Apartment Marketing; It Starts with a Google Search

A Guest Post by Brian Owen; Executive Director of Marketing for Laramar Group in Denver CO. Brains post illustrate exactly what we teach folks in our Move the Google Needle sessions, most recently at Optimization Summit in Dallas. Here are the slides should you have interest.

Enjoy Brian’s post, and let us know your thoughts and comments,

Google Killed the Adjective

Quite frankly, Google doesn’t care what serene, beautifully landscaped, sparkling surroundings your apartment community is nestled in nor do the prospects using Google, per se.  Not initially at least.  This makes marketing apartments a little less creative from a writing standpoint, but a little more fun and challenging from an analytics and strategy standpoint.

If you currently have Google Analytics on your website, run a report to see if anyone found you by typing in adjectives other than those related to proximity or cost (close, near, cheap, affordable).  Trust me, they didn’t.  So why do many of us continue to use those “romance” paragraphs on our website and in our ILS advertising?  The only answer I have is that some of us are still stuck in a print mindset, and between you, me and Dupree, using romance paragraphs in your print ads is a waste of creative energy as well (that’s a whole other discussion).

I’m not going to tell you what keywords you should be using on your landing pages of your websites, but I will say that if you are close to the campus of University of Michigan, you sure as hell better mention that because Google will find that a lot more relevant than a sparkling pool.  Highlighting your city name, neighborhood name, landmarks, points of interest, major roads and freeways, public transportation, shopping and entertainment in the area is the way to define your community and for many of our communities are the true amenities prospects seek.  It’s not sexy, but those of us who are creative and savvy will find a way to make it work and boost our search engine results.

Alone and No Visitors Have Arrived: Creating Engagement in Business Blogging

So you have started your company or apartment community blog, and you are posting away, but you look around only to discover you are Alone and No Visitors have Arrived

Now What

Well, according to the American Marketing Association, you aren’t really alone. When tasked with the question, Are brands providing meaningful and engaging experiences to their customers through their online communities, the answer is a somber no.

Our research on 135 online communities representing 45 major brands indicates that, with few exceptions, the answer is no.

Nearly half of the brands in the study were still in the social marketing experimentation stage, showing fairly robust levels of activity but lacking an integrated strategy across multiple communities and social media. Almost one quarter of the communities were “ghost towns,” mere facades with little or no member participation.

So if big brands can’t get it right with engagement, what doe the small business do who has jumped in with both feet. There is a great discussion going on over at our good friend, Jason Falls blog on a post titled Corporate Blogging Success Starts and Ends With Business Metrics.

The social media purists will tell you that a corporate blog serves as a community hub for your brand. They say it gives your customers a connection point to your company and engenders a sense of community. In some cases that’s true, but you’re going to see me exploring corporate blogging a lot more this year to follow up on a theory that your “community” or “audience” for your blog isn’t what you think it is. That, and the ultimate judge of a corporate blogging effort must be more closely tied to success metrics than making everyone feel good.

Start With a Corporate Blog Purpose

With our blog for our own small business, Urbane Apartments, and our blog The Urbane Life, our first goal was to create SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and web traffic to our UrbaneApts.com web site, for the sole purpose of Renting More Apartments. While there are a lot of little pieces and parts to the puzzle, our blog was and is the highest driver of leads for us. Our combined blog and web traffic for our small business will exceed 17,000 views this month, and 51,000 page views.

We went on to create Engagement next, and have enjoyed the benefits of that evidenced by increased resident retention. But it took awhile to enact engagement, but after 467 posts and 1,851 comments, our blog is humming along nicely.

All Blog and No Comment Makes For Slow Growth

When we started our blog at our small business, it didn’t do so well. The fist set of posts went up in February of 2008. We did what we thought you were supposed to do, we provided regular content, (at least what we thought regular was at the time, we since have increased “regular) we posted relevant content to our business, and we had a pretty good writer with a journalism degree doing the posts.

Dribble, Dribble, Dribble

I love to do marketing experiments to test what works and what doesn’t work, and see our own small business as a “laboratory” to test ideas before bringing them to our clients. So, that is partly why we started blogging in the first place, to see what worked. I actually hung with the blogging test with lackluster results for much longer than typical, as by August of 2008, some seven months after the blogs launch,we only had about (35) monthly visitors. Frankly, most of the ideas we test fail, and so I was ready to pull the plug on this one too, as just being some type of fad for folks drinking the Social Media Kool Aid.

