Are You Overspending 70% of Your Apartment Marketing Budget
Do you have a mentor? If you are lucky enough to have one to help guide your career, or even just visit with every now and again, take advantage of that resource. I have done just that with my last employer, Jonathan Holtzman, Chairman at Village Green Companies. It may only be a breakfast meeting here or there a year, but I always come away with a new perspective on apartment marketing and apartment operations.
Perhaps You Just Need to Redirect Your Traffic
At a brief breakfast meeting last fall Jonathan was on a roll about how much precious operating revenue is squandered on Apartment Marketing, up to 70% he says. Certainly a lot of the rant was theoretical, but I have been thinking about how how much web traffic we “waste” by not shifting inbound links directly to our web site landing pages for the apartment communities, in lieu of sending the traffic to the Home Page.
Apartment Community Landing Page Conversions
Are you linking your Craig’s List Ads to the Apartment Community Landing Page the ad references? You should be, otherwise you confuse the prospect. Have you done any conversion ratio experiments to track and measure how your Landing Pages are converting to Guest Cards? We are running a series of tests here at the Urbane Lab to track just that over the last eight to twelve quarters for a client over a 5,000 unit protfolio, and what we are seeing is that many times traffic from other sources such as blog posts that were sent to to the Home Page clearly fall into the “Wasted Apartment Leasing leads” bucket.
What is worst, is that during some of those time frames, marketing spend was increased due to specific vacancy occurring at select communities, increasing costs at the same time web traffic conversions were overflowing at other sites.
Can You Really Direct Web Traffic Toward Vacancy
Perhaps it isn’t an exact science, shifting inbound links toward the apartment community landing pages with the lowest leased occupancy, but if you are on your game you should know thirty to sixty days out what occupancy dragan you need to slay first.
Our initial testing of this practice of redirecting inbound links appear to be working to increase occupancy at those sites, and cease the knee jerk reaction of buying more advertising from third party sources as overall occupancy flattens out across an apartment portfolio.
We would love to hear your feedback and experience here,
Eric Brown
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 Urbane Media, 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 Urbane_Media on Twitter. Eric also writes regular articles for the following publications; Multi Housing News Social Media Examiner Search Engine Guide
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