You can spend thousands of dollars and hours on marketing and advertising but one negative interaction will undo all that hard work. The front-line team is the public face of your organization. If they are frustrated, harried, not knowledgeable, incompetent or rude you will alienate your customer (plus her circle of influence). Numerous retail studies have demonstrated that it is human nature to complain about our negative interactions while we rarely repeat positive ones. While we cannot completely eliminate negative interactions (or at the very least, a perception that a negative interaction has occurred), we can do our best to minimize them by effectively training our team. We talk about the benefits of training but few want to foot the bill. In fact, throughout the past few years of economic stress, the training budgets of most companies have been whittled away. However, consider the cost of one lost resident—due to a negative showing for example—and you could easily justify the cost of a basic training program. Engaging in a program of effective training results in two broad areas of benefit: improved morale and increased knowledge. Employees view education as the employer’s investment in them as well as a signal that they are valued. This results in an improved outlook towards the employer, towards the job and themselves. This morale boost results in more positive customer (as well as coworker) interactions. Conversely, when employees become stagnant their results and customer relations become stagnant. Training counteracts this tendency. An increase in knowledge is...

Add value for your residents, while creating lasting relationships in the community. Facebook is an effective medium for local businesses trying to drive people offline to their premises and for building deeper relationships with members of their local community. Using Facebook to cross-promote in conjunction with a local merchant can gain greater exposure for your offering and should be at the top of your marketing to-do list. What is cross-promotion? Cross-promotion is where two parties, who target identical or similar markets, decide to promote each other’s services.   Picking a Cross-Promotion PartnerTo determine a partner to align with, consider the following:   1. DemographicsFirst, make sure there is alignment. If you’re a retirement community, for example, avoid partnering with a nightclub whose young audience will be off your target. Second, brand image is a consideration. Make sure it’s compatible with your partner. If your interior architecture is ultra modern, you’re probably better off partnering with a contemporary furniture store than an antiques store.   2. ReachMake sure that your cross-promotional relationship is equitable. If you have 2000 Facebook fans and you’re doing a campaign on Facebook, you want to make sure you aren’t working with merchants that have only 10 fans of their own. Though, you can mix and match marketing channels to make your relationship work. For example, if a merchant has tons of website traffic, they might still be an attractive partner.   3. VariationIdeally, you’ll launch new and different promotions over time so that you can constantly reach...

Betty’s a self-described ‘old-timer’. She has been through more up-and-down economic cycles than she would care to number. "Happy Days are here again!" she told me. "But you know, it doesn’t last." Way to kill the mood, Betty. She is right. Cycles are called cycles because they keep coming around. In most of the markets I visit times are good. Vacancy is down; rents are being pushed. It is time to seize the day! Increase rents, pump increased revenues back to your profit-starved investors and make those long-deferred capital improvements. However, now is the time to put on your Leader Cap: your job is to take the long-range view. What are the potential outcomes of our current management behaviors? First, review economic reality: Homeless - According to the MBA National Delinquency Survey, 4,296,018 homes were foreclosed, sold in a short sale or the mortgage was over 90-days delinquent in 2011. Of these, 1,445,000 houses were lost due to foreclosure or short sales. Each of these people moved in with friends or family, are in a shelter, living in their car or are your new residents. Unemployed / Underemployed - Bloomberg reports that while the unemployment rate is dropping (down to 8.3% in January, 2012), underemployment is hovering around 17%. These are folks who are working well below their potential. No Cushion – MSN Careers says that 42% of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck while Economicrot puts the figure at a staggering 77%. Either way, there are a lot of people whose economic...

