From the category archives:

marketing

Of all the social media platforms, Twitter is the one that puzzles marketers the most. The typical observation is that they don’t get it and can’t figure out why it’s important.

EMarketer shared some research recently from ExactTarget that provides an easy answer: Twitter gives you a way to reach people who have loud and active voices online. Once you’ve gotten their attention around your message, you’ve got a good chance that they will redistribute that message somewhere on the web.

How’s that work? ExactTarget shows that the 26 million monthly users of Twitter are three to five times more likely to comment on blogs, post to forums, participate in view sites and blog themselves than the average Internet user.


“Consumers active on Twitter are clearly the most influential online,” said Morgan Stewart, principal at ExactTarget’s research and education group, in a statement. “What happens on Twitter doesn’t stay on Twitter. While the number of active Twitter users is less than Facebook or email, the concentration of highly engaged and influential content creators is unrivaled—it’s become the gathering place for content creators whose influence spills over into every other corner of the internet.”

The conclusions suggest that the time spent investing in an audience on Twitter is likely to have an exponential impact. This is the crux of social media marketing, and provides a simple justification for using a service that at first seems fragmented and chaotic.

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I’ve been intrigued by the dynamic of building lead volume in our Apartment Finder business over the past year.

As I’ve discussed before, the multi-family marketing business is a competitive, lead-generating business that is driven by consumer’s accessing print and online directories and inquiring about apartments for rent.

There are three ways that marketing companies like Apartment Finder hand customer leads over to its clients:  a phone call directly to the apartment community; an e-mail to an apartment community, either directly or through a leasing intermediary; a click-thru to the apartment community web site; and, a prospect who walks directly into the community leasing office without making prior contact.

This week, one of our biggest competitors in the space shared a few public metric related to their lead production.  According to their recent earnings release, the company increased leads 35% year-over-year, and currently produces more than 75% of their leads from their Internet and mobile platforms.

lead comparison.pngThat made me curious.  How did our metrics at Apartment Finder measure up?

The chart to the right shows the increase in lead production at Apartment Finder over the past year.  Overall, leads gained 43%.  Phone leads were up 25%, e-mail leads were up 169% and click-thru’s to property web sites were up 71%.

This data is derived from two third-party sources:  CallSource, which manages our tracking number program, and Omniture, which provides us with web analytics.

Most interesting to me was the distribution between leads from print distribution and from internet and mobile distribution.

At Apartment Finder, 53% of our leads, including click-thru’s, are driven by our Internet distribution and 47% by print.  Subtract click-thru’s, which can’t be tracked back to a specific individual, and the ratio drops closer to 50-50.

But the key issue isn’t what source the lead comes from.  The issue is how useful the lead is.

I had an engaging conversation around the relative quality of leads with a leading apartment marketer at the National Apartment Association Conference this past June.  E-mails that are generated as a by-product of creating an appointment to see an apartment had a high conversion, he said.  Phone calls to the community were the second best kind of lead.  And e-mail inquiries were the lowest-converting type of lead.

That means there are other metrics that can point to how good the lead generation of a marketing partner will be.  A big one is the percentage of phone calls to e-mail leads.

At Apartment Finder, 80% of our leads from print and internet are phone calls.  20% are e-mails.   That’s an exceptionally good ratio, I think.

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Economic indicator: Bullish growth projections for online advertising

July 13, 2010

via emarketer.com
eMarketer sees online advertising growth rebounding to double-digit levels, after experiencing a lull during the recession.
The forecast projects online spending will come close to $100 billion by 2014. Online share of total media spending will gain significantly.

The internet’s share of total ad spending worldwide will jump from 11.9% in [...]

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Who writes ViralHousingFix?

July 6, 2010

I do.
The first time I got this question, I was surprised and took a second to answer.
Of course I write it, I thought. My name is on it.
When I asked people why they asked, they said that they loved the blog, but figured that I had other people writing under my direction. I [...]

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The cheapest food in the world

July 5, 2010

I was struck the other day by the observation that the start of our current recession was sharper than the Great Depression and that the steps taken by governments around the world to provide financial stimulus helped to moderate the decline.
That observation got me thinking about how different the images of this recession are from [...]

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Social media marketing drives search traffic 61% for one small business: a case study

June 7, 2010

Any small business looking at social media ultimately has to ask, What business benefit am I going to get from being active in this media? No matter how compelling the user statistics are, any commitment of time for a small business needs to be rewarded with results.
I thought it would be useful to share [...]

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