YMF New Orleans

3 Quick Takeaways

By Geneva Ives on Nov 19, 2018 in Marketing

The Yardi Marketing Forum took New Orleans by storm earlier this month. This sold-out event drew top multifamily property marketers from across the country to The Big Easy for three days of fun, education and networking. View the photo album for a behind-the-scenes look.

Attendees enjoyed focused attention from Yardi team members and exclusive guest speaker presentations. Google’s session on “The Age of Assistance” gave the audience three tips for winning in today’s competitive search environment: be there, be quick and be useful. Keep reading to see how you can apply these marketing takeaways from the forum to your property management business today.

Be There

You can’t win clicks if your customers can’t find you. Ben Waltzer from Google Fiber shared that today’s consumers are “more curious, more demanding and more impatient than ever before.” In fact, 15% of Google searches today are ones they’ve never seen before.

Co-presenter Jeff Kirschenmann asserted that searchers “expect us to deliver relevant results at the right time.” Do you have a plan in place convert prospects by connecting during moments of intent? A successful marketing strategy includes being present at every stage of the customer journey. This might include SEO for long tail searches, paid ads for different demographics and nudge marketing that spurs website wafflers into action, as well as a healthy presence on review sites and social media platforms.

If that sounds like a lot and you just don’t have the time or staff to handle it all, you might want to consider the advanced property marketing services of RENTCafé Reach.

Be Quick

Filmmaker Gavin Garrison’s talk focused on the emotional impact of storytelling – not just for video but for all forms of marketing. He spoke about using the power of relatable emotion to cut through the marketing noise and land your message. To do this in the face of ever-shrinking attention spans, it’s critical to stop talking about yourself and get right to the point. “If you’re explaining, you’re losing,” he said.

Be Useful

How much value are you getting out of your marketing tools? One of the most interesting sessions during the forum involved a panel of technology power users: Jaymz Yates (Westdale), Brenda Studt (The Excelsior Group), Shelly Steitz (The Excelsior Group),

Nicole Crosby (Buckingham Companies) and Daryl Smith (KETTLER). The group discussed which tech advances were “worth the squeeze” aka worth the time and effort.

Some interesting findings from this group:

• Instagram website integration is a crowd pleaser. At the Aertson Midtown in Nashville, website visitors who go to their Instagram page spend an average of 8 minutes there.
• Nudge marketing works… even better with a few best practices. The Excelsior Group suggests asking a question, limiting exclamation points and always A/B testing your nudge campaigns.
• Social media is not the time suck you think it is. A new Westdale lease up is seeing more than 200 visits per month coming to its website from its social media profiles, and these visitors have a lower-than-average bounce rate.

Don’t Miss the Next One

Every Yardi Marketing Forum seems to be even better than the last. In the words of Esther Bonardi, vice president of marketing at Yardi and hostess with the mostest during the forum, “I may have loved this YMF the most of all… until the next one, of course.”

For spring 2019, we’re heading to Santa Fe, New Mexico. It’s also our 5^th anniversary of the Yardi Marketing Forum, and we have big (top secret) things in the works. Want to be on the list for this invite-only event? Get in touch!