Dark Virtual Storm Still on the Horizon? It was a dark day on Wednesday, January 18, 2012—for some of us more than others.  Murphy’s Law was in full effect the moment my feet hit the ground that morning, and the string of mishaps continued when I got to work and turned on my computer. I opened Google to check my email, and I saw a thick, black bar covering the logo at the top of the page. Thinking my computer had a virus, I opened some of the other websites that I commonly use. The WordPress homepage was dark, and the site looked like it had been abandoned. Same thing occurred when I went to Wikipedia. I asked my coworker if she was experiencing problems with the Internet, and she told me it was because of SOPA—an answer that left me more in the dark than ever. A cursory search on the Internet led me to understand that SOPA stands for the Stop Online Piracy Act. I dug into it deeper to find an answer to my next question: What was up with this Internet blackout?  The Scoop on SOPA and Its Cohort PIPASOPA is a House bill introduced in October that would give federal prosecutors the authority to crack down on foreign online piracy sites that trade in counterfeit music, movies, software or other U.S. copyrighted products. SOPA isn’t the only acronym swirling around this news story that stormed in our lives last week. Protect IP (Preventing Real Online Threats...

Hidden on each of your apartment properties is a secret marketing weapon that can help in your never ending battle to improve resident retention: your maintenance staff. I’m sure you’re thinking, “Well, duh Michael. Quality and timeliness of maintenance service is a key factor in resident renewals. Don’t you keep up with SatisFacts Research’s data?” Well, Duh: Based on a national study entitled, “Getting Inside the Head of the Online Resident,” conducted by SatisFacts Research in 2011, a “sense of community” and “resident events and activities” rated as having low importance when it came to their decision to renew their lease. Basic service expectations, such as quality of maintenance service and quality of customer service had the highest importance. But I’m not talking about maintenance. I’m talking about marketing. In addition to your leasing office staff, your maintenance team are also marketing your property. Let me share with you a recent experience from a stay at Hampton Inn & Suites Memphis-Shady Grove  that illustrates my point. On the morning of my checkout, I’m dragging my suitcase behind me down a hallway when a housekeeper came out of a room. She gave me a big smile. Housekeeper: Good morning sir, how are you today. Me: I’m well. How are you? Housekeeper: I’m fine. Are you leaving us today, sir? Me: I’m checking out today, yes. Housekeeper: Oh, did you have a nice stay with us, sir? Me: Yes I did, thank you. Housekeeper: I’m so glad. Please come back and see us again....

Here are three quick tips to help your email messages reach your subscribers’ inboxes, avoid spam complaints and maintain your status as a reputable sender: 1)     Ensure you are sending relevant messages to subscribers who have expressly opted in to receive your emails. For example, if a prospective renter signs up to receive property listings, the last thing they’ll want to see is an advertisement in their inbox about the latest weight loss trick!  There are many people out there who want to receive promotional emails, provided that you give them exactly what they’ve asked for. 2)      Don’t send to lists that are too old. While a subscriber may enjoy reading your emails when they first sign up, there often comes a point when they simply no longer wish to hear from you -- and that’s okay!  Perhaps they no longer have a need for your service or your message doesn’t apply to them anymore.  If you send to subscribers who signed up for your program years ago, you’ll have a much higher likelihood of spam complaints and bounces.  You may find many of these folks are no longer using the same email address or have completely forgotten they opted into your program way back when. 3)     Send your messages at an expected rate. While you don’t necessarily need to tell subscribers exactly how many emails they should expect to receive, a little common sense and the golden rule can go a long way.  You don’t want to bombard them...

No matter what our role is within the multi-family industry, there is always one word which is used more than any other; “community.” Some of us own communities, some of us develop communities, some of us design communities and others of us lease or operate them. And chances are that many of us live in an apartment, condominium or townhome community as well. So then why is it that there is so little ‘community’ in our communities? When it comes down to this failure’s root cause, it can really only be one of two choices; a.       Either the management team does not expend their energies in a manner that creates a welcoming and vibrant atmosphere that encourages interaction, or b.      The developer did not guide the design in a manner that supports congregation. Now because I am an owner and developer by trade and not a manager, my expertise is limited when it comes to the nuance of property management. I am positive that I undervalue the challenges of those on the front lines. But where I do have some insights is on the development side of the industry. I have mentioned in multiple other essays that the developer has become effectively a highly functioning project manager. We have lost our intellectual curiosity about how folks ‘actually’ live. We have lessened our study of the ways that neighborhoods, communities and cities are formed, only to concentrate on sharpening our excel acumen and expand our address book of consultants. Instead, we generally...

