Today’s prospects are looking online first to find their next apartment home. With occupancy still high as we enter busy leasing season, now is a great time to make sure that your community’s online reputation is up-to-date and top-notch.  

So, how can video help you accomplish this? Use apartment video marketing tools to personalize the review experience! Here’s how to use video for reputation management.

Be Proactive When Asking for a Rating or Review

What’s one of the best ways to get what you want? Ask for it! It’s also true when you want ratings and reviews to add to your apartment marketing ideas. For instance, you could ask for it after you’ve just taken a prospect on a great tour, or your team just successfully completed a service request. Anywhere throughout the resident lifecycle is a good time to ask for a rating or a review. 

If you want to streamline the process even further so you can scale quickly, create a short video – 30 seconds or less – explaining exactly how ratings and reviews help the property and also help other prospects make their decisions. 

For the video, talk about how you strive to give exemplary service and hope you did so for them. Then, directly ask them to leave a rating or review. You can direct them to a specific platform where you’re trying to build your online reputation or just give them options like Google, Facebook, Yelp, or Apartment ratings. When people are asked directly, they are more likely to leave a favorable review. 

You can quickly share your video every time you have a strong, positive interaction with a prospect or resident. If you’ve just had a great prospect tour, you can send the video with a note thanking them for touring and asking if they’d be willing to do you a quick favor. With the video component, more people will engage with the email and it continues creating the human-to-human connection. The prospect is more likely to leave a positive review, which is exactly what you want.  

Start Responding to Reviews with Video

Speaking of ratings and reviews, it’s a best practice to respond to those – good and bad. A great way to level up that practice is to use video to respond. If you can type a response, you can create a video. Not only will the video response allow viewers to see your face and body language, but it’ll help convey empathy more effectively if needed. 

However, it’s not just for the person who left the review. It will also support your apartment video marketing efforts because there are other people combing through and reading those reviews. They are looking to see where they want to live next, and where they’ll have the best experience. They’ll see how you take the time to respond this way, you took time to respond via video rather than a canned response. 

You can also create videos to thank your prospects and residents for leaving those positive reviews. Shoot them a quick thank you via text or email. You could also create a GIF and send that over. Overall, video is a great way to make this best practice even better. 

Use Your Reviews to Find Common Themes 

Another way you can use apartment video marketing for reputation management is to comb through your rating and reviews for recurring themes. Whether it’s common issues they have or things that go unanswered or seem confusing, use that information to create videos. For example, if you see a lot of questions, concerns, or comments about your pet policy, take that and create a video. This video can explain the policy and why it is the way it is. Many times, that’s all people are looking for – the why behind the policy. 

You can do this for any other FAQs. Having that video content available means you can quickly send it or post it in response to reviews or with follow-ups. It’s also great to use as an apartment social media idea – post those videos on your social channels to share information about your policies or when those policies change.

Collect Renter Sentiment via Video 

Your current renters have thoughts and feelings about your property. Using video to collect those thoughts, provided they are positive, gives you social posts, SEO content, blog content, and more. 

Prospects looking for new places to live can see from current renters what living in your property is like. While this may take a bit more enticing, it’s worth it. You can make it short and easy for them by providing example scripts. It can be as simple as “I love living at XYZ apartments because…” Pull all those videos together into a nice PR piece, something you’ll have available to share with prospects as they are considering your property. 

Reputation management and apartment video marketing are top-of-the-funnel methods that you can fuel using the bottom of your marketing funnel. So, during multifamily budget season, as you’re considering must-haves, you should get a built-for-multifamily video platform so you can create all these video ideas we just shared! 

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