Apartment marketing
Jesse Stein | Collective Conversations
Multifamily Marketing: Design
Photo by Med Badr Chemmaoui on Unsplash
Design is a crucial component of multifamily marketing. It plays a key role in attracting potential residents, creating a memorable brand, and setting your property apart from the competition. According to Founder and CEO Mike Brewer of Multifamily Collective, becoming brilliant at using design in multifamily marketing requires a few key steps.
- Understand your audience: To create an effective design, you must first understand the needs, preferences, and behaviors of your target audience. What do they value in a living space? What are their lifestyle habits? What kind of visual language speaks to them? By researching and understanding your target audience, you can create design elements that resonate with them.
- Define your brand: A strong brand identity is essential to a successful multifamily marketing campaign. Define your brand values, mission, and tone. This will serve as a guiding principle for all your design decisions. Your brand should be reflected in all your marketing materials, from your logo to your property website.
- Use visuals to tell a story: Design is about more than just aesthetics. It’s about telling a story. Use visuals to connect with your audience emotionally, showcasing your property’s unique features, benefits, and amenities. High-quality photographs and video content can give potential residents a feel for the living experience at your property.
- Make it easy to understand: Complex designs or confusing layouts can detract from your message. Keep your design simple, intuitive, and easy to understand. A clean, streamlined design will help communicate your message effectively and make it easier for potential residents to take action.
- Stay consistent: Consistency is key in multifamily marketing. Your design elements, such as color palette, typography, and imagery, should be consistent across all your marketing materials. This will reinforce your brand and make it easy for potential residents to recognize your property.
Following these steps, you can create an effective design that attracts and engages potential residents and sets your property apart from the competition. With a strong design strategy, you can maximize the impact of your multifamily marketing efforts and build a successful brand.
Referral Fees – Not Quite So Easy Breezy
Referral Fees – Not Quite So Easy Breezy
Referral fees have been a staple in the multifamily industry for decades. The programs are typically basic – residents tell their friends and families about their apartment community and send us qualified applicants who go on to move in and become residents. We post signs reminding our residents of the promotion – Earn $200 – $500! for every move-in. What we fail to do is simplify the rules for earning the referral fee. The small print can turn a fairly straightforward program into a very complex one and quickly deflate the joyful chance to turn a friend into a neighbor and pocket some easy cash.
I cringe when I think of a manager arguing with a resident about the five steps required to claim the fee and – Oops! You missed step #3! Sorry, that’s our policy. But thank you anyway. Do you feel the same pit in your stomach as I do when considering that scenario?
Rents are well above record levels which can be stressful for residents, making the chance to earn some extra dollars appealing indeed. So, if the rent were let’s say $1800/month, then the value of that new customer is more than $21k for the first year. The referral fee is peanuts comparatively. Instead, we often stand our ground and turn the initial resident into a raving enemy. You might win the fight, but the war is over. A happy resident tells a few people. An unhappy one tells the world.
A colleague of mine shared this story about a recent customer experience from a different industry altogether.
“Recently, my adult daughter purchased a new bed and mattress from a smaller online company, and she loved it! She did her homework in advance and had zero regrets. A few months later, my adult son took notice of her two thumbs-up review and bought a mattress, frame, and the works from the same company.
Since I was also on the hunt for a new mattress, I jumped on board and bought one, too. I know the story sounds improbable, but mattress shopping is really stressful, and if you know someone who actually loves their new mattress and the overall buying experience, that creates a huge level of trust. I don’t know about you, but it is awkward to go into one of the many Mattress stores found in every strip mall and shop while a salesperson hovers over you, encouraging you to sit or lay down on several of the floor models. Talk about a position where you have zero power! Back to our story – none of us had seen or even sat on the product before buying it – we relied on the words of a trusted family member in addition to online reviews and website information.
After all our financial transactions were complete and new beds were on the way, I realized that no one had used the right referral link to earn the $50 bonus. Bummer. I had corresponded with Shannon from customer support over some pre-purchase questions which she quickly answered. I used that contact to reach out and share our story – the family who each bought into the Big Fig experience. I acknowledged the fact that we failed to use the referral link. My email ended with this question, “Is there anything you can do to reward this much family loyalty?”