It Is All In The Comments

So, in September we made two significant changes to our blogging approach,

1. We added Guest Bloggers, which later became staff bloggers (more on that in a later post)
2. We required the Guest Bloggers to leave 3-5 comments on like other blog posts for each blog post they did for us.

An array of pretty interesting things happened from this turn of events, but the most significant was that our monthly blog traffic took off like a rocket. By March of 2008, monthly visitors to our Urbane Life Blog had grown to over 4,500 unique visitors.

Slow But Steady

Social Media Today penned a post recently titled Comments Have More Value Than Tweets, which tends to support this commenting theory.

If a person blogs and uses a commenting service like Disqus, you’re pretty much guaranteed they will receive your comment. Email gets ignored. Calls go straight to voicemail. Comments get responded to.

Commenting on someone’s blog accomplishes so much:

• you engage someone on their turf and in a very non-invasive way
• comments tend to have a high response rate, it’s likely you’ll get a reciprocated comment back
• comments let you showcase critical reasoning and smarts
• regular commenting is a sign that you value the other person’s opinions; that won’t go unnoticed

But here is the rub, and we speak this from first hand knowledge,  Blogging is Fun, commenting can become work. We typically get push back from bloggers and folks starting out blogging, as everyone wants to create content,which is good, but Social Media at its core is about connections, and leaving thoughtful, relevant comments on like minded blog posts is an excellent strategy.

How about you, what has worked for your blog growth,

It’s Not About the Tablet, and Everything About the Experience

A few  things that Robert  Scoble expects from Steve Jobs Apple presentation today, differnt form Steve Ballmer’s recent pitch

The use cases I’ll be watching for are:

1. Classroom. Steve will tomorrow show off a textbook of the future. One where there isn’t just text and photos like in the textbooks that I grew up in, but ones where there’s augmented reality. Where 3D objects, maps, and videos pop off the page ready to be interacted with by the user. A company named Metaio has already shipped a book that does this, but Steve Jobs will bring these capabilities to the masses.

2. The Couch. TV is about to radically change. Imagine sitting on a couch, looking at a new virtual TV guide like the very cool Clicker, seeing a cool video on YouTube, then flinging that video up to your big screen. Or, let’s say you are watching what your few hundred Facebook and Twitter friends are sharing tomorrow morning from the Apple keynote in real time and you point at one of the videos to play it. Using a service like Redux you can already do that tonight! No need to wait for Apple to show it off, but Steve Jobs will make this integrated media experience cooler and easy for non-geeks to do. Tonight look at Boxee, it has been shipping for months what Apple will bring to the masses with the new tablet.

3. The car. Yeah, you can’t text in the front seat of the car in California, but come on, if you had an always connected slate wouldn’t you find a way to mount that to read Tweets to you like Buzzvoice does, or show you a Google Map, or use Waze to report traffic conditions to others. But put the tablet in the back seat, and it becomes an entertainment device for the kids. I already see how valuable that is. This is where Jobs will bring out a few new games that will let tablet owners play against each other, so my kids in my car could play against friends in their cars on a long road trip, or on the way to school, etc.

4. The coffee shop. OK, most humans still love visiting their local coffee shop, checking in on Foursquare, and then sitting down with a magazine or a newspaper. But watch as Jobs makes those things come alive and do stuff that a Kindle just can’t do. Videos, augmented reality again, games, graphics that move and flow, charts that show up-to-the-minute info from Skygrid, which already is way better than any financial newspaper printed on dead trees.

5. The airport/airplane. I flew in a rich guy’s private plane a few weeks back. What did he have in the cockpit? An Amazon Kindle. No, not to read newspapers or Tweet or anything stupid like that. He had all the airport charts loaded on his Kindle. But, he showed me how weather maps use color and he wasn’t able to display those on the Kindle. OK, OK, there aren’t enough rich guys in the world for that use case to matter, but what about those of us who sit back in coach? Well, how about showing off how Tripit will help you find a better seat when you buy your ticket, or how it’ll warn you if your plane is running late, etc? Yeah, not to mention that watching a movie on a Tablet will be a lot more comfortable than watching it on a laptop, and there’s lots of game scenarios, etc, that would be fun to see him demo here.

6. Healthcare. Tablets make a HUGE amount of sense in healthcare. Remember Epocrates, the iPhone app that Steve Jobs’ own health team helped influence? Now imagine they came out on stage and showed off their new version which has much better integration with your entire health chart.

