Cost & Benefits of Blogging on Your Apartment Website

Imagine yourself as a prospective renter browsing through two different apartment websites.

You’re well informed about both apartments’ similar floorpans, prices, features, and amenities. The only difference is that apartment “A” created a blog section that features a variety of topics on apartment living around their community, and apartment “B” doesn’t. Which apartment community leaves a better impression?

The fundamental purpose of an apartment website is to inform its residents and prospects. Pages like the floorplan, amenities, neighborhood, galleries, map, and contacts are a must. Still, many property managers wonder if blog sections are necessary for apartment websites.

If you’re still wondering about joining the blog bandwagon, we analyzed the cost and benefits of blogging on your apartment website. After reading you can decide whether or not to put your marketing efforts into blogging.

Here are the benefits of having a blog on your apartment website:



1. Drives Significant Website Traffic 

Driving traffic visits to your website is key to meeting your business goals and leaving no vacancy unit behind. Having a community blog can make your site more valuable, push for higher organic visibility, and share more information with your potential and current residents. 

Blog topics as simple as community events, neighborhood information, and fun city activities will not only attract audiences within the community but, people who are planning on moving into the community. This helps you branch out your audience to a larger group of people, allowing them to know your brand.

According to the State of Inbound, 82% of marketers who blog consistently see positive ROI and increased rankings in search engines. With a higher search ranking, your apartment will have a higher chance of staying on top of the search results and be more visible than your competitors.

Businesses that spend time actively blogging receive 67% more leads than those who don’t. With this information, we could conclude that apartment websites with blogs on average have more leads than websites that don’t.

2. Affordable Form of Marketing

Blogging is more budget-friendly for apartment communities with limited to no budget for advertising and marketing. Because the apartment website is already yours, there is no extra investment needed for additional blogging platforms. The apartment website is the best place for blogging, and the apartment's social media is a great promotional tool for sharing new content. 

In addition, the apartment managers are the experts in apartment floorplans, community, outside neighborhood, leasing process, and moving timelines. These experts can be the most informative bloggers for your apartment community already, meaning there is no need for outsourcing blog copywriting.

Finally, if you’ve got the blogger and the platform – you already have what you need to start a blog for your apartment today!

3. Lasting Marketing Value

Great Content = Great Value! 

Blog posts can be the consistent advertising your apartment wants. With people frequently visiting the site for additional life information/content, the apartment blog posts show visitors the value of continuously coming back. This then leads to visitors coming back to share or repost your content with their network. With ‘on point’ content, you will begin to notice that your blogs are contributing to your overall traffic within around six months. 

Finally, make sure your content stays relevant. Due to the fact that blog post topics renew frequently, we encourage you to invest your time in evergreen content that maintains the same value in the long term.

4. Stronger Audience Targeting

Apartment blogs can be used to target different groups of audiences. Focus on writing blogs that speak to different interests, languages, hobbies, and lifestyles. 

Let’s use college students and pet owners as examples of target audiences. By understanding college student lifestyles, you know writing blogs that highlight all the fun activities and convenient public transportation around the apartment community is what will attract college students. 

On the other hand, when targeting pet owners, write blogs on pet events hosted around the city and highlight all the pet-friendly features within and outside your apartment.

5. Provides Educational Content For Prospects

A blog is an excellent source for apartment communities to emphasize the advantage of living within that specific community. As an apartment industry expert, there is an expectation by prospective renters to provide insights into the apartment knowledge better than anyone else out there.

We’ve detailed some topics for blog posts that are known to grab prospect’s attention:

• Everything You Need to Know to Live in [Community Name]
• Top Ten Moving Tips, Make Your Apartment Moving Easy
• Pet Events You Don’t Want to Miss 
• Top 5 Places to Explore When You First Arrive at [City’s Name]

The benefits of website blogs are incredible and hard to look past. Now, let’s talk about the costs of taking your apartment website to the next level through blogging.

Here are the costs that come with having a blog on your apartment website:

1. Time-Consuming

Frequency is the key when it comes to blogging, which means consistency is important. When deciding to blog, the team needs to be dedicated to spending a lot of time coming up with topics and actually creating the content. Blogging can be very time-consuming, which can make people shy away from blogging if the team is small.

According to Orbit Media, each business blog post takes, on average, 3 hours and 16 minutes per piece to complete. The more frequently blog posts appear on the site, the more likely it is to increase traffic. Apartment experts need to carefully plan out how much time they want to invest in blogging on their own, with it being so timely. 

2. Return Takes Time 

Don’t expect an instant return in traffic and conversions at the beginning of a blogging project. Based on multiple studies, the average time it takes for a new blog to get traction on search engines is around 3 to 6 months. 

Patience in return is key to long-term success. Blogging is a long-term strategy to gain traffic and tenants, blog posts won’t show success as fast as you think. 

3. There May Be Additional Expenses

Although blogging is cheap, it doesn’t mean there are no costs at all. Just like every project and job, time is money. The time invested in writing blog content costs time and energy when it could be spent on other areas, projects, and activities. 

According to Sprout Social, if you want to outsource your blog writing and make it easier, be expected to spend between $25-$150 on each blog post.

After evaluating the benefits and costs of blogging on an apartment website, we hope you have an idea of whether or not adding a blog section as part of your inbound marketing approach is best for your business goals.

We understand starting a community blog is challenging, but Repli is always here to help. Our content experts are here to answer any questions you may have. Feel free to contact us and get to know more about content marketing today by clicking the Get Started Button or by clicking here!