This the full answer to Jon Zemke's first question to Eric Brown in Becoming Urbane: A Q&A with Eric Brown.
How does someone go from apartment building manager to social media maven?
(laughs) That's a great question. After we got our first apartment community, I was to some extent naïvely thinking, 'OK, build it and they will come.' That is a complete myth. You have to market your product. We started doing that and what forced us into social media was traditional marketing for apartment scales if you have 200-300-400 units per site. We didn't. We had 20 or 50 units per site. In the beginning we couldn't afford to do that.
I thought if we could figure out a way to drive people to our website we should have a better chance than normal of getting a tour and then a rental. In late 2004, we started fooling around with social media and really started to gain some traction with that. By early 2005 we abandoned all traditional marketing approaches. We weren't doing any print or apartment listing services. We were doing Craigslist.
What we found out is social media is really just a conduit. If you can get people talking about your product, social media puts that on steroids. In the past if you thought Pronto's restaurant was pretty cool, you might tell six people you come in contact with over the next five days. With social media you can tell 66 people in five seconds by just typing it into Facebook. It spreads both good and bad things. We started working that and the angle that if we're interested in the community and what our resident and perspective residents are interested in, what happens with that?
Somewhere around 2006-07 we started an online blog. We have something like 600 posts now. Not one of those is about Urbane Apts. It's all about the local sushi place or the dry cleaner or the new restaurant or something lifestyle-based or something controversial, like parking in downtown Royal Oak. Things people are interested in. By accident we discovered through the links back to our parent apartment websites, the more content we wrote the traffic we got for our website. That became the big payoff of doing the blog. We then discovered if we want to increase physical traffic coming through the door we just have to put more content out there. We put more content on our blog, it drives more traffic to our website, more people come through our door. That was interesting.
Some of our apartment peers from across the country were watching what we were doing and became interested. I started blogging about larger platforms. We got invited to speak at some events. There was a period of time where we got pigeonholed. A guy said, 'Well, that works for Urbane because its boutique and he's hands on.' Both of which are true. I'm a hands on guy and we are clearly a boutique business. They said this wouldn't scale for a bigger company. I said, 'That's a bunch of bunk.'
So we got an opportunity about two years to do social media for another apartment building here in Michigan, Paragon Apartments. They said, 'Are you interested in doing this?' I said, 'Absolutely.'
I didn't know for sure if it would work or not. I didn’t know it would scale. Another thing I wasn't sure about is our product tends to be younger and more eclectic. It definitely has a more vibrant feel than your more run-of-the-mill apartment. Our buildings just look different. Paragon is a very well-run, kind of down the middle of the road company. They're solid, but their stuff is sort of clean but nothing spectacular.
We did literally the same program we did here but on a regional basis and got phenomenal results. We took their website traffic from about 2,500 visitors a month in September to 8,000 by March. We have since put that over 11,000. That's something like a 280 percent increase in website traffic. We did it the same way of writing blogs and working the Facebook and Twitter pages. That news spread pretty quickly within our circle of influence of apartment peers.
I invited Justin, the president of Paragon, to come to some of these seminars with me. My pitch was pretty simple. If you're social media marketing and you're not selling more stuff, it's just a hobby. That kind of catches people off guard. The average agency wants to talk about things like engagement and listen to the customer and all those kinds of things. All of which true. You have to do that. But if that's all you're doing... At the end of the day you have a business you have to run. You have to market it and at the end of the day you have to more people buying more stuff today then they did yesterday. We kept that front focus for us.
The reason we did social media marketing was because it rented more apartments for us and at a bit of higher price. We did that with them and we got a couple of other apartment clients. We were then asked to do some things outside of the apartment industry. We've got a furniture store. We're rinsing and repeating the same kind of approach.
What we're learning is that people want to connect. The directional flow of marketing has changed. People used to think if you want to sell more stuff you buy a bigger block of widget apps. Not that that doesn't still work. It does. Traditional still works. I am not suggesting people abandon traditional means of marketing. However, people who are buying that know the cost is going up and the result is going down. Every year that spread if getting bigger. They're spending more to get the same result. When you toss social media marketing in there, it begins to off-set that.
One thing we were able to do for Paragon is lower their marketing expenses by 40 percent. That's a pretty big number. That got a lot of people's attention as well. I just try to talk about results. That tends to get business owners attention. I helped Village Green somewhat with its initial social media planning. I didn't do it for them but we talked through some things. I was sitting Jonathan Holtzman's office (Village Green's CEO) and he said, 'Well, we're on that stuff.' I said, 'Jon, you're not.'
He said, 'What do you mean we're not?' I said, 'Google Village.' It came up three times. Google Urbane Apts. We came up on the first 16 pages.
The point is the business owners who has done business the same way for the last 25 years can pick up his ads, see them and feel them. But when they're out on the Internet somewhere... I think its a different mindset of how does this stuff work. If you believe 70 percent of the people start their search for anything by typing in a search box, then it bodes well for your business to come up high in those rankings.
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