AIM: Apartment Internet Marketing

Don’t know an ILS from a CRM? Still confused between pay-per-click, pay-per-lead and pay-per-lease? Always a standing-room only event, our annual boot camp has your Apartment Internet Marketing 101 needs covered, and will feature seasoned multifamily marketers demystifying the jargon and delineating the must-haves and the have-nots of a premium apartment internet marketing platform.

Presenter:

Dr. BJ Fogg, Director, Persuasive Technology Lab, Stanford University

Can technology ultimately compel behavioral change in customers? Absolutely, says Stanford University professor and the founder and director of the Stanford Persuasion Technology Labs BJ Fogg. In our kickoff keynote presentation, Fogg—recognized by FORTUNE magazine as one of the top 10 business gurus to know—will share how persuasive technology activates rich customer experiences and influences specific user actions. Leveraging his experience implementing persuasive technology with firms like Proctor & Gamble, Nike, and even AARP, Fogg will detail why mobile technology will be the most powerful way to influence consumers over the next 15 years. Join us for this exclusive look into the application of behavioral technology and discover how manipulating systems and technology can make the mobile user experience simply irresistible.

BJ created a new model of human behavior change, which guides research and design. Drawing on these principles, his students created Facebook Apps that motivated over 16 million user installations in 10 weeks. He is the author of Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do, a book that explains how computers can motivate and influence people. BJ is also the co-editor of Mobile Persuasion, as well as Texting 4 Health. His upcoming book is entitled The Psychology of Facebook.

Investors, clients, property buyers and local governments are all finding out about your property or company online – along with prospective residents.  Now how do you influence of the message and make sure you’re leading the discussion? This session moves beyond the basics to plan steps necessary to shape the terms of public comment and make sure you’re taking the steps to move past listening to leading the discussion.  This panel will get you beyond Google Alerts and suggest strategies to plan for a future in which your reputation is built, measured and indexed in public online – with your help.

Beth VanStory, President, Thinkout Consulting

Beth VanStory is the customer experience expert behind the many online channels used by some of the most successful automobile dealerships in the country. She will detail the online road to the sale that generates strong website traffic, high conversion rates to leads and sales, and drives service revenue. She’ll share best practices gleaned from 25 years of leading high-impact marketing efforts for big-ticket items – with the last 15 years focused on online marketing. From the first contact to beyond the sale, VanStory measures, improves and trains for a great multiple-channel customer experience that leads to increased sales. She’ll share with us some of the secrets behind making it easy to find, capture and convert customers.

Prior to iMotors, Beth was Vice President of online at Office Depot, where she led the launch the company’s public website www.officedepot.com and managed the online division serving small business customers. This site was fully integrated with the company’s legacy systems including order entry, customer information, warehouse and store inventories and product catalog databases. She has been profiled and quoted in publications including CIO Magazine, Newsweek, New York Newsday, Internet World, Communications Week, Information Week and numerous local papers.  She has appeared on CNET and ZDTV’s Silicon Spin and has testified before Congress regarding issues in the high tech field.

She holds an MBA from Northwestern and an undergraduate degree in Finance and Management Information Systems from the University of Virginia.

If you build it, will they come? While the lack of new apartment supply seems to favor the newest community on the block, new marketing techniques and technologies have emerged since the last boom to help measure and maximize lease-up success based on delivering an unforgettable customer experience. Hear a panel of new lease up specialist detail the future of filling up.

Presenter:

Steve Taraborelli, Vice President, Director of Sales and Marketing, UDR, Inc.

Keynote: Advanced Topics in Multifamily Mobile UX

Text, apps, location awareness and even augmented reality all continue to elbow for face-time with apartment seekers and residents who rely primarily on their mobile phone as a computing device (and really, who doesn’t?). Prioritize your mobile strategy with an advanced look at customer expectations and proven deliverables when it comes to mobile apartment marketing.

Prior to that, he held various sales and marketing executive positions with the Ford Motor Company in areas of sales, marketing, franchising, business development, ERP sales, customer satisfaction, and branding. He received his master’s degree in business administration from Hofstra University. In his spare time, Steve trains in karate and mentors local high school seniors since 2006 conducting clean technology research in order build a clean technology business incubator in Highlands Ranch, CO and to amend the Colorado constitution to allow energy city incorporation.

