John Stepleton's Blog

Key performance indicators (KPI’s) are measurements organizations use to track and evaluate how effective they are at making progress towards their long-term goals.  What metrics does your property use evaluate progress towards your apartment marketing goals?  Do you wish there was a better, more efficient way to track your property marketing leads?  Do you ever wonder what your prospects are thinking when they read your ads?   Are your staff members effective at turning leads into leases? 

Here are six metrics that we think that can help and that every property should track.

• Ad Impressions
• New Leads
• Lead to Tour
• Lead to Lease
• Average # of Follow-ups Per Lead
• % Open Leads

Best practice is to gather and report these metrics at least weekly (daily preferably).  This will ensure everyone at the property knows when things are going too or are off track and will give them time to correct issues before they get too big.  After all, you wouldn’t drive a car if you couldn’t see where you were going – the same is true of your marketing efforts. 

In today’s challenging market, finding new ways to increase your occupancy is on everyone’s mind.  Here are 10 ways you can increase your occupancy and look like a rock star.

• First, set a goal and make your progress visual.  Put a graph on the wall and update it weekly.  By making it visual you keep the issue top of mind to all of your staff, and will get everyone thinking about what can be done today to make a difference.
• Next, get everyone in the community involved.  It doesn’t matter what the job description is – everyone plays a part in increasing occupancy.
• Implement some type of lead tracking software.  There are a number of great providers – but until you can see where marketing is working and where it isn’t, you will have a hard time knowing where to put your time and energy.
• Pick up the phone.  I say it over and over.  It doesn’t do any good to spend tons of money on marketing if you don’t answer the phone.  If your staff doesn’t have the time, then outsource your leasing calls to a third party.
• Update your marketing content.  This includes things like pictures, ILS descriptions, and Craigslist ads.
• Focus on your message and stop trying to be everything to everyone.  Think about 2-3 things that set your property apart from the competition and apply your message to those benefits.
• Try lots of different things and keep what works.  I find some of the best ideas are those that I didn’t think would work.  Just remember to stop doing what doesn’t work.
• Increase the amount of follow-up with your prospects.  Make it competitive among your leasing staff and track the average number of follow-ups you do per prospect.   Then concentrate on increasing that number.
• Finally, be sure to make it fun.  Putting an emphasis on an operation metric like occupancy can create a lot of stress among your staff.   However, finding ways to make it fun will help to engage your staff and get them excited about making changes.

Visit us here for more property marketing tips and resources that will help to increase your occupancy.  Be sure to share what you’ve done that has helped increase your occupancy at your property. 

http://propertymarketinggurus.com

One of the most important elements of your apartment marketing strategy is your property photos.  Even if you aren’t a professional photographer, here are some creative ways and hints for taking great pictures of your property, while accentuating the best features and amenities it offers and minimizing the less desirable features.

1.)     Take pictures of rooms, not furniture.  The furniture should complement the room, so arrange the shot so that you are focusing on the entire room, not just a couch.  Prospects want to see room sizes and things like sliding doors, how the fireplace is situated in the room, how their dining room set might be placed, etc.

2.)    Exterior photos should be inviting and welcoming.  Use your property’s assets like trees, benches, and water features to welcome your prospects by including them in the frame when you shoot buildings, monuments, and clubhouses.  At the pool, showcase the lounge areas and spa.  Try taking your exterior shots at dawn or dusk when the lighting is not directly overhead.

I first heard about Zappos.com a few years ago.  Unlike some people I first heard of Zappos.com because of their unusual corporate “culture” not because of their online shoe store.  Over the years I had read a lot about Tony Hsieh and it was a goal to get the chance to visit their world famous headquarter myself.  Earlier this year I got my chance.  What an amazing experience – words can’t describe the experience.

Tony Hsieh took the company from almost no revenue to over $1 billion in less than ten years!  And, he did it by simply focusing on building the best culture he possibly could.  The result is an industry leading brand and company that was recently bought by Amzaon.com for $1.2 billion.

If you would like to see for yourself you can take advantage of a free tour Zappos.com without leaving your desk.  Here’s the information – share it freely!

In my last installment we reviewed three different functions a property website may serve.  Now we’re going to discuss the Prospect Portal in more detail, describe the differences between some of the choices available (template sites, custom sites, etc.), and help you understand which is best for your property.

Let’s clarify exactly what we mean by Prospect Portal.  This is a website with the sole purpose of helping your community prospects get to know, like and trust you.  The desired outcome is to provide your prospect with enough information to take the next step towards contacting the property and consider the apartment as their next home.

There are two things you need your site to do.  First, you need the content on your site to inform, educate and motivate the prospect to call the property for a tour.  This may seem obvious, but finding the right content and displaying it in a concise and consistent manner is more difficult than it sounds.  Secondly, you need your site to “look good” to search engines like Google and Bing, so when prospects are searching for things like – apartments Phoenix – your site gets listed (ideally on the first page) .

Not all websites are created equal.  It can be confusing to understand precisely what the difference is between certain types of websites.  We hope this helps clear up some of the confusion surrounding what type of property website is best for you.

First it’s important to think about the purpose of your new site.  There are three main types of websites for properties – Prospect Portals, Resident Portals and Corporate Sites.  Each type serves a different function and would, therefore, be designed differently.

Corporate Site: Used by a property management company needing to promote their property management services to other owners. This is also a site for employees to find information, and potential employees to apply for positions, etc.   A corporate site would also be used so the management company could post news, company updates, investor relations, etc.

By now everyone knows the importance of having an effective online classified strategy as part of your property marketing efforts.   For many communities, advertising on sites like Craigslist make up a significant share of the total prospect traffic for the property (over 50% in some cases).  But how do you know if you are getting the most from your online classified advertising effort?

As part of our mission we are constantly looking for new and creative ways to explain complex ideas.  We get a lot of questions from property managers wanting to know what really is behind the mystery of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). 

SEO is the process for getting search engines like Google to recognize your website as a credible source for searches conducted on their engines (also called organic search).   As you probably know SEO is an important part of any web marketing strategy.  However, understanding all the complexities of SEO is not easy.  So, a few Gurus over here put together a short video that tries to explain SEO in more simple terms.  Enjoy the video and let us know what other property marketing topics you'd like to see us explain. 

It’s so easy to get caught up in the latest, greatest technologies and social media buzz.   However, at the end of the day it’s the un-sexy part of apartment marketing that really matters most.

“As unsexy and low-tech as it may sound, our belief is that the telephone is one of the best branding devices out there.  You have the customer’s undivided attention for five to ten minutes, and if you get the interaction right, what we’ve found is that the customer remembers the experience for a very long time and tells his or her friends about it.” Tony Hsieh – Delivering Happiness

For many properties – and our clients – the idea of paying a third party call center to answer the phones seems like crazy talk.  But, when you think about the importance of making that first contact with a prospect flawless, it only makes sense to leave it to the professionals.

So, you have a website.  If you haven’t put any time or energy into optimizing your website then you probably haven’t been getting the traffic to your site that you had hoped you would.   The question is, where do you start?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a complex and confusing process.  The good news is that it doesn’t have to be.  SEO begins with “Keywords”.  Keywords are the search terms people use to find things on the web.  They are also the content or DNA your website that search engines like Google or Bing look for to determine how relevant your website is for any individual search result.  The strategy you use to determine which keywords to include on your site matters.

First, you need to understand what your customers are searching for.  If someone’s looking for a coffee shop in Portland, they might search using keywords like “good coffee” or “Portland coffee”.  Coffee shop websites using these keywords on their web pages, in their site code and in their web marketing, might stand a good chance of showing up in this search.