Executing Quick Marketing Wins

In our industry with technology moving at the speed it’s moving…. our options of where we should be devoting our financial resources and our brainpower and our physical man-hours is ever changing. It’s hard to know what direction to turn, what ILS to partner with and which social media profiles to maintain. It’s all gotten a little too crazy! And while we will each have our own favorites when it comes to our ILS partners, I do have some suggestions of tried and true quick wins. I base this strategy on the old adage work smarter not harder and let your money work for you. There are a couple of programs/features out there that you can set up once and know that they are benefitting your property in perpetuity.   Ready for this week’s quick wins? You might have already done one or all of these things, but each week I am going to speak to a different marketing manager and learn their secrets. Check back monthly… because where else can you become a marketing hero in thirty minutes or less???

Yes Instagram. Probably the lowest threshold for people to engage with you, but we have proven that you can get leads. In fact with one weeklong experiment we delivered 18 leads sourced directly from Instagram. This is such an easy one to have site teams involved with, and yet you still have total control!   I set up a dropbox and invited the entire site team, including porters and maintenance team to join. Then I sent them a list requesting all of the different things I wanted photos of, from flowers to appliances to parties to pool pumps. I told them I wanted to see the property through their eyes. Including where they went to lunch and happy hour. About once a week, I scroll through all of the photos they have uploaded, pick my 5 favorites and voila, content for the week. I’ve also set some aside for next year and have already noted that I have content for that on my calendar. {Like an abundance of 4^th of July photos or Halloween pics.} One of the secrets I’ve found to Instagram is to hashtag your photo. Hashtag etiquette is a bit different on Instagram compared to other platforms with up to 30 hashtags being completely acceptable.I typed out typical groups of hashtags that I would use {city name, apartment name and the #photooftheday or #InstagramHub} on my notepad app on my phone so I just select and paste when I post a photo. It’s faster than posting a craigslist ad and it’s actually working! We had 50 visits to one of our property pages last month directly from Instagram.

Top Line Local-My favorite set it and forget it tool and the best money I spend on a monthly basis. I set up my account once and pay $75/month and the team takes care of all of my local listings. By now you’ve heard plenty of chatter about citations…it’s easy to get bogged down in the details here. Main point, we all know customers find and engage with your brand across a variety of platforms. It could be an apartment locator, search engines or social media platforms. The problem is that duplicate listings on social platforms like Facebook can diminish the reach of your brand. Additionally, listings on sites that don’t match 100% can also weaken your credibility with Google. Top Line makes it easy to identify and merge these pages and their audiences to your ‘official page’ and manage all of the listings with a single solution.   The best part my analytics are showing actual leads coming in via the local listings. Cost per lead the lowest second only to CL!

Google+ pages…again, I imagine you have already done this for your properties but I still subscribe to the Google Loves Google Loves Google philosophy. So if your pages are set up, you can rest assured no matter what changes Google makes, they are going to make sure their own products are kept in good graces. Again, it’s an easy set up one time. You can post updates if you want…and I do occasionally. If you don’t at least your location and information is in place for whatever Google algorithm decides to do next!

So that’s my 3 for today. Join us next week when we hear from one of my favorite multifamily peeps share their top ideas! PLEASE let me know if you are doing these things or if you would like to share your top 3, I’d love to hear from you!

Cheers!

~Holli