The company wasn’t required to do anything. We clearly missed the requirements (which included using the special link AND waiting until the 120-day trial sleep period ended.) I had no expectations but thought it was worth a shot.
Instead of highlighting the rules and requirements of the referral policy, the company chose to make it more than right. She replied quickly, thanked us for our support, and sent each of us a $50 Visa gift card. If I have the math right, that’s one more than we would have earned under the program if we had followed the referral rules initially.
Hats off to Shannon the Customer Support person who works for a company that understands the imperative to exceed expectations at every opportunity. The $150 they spent on Visa gift cards is a tiny fraction of the thousands of dollars we paid for our mattresses. And it guarantees that each of us will share the word with our friends and colleagues. (Hi friends & colleagues! Check out Big Fig Mattress!)
A $50 gift card is nominal and pays back far more than it costs. What really stands out here is that Shannon didn’t need four levels of approval and forms to give away the gift cards. She was empowered to make decisions on the spot that ensured an exceptional customer experience.”
What are you doing to empower your front-line team members to resolve situations and build brand loyalty? Are you giving your Shannons the opportunity to be the hero?
Please share your stories with us. (Oh – and hit me up if you need a new mattress!)
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Mark Juleen | Collective Conversations
That’s Bananas!
Photo Credit: Savannah Bananas Twitter
That’s Bananas!
Bananas are a very versatile fruit – a good source of potassium, magnesium, and vitamins B6 and C – and are consumed plain, in recipes, and as an ingredient in many a smoothie. Did you know that bananas are berries, but blackberries, mulberries, and raspberries are not? This article published by McGill University in Canada explains this fact in much greater detail. But suffice to say that things can be radically different than what we believe. We get so attached to the truth as we know that it can be incredibly difficult to allow our brains to embrace a different reality.
Jesse Cole figured out how to crack the code. In 2016, the Savannah Bananas took to the field. A minor league baseball team, the Bananas understand that baseball isn’t just about the fundamentals and stats – it’s about entertainment. And boy oh boy – this is a team that knows how to entertain! They sing, dance, and sell out every game and win more games than any other team in their league. Their mascot is a muscle-bound banana named Split. Of course.
Part PT Barnum, part Harlem Globetrotters and part like nothing you’ve ever seen – the Bananas are a winning combination – and the peeling – er feeling, is contagious. The players aren’t afraid to look foolish, they lean into the tomfoolery and as a result, their fans lean into it too – hard. Banana babies, Bachelor parodies, playing in kilts, and stands full of banana everything – including underwear as outerwear. Bottom line – everything is about creating an exceptional over the top entertainment experience for the fans.
Sounds crazy, right? Maybe. Maybe not. Jesse Cole has authored two books: Fans First and Find Your Yellow Tux. How might we in the multifamily business radically change the resident experience if we learned the fundamentals of entertainment and implemented those principles in our business? It’s not so far-fetched as it seems. I have long believed that what we do is performance-based in that we opened the theatre of property management every day, but this is lightyears beyond clean, safe, and friendly.
If Cole could figure out how to take talented baseball players and convince them to go all-in on the spectacle and the game, I have to believe that we can bring a fan-first entertainment-focused resident and prospect experience to the multifamily space. We just need to be willing to think about the customer and team member experience in a radically unexpected way.
What might that look like? It’s gonna take courage, grit, and the ability to risk looking silly. It seems to me that this radical shift is about creating a feeling – a memorable experience that leaves our customers feeling ‘something extra’ about living at our properties – more than service and bigger than pleasant – it requires the creation of a full-on profound experience. The kind of experience that fills up your social media feed with resident and guest accolades because it is just that incredible. Shockingly cool.
The question isn’t when this type of experience is coming to multifamily – it’s WHO is going to do it first.
Please share your theatrical resident entertainment stories with the members of the Multifamily Collective! The thought is pretty a-peeling.
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