What You Need to Do to Position Your Multifamily Marketing Strategy for Success
It’s crucial in the digital world for a property to develop a strong multifamily marketing approach. Traditional marketing methods — which include print and cold calling — have proven to be quite costly over time.
With the growth and development of the internet, however, multifamily organizations are no longer reliant on these approaches. If you are using one of these multifamily marketing approaches in your day-to-day business, you may not see optimal results.
The traditional approaches are “tried and true” but they do not work for every company. Stepping back and looking at the big picture may be all you need to see why your multifamily marketing approach isn’t cutting it.
Some questions you may ask yourself include:
Has our organization created buyer personas?
Residents and prospects are increasingly reliant on the web to inform their purchasing decisions. They look to reviews, opinion articles, and related web pages to make choices. It’s important your apartment web design and social media appeal to their interests. It’s for this reason that every business should develop buyer personas.
Buyer personas are semi-fictional characters who represent the potential buyers of your business — in this case, prospects interested in renting at your apartment community. Personas are not purely demographics; they are a way to understand the wants and needs of your potential residents to boost your apartment lead generation. Developing buyer personas take time, and it should be precise and accurate. This can be achieved through interviews, big data, internal research, and understanding market trends.
When determining who to interview, there are four outlets you can turn to:
- Customers
- Third-party networks
- Prospects
- Referrals
These are people who you may already know that can provide you with valid, useful information for your personas.
Negative personas are also beneficial for a company to create as they can pinpoint the individuals that you are trying not to reach. For example, negative personas could be people who are looking for apartments at a lower price point, people out of the property’s desired age group, or people who are likely to be destructive residents.
Find out if you have multiple buyer personas
Once you’ve talked to a few residents and have your answers compiled, start creating your buyer persona. You might even discover you have multiple personas. For example, if you have a multifamily property in a live-work-play atmosphere, one of your personas might be a millennial professional and another might be a recent empty-nester who is ready to downsize their living space.
These personas (which are fictional representations of your ideal resident) will help you hone in on the appropriate messaging for all of the content that surrounds your property, including your social media posts and multifamily marketing campaigns.
The important aspect of knowing your personas before starting a multifamily marketing campaign is knowing what to talk about and when. For example, if you are posting on social media about the local happy hour and exciting nightlife next to your community, this type of content may not appeal to the empty-nester persona who values a quiet, quaint living space and maybe prefers to know about the lunch specials at the nearby diner.
Once you have completed your persona interviews, you can use our handy Buyer Persona Worksheet to organize your responses and create your persona.
Is our multifamily marketing approach entertaining and educational?
Potential residents generally do not have an interest in reading about the latest developments in the multifamily industry that don’t apply directly to them. This relates back to buyer personas and their importance. You need to understand exactly what your ideal resident is searching for online.
A good way to think about it is “The Cocktail Party Approach.” If you are one of our avid blog readers, you’ve heard of this approach before. “The Cocktail Party Approach” essentially means no one wants to sit and listen to someone talk about themselves for the duration of a party. Rather, people will gravitate to the person who listens intently and gives valuable responses. You should aim to be that person. Educate and entertain your residents in a way that is valuable to them. Use keywords, image alt-tags, and meta descriptions to increase your multifamily SEO.
Mix entertainment and education
A multifamily marketing approach that mixes entertainment and education successfully will appeal to customers far more than a company that employs intrusive advertising and multifamily marketing methods. Taking the spotlight away from your apartment brand is important when trying to appeal to the consumer’s wants and needs. Of course, you can talk about your company and what it has to offer, but it should be consumer-driven, rather than profit-driven.
The goal of your multifamily marketing efforts should be to help guide the consumers and convert visitors into apartment leads. There are a number of companies that do this successfully — and you can as well. Developing buyer personas is a key first step so you can formulate just how to entertain and educate your target consumers.
Are we utilizing social media for apartments effectively?
Social media is the digital driver in the world of multifamily marketing. A company should be taking advantage of everything that the platforms have to offer. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest are the top social media outlets. Each platform offers a unique way to market your company, so don’t be afraid to be informal, humorous, or informational. Social media gives your property a chance to directly interact and relate to consumers, so take advantage of that and drop a few puns every now and then.
Social media and other digital platforms are an excellent way to reach residents where they already are. Billboards and flyers are good multifamily marketing tools, but they don’t bring your property top-of-mind. This is another area where buyer personas come in handy (see, we told you they would be worth your time).
You already determined who you are targeting, where they can be found, and what their favorite media outlets are. All that is left to do now is to figure out what you are going to say. No need for pick-up lines or corny jokes. Find your property’s personality, own it, and above all, make it relatable for your potential residents. You will be an industry thought leader in no time, and residents will be flocking to your door with the desire to live at your property.
Understand & Tackle Multifamily Marketing Issues Head-On
Understanding why your multifamily marketing approach is not working for your company is the first step. The second step is approaching those issues head-on. Consider conducting some research about inbound multifamily marketing as well. Inbound multifamily marketing is a technique that pulls customers in through social media, relevant content, and multifamily SEO. It’s taking over traditional marketing by creating an exciting future for multifamily marketing and the approaches used by properties and developers everywhere.
