
Greg Sterling, Josh McDonald and Lynette Hegeman crack the code to capturing localized mobile search for apartments.
Sterling Market Intelligence founder Greg Sterling couldn’t have summed up the need for a great multifamily mobile marketing experience any better: “Bad stuff happens if you offer bad experience, so the mobile user experience is critical to multifamily marketing,” Sterling said at AIM 2013 during the Cornering the Mobile Search Market panel that also featured Holland Residential director of marketing Josh McDonald and Berkshire Property Advisors’ vice president of marketing Lynette Hegeman.
How critical is mobile? According to original research compiled for AIM by Sterling, Specific ROI analyses continue to stymie search experts, even as the way mobile influences purchases is categorically becoming a very big deal:
- iOS is driving more apartment search leads than Android, and among tablets, iPads have 81 percent of rental search.
- 66 percent of mobile users find mobile sites through search engines, and 94.7 percent of mobile search engine traffic is via Google.
- 73 percent of mobile users trigger a follow-up action and 63 percent of those triggered actions happen within the first hour of the mobile experience
“The growth for mobile is at a precedent that we’ve never experienced,” agreed McDonald. “We are constantly look for ways to drive our spend into mobile and ratchet down our spend into desktop. To that end, we’ve found that you really need to focus on the user experience in the design phase, and specifically the economies of scale to be achieved through responsive design and in reinforcing your brand.”
Hegeman agreed, and likened the shift in device marketing to “skeuomorphism,” or the hybridization of digital marketing user experiences to resemble a mobile UI regardless of device. “We are seeing a unification of desktop into mobile, with simplicity and usability at the core of design” Hegeman said, and also agreed with McDonald that click-to-call functionality has virtually changed the landscape for multifamily mobile marketing.
“That’s because mobile momentum is huge,” Sterling explained. “When you whip out your mobile device, you are typically already looking for something and ready to buy. Mobile users are that much closer to a purchasing decision than desktop and other users.”
Download the Cornering the Mobile Search Market presentations here.
Session Twitter Feed:
@TonyAtSequoia “46% use mobile as their only research tool” – US census data via @gsterling “If you don’t have a mobile strategy, you need one.” #aimconf
@cbryars While building a mobile site consider this: Experiential – Easy Search – Simplicity #aimconf
@shashib RT @Lindsay418: Focus on the customer experience on your mobile site. Give them what they want fast and easy! #AIMConf









