t hard or complicated When You Care.

For anyone that knows Erica, she is pretty passionate and has a knack for showcasing the products she loves, 

Your Apartment Community Web Site is Broken

Apartment Community Web Sites across the land are broken. Most are stagnate with few updates in years. They have a low or no Google PageRank. Prospects cannot find a lost web site. The “content management” solution has failed. Apartment managers do not really know what to update regularly. Having a blog attached is a fragmented approach at best. Then there is Facebook and Twitter and You Tube and LinkedIn. Who manages and creates the content, the property manager, leasing, someone from corporate? This mess needs fixed.

 There is a Better Way

We are proposing a product that enhances the users leasing experience, specifically designed to replace the typical static apartment community web site. This apartment marketing and leasing website will incorporate hyper local articles and be everything local, similar to what Airbnb recently launched with Neighborhoods . With a fully automated web based Lead to Lease, lead collection and tracking system woven into the fabric of the site as a seamless part of the user experience, effectively managing leasing leads is easy.  Being fully automated is a key component. Too many leasing leads are lost sticky notes.

 Each component and touch point must enhance the leasing experience. The site will sport strong and pleasing graphics, photography and video illustrating all things local via a variety of content mediums and reviews.

Districts and Neighborhoods 

 The website framework will be organized by geographical regions, referred to as “Neighborhoods” or “Districts”. The site will incorporate a streamlined Guest Card, which auto flows into a Lead to Lease Management System. The Guest Card would also be placed on the apartment operators “regional” Facebook page and all information would flow directly into the Lead to Lease System. The “regional” Facebook pages would mirror the brand images of the regional web pages. One of the key points of organizing the apartment operators affairs and digital assets regionally, by Neighborhoods is to steer away from single one off apartment community Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, Pinterest accounts, You Tube and so forth. This creates an excellent opportunity to brand the property lifestyle. Every apartment community has a persona and a certain lifestyle. This new web site will better convey that. The challenges of managing one off social marketing at the community by community level does not scale. Most apartment operators with scattered communities still break down into only a handful of regions. Content marketing, partnership marketing and social outreach become much more effective and manageable by region.

 Unit Availability by “region” or by Neighborhood will be incorporated and will be a centralized, real time place for daily updates of unit availability. The Unit Availability will include unit photos, 3D floor plans and videos cataloged by unit type and be clickable link that open a window on the Unit Availability.

 The web site will be clean and simple. Less is more. Fill the space with great photography, local reviews and all things hyper local. Each page will have clear Call to Action leading prospects into the sales funnel, however this is an “opt in” experience, meaning the prospect decides when the conversion process starts. We expect that prospects will stay on the site much longer and may visit several times before renting.

 The site will make every effort to “match” the prospect to a certain apartment community based on the property strengths and personality. Each apartment community will be assessed and categorized. Each apartment-landing page will include the Walk Score Widget, and will expand a window with all things local. The site will include articles and reviews to coincide with these local neighborhood businesses that are in alignment with the apartments brand and core targeted demographic. 

 Partnership marketing opportunities will be negotiated with these core businesses that make the match. These rich relationships provide excellent cross marketing opportunities. For instance, helping promote the local burger joint is an opportunity to give away something as a promotion from the burger joint on the apartment operators Facebook page at no cost to the apartment operator. 

 The site will automatically capture email address for with each Guest Card. Appropriate language will be embedded to allow the user to request future emails about neighborhood events, new business openings, festivals and local news happenings.  Regular email offerings would be processed to keep in touch with prospects and residents a like on all things local.  

Just an idea for now, although I have shared this manifesto with a few industry peers. Should you have interest in chatting further, give us a ring. We love talking all things Apartment Marketing