Contributed by: Rebecca Konzem
Category: Marketing
Idea/Theme: We have created snazzy, colorful cards that give the quick steps to posting a nice comment on apartment ratings.com. Once we receive the confirmation of their post, we hand them a $5 gift card. We’ve found that our ratings have gone up significantly in a very short period of time. The cards are handed out at move-in, with maintenance requests and as residents visit the office.
Key Visuals: Just a small card the size of a business card.
Estimated Cost: 200.00
Results: More leads as our apartment ratings have increased and this is one of the first sites that comes up in the search engines.
We just ran a very similar promotion at our properties and it worked very well for us as well, we took it a little further by offering a $5 gift card for each review that they posted on up to 5 review sites that we approved and we also offered 1 raffle entry for each review that they posted as well which gave them a chance to win a $500 Gift Card in a grand prize drawing that we held for each property.
Our ratings went up on all of the 5 review sites that we approved for them to post on, almost every review that was posted was positive & traffic to our website from the review sites increased dramatically.
This helps get those who are happy with their experiences at your properties out to post reviews for you, which is very important because those that are angry or upset are usually the only ones that go and post reviews on these sites.
AWESOME! Thanks for sharing Brian. Would you mind telling us roughly how many positive comments you were posted, how many negative comments were posted and how many apartments were included in this promotion?
Sure, The promotion ran for 2 months. We ran the promotion at 15 of our properties, we received a total of 401 reviews for an average of 26 total reviews per property posted and an average of 10 different residents per property posting a review on 1 or more of the approved review sites, 382 of the reviews were positive and ONLY 19 were negative.
It seemed counter intuitive at first to possibly end up paying for negative reviews, which made the idea hard for me to suggest to my boss, but as we gave it more thought we figured that most of our residents were happy so therefore it would be a reasonable gamble to expect that the majority of these reviews would be positive and of course some would be negative. We made sure to point out that negative reviews would in no way prevent residents from getting their gift cards and raffle entries and stressed that we wanted their honest feedback.
We also figured that if all of the reviews that were posted were positive it might give the impression that we were spam posting these reviews on our own behalf so oddly enough we were hoping to get a few negative reviews posted in the mix as well.
The negative reviews also presented us with a few opportunities to resolve some issues with unhappy residents that we might not have had without running this promotion.
Excellent strategy, all too many marketing people would have never tried to get the idea approved due to fear of failure. Well done all around!
Tami