If you feel lost about where to start your marketing for your community, you are not the first and won’t be the last.
There is a lot to consider when working on a multifamily marketing strategy, and having one is a must.
It’s important to have a road map along with time frames for how long you will test each idea as well as execution time. A timeline of 90 days or a quarter is a good start to examine your progress.
After each time frame, take a look at the progress you made and if there is something that is not working, change it.
Your multifamily marketing strategy should have multiple approaches to ensure stability in case something does not work out.
This type of strategy means having multiple channels and marketing your multifamily community with different approaches.
Whether that is optimizing your website and Google My Business Listing for SEO, creating more digital content for your social channels, or creating a virtual tour of your property, combining different multifamily marketing strategies will help you in the long run.
Next, we break down a few content ideas that can help you crush your multifamily marketing in 2020.
You might be inclined to take your own community photos on your iPhone or with a point and shoot camera to save money. However, professional photography can have a much stronger impact than iPhone photos.
According to a Redfin study, “professional photography helps a home sell faster, for more money and is more likely to sell than a home with point-and-shoot photos.
A professional photographer is skilled to take photos with the right angles and composition. High-quality images from an experienced photographer demonstrate to your audience that you have a well-kept community with an image that you care about.
By making a one-time investment for DSLR photography, you will not only impress your prospects but also attract them to come on-site.
When you are ready to put together your multifamily marketing plan together, give professional photography some serious thought.
Your website is the modern brochure where your prospects will look for more information. This means that it should be clean and simple to use. It also needs to be mobile-friendly.
Today, people are more likely to look at your community on their cell phones than on any other device. With 58% of searches conducted on mobile devices, if your website is not responsive on a phone, you are sure to lose the lead.
Longer content has been big in 2019 and continues to grow for multifamily marketing in 2020.
Longer blog posts are important for 2 main reasons, one is that they get shared more and two, they rank better for SEO.
When writing longer blog posts, you want to aim between 1000 to 2000 words. You also need to remember your keywords
Making sure that your copy includes at least 1% of keywords will help your Google searches.
You can write about a variety of things that are happening at or around your community. Start by highlighting all of your community events with a blog.
You can also let your residents provide you with content such as the things they love the most about your community. Maybe it’s their favorite place to read in a book in your clubroom. Or the best amenities to use during the summer.
Don’t forget to look outside your community too, by highlighting local businesses and any great inside knowledge on the best pizza places in town or the must-see museum.
New residents love finding hidden gems around your neighborhood, and your blog can be the perfect city guide to help them assimilate.
When creating your multifamily marketing plan, consider your whole target market which also includes people with a distance barrier. Marketing to your out-of-state prospects should include a 360 virtual tour as a way to bring the community to them.
For someone who cannot see the property in-person, a 360 tour can become the deciding factor to lease sight-unseen.
Nowadays, people like to be engaged. Interactive content like a 360 virtual tour is great to embed on your community website and your Google My Business Listing to do just that.
Time flies, and you might not even realize that it's been a few years since the last time you cleaned up your GMB listing.
This is probably the first place that your prospects will land when searching online for apartments, so you want to make sure they are met with great content.
Since this is an open forum, anyone can post to your listing, which isn’t always ideal. If a user ever posts inappropriate content or a photo that doesn’t represent your community, make sure to flag it for review.
In addition, low-quality photos won’t resonate well with your audience and ultimately keep them away from wanting to tour in person.
A great multifamily marketing strategy for updating your content would be posting a 360 Google tour along with recently updated photography.
We are far into a time of social media and it would be foolish not to take advantage. Instagram has so many tools that help showcase your community, including the use of Story Highlights.
Posting your amenities and unique areas of your community will make you more transparent and trustworthy. Keeping active on the platform is key, therefore, once you build a solid following, make sure to post regularly to keep your audience interested.
This can also be a platform where you provide helpful tips for people who are in the process of moving or looking for their new home.
Not all content needs to try to sell to your prospects. Being helpful makes your community look friendly. Having tips and helpful notes will also result in more shares which is a great way to reach more people at no extra cost.
Utilizing Facebook events should also be a part of your multifamily marketing as it is free, and with Facebook recording over two billion user logins daily, that is a huge pool of potential prospects.
One way to utilize Facebook events is to post your open houses. This is a great strategy for an early stage of your leasing process as this might bring in an influx of people.
With this multifamily marketing plan, you have to be ready for a large number of guests at your property. Once you collect information from specific people who are actual leads, then you can do more of a personal open house.
One thing to keep in mind is that even though Facebook and Instagram are the biggest social accounts at the moment, it’s important to keep in mind all of the other channels.
Staying active on multiple accounts such as Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, LinkedIn and more will give you more opportunities to be found.
Different demographics use different accounts, so this is a great way to reach all sorts of people.
If you are having trouble leasing a vacant space, consider ways that can help your space stand out. People have a much better time visualizing a space as their new home if they could see what their furniture might look like. That’s where virtual staging comes in.
While staging an apartment traditionally can be time-consuming and costly, virtual staging is a great alternative that is an attractive marketing tactic but also budget-friendly.
Virtual Staging allows you to fill the space beautifully in no time and at a fraction of the cost.
If you are running into the issue of not having anyone available to answer phone calls, it might be a good idea to incorporate a chatbot into your multifamily marketing strategy.
Extending your office hours during peak season might alleviate that issue a little, but there is only so much one person can do.
A chatbot will help you funnel down your leads and assist in answering any general questions that people may have, all while you are busy helping other prospects. Consider the chatbot your own personal assistant.
It is human nature to get excited about free stuff. You can tap into that by offering free gifts in the welcome packages. You can kill two birds with one stone by giving away your own merch. A free t-shirt or a mug with your property logo makes the tenant happy and becomes free advertising for you.
A referral program in your multifamily marketing plan could also get people excited. By giving your tenants a month of free rent for every prospect they bring in and that signs a lease, you create an incentive for your current tenant to stay as well as for them to do your marketing for you.
If your community is in the development stage, a great multifamily marketing strategy would be to invest in 3D renderings, whether that be 3D stills or 3D 360 images.
There are many benefits to getting 3D renderings, animations or 3D interactive site plans, and since there is not much to show with a developing community, that content becomes your backbone for marketing.
3D interactive site plans can also create a sense of urgency as they show your apartment availability in real-time with no additional work on your end.
Personalization goes a long way, especially if you mention something that was discussed during a previous on-site visit.
Many people don’t see the power in Thank You cards, but they make people connect emotionally with your community which can sometimes be the deciding factor.
A thank you note is also a great way to follow up with leads to stay top-of-mind. If you want to take your multifamily marketing a step further, you could even call a potential prospect and offer a virtual meeting to be more proactive.
A lease renewal is the easiest sale you can make since you are selling to someone who already chose your community before. All you have to do with a renewal reminder is convince your tenant just how great living here was last term.
Being creative and fun with this multifamily marketing idea is the way to go. If the renewal notice can make them smile, you can bet they will be coming by to renew.
Try asking your tenants if they would be willing to record a video of their testimonial. Video marketing is still growing in popularity and builds trust for the community more than a written review.
The last piece of advice I want to leave is that analytics is still the key to successful marketing. Data-driven decisions are the best decisions you can make when building your multifamily marketing strategy. Google Analytics is a great place to check in on a regular basis to see how your website content and overall strategy is performing.
You cannot implement any ideas from your multifamily marketing strategy, and walk blindly hoping that they are working.
In need of digital content for your community in the upcoming year? Contact us today to learn more.
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