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.

Experimenting With Facebook Fan Page Growth

Corralling facebook fans can be a tough sled. All of our facebook in boxes are inundated with fan page requests, most of which are ignored. Search the web and there are dozens of “How To” guides on the topic

Mashable penned a 5 Elements of a Successful Facebook Fan Page

For many companies a Facebook fan page is an integral part of their social media campaign. But, what elements help fan pages build up large followings and what can brands do to emulate the success of others? I’ve put together a list of specific elements that I believe have helped create fan pages with large, engaged, followings.

As we grow our Digital Sherpa Brand and our Turn Key Social Media Product, one of the things we are constantly doing is trying experiments, some of which may seem small, some that don’t work, and some that have an impact to results.

Experimenting With Facebook Fan Page Growth

So we started our Digital Sherpa Facebook Fan Page about 30-45 days ago. Our first exercise was to do like most folks do, which is to invite your friends from our personal profiles, which netted about (350) fans. Next two weeks, hardly nothing, fan adds completely stalled for the next couple of weeks.

Time for Something New

Sometimes to my demise, I am an action oriented guy, and while that doesn’t always work, some of our best discoveries have been from twisting and turning when things aren’t working. So, for the last two weeks, we have been adding three to five articles of interest, our own morning reads to the Digital Sherpa Fan Page, and I have tweeted the article, but linked to the Digital Sherpa Fan Page. The hope was that our Community of Interest found value in the shared, filtered article, and also became a Digital Sherpa fan.

I am a big believer in “borrowing ideas”. Dan McCrthy has blogged about how his blog traffic has increased from his recent, regular Good Reads posting, which is a similar idea on “sharing”

I’m acting as a curator of content that I’m experiencing. I’m applying an editorial filter on that content, and in each summary providing some context for why I think the post is interesting. The blog post itself isn’t strictly original, but it is definitely presenting a point of view that some number of my readers find useful.

Here are Our Two Week Results,

We have added a little over (200) facebook Fans in two weeks. Not bad, and that is helping us move from the staled position. That tact may not work to get us to (5,000) fans, but it has moved the needle for now. I liken this to one of our angles as to how to grow blog followers, is by leaving thoughtful comments on like other blog posts. The point is this is, we are filtering and sharing what we find with our Community of Interest.

So we will keep you posted. What has worked for you in adding Facebook Fan Page fans?

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.

Tactic Lust Has Little Value

Are you in love with on line tactics, such as facebook and twitter, but are wondering why you only have a handful of followers or fans? It is all the rage today to be a part of this craze we call Social Media Marketing, but if you are just talking to yourself, there is no net effect for your business. Said differently, being on facebook and twitter alone has little to no value to your small business unless you are engaging with your community of interest.

What Do I Say or Post

Social Media is outreach on steroids. it is a way for folks to share things of interest with other like friends and associations. Social Media Marketing can be an excellent way to expand your customer base. Master aligning content with your core customer base, and become a source conduit via the various social platforms within your Circle of Influence.

Be a Curator of Content That You Are Experiencing

Dan McCarthy summed it up nicley on a recent comment he left on his blog

The distribution challenge — how do I get the content I want to share out into my social graph as easily as possible — is a technology-standards issue. For Facebook et al to leverage value out of their audience, they need techniques to keep their audience as organized as possible. Ergo, a walled garden of a certain degree. As a marketer or a media player, you want to assess each potential distribution channel in terms of the scale that you can aggregate and the results that you get from distributing content. The equation would be something like: (Size of social graph on platform/click-thrus)+(Redistribution of links)+(Inbound link recognition by Google)=Weighted value of audience.

The broad debate across the social media community about “original” versus “repurposed” content defines the content question in a way that is too confrontational, I think. A good example is the Good Reads summary of things that struck me that I do on this blog. I’ve been fascinated by the volume of upstream click-thru’s I’m driving with those posts. People are reading them and clicking through to the articles that I’m highlighting.

I’m acting as a curator of content that I’m experiencing. I’m applying an editorial filter on that content, and in each summary providing some context for why I think the post is interesting. The blog post itself isn’t strictly original, but it is definitely presenting a point of view that some number of my readers find useful.

