Meet Kelley Shannon, Vice President of Consumer Marketing at The Bozzuto Group and marketing genius who started her professional career in accounting before changing courses to focus on brand management. “Coming from accounting where you’re looking at numbers all day, I was missing the creative piece. While I enjoyed the problem solving, I missed the human connection. Marketing allows me to be analytical and apply creativity to help people solve problems and meet business goals. It’s the right fit for me.” In her role at Bozzuto, Kelley leads a team that focuses on impacting key touchpoints in a customer’s journey. With dozens of new communities every year, Kelley and team are busy developing marketing plans to deliver quality leads to over 200 communities, creating engaging brands and cementing memorable customer experiences – while ensuring that all marketing is reflective of their diverse and inclusive culture. We recently had the chance to ask Kelley how she manages to keep up with (and support) the pace of growth at Bozzuto. Keep reading to find marketing tips you can apply at your own properties, no matter how big or small. Q: Can you tell us a little about Bozzuto and what makes the company unique? A: Bozzuto is a regional leader with a national reputation. We currently manage more than 60,000 apartments and homes. We pride ourselves on providing outstanding service and consistent value for customers, clients and partners. Jamie Gorski, Bozzuto’s CMO, being the visionary that she is, is not one to rest on our laurels. She is always looking for what is new and interesting, especially outside of our industry. When we find it, chances are we’re going to evaluate it for its relevance to marketing real estate. Q: How does Bozzuto use RentCafe? We partnered with Yardi and the RentCafe team to create a property marketing website template that supports Bozzuto’s brand and marketing strategy. It provides us with a pre-approved yet customizable platform that our team can use to reduce the typical time to market, while maintaining our design and usability standards. We can build new sites more quickly with RentCafe. We can also rapidly convert old websites that aren’t working and bring them to a place that better reflects the brand story and engages prospects instantly. Now site visitors view 23% more pages and spend 20% more time online with us. Q: What are you doing to promote increased session duration on your property marketing sites? Why do you think visitors are staying longer? A: We focus on putting information that prospective renters want front and center…floor plans and visual content. When you visit any of our sites, we’ve made the navigation to these key areas immediately accessible. And we often add video content on the homepage to draw people in. These visuals give you a sense of how the community lives, how people use the spaces. I feel like we’ve won when someone says, “I could see myself living here.” Q: How important is the mobile experience? A: With the growth in mobile as the first point of entry for many people searching for apartments, our goal is to deliver a great mobile experience. This means quick access to photos, contact information and online tour scheduling. Q: What are some advantages that you have seen from working with Yardi? A: RentCafe saves us time and offers a cost-effective website solution for both new communities and those needing to update their online presence. It helps us keep up with Bozzuto’s pace of growth without compromising our standards or putting extra strain on the marketing team. Yardi has been a great partner! Q: If you’re not in the office, where are you? A: I enjoy visiting the communities, but I’m happiest brainstorming with my team. We talk about marketing pain points and how to fix them. We find ways to automate tasks, and our latest effort is to...

Our second Yardi Marketing Forum of 2016 is coming up next week, and we couldn’t be much more excited! Multifamily marketers from across North America will meet us in Seattle to talk tech, trends, and best practices during this multi-day conference. Talented guest speakers – from within and without the real estate industry – are a huge part of the success of this biannual conference. In preparation for the fun and learning ahead, we asked three of them to share some insights into their marketing roles. Keep reading to learn how these marketing pros got started, what they love about their jobs, and what’s inspiring them right now (spoiler alert: if you’re into Snapchat and Pokémon, you’re not alone). Meet the speakers: Kelly Cook, Chief Marketing Officer at Kmart Alex McGhee, Digital Marketing Manager at Pinnacle Karen Kossow, VP of Marketing at FORE Property Company Yardi: How did you get started in marketing? Kelly: I actually started out in finance, can you believe it?! From there, I managed a reservations call center, and was eventually asked to come to marketing to manage the new marketing IT systems. In marketing, I fell in love with inspiring our employees to deliver magic to our customers. Alex: I first got a taste of marketing in college when I obtained a minor in Marketing at the University of North Texas. After I graduated, I tried my hand in sales and financial services for a few years then landed a job with a small insurance startup overseeing SEO and SEM. That was really when I got hooked on the marketing career path! Yardi: What do you like best about your current role? Kelly: We have 100K passionate and member-focused employees at Kmart working hard every single day to transform our business. They inspire me to be a better leader, better colleague, better employee. Seeing