ForRent.com® clients grow review volume 2180% with reputation and listing solutions
ForRent.com® was founded in 1982
Provide property managers and owners with diverse marketing services
Operating in a global rental market
The Challenge:
With 90% of consumers relying on internet listings to research rentals, ForRent.com knew how essential a properly managed online reputation and presence was for their clients. ForRent.com needed a platform and a partner to offer such solutions to their clients, closing the loop on their service offering.
Optimizing the digital footprint
year-over-year review
volume growth
average yearly
listing score growth
total review volume
growth every year
Background
ForRent.com® was founded in 1982 to provide property managers and owners with diverse marketing and advertising services, products, and education. ForRent.com prides itself on offering products and services that are easy to use, easy to understand, and are designed with the modern renter in mind. Operating in a global rental market, ForRent.com’s mission is to help their clients drive leads, retain residents, and build their brands.
ForRent.com wanted to close the loop on their marketing and advertising services, and offer their thousands of property management clients with reputation and listings management solutions for the digital age. ForRent.com therefore needed a platform solution that would integrate seamlessly with their digital offerings that they could roll out to thousands of property management clients. This would allow them to expand their offerings as a digital media company, and grasp a larger share of the digital market. Additionally, ForRent.com needed a platform solution that would accommodate both their clients fulfilling the work, and the ForRent.com team themselves, in order to offer a variety of fulfillment options to their clients.
Objectives
ForRent.com saw a clear advantage in offering reputation and listings management solutions to clients, coupled with a managed service fulfillment option by the ForRent.com team. Oftentimes, the clients do not have the time to manage their online reputation themselves, or the knowledge and expertise on how to do so. Plus, with 90% of consumers relying on internet listings to research apartment listings, ForRent.com knew how essential a properly managed online reputation and presence was for their clients.
ForRent.com’s objective with Vendasta’s Reputation and Listings management platforms was to close the loop on their marketing and advertising services, expand their brand as local experts in the digital age, and put their real estate clients’ online reputation into their own hands. This integration with the Vendasta platform would allow ForRent.com to offer their clients both a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) and Do-It-For-Me (DIFM) solution for managing the online presence of their property management businesses.
“With thousands of property management companies in the apartment industry, there is a tremendous challenge seeing and managing the digital points of presence across so many online directories and social sites,” says ForRent.com Assistant Vice President of Social Media, Erica Campbell Byrum.
Process
By partnering with Vendasta, ForRent.com gained access to Vendasta’s robust Reputation and Listings Management platforms. These platforms have both a partner-facing and business-facing side, which allows both ForRent.com’s team of experts, as well as the business owners themselves, to manage their online reviews and listings. ForRent.com rebranded Vendasta’s platform under the ForRent.com banner, and offered two service types to their clients: Do-It-Yourself, and Do-It-For-Me. The DIY package offers business clients access to manage their own reputation through the ForRent.com-branded platform. The DIFM package has ForRent.com’s in-house team handle the fulfilment work, through Vendasta’s platform, on behalf of the businesses.
Vendasta’s Reputation and Listings Management Platform
The Reputation and Listings Management platforms ForRent.com integrated into their offerings are equipped with tools that help local businesses manage their online presence. They cover all aspects of online visibility, from where their business is listed across all major directories and listings sources, to public reviews, and more.
Vendasta’s Reputation and Listings platforms allow businesses to:
- Manage their online listings
- Monitor and respond to business mentions and reviews across the web
- Identify and correct inaccurate and duplicate online listings across all major sources
- Compare their online presence to industry competitors
- Track their listings score over time, determined by number and accuracy of all business listings
- Generate and manage new reviews to boost and improve their reputation
- Monitor their overall reputation and listing presence with weekly automatic reports
These online presence management services connect apartment communities with new leads through:
- Automatic listing updates to remove outdated and incorrect contact information
- Instant visibility on key directories and navigation systems like Waze and Google Maps
- Protection against unauthorized, lead-hijacking listing changes
- Improved listing accuracy so prospects can connect with their business instantly
- Improved listing score leading to better local SEO and findability
The result
year-over-year review
volume growth
average yearly
listing score growth
total review volume
growth every year
The numbers
Thousands of ForRent.com’s accounts using the reputation and listings management services saw huge growth in total review volume, citations, and listings. Additionally, it’s clear to see that the DIFM service accounts are generating reviews and improving listings at a much faster rate than their DIY counterparts. With a 2180% year-over-year review volume growth, and 24.6% average yearly listing score growth, it’s easy to tell the value of a full-service reputation management solution for small businesses who often lack the time, expertise, and/or resources to dedicate to managing their online reputation.
With Vendasta’s platform, ForRent.com was able to provide both instant and long-term value to their real estate clients with listings and reputation management services. Additionally by providing service model options, they were able to cater to different budgets and needs, while continuing to provide huge value to both types of accounts.
“The solutions Vendasta provides has not only helped our business save time and money, but also provide differentiation in a crowded, competitive environment. The platform has enabled us to scale and improve our efficiencies for reputation management and listings management with an easy-to-use interface,” Campbell Byrum says.
Conclusion
With drastically improved listings, reviews, and citations, ForRent.com’s clients will experience more business generated from their improved online presence. Additionally, ForRent.com will be seen as the authority on getting real estate businesses found, clicked, and visited in the new digital world.
“Vendasta has been a perfect match for us to support our growing reputation and online marketing services for our clients. Their digital agency has become an extension of our team, enabling us to grow our account base while still providing great customer service to our clients. We appreciate our partnership and the quality solutions they offer,” Campbell Byrum says.
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