OFFICIAL RULES 2019 Yardi at Yardi Marketing Forum Sweepstakes NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. PURCHASE WILL NOT ENHANCE CHANCES OF WINNING. Sweepstakes is open only to legal residents of the 50 United States, the District of Columbia and Puerto, who are 18 years of age or older (except residents of Alabama and Nebraska who must be 19 years of age or older) at the time of entry. Employees, officers and directors of Yardi Systems, Inc. (“Sponsor”), and its respective subsidiaries and affiliated companies, advertising, promotion, or production agencies (and each of their respective IRS dependents, immediate family members [children, spouse, parents, siblings, and their respective spouses, regardless of where they reside] and individuals residing in the same household of each, whether or not related) are not eligible to participate. Void where prohibited by law. By participating, entrants agree to these Official Rules and the decisions of the Sponsor, which are final and binding in all matters relating to this Sweepstakes. ENTRY PERIODS: Sweepstakes Promotional Period begins on November 19, 2019, at 8:00am EDT. Entries must be received by 12:00pm EDT on November 21, 2019. There will be four drawings in total. There will be two drawings after 12:00pm EDT on November 20, 2019, and two drawings after 12:00pm EDT on November 21, 2019. HOW TO ENTER. During the Promotional Period (i) respond to the Yardi Marketing Forum “Caption This” post on Facebook or Instagram (no purchase necessary). Limit one (1) entry per person per approved social media platform (Facebook, Instagram) during the Promotional Period. Any attempt by any person to obtain more than the stated number of entries by using multiple/different accounts on a single platform or any other methods will void all of that person’s entries and that person will be ineligible. Participant social media profiles must...
YMF New Orleans
3 Quick Takeaways
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...
YMF Beverly Hills
3 Tips for Marketing Geniuses
The Yardi Marketing Forum happened in Beverly Hills last week, drawing a crowd of marketing geniuses from property management companies around the country. Attendees caught a show at the legendary Magic Castle, strolled Rodeo Drive and indulged in a champagne and caviar tasting at Citizen. See the photos here. Sounds fun, right? It wasn’t all swimming pools and movie stars. During the day, the forum took a deep dive into all things property marketing. Influential speakers took the stage to talk about everything from video marketing and automation to lead attribution and the future of marketing technology. By the end of two days, it was clear: property marketers need to embrace customer-centric marketing to stand out from the competition. That means putting the customer first, ahead of your properties and your brand, to ultimately win more leases. 3 Ways to Embrace Customer-Centric Marketing 1. Connect with story If you think all property marketing videos look the same, you’re not alone. You’re probably picturing a camera panning around an empty display model, focusing on the gleaming hardwood floors and stainless steel appliances, while a voiceover lists amenities and throws the word “luxurious” around. The thing is, those kinds of videos don’t make a connection with the customer. You’re not just leasing them an empty apartment, you’re renting them a home, a lifestyle, a place to tell their stories. The easiest way to make an impact? Tell a story with your video marketing. A full 70% of consumers say storytelling makes them feel more connected to a brand. Want to learn more? Watch our keynote “Emotional Impact – Marketing Lessons from a Filmmaker” with cinematographer Gavin Garrison below. 2. Be a helper, not a pusher “Buying today – especially for larger purchases – is fraught with tension,” said guest presenter Kyle Rees, senior executive advisor at CEB, now Gartner. “Customers are looking to us for help.” He suggests making it easier for customers to buy by updating the buyer’s journey to make it easier for them to learn. “Instead of mapping how to buy from us, we need to map how to buy in general,” said Rees. Consider the research, questions and roadblocks that will pop up on the path to rent an apartment and then make sure your company has tools to help them along the way. The more resources you have in place to identify decision criteria (like floor plans and neighborhood maps) and explain pros and cons (like property reviews), the more likely you are to provide a positive customer journey and win the leases that are right for your property. Wondering what happens when you don’t focus on the customer and provide a bad buyer’s journey instead? It increases purchase regret by 54%, meaning those residents will be less likely to renew their leases or recommend living at your property. 3. Track the total journey Today’s online renters don’t make a leasing decision without doing a lot of research. In fact, at least half of them visit five or more property websites before visiting a leasing office. This means that our old ways of reporting on the customer journey – using either the first or last touchpoint to attribute the marketing source – is showing only a small piece of the puzzle. To effectively market to your customer, you need to know where your customers are coming from and what they’ve seen along the way. This means it’s time to embrace multi-source lead attribution for more accurate insight into the customer buyer journey. One thing attendees at the forum learned before anyone else is that RentCafe CRM is evolving to do just that, and clients will soon have the ability to see multiple touchpoints on the prospect journey from lead to lease. Exciting News Our next Yardi Marketing Forum will take place in the Big Easy! That’s right, YMF is heading to New Orleans this November. Registration...
