Brand Equity
We often have the question posed to us when companies are considering rebranding or enhancing the marketing of their corporate website – How can we present unified branding?
One option is to house your properties on one domain. Especially in situations where a company has the freedom to cross-sell units at multiple properties, this can be a very effective strategy. However, this is not recommended if you have multiple owners involved with different branding requirements and if domain ownership is split between different stakeholders. That can create a very complicated situation. However, where ownership and management are aligned, a unified front can be a strong approach.
The corporate URL has the root branding. The presentation of tone, color, identity is all presented in one voice which unifies the prospects impression of the whole. The properties hang off the corporate domain, instantly associating them to that first impression from the company. If the prospect came directly to the property without coming through the corporate website, as they shop this property and the others from the company they observe the unifying presentation that ties them together. This is not to say they must be identical though layout, navigation, and calls to action being in the same place simplify the user experience. Properties can have their own colors, patterns, even fonts as long as they still maintain the feeling of the core corporate identity.
In the past it was recommended to keep property websites on separate domains as Google was then only ranking one property per search query. So if you had multiple properties in one city on one domain, only one would show up in the organic results. Now, Google will rank multiple properties on the same domain as long as a unique detailed URL structure and unique GMB/local listings are correctly set up and optimized.
Benefits to the single domain when executed correctly can be manyfold. Traffic coming to the domain is inclusive of not just the corporate website traffic but also the property website traffic; and consider this will also include returning visitors/residents.
These higher traffic numbers improve the search engine’s impression of your website granting you higher domain authority and quality scoring. These are important factors for ranking organically.
From a paid traffic perspective, either from social marketing or browser ads, you can also potentially market more properties for less cost depending on the cross-selling structure of the property websites. Because they share a domain, it can be easy for the prospect to look at the initial property of interest or cluster of interest and branch out to nearby communities that may have the right price point or availability for the prospect.
For example, let’s says a prospect clicks an ad for Property A from Google’s results page. They come to the website with the signature brand experience for that company. They are disappointed to find that the availability for the size of the apartment they want (perhaps a 2 or 2.5 bedroom) does not align with their needs. But the presentation makes it easy for them to see that at another nearby community (B) and another (C), there are two bedrooms available. The prospect reviews the pricing and features and decides to tour at Property C. This conversion was the base cost of one click from one ad, however three communities were marketed. This could serve as a stepping stone also for companies considering a centralized or partially centralized leasing office for clusters of properties.
For signage and print, shorter versions of the URL or vanity URLs that serve only to redirect to the longer property page on the root domain can make it easy for prospects to have something easy to remember and type.
Of course, for this one domain scenario to be most effective, supporting products are also necessary. You need a reliable CRM that can track your sources across your domain and properties as well as a website provider that can manage pricing and availability information for multiple communities at a time while keeping the designation of which property clear for the prospect just looking for a simple and fast way to find their new home. Tracking and managing analytics in this single root domain environment is more complicated. You definitely want to ensure that your SEM team is familiar with managing DNI, UTMs on redirecting URLs, tagging, traffic, and conversion reporting per property not per domain which of course Spherexx has been doing for over 10 years.
Spherexx provides multifamily websites that consistently outperform our competition. We achieve this with our talented SEM team and with the support of the robust ILoveLeasing CRM to not only nurture and convert leads to leases but also to provide a holistic picture of what sources are bringing the most traffic which as noted above is even more important with a unified presentation. Market Insights and Business Intelligence can also be added to give an even higher bird’s eye view of your area and how to adapt your strategy to garner more leases.
If you would like more information on how a unified single domain approach can improve your search engine marketing and how the product suite from Spherexx can simplify making marketing decisions, please contact us today.