#apartmentmarketing
#Apartmentmarketing: Blog for Juice
No matter what, the very first piece of social media real estate I’d start with is a blog. – Chris Brogan
Blog About Everything Unrelated
United Blogs of Benetton is one of my very favorite blogs. It was one of my early inspirations when I started writing a multifamily industry related one back in 2005. The thing that struck me most about the blog is that it had absolutely nothing to do with their core business of fashion. In fact, I remember reading a post they wrote back around that time that suggested their reason for doing so.
I can’t find the post so I am doing my best to recall here. The gist was that they thought that the real value of blogging was to give the people that read it the essence of what they valued as an organization. In other words, they wanted to translate the values of their organization by way of compelling and worldly content.
Our First Company Related Blog
When we started our first company blog in 05′ we did just that. But in lieu of a forward facing, community gathering effort; we brought out the personality of EQRs Portland Portfolio. We called the blog: Portland Rocks Newsletter and the content consisted of stories about our teams. Be it work related or a personal experience we allowed just about everything.
Everything that is except for content about EQR or any specifically related to our apartment communities. Our chief aim back then was to invite people into relationship. Whether they bought from us or not was not the point of the blog. If they did, we considered it icing on the cake.
And, fathom this for a minute. It had nothing to do with SEO or SEM back then. Whoa!
It’s All About the Juice
Fast forward to today – everyone has a blog and everyone is jockeying for the first page of Google search. And, we all do it for Google Juice. We wrap it in 800 count Egyptian cotton [Read: adding value or enhancing experience].
All that being said, I agree 100% with Chris B.
AI: Start a blog today – if you have not already!
M
#Apartmentmarketing: Waiting
“If you wait until there is another case study in your industry, you will be to late.” Seth Godin
It goes against the old axiom, ‘good things come to those who wait.’ Anymore you get cooked in the squat if you wait too long. With the advent of the Internet came an accelerating pace of change. Moore’s Law even exists, to some extent, in the world of property management. We are seeing newer, bigger, better and flashier ways of attracting new people and keeping relationship with them over a long bit of time. It’s nuts out there.
Oh, and we have a blog…
Multifamily: Second Mover’s Advantage
At Mills Properties, we like to think that we are exercising the second mover advantage. While we did have our company [internal] blog in place nearly three years ago now; we were a bit delayed in getting our forward facing blog out to pasture. It did put us behind the eight ball and in the same respect, it allowed us to make observation of several other industry movers and shakers. That time and those observations gave us the ability to design a strategy that has yielded some very good results for us.
At just six months in we have achieved the following with our blog:
It’s been the result of some hard work and dedication on the part of many people, first and foremost. Beyond that I would suggest that it’s been the result of setting back and making some observations, learning from others experiments and applying as much as we could.
Today’s call to action – wait. Sometimes, it is okay to wait, watch, learn, strategize, act and fail fast. We did!
What have you gained by waiting?
Multifamily: 101 Days of Marketing
As the #trust30 challenge winds down; we are gearing the next series of compelling content. The series will be dubbed 101 days of apartment marketing and will start July 3 when we wrap up #trust30. We were so inspired by the absolute discipline of the last series that we thought; why not try and continue the daily routine of writing.
#trust30’s concept of penning daily prompts lead us to search for something that would provide the same sort of direction. We looked at several lists and settled on @hubspot ‘s 101 Awesome Marketing Quotes .
Keeping in mind that multifamily professionals are busy; we intend to keep or offerings short in nature, hopefully 200 words or less. And, quick and to the point. Some will be conceptual while others will be real life examples from our journeys at Mills Properties [the sentiments aimed at those out there that believe content not backed by practical application or identifiable results is waste – we agree to disagree].
Nevertheless; we hope to make it fun. We hope to learn some things about ourselves and the community we have managed to attract over the years. And, we hope to conjure up some cool multifamily conversation.
Please feel free to comment where you see fit – good, bad or ugly. It all matters to us.
M