How many times a month does your Leasing Office receive requests for updated Market Surveys? Do you cringe when you see these come through the fax machine or when you recognize other properties’ telephone numbers on your Caller ID? I think it is only human to react this way, especially, when you feel like they ask the same information month after month.  The BEST Leasing Manager I ever knew (and it sure wasn’t me!) and I worked out a different way of obtaining the most accurate and reliable property information so that our Market Surveys were always easily updated. I use this technique as well when gathering market information for possible acquisitions as well.  I dislike wasting time and I dislike “busy work.” Busy work, to me, is when a company hires a new or inexperienced Leasing Consultant and assigns him or her the task of doing the monthly Markey Survey. (And you know the person who USED to get this chore each month is secretly happy to be relieved of this!) So, the new person asks which properties to call and proceeds to do so. He or she sometimes never even introduces him/herself to the person who answers the phone and usually says something like this: “Hi. I was wondering if you could answer a couple of questions for my Market Survey?” When the person says yes, then the Consultant starts in with fifteen different questions as to the size of the units at your property, how much do they...

And I'm not talking the married kind of engagement. (although that can be pretty pricey too)

I'm talking the price of engagement in regards to social media. I was not a bandwagon social media user. I wanted to understand how to engage and converse with our residents and potential residents before I jumped on the social media train. I also wanted to understand how to measure engagement and then translate that to value for our clients. 

For me, the  issue with social media is not the time it takes to post, blog or tweet, the issue is engagement. Are you maximizing on opportunities of engagement? Are you talking at your residents and prospects are talking with them? Having thousands of fans or followers are great but what are you doing with them?

What gives you the best engagement bang for you buck? I have included my top three.

DON'T BE A NEWS FEED HOG

Posting and tweeting are a marathon, not a race. If you clog up their news feed, they are sure to unfollow or unsubscribe. Studies show a post every 3-4 hours is the sweet spot.

INSIGHTS

Are you looking at your insights page? Your insights page has a wealth of information and demographics. Use that to your advantage when posting. 

FEEDBACK SCORE

Look at your most successful post (in terms of likes, comments, impressions, re-tweets, etc) and figure out your feedback score. For the posts with the highest feedback percentage, do you see a pattern of posts people engage with most... sports, fashion, decorating ideas? 

I benchmark everything. As a Director of Marketing, making sure my marketing team's time is well spent requires just that, benchmarking everything. Have we figured out the secret formula to social media, engagement and ROI.. not yet but I'm working on it. :-)

Happy posting!

 

Sparkle Hammond, M.Ed.  First Communities | Director of Marketing
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www.century-apartments.com | www.facebook.com/centuryapartmenthomes

It seems like over the past five years or so, an infinite number of marketing channels have emerged. We bought pages on listing sites, then we created our own property websites.  Now web pages are generated for our property just by having a resident “check in” on Facbook or Foursquare.  Seriously!  This makes it extremely challenging for an apartment community to have one coherent brand on the web. So what’s a marketer to do? First, claim your facebook page! This can be as simple as going onto facebook and searching for your property name to see if it has already made its way onto Facebook without your knowledge. If you see your property in the search results, click on it and take a look… It probably says X number of people like this, Y number of people are talking about this, and Z number of people were here (where X, Y, and Z are real numbers). This is because everytime someone adds an interest to their profile, Facebook automatically creates a landing page for that interest. So if they like where they live… Bam, landing page!  The same thing happens if someone checks in somewhere…it will add it to an existing page or create a new one.  While it feels like this is totally out of your control, don’t worry – it’s actually a GOOD thing. It means (a) your residents like you, and (b) they’re telling their friends about your property (by virtue of publically checking in).  So how...