You know your community needs an online presence to help increase leads and occupancy. Even back in 2010, the Internet was twice as popular as any other method of searching for an apartment. But unless online marketing is your specialty, figuring out what you really need to do can be overwhelming. Ryan Lucia, our director of sales, boiled it down into three basic building blocks:

1. Build a Smart Website
This one’s pretty obvious. Your prospects are online, so provide a site that shows them your community’s offerings in a smartly designed way. After all, you have to look good online to be taken seriously—did you know that 94% of people cite design as a reason they don’t trust certain sites? And this applies to both desktop and mobile sites. If you don’t have a responsively designed website, you at least need a mobile version of it because 89% of consumers use a search engine on their mobile device.

2. Attract Visitors
Once you’ve built that awesome website, don’t just trust in “build it and they will come.” You need to give your prospects a little help in finding you first! Consider investing in online and mobile advertising, including listing your properties on search sites like ApartmentFinder.com, Apartments.com, etc. And since many use search engines as their go-to research, look into SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing) strategies. Probably the most important step you can take to optimize your site for higher ranking in search results is to focus your content on answering the questions your prospects are asking. 

3. Convert Website Lookers into Leads
Once you’ve drawn people to your site, a major goal should be to get them talking. This gives your team more chances to answer questions in ways that influence decisions, set up tours and just leave a better impression of your community. But first, the prospect has to initiate a conversation. 

To encourage that, keep your contact information and calls to action highly visible and grouped together (you don’t want them to have to scroll to find it if possible). You might even want to test out different communication options. For instance, a click-to-chat or click-to-text option could be a natural next step for an online prospect―they wouldn’t have to wait or leave the site to learn more. They could chat right there on the same page (even from the ad listing); mobile prospects could even start a text conversation with a tap. 

Ready to Build?
Many people stop with just the first two steps, but that’s like building a bridge that stops short of the other side. Sure, some folks will make the final leap on their own, but others will turn right back around and go elsewhere. So make the final conversion step the easiest of all to take. Make it easy for prospects to connect in whatever way they want. The easier you make it—the better you build the bridge—the better your chances of guiding someone right on in through your doors.