Canadian Apartment Properties Real Estate Investment Trust Website Considerations – CFAA June 2011

CAPREIT Are You Using the Basics? Not a question of IF you have a website, but HOW you develop, use and leverage your site Focus on business functionality, user experience and ROI What do you need? How do people find you? What did they do? How did it work? “An entire generation is growing up that will never dial a number for customer care”

CAPREIT Scope your needs, goals and investment appetite Marketing vs sales or operational needs Functionality in phases (brochure ware vs online interaction) Scalability Examine other sites for ideas Choose your supplier Experts are needed Industry vs functional knowledge importance References (project management, technical, design and branding) Transition some future work in-house Get yourself educated Assess Needs

CAPREIT Design and Build Think about: 1.Importance of your brand Brand is the perception your audiences have of your company Not just colours and layout First impressions are important 2.Wireframes and flow of functionality 3.Storyboards of design 4.User experience and acceptance testing 5.Ease of management (CMS)

CAPREIT Website – Search Engine Marketing What good is your website if nobody finds it? Traditional marketing (your website is on everything) get found by Google, 14 billion searches on Google each month 80-90% of people research online Paid Placement is something to consider can get expensive, but good if highly focussed in a non competitive market place explore free tools to help manage campaigns in terms of budget and effectiveness SEO should be forefront decision making from the design stage

CAPREIT Where should you spend your money – SEO *2010 seomoz survey of SEO experts

CAPREIT Website – Measurement and Analytics Many tools to choose from What is your level of commitment, understanding, needs and budget (Google Analytics, Ominture, WebTrends etc) Point is – Just do the measurement and follow-up

CAPREIT Website – Measurement and Analytics How do people find you? Look at where your visitors are coming from What did they do ? how many and what pages were viewed? how long was spent on site? where did they exit the site? How did it work? set goals and change usability to monitor progress Traffic Sources Overview “I know half of my advertising dollars are wasted… I just don’t know which half.” Charles Warnock

CAPREIT Final Thoughts Know where you want to go first. Then figure out the right tools and suppliers to achieve it. Have a short term and long term strategy. Generate company wide buy-in, measure it, talk about it. We are living in exponential times. Enjoy! “Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.” John Wooden

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