When we talk to apartment marketers about building out their branded media for their apartment portfolio, there is typically much skepticism. Which is understandabe, as marketing that works effectively today is very different from what worked yesterday and our beloved apartment industry is pretty slow to react.

Companies taking the social media plunge experience several internal and external phases as they transition into a succession of building their own branded media. Perhaps, the sweetest one is around the 36-month mark, when enough content has been created to have a solid digital footprint large enough to consistently drive more web traffic than the apartment marketer needs to sustain acceptable occupancy levels. At such time the savvy apartment marketer can begin to make well-informed decisions about how to redeploy marketing dollars into more effective channels and pocket savings along the way.

There is something known as the corridor of opportunity. The gist is that many times some of the greatest fruit bears itself once we are immersed in the process, and if you do not start the trek down the corridor, you never see the hidden opportunity. There have been many such circumstances once we started to build out our own branded media platform, many of which have become partnership marketing opportunities.

A recent such example has been with the Detroit Music Awards. The core of your branded media platform is your blog or online magazine. With that, you need to constantly find interesting topics to write about. But the real payoff comes when other people share what you are writing about. In this case, Vitamin Water, a sponsor of the show is giving folks the chance to grab some tunes fresh from the Motor City with a Vitamin Water Revive media player. Folks can download their favorite tracks free and vote for the people’s choice award. The artist with the most downloads wins.

Our play was to interview many of the artists, and to do feature stories on each as articles in our online magazine, The Urbane Life. That landed us an opportunity with Vitamin Water to allow us to place one of the their Vitamin Water Revive media players, with full voting capabilities right on our site.

Certain types of content are more sharable than others, and anything with pets likely is number one, but music, particularly local music, is right up there. As a result, our web traffic has skyrocketed, and folks are sharing links frequently as each new interview rolls out. We have become part of what the hyper local community is following, most of which are active renters. The cost to Urbane was zip, as we need to post a certain amount of articles anyway.

Eric Brown’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 Village Green Companies, a Midwest apartment developer. He also established The Urbane Way, a social media marketing and PR laboratory, where innovative marketing ideas are tested.

We kicked off this series with the notion that apartment marketers who are using social media or thinking about it should shift their thinking from the array of soft metrics that social media consultants banter about to hard numbers. Broken down to its simplest form, “If you are not renting more apartments from your social media efforts, it is just a hobby.” Social media is a lead generator.

We started talking about Twitter last week, and have implied that with relative ease your apartment community can generate several thousand relative, hyper local followers. In all of our analysis herein we are writing about the embankment of our own journey and the fruit it bears and not theoretical rhetoric. All of the quoted numbers are centered around an average-size apartment community of 300 units. A significant piece of social media marketing for apartments is execution. Someone on behalf of your apartment community needs to consistently engage the process: either your staff or an outside consultant.

Similar to answering the phone, our leasing consultants at Urbane Apartments are required to post six original Facebook posts, some with links, per day and eight tweets, every day, no excuses. And we measure them for engagement. A one-liner doesn’t cut it; the intent is to engage a conversation.

If you have elected to trek the social media path, the cornerstone of your marketing strategy is your blog or online magazine. Note that we did not say Facebook. Your blog is not a resident newsletter, nor does it replace that. Your blog shouldn’t be about your apartment community; that would be an electronic brochure. If social media is a lead generator, then your content plan, which is the dashboard for every blog post, must be targeted toward prospects, not just residents.

Similar to Twitter, building a solid hyper local readership, with sharable, interesting content is a must for your blog effort. Simply put, if no one is reading your blog posts it is work with no payoff. As with any advertising medium that generates rental leads, you must have a following. We have just under 700 posts on our blog and just under 3,000 comments. We have around 12,000 monthly visitors, and our blog is the primary traffic source for our apartment website.

Giveaways, contests and sweepstakes are an excellent way to drive blog traffic, and in most cases the stuff we are giving away is free from the marketing partner. It makes for a win-win. We gave away 25 free tickets to a movie premier two weeks ago, with a crafted set of questions on The Urbane Life online magazine and got just under 90 comments. The cost to us was nothing.

As those comments were piling up, it was no surprise that we had our best leasing traffic day the day or two after the contest. The point is to get people talking about you, sharing things about you and your brand.

About Eric Brown

Eric Brown’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 Village Green Companies, a Midwest apartment developer. Brown also established The Urbane Way, a social media marketing and PR laboratory, where innovative marketing ideas are tested.

As we head into the New Year, what are you doing differently with your apartment marketing? There is so much low-hanging fruit for most apartment operators that even a few small changes can have a huge impact on occupancy.

An easy place to start is email capture. It has been reported that, on average, property management companies have only 15 percent of their residents’ email addresses, which is really a bad statistic. There isn’t any reason that you shouldn’t have 85 percent to 100 percent of your residents’ email addresses. If you can figure out how to collect the residents’ rent check, certainly you can figure out how to get their emails.

And what about prospects? Are you collecting those email addresses? Prospects can be your best leasing agents in a down market. Although you may not have leased an apartment to them, you may in the future, and they may well know a friend or family member looking for a new place to live.

So think about this: The average 300-unit apartment community gets between 2,000 to 2,500 pieces of traffic per year. Let’s say you capture 75 percent of those email addresses, which is 1,500 per year. Over a five-year period, you now have a 7,500-name email list. Let’s also assume you have been doing a quality monthly newsletter about hip and cool things going on in your city or neighborhood. You have in fact built a community of interest that is significantly larger than your 300-unit apartment community. The community at large has as much potential value as your resident base.

We all have those months where occupancy dips or move-outs increase. And what happens next? We increase some type of marketing, either with advertising or, at an extreme, free rent. If you have done a good job building and fostering your digital footprint, and have created a following, you can easily add a clip into your monthly newsletter that you will pay a referral fee for any rental this month.

If you have 7,500 folks on your email list and you have an open rate of 30 percent, then 2,250 folks just looked at your referral offer. That is a heck of a lot more effective than door hangers, and because it is digital, it is much easier for folks to share the offer with friends and family. And you have just reached seven times your resident base.

These numbers are not theoretical, either. They are based on the results we achieve in our own portfolio. Start today. And let us know if you have any questions along the way.