With more than half of the United States on Facebook a new analytical layer has been created for marketers to understand.  The social and familial connections between us are deeper than demographics and potentially as powerful for marketers as every other ​market segmenting device.  Social connections correlate positively with the likelihood of renting.  Friend status trends with close rates.  And no matter the lead source, renters only have one Facebook profile – making it potentially possible to tie all searching behavior to the unique consumer.  This session will detail current research, the future of social connection analysis and the privacy and legal considerations that have to be understood.​

Forget blanket blasts: today’s successful email marketing campaigns focus on targeted customer verticals to maximize the connectivity that improves open and click-through rates, not to mention lead generation and prospect conversion. Rediscover your audience and quickly determine how to make sure your message is getting delivered to the right address.  Underlooked in the early days of multifamily marketing, savvy apartment marketers use best email practices in retention marketing, responding to online inquiries and in internal communication.  Email is far from dead – and many say still the most effective tool for reaching a buying audience.

Mobile and local search methods are the red-hot trend in being found online, continuing their growth arc from the past few years.  With the proliferation of smart phones and the growing sophistication of users, some analysts predict that half of all searches will be on phones by 2014 – up from the ~ 10% of all searches that are mobile today.  Google, Yahoo and Bing and Amazon are locked in a business arms race around local search – fueling acquisitions, products and changes to their data acquisition policies and how they produce personalized results based on location.  This session will outline the state of the market and how these trends can be harnessed in the next year in attracting renters and managing reputation.

As far back as 2006, AIMCO was using a predictive analytics firm to help identify the most successful potential new hires and lower associate turnover.  Today many software providers package in ”business intelligence” dashboards with their offerings.  Business intelligence and predictive analytics are cutting-edge topics in financial analysis – but how can they apply to the multifamily business?  From keyword buying strategies to demand modeling to energy usage this session will move beyond revenue management and outline the potential to use predictive modeling and enhance the effectiveness of your online marketing components. Not just for the gearheads, this number-crunching session highlight current and future application of analytics and forecasting to apartment marketing and operations.

​​From the first view on an ILS to the exit interview, how do customers interact with your online marketing, conversion, tracking, and customer service technologies? Identify best-in-class customer workflow from our panel of mystery shoppers, multifamily operators, and marketing agencies engaged in identifying trends in usability and developing new resident paths from lease up to renewal.

What’s better at the end of a busy day than a kick-back review session on the near future in hardware and software technologies that may affect consumers and marketers.  Since we already have phones that talk back and cars that park themselves, we’ll look at robotics, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, digital money, energy distribution, building materials and other future trends in  a series of short takes on the (possible) future of consumer life in America.

If you’re still looking to social media as a source of new prospect leads, you’re missing out on the broader opportunities to engage your customers (and of course their exponential network of friends and followers) across the resident lifecycle. Learn from a panel of multifamily marketing experts how to activate social media relationships that last by tailoring your online posture to anticipate and deliver on resident expectations.

Most new apartment searches go from Google to an internet listing service.  Your national ILS is still the dominant channel in providing first impressions that drive sales. This session will look at the state of the ILS sector and where they see opportunities to focus on the customer experience – broadly defined.   Does convenience lead to conversion? Reexamine the opportunities of cost/lead metrics by exploring how to match online advertising to the circumstances of resident search.

We’ve asked marketing executives to outline their complete online marketing efforts – complete with screenshots - and interact with each other and the moderator (and the audience) about cost-effective things they could do to reach more of their intended audience and create a better customer experience.  This session is meant to be fun and collaborative and an opportunity for all attendees to sharpen their thinking and interact with each other around what real companies with real parameters and time restrictions actually do with their marketing budgets.

As online pioneers we’ve progressed from hacking to spam to viruses to identity theft and back to hacking – done by organized crime gangs, political factions and even by governments.  We’ll ask fun presenters to brief you on the dark side of the web, and the growing considerations for businesses that depend on the internet to attract customers.  This wide-ranging session may shock you, and give you actionable steps you can take to protect your company and your customers when interacting with you online.