The focus of the presentation was to analyze an industry leader, Simpson Property Group and illustrate the SPG customer online experience. Additionally, the broad based presentation set the stage for the more focused presentations on social media, analytics, and search marketing throughout the rest of the conference.

Key Takeaways included:

• Your internet presence is not a website. Instead, it’s every point your target audiences are exposed to your brand online.
• Break down the online experience of your target audience into defined steps of the customer relationship – Acquisition, Conversion, Retention and Extension.
• Renters are looking online for peer support as well as information. Ratings and reviews as well as social networks are becoming huge factors in major decisions like where to live.
• With Internet Listing Services (ILS) and Online Classifieds, leads come from a multitude of online sources. Track and measure of all these sources and optimize these acquisition and conversion resources.
• Segment your audience into personas and understand their desired tasks.
• Get local. Capitalize on local search, and local social to acquire traffic.
• If nothing else, start ‘listening’ to social networks and create strategies to start participating.
• Be aware of mobile users and target them with mobile friendly listings.
• Your digital brand experience is not just your website, consider how users learn of you and make improvements wherever possible.
• Retention tactics like email, social and CRM may be the most effective ways to weather a tough economy. Keeping tenants is far cheaper than finding new ones.
• Build your plans from well implemented analytics. Without measurement, you’re not able to measure your impact on each step of the online customer experience.

Learn more about the the 2009 Apartment Internet Marketing Conference, and check out the Twitter history during the presentation, (start from the bottom).