That’s the role of curation, and every brand can benefit from it. For instance, imagine posting once a week on your Urbane apartments blog about new reviews of restaurants in the surrounding area. The reviews can come from any number of sources, and you pick out the ones that you think would be the most interesting to your Community. That’s curated content. It’s not original. But it is incredibly useful.

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,

Social Media Engagement

One of the reasons that I enjoy writing blog posts is that it helps me better organize and sort my thoughts. When posts resonate with the readers or followers and as conversations unfold, further understanding ensues. One of the things we have been grappling with internally is engagement, and does that mean that we have achieved success with our clients because we added (10) twitter friends every month, or does that mean we failed because we re-purpose content on a blog post in order to meet a blog quantity metric.  Frankly, it is neither, and sometimes we all miss the point of the Real Value of Engagement, and the order in which it even occurs, which is sometimes different for different clients.

Social Media Engagement

Social Media Explorer and friend Jason Falls recently penned post titled , What is Engagement and How Do We Measure It, that attempted the question, but it seems there are a variety of answers, depending on who you ask.

One of the most powerful business objectives social media can deliver is consumer engagement. At least that’s what all the social media advocates tell you, right. But what exactly is “engagement,” how do you measure it and why is it all of a sudden the holy grail of marketing?

Frankly, engagement is just a bullshit term made up to apply to making people do something in the online (or offline) space. Sixty years ago engaging a customer meant you said, “Hi. Wanna buy some stuff?” They said, “Sure, whatya got?” Then they bought something.

Jason points out in his post, It’s always about the bottom line to the people who sign the checks. We tend to agree here at Digital Sherpa, and have a saying that If You Aren’t Selling More Stuff to More People for More Money, Then Your Social Media Campaign is Just a Hobby. That tends to get the Social Media Purists in a bit of an uproar, but it really is the bottom line. Sometimes it even gets our own staff in an uproar as they too can tend to cling to a self imposed need to be right.

There a zillion and one ways to engage with your customers and clients, and we will start to cover some of those with a couple of examples.

What to Measure; Hard to go Wrong with Results

As simple as it sounds, I tend to gravitate toward results. I am not always the most tactful guy in the room, so delivering sustainable results has helped me immensely throughout my career. Social Media Marketing, frankly any type of marketing, can be a little vague. One of our clients, Paragon Properties, a regional apartment operator in SE Michigan with about 7,500 units engaged us to help them with their internet marketing and to Expand Their Digital Footprint.

Rather than starting with adding facebook fans, twitter followers and the like, we started with Increasing Web Presence. According to studies, we continue to read that over 80% of consumer interactions w/ a brand start in a search box. If that is the case, don’t you wnat your business showing up in search results?

That is exactly where we started with Paragon, and we delivered. We started the project in September of last year, and after (106) blog posts and several web site optimization tweaks, here are January, Year over Year Results

Web Traffic Increase       93.44 % Increase

Page View Increase         112.47% Increase

But if you are the check signer, do you really care about web traffic increase? I have done enough of this to know though, that with those kind of increases, actual physical traffic in the door had to increase, and so it was no surprise when the company president phoned to tell us they experienced their highest traffic and rental month in January that they have had in the last six months! Being in SE Michigan, with the highest unemployment in the nation, helping the client have the largest traffic month in six months in January is of real benefit, and makes renewing the contract a shoe in.

Next post, we will cover another client, Harvest Power, and their specific goal is to build a following first, and we will outline how we soared past 1,000 relevant twitter followers on our way to 2,000 followers in weeks, not months.

So, What are you looking with Engagement?

Digital Marketing; Want More Business-Start Blogging

So, How much data do you need to start blogging?

I am a big fan of what the folks over at Hub Spot are doing, and they continue to provide actual results as to what is working for their clients. According to a study of 2,300 HubSpot customers revealed that businesses that blog witness their monthly leads rise by 126% more than those who don’t.

According to the folks at Hub Spot,

We compared leads last month with leads two months ago for 6 consecutive months, and the result shows that blogging businesses, whether or not they use the HubSpot platform, experience a 165% lead growth, a much larger increase than that of non-blogging businesses, which experience a 73% lead growth.

So, How long are going to wait to start a blog for your business? No time for that, let us here at Digital Sherpa help, we do blogging you, in a big way, and we can help you move the Google Needle! This stuff works, and IS how we grew our own small business, It will work for you too.

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,