YMF Baltimore
3 Marketing Themes for 2018
A savvy group of marketers joined us for learning, networking and fun at the bi-annual Yardi Marketing Forum (YMF) in Baltimore last week. During the event, attendees explored the latest trends in digital marketing, tips and tricks to optimize outcomes, and real estate technology. As noted by Esther Bonardi, Yardi vice president of marketing, the event is “all about helping you tap into your inner marketing genius.” Here are some of the top digital marketing themes covered: Get in touch with your audience As marketers, we’ve traditionally divvied up our target audiences by demographic information. In today’s noisy digital landscape, we need to meet our customers where they’re at. Speakers Brad Downs, vice president of marketing for the Baltimore Ravens, and Brad Batesole, staff author at LinkedIn, shared strategies to better reach target audiences. Drawing from his fifteen years of experience in sports marketing, Downs stressed the importance of moving from brand first to fan first. “It’s that fan first mentality. Our fans are incredibly important to us. Fans want to feel as important as they are,” he said. By focusing on fans first, opportunities to engage and foster fandom become easier to identify. Downs demonstrated that life stage marketing goes beyond traditional demographic segmentation, resulting in better customer experiences, tailored events and increased engagement. For the Ravens, life stage segmentation resulted in targeted fan development campaigns focused around women and adolescents. This included Purple, a community building initiative to cultivate the female fan base, and RISE, a football outreach program for local children and high schoolers in emerging Ravens strongholds. Life stage segmentation helped draw 130,000 fans to Ravens marketing events, development of an international audience, and an average attendance of 71,000 people at each home game. At Wednesday’s marketing master class, Batesole...
YMF Austin
5 Marketing Takeaways
Are you familiar with the Yardi Marketing Forum? This biannual event brings multifamily marketers from across the country together for three days of fun, education and inspiration. We just wrapped up our first forum of the year in beautiful Austin, Texas. If you couldn’t attend, here are the top five marketing takeaways that were shared by our guest presenters. Stop Hunting, Start Cultivating Anders Bergstrom, marketing director for Sanuk, opened the Yardi Marketing Forum with his keynote address on “Surfing the Waves of Consumer Change.” He stressed the need in every industry to build a lifelong fan base, instead of targeting consumers with marketing that kills the relationship after the sale. “When it comes to your audience, cultivate. Think of yourselves as farmers,” shared Bergstrom. “Become aware. Become curious. Become advocates for your clients.” Watch the recording of Anders’ presentation on Facebook. Dial in Prospect & Resident Communications Do you feel like your marketing messages are getting lost in today’s increasingly crowded digital space? For our session on “Getting Heard in a Noisy World,” we were joined by Nikki Crosby from Buckingham Companies, Mallory Monsma from NALS and Yardi’s Nima Farkhak to talk about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to interacting with residents and prospects. The panel consistently reinforced the need to be present everywhere your customers are. Crosby noted that Buckingham properties that use social media remarketing far outperform properties that don’t. Monsma shared email tips that have resulted in a phenomenal 50% open rate for NALS, including keeping subjects snappy, limiting frequency and scheduling the month’s emails in advance through RentCafe. And Farkhak talked about the importance of live chat, citing a case study that netted a RentCafe Connect user an $80 return for every $1 spent. “The best...
Cooking for a Cause
Yardi Marketing Forum 2016
The invitation-only Yardi Marketing Forum is designed to help professionals excel in marketing multifamily real estate. Attendees participate in focused discussions, interactive training, and engaging social activities—but first, they designated time to uplift the local community in Seattle. For the second segment of this biannual event, clients representing more than 35 companies from throughout the U.S. convened in Seattle. The forum kicked off with a welcome reception at W Seattle before heading to Cooking for a Cause at Blue Ribbon Cooking School. Cooking for a Cause is a corporate team building initiative that benefits local charities. For this event, the Yardi team volunteered to support ROOTS Young Adults Shelter, a nonprofit organization that fosters dignity for its clients through access to essential services and a safe place to sleep. One of the most essential services is access to a healthy meal. Cooking for a Cause participants prepare top-notch meals for those in need. The menu for the Yardi team included shepherds’ pie, grilled lime-marinated chicken and veggies, truffle mac n’ cheese, and chocolate molten lava cake for dessert—all from scratch. The group divided into teams with a chef at each helm to ensure smooth operations and delicious results. Participants peeled, chopped, diced, grilled, and baked together. A conga lined helped pass the time as the participants waited on the ovens. Cooking for a Cause was a huge success. The group furnished hundreds meals for ROOTS Young Adults Shelter. “It was a really fun experience. The atmosphere was…warm,” laughs Geneva Ives, marketing writer on the Yardi team. “We were in there cooking up a sweat! But it was also fun, friendly, and energetic. It was a nice collaborative effort.” Of course, the novice cooks reaped the benefits of their labor. The team enjoyed a meal...
User Behavior
Making Better Property Websites
If you’re at all involved with property marketing, you’ve probably been part of more than a few discussions about property marketing websites and their ability to convert prospects to leads and leads to leases. Great web conversions depend on your ability to truly understand your website visitors. How do they behave on your sites? What do they care about? How easy is it for them to get the information they need and take the next step? During this week’s Yardi Marketing Forum in Seattle, our very own Tudor Manole, development project manager for RentCafe, will lead a session that takes a deep dive into user behavior on property websites through analytics, user testing, and real-time recording. For those of us unable to be at the forum in person, here is a quick synopsis of his presentation, “Gold Star for Good Behavior,” as well as a few insights that you may be able put to work on your own sites to increase web conversions. At a glance, can you tell whether a website – in any industry – will convert or not? Yes and no. Great web conversions depend on the ability to craft a simple user experience that is intuitive, uncluttered, and can be navigated without instructions. So visibly, a straightforward site with a clear user journey is a great start. But there is other data we have to take into account to create a successful website too. What is user experience and why is it important? For a website to convert leads, it has to have a user experience that helps prospects complete the conversion process instead of abandoning the site. User experience (UX) design means observing user behavior in many different ways, and natural use of product is one that should not be...