them be the hero to our member – and seeing the member’s reaction… that’s the best part. Karen: Tough one… there are a number of things. I love that I’m getting to expand my knowledge base by working with new markets. There are a lot of great people here whom I really enjoy. Although it’s not a full rebrand, I am getting to be the driver of a FORE “brand tweak” with new corporate brochure and website. It’s a lot, but I’m a bit of a challenge junky – if everything were easy, I’d be bored. Yardi: Which marketing trends are inspiring you right now? Kelly: I’ve been on Snapchat for a long time, but now I’m getting snaps from our members and their kids. My Snapchat ID is runwayroadkill (nickname –  it’s long story, ha). Our members and their children snap me all of the time telling what they want more of or less of. It’s super fantastic! Alex: Snapchat’s geofilters are very intriguing at the moment. I have also very recently been exploring the benefits of piggy backing off the current global Pokémon trend. Karen: Yes, I’m also excited about Pokémon Go, and not necessarily for all of the same reasons as others. I do love how people have been leveraging it through social and other marketing tools, but for me it’s the fact that it’s such a successful use of augmented reality. Augmented reality has fascinated me for years, and I can’t wait until the costs to create/implement come down enough that we can find lots of ways to apply it to what we do. Hopefully I’ll still be alive and marketing when that happens! Yardi: What are you looking forward to most about the Yardi Marketing Forum in Seattle? Karen: I’ve met and gotten to know so many great people at the forums I’ve previously attended that I’m looking forward to doing so again. I love the ability to brainstorm about the RentCafe platform products and to be able to talk to the experts about them....

Community Realty Company is a leader in property management, leasing, and asset management for income producing properties in the Washington D.C. area and beyond, enhancing values for owner-investors and known for providing an exceptional tenant experience. We recently enjoyed an interview with Karen Kossow, Community Realty Company’s Vice President of Marketing. She talked about industry trends that are changing the way multifamily does business and shared her advice for other apartment marketers. Whether you’re an experienced pro or just getting your feet wet, we’re sure you’re going to learn something from Karen, that’s why we recently selected her to be our newest RentCafe Marketing Genius. How long have you worked in multifamily? Kossow: This is my 25th year in the industry. I started out as an activities director immediately after college and just kind of fell in love with multifamily. It gets under your skin. As the VP of Marketing, where do you find that you spend the majority of your time? Kossow: We are small. We don’t have an internal IT group. RentCafe has become such an important piece of our marketing; I spend time getting our teams trained and to buy into it. Beyond that, a lot of my week is spent analyzing results. What’s working on our websites and what’s working in the industry in general. What do you see happening in the industry right now? Kossow: We’ve heard all about the Millennials for the past five years. But to me, one of the biggest trends is really having to touch more demographics at one time than we ever have before. The Boomers are also coming in, and they’re looking for a lot of the same things the Millennials are… and they have the money to pay for it. Although the Boomers and Millennials want similar amenities, they search for apartments differently, using media in different ways. So we have to use more marketing channels today than we did in the past. And we have to make sure we’re using them appropriately to reach all the different kinds of renters. So you’re seeing a different mix of renters today than when you first started? Kossow: Yes, at one of our lease up properties 39% of our renters to date have sold a home to move in with us. What are your thoughts on online ratings and reviews? Good, bad, or necessary evil? Kossow: Definitely good for converting prospects. We put our reviews right on our websites for a couple of reasons. For one thing, it keeps visitors on your site, instead of sending them to find reviews on outside sites. For another, building changing content into the site is good for SEO. How do you solicit reviews from your residents? Kossow: We use the email tool within RentCafe to solicit reviews that we add to our sites. Then we take it a step further and make video testimonials that we embed into our landing pages. When you hit one of our property sites, within seconds you’re hearing residents talk about their experience (see it in action here). Prospects are automatically hearing something positive as soon as they find us. We’ve had people come to the property and specifically mention the impact of the videos. It’s definitely impacting our results. Why RentCafe? Why Yardi? Kossow: Having everything on one platform allows us to be more aggressive. Yardi really cares about our industry and our needs. Working with the team has been a hugely collaborative process. Sometimes it seems like anything we think of, voila it’s done! RentCafe’s capabilities evolve to match our requests. It’s always getting better, which is great. So is your day-to-day all marketing, all the time? Kossow: At work, yes, but outside of work you will find me tackling more physical challenges, including a recent surf camp I attended in North Carolina where I got my first nosebleed ever! Minutes after wrapping up our...