GTMA’s Complete Guide to The NaaEduConf
It’s that time of year again. No, not Christmas — the 2016 NAA Education Conference & Exposition, duh! Think of it as an educational Christmas for multifamily professionals. GTMA will be there in spirit (and online of course) very much leading the multifamily thoughts and discussions. Therefore, we’ve created our very own guide to NaaEduConf! Follow along with GTMA as we discuss some of the speakers and topics we’re interested in this year along with some of our own contributions to the topics.
Day 1 Wednesday:
“Buzz is Just Noise” with Kate Good brings up a valid point and cutting through the noise online is a challenge we grapple with daily in multifamily marketing. GTMA’s digital marketing perspective on taking buzz and turning it into valuable leads is a multi-faceted approach across social, reputation, SEO, and PPC campaigns. Synergy between all platforms of a community’s online presence backed by smart, humanized marketing is the key to successfully gaining future resident’s attention, and keeping it!
“Good Dogs, Happy Cats: Optimizing Revenue with Strategic Pet Policies” by Inga Fricke
We may not be in the business of building pet friendly properties or making pet policies, but we are in the business of helping people find the right home for right now. We stand at the intersection of pets and communities in the digital realm, and we find that promoting pet friendly features online is enormously beneficial for attracting residents and building a loyal community among residents. See some of the ways GTMA gets creative with pet friendly communities, it will make your proverbial tail wag!
Day 2 Thursday
Jonathan Perelman likes to say, “Content is King, but distribution is Queen, and she wears the pants”. Well said, Jonathan! In the early days of GTMA we believed kick-ass content would bring the audience to us, and it did. However, social networks are moving in a different direction and the odds aren’t stacked in favor of organic. As social media sites encourage businesses to pay them for value once gained for free, and more people and businesses post to social media more often — everyone gets less attention. Supply and demand pushes reach down and rates up. It’s not the landscape we once knew, but it’s the reality of social media today. We still make that kick-ass content, but we’ve had to get a lot more creative when it comes to distribution strategy.
To be a player in today’s social media game, you’ve got to be an expert on each social ad network. We take advantage of all the audience targeting, custom audiences and retargeting available using Facebook exchange, and think hyperlocal. Hyperlocal + paid social advertising makes sure your content isn’t going unseen in the abyss that is social media.
Breakout Session: Reputation Revival: OMRealness
Breakout Session: It’s Not Just a Review, It’s Market Research!
Oh boy, do we have some things to say about reputation management — probably more than this guide can handle. The facts are that nearly 70% of consumers, and 82% of millennials, seek opinions online before buying, meaning your reputation is the new way to advertise. Control your story, if you don’t want this to be the first thing future residents read about your apartment community!
We can’t get enough reputation management, and if your online reputation is the new advertising — you best be keeping track of what people are saying about you. We’ve been tracking sentiments for our clients along with reputation management, and it will be quite interesting to see what multifamily does with this information as it becomes ever more available and important.
Day 3 Friday
David Rose, the famous thought leader who brought us ‘Internet of Things’ is a major source of geek fandom for us at GTMA! When products are poised to become services, and user experiences are more valuable than technology, what direction should multifamily be moving in? Resort-style living, on-site services, classes, all kinds of fun and practical services you can imagine are becoming the new norm in multifamily. We’ve been witnessing our clients transition to this new landscape, and to be quite honest — it makes our jobs as storytellers much more exciting. Forget ‘buildings’, and ‘things’, these are useless without an experiential factor. We’re using digital media platforms to help renters experience the lifestyle of an apartment community.
Breakout Session: Succeeding in a Mobile World: Google Talks Micromoments & More by Esther Bonardi & More.
Microcontent, micro moments, micro media, call it what you’d like, but it all boils down to ‘micro-attention’. Whether we’re talking social, a blog, an online ad — the name of the game is mobile, and the attention span on mobile is short and mobile now accounts for a majority of user’s online time. Combining content tailored to your audience and distributing it appropriately are key to succeeding on mobile. In this case microcontent is King, but targeting is Queen and she wears the pants! We’ve been working with GeoTargeting, a really neat tool for capturing the attention of an audience in a hyperlocal area on mobile and desktop. If you didn’t catch GTMA CEO Joshua Swanson’s talk on Geotargeting last November at MultifamilyPro Brainstorming, here’s a little refresher on how to use this cutting edge tool for multifamily.
There may or may not be a very fun GTMA Snapchat filter headed to all you NaaEduConf goers, send your snaps to GoToMyApartment so that we can laugh at you..with you we mean! We hope you all learn a lot about ‘apartments and stuff’ this week, happy NaaEduConf 2016!