Apartment Marketing: Paragon Properties Moves the Google Needle

January 23, 2010
By

Welcome to Episode #3 of the series on our interviews with Paragon Properties, a regional property management company, managing what was 4,500 units in SE Michigan that has now grown to 7,500 units

Paragon Properties has entered the Apartment Social Media Marketing space in a big way. (Full Disclosure; Paragon Properties is a client) We will be checking in with the folks at Paragon with a bi monthly series for a candid conversation about what is going right and what isn’t going so well on their Social Media quest.

Just so folks know what our promise to Paragon was when we took this project;

Our target and performance goals for 2010 for Paragon Properties:
• Increase Web Traffic by 60%
• Increase Physical Traffic, (Guest Cards) by 20%
• Decrease Market Costs by 30%

How Are We Doing
In checking on our progress with Google Analytics for the Paragon Properties Web Site, we are pretty excited about our results so far. We launched the Paragon Life Blog and the Paragon Patio.
Although the Blog Site just went live in late December, we have just under (100) posts up, with rich keywords and tags. Already, Paragon Properties are coming up high in Google Page Rankings, but the cool news is that month over month results from when we started the campaign in September, Paragon Properties Web Traffic is UP 70%!

Enjoy the Video, as Justin and I bang around ideas,

Eric’s background is rooted in the rental and real estate industries. He founded metro Detroit’s Urbane Apartments in 2003, after serving as senior vice president for a major Midwest apartment developer. He established a proven track record of effectively repositioning existing rental properties in a way that added value for investors while enhancing the resident experience.

He also established The Urbane Way, a social media marketing and PR laboratory, where innovative marketing ideas are tested. Eric has been featured in Entrepreneur Magazine and Business Week Magazine.

You can connect with Eric_Urbane on Twitter.

Eric also writes regular articles for the following publications;

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  • Mark Juleen

    Up and running with what? You have to be doing something if web traffic is up 70%, no? Also, this stuff does take time. We all need to admit this. That time is money, thus, social media is not free either. You can't do this alone in my opinion. I think having a 3rd party involved is an excellent strategy. Look forward to hearing more gents. Thanks for the update!

  • UrbaneWay

    Hey Mark,Thanks for stopping by, We have used and implemented every trick we know and have learned along the way on this Paragon Account. Justin had enough faith to believe in us, and so we are doing everything we know, or at least think we know to expand Paragon's Digital Footprint. I want to hit this one out of the park for all the naysayers and babble about scale, and that the stuff we have done at Urbane only works because we are a boutique shop and I am hands on. While there are certain truths to that, most of the things we are replicating at Paragon are scaling proportionately. We are learning a lot as we go too. We have been working on this account and year long contract since Sept, so it really hasn't happened overnight, and to your point, it doesn't, we are only in the beginning stages. We have optimized parts of the Paragon Web Site, and continue to tweak that, we have started a Content Marketing Campaign, we are organizing an Email Marketing Campaign and many other things in addition to the Ning Site (Paragon Patio) and the Word Press Blog Site (Paragon Life) We came out of the gate, day one of the blog with over (60) blog optimized posts.The most fascinating piece about this is the energy it has created within the Paragon organization, and with their core resident base. We have organized an army of Paragon Resident Bloggers that are really fired up.Having said all that, we are only at the beginning, and we are driving traffic, lots of it to their web site, the next challenge is conversion and driving more physical traffic;ie Guest Cards

  • Mark Juleen

    After meeting Justin a few weeks ago I can tell you that I know he is excited about what's happening. This stuff definitely doesn't happen over night, but I think the support from the top is a key to moving forward. Thanks E.

  • UrbaneWay

    Mark, You hit on a very huge issue here, the guy at the top has total buy in. We have no internal approval process to deal with for anything, other than Justin and I discussing things over lunch, or coffee. He has not pushed back any of the ideas, and his folks have given this project their number one attention, The significance of that cannot be underestimated,