Google Juice and Social Media Marketing

A proven strategy for Moving the Google Needle is Consistent Content, which starts with a Content Strategy Plan. Dan McCarthy in his post titled A Case Study in Building Google Juice lays out how consistent posting, with relevant copy can and will  serve up some of that famed Google Juice.

Dan points  out some flawed thinking surrounding the Google Juice and Internet Marketing debate;

Say the words “Google Juice” and people are likely to nod their head knowingly. Getting Google Juice is a dark art, easy to understand and hard to execute. People hear Google Juice and they think, Page 1..

These conversations are flawed. Google Juice is an ongoing by-product of a consistent content strategy that connects with a specific audience. As my colleague Todd Dubnerpoints out, when you try to game Google, you end up gaming yourself. But when you try to serve a market with consistent content, even with a marketing emphasis, you’ll accrue a natural level of Google Juice that will differentiate you from the market.

Content Strategy

Valerie Maltoni, over at Conversation Agent lays out a the importance of a Content Strategy.

Static and often stale Web sites have been in dire need of evolution for a long time. Content formats shared in social media and networks suit the way we evaluate, talk, and socialize our decisions about products and services better, at this stage.

Although we all know that it’s still very early days. We’re trying to retrofit how we think and organize our knowledge, recombining and building on information, as well as out humanness, in a medium that has a long way to go on mapping to either one. Content comes close, but only when it’s activated with engagement.

Just like TV didn’t kill radio, the company Web site still plays an important role in the digital marketing mix. Razorfish highlighted the importance of Web content to provide experiences in their 2008 FEED report.

Instead of building a site around an organization chart, which in many ways mirrors the company’s hierarchy, we should build the context around customer needs in two areas of browsing:

(1) search – for answers
(2) sharing – of stories

These two desires and functions are the bread and butter of blogs, where more recent, or shared trump content win. Plus, blogs help with the relationship thing in ways that Web sites don’t – by humanizing the interaction with your company through conversation and relationship building.

Blogs Are the Cornerstone of  Your Digital Footprint

As both Valerie and Dan point out, a company blog is an excellent tool to Expand Your Digital Footprint, and create Google Juice. While your individual approach for your business may differ, the fundamentals are mostly the same.

Think about this, most companies create a web site, and then sort of forget about it. That doesn’t work for Google, as they are scouring the web for fresh content regularly. A blog, which is just another web site allows you to easily update content easily.

We would love to here what is working for you, and what may have been a challenge,

Yelp Ratings Virtually Showing Up on Your Door

So, If you are thinking you can avoid those Ratings and Reviews, think again, they are now showing up literally on your front door. John Jantsch penned an article over on his blog titled Yelp, Changing the Local Game Some More

The image below is a screengrab from my iPhone as I am pointing it down a street. The phone is using an augmented reality feature of the  Yelp! iPhone app called Monocle. What your seeing is that as I point the camera at a location Yelp! reviews pop on the screen. I can click through or simply choose to skip that shop I was going to go into based on the slew of two star reviews. If this image doesn’t get your attention that reviews on sites like Google Maps and Yelp! are important then nothing will.

Yelp! also added a “check in” feature so people using the app can note when they visit a location. At some point this information will become very valuable and expect Yelp! to build advertising opportunities around check ins – on your 10th visit to a coffee shop you get a free drink coupon, for example. This could be bad news for location games  Foursquare and Gowalla.

So How Do You Feel About That

So, now anyone can see those reviews and ratings pasted virtually on your property, building and place of business. And, You can’t remove them or do much about it. How does that make you feel. If you have a crappy business model, I would guess you are worried.

But what about the shop thats is doing it right, be it an apartment community, a restaurant, a baker or an auto mechanic, this is like having virtual customer testimonials. Take advantage, get involved with Yelp, start to build your Digital Footprint, Why would you wait any longer?

ApartmentFinder.com has recently launched a new cool social media integration feature where any of their advertisers can have their Yelp reviews displayed on their property details pages.

Talk Directly to the Top Gun at Yelp

In an effort to dispel some of the fears Geoff Donaker, the COO at Yelp, has agreed to participate in a joint webinar with NCI on February 5th  for anyone to hear directly from Geoff and the team at Yelp about how their product works and their understanding of how rental prospects use their site

This webinar is FREE, and you can sign up here, Don’t miss this one friends. We are expecting a big turnout for the event and most importantly to see what kind of questions our industry has for the guys at Yelp.