Apartment marketing
Authentic Apartment Marketing
Think of apartment seekers as consumers and your communication with them will be perceived as not authentic – think of them as people and you have a shot at creating conversation that speaks to fundamental human need(s), want(s) and desire(s). Think food, water and shelter. And, how do you become authentic as it relates to apartment marketing? You get an understanding.
Understand People and Their Behavior
Why would you want to understand people and their behaviors? The only way you change how people feel, think and behave is to understand them in a very authentic way? Only then will they respond to the power of your creative apartment marketing. Or, conversation and content marketing.
What can you do to understand people and their behaviors? First, you create an authentic and ceaseless urge to know more. You make it your daily quest to always know more about people. Always take notes. Take pictures. Record thoughts. Write a blog post or two or three to flesh out your thoughts. Make it your mission to understand what they think. What they prefer. What they dream. What they desire. And, what they need.
One item on note on understanding – what makes people people is always changing. And, if you are not leading that change in an authentic way then someone else will.
Your, highly interested in anthropology, multifamily maniac,
M
Craigslist with a Twist
Can you make it more social?
What if you took Craigslist and made it just a little more social? What if you extended your leasing team by four fold overnight? What if you took the current tired resident referral model and tossed in a tool to assist those who would actually assist us in producing leads and leases?
Get the community involved
I have thought for a very long bit of time and even experimented with the idea of partnering with the people who live in our apartment communities to churn out marketing on our behalf. Our experiments have not been backed by a ton of passion and or adopted with cheery fanfare by the people that we invited to play along and nonetheless I think there might be an opportunity. I intend to continue to experiment.
How do you make Craigslist a little more social?
The loose thought, in brief, is to organize four to six template Craigslist Apartment Marketing Packages. Photos, ad copy, headlines, pricing and the such would be included. A detailed white paper to include step-by-step instructions for posting and responding to would be residents. It would also include an introduction training provided by the Mills Marketing Team. The training would be supplemented by four to six ongoing training sessions over time.
WIIFM
What’s in it for me? Or, for them? The carrot – a monetary incentive for every lease we secured, aka – the resident referral fee.
What do you think?
Your -thinking Craigslist can be more social – multifamily maniac,
M
Apartment Marketing: Real or Just Great Storytelling?
In all fairness, I have not taken the time to view an episode of the show Ghost Adventures . In face I just learned about it this past Thursday when Mary Korte of Mills Neighborhood Blog fame wrote it. It immediately got me thinking about the topic of storytelling, the following quote being the real catalyst;
Zak, Nick, and Aaron go to some of the scariest places to try and get answers and information about the people who used to inhabit the spaces. These guys aren’t your average investigators. They are not afraid to go places where other paranormal investigators refuse to tread. From apparitions to demons, these guys find it all!
Real or Just Great Storytelling
First, let’s give Zak, Nick and Aaron props for profitting on one of the most fundamental emotions that makes the world go around – fear. It’s well know that we are motivated by the pursuit of pleasure or the quest to avoid pain and fear plays a major roll in that. Can we profit off the back of fear like these three and all associated with their show have so brilliantly done?
Let’s face it, we humans have been scarying the hell out of each other from the beginning of time. You read about it in every kind of fiction and non-fiction. You hear the folktales and hear the creepy stories while sitting around the campfires we stoke up with every single passing summer. It’s just plain fun. Persoanlly speaking, I get a real charge out of scaring my kids into a frenzy through stories and outright hide and seek styled shockfests. And, they love it too. Ok, after they get over the initial reactions. But, do they belive it? Na – they just think I am a fun dad. And, good chance they will carry on the tradition with their kids.
Lesson for Apartment Marketing?
Is there a chance we could sell more apartments by scaring the wits out of the people that walk in our front doors? Not likely, but we may be able to calm the fears they have of renting a new home. Espcically, those that have been burned in the past by bad service, bad attitudes and bad storytelling.
Everything is marketing and storytelling is the vehicle that moves people to action.
What is our lesson? Glean what you can from Zak, Nick and Aaron in the way of storytelling. Make their tactics and strategies your own. Add a dose of personality. Entertain the people that choose to live in your apartment communities. Consider your office the theater, your desk, tour route and display apartment the stage and you are the main character. Act accordingly and tell some mind blowing stories.
Game on –
Your – beliving not in ghosts but rather the power of storytelling – multifamily maniac,
M
More Outlets Does Not Equal a Better Story…
…People do.
This is a simple unscientific case for passionate apartment marketing (professional or otherwise) content producers [Read: conduits]…
I picked the following quote off of a blog some time ago and pasted it into a file for future posting. Now, after a few search engine attempts, I can’t find the author of it so if it’s yours – please claim it and I will give you the due credit.
There seems to be a curious thing happening – the more outlets for stories we get… the less and less we’re hiring writers, content strategists, editors, designers. It’s like the second spawning of “reality programming”- no need for writers … it’s real life.
It’s a very interesting dilemma that we find ourselves facing in the apartment marketing space; do we go it alone in an amateur more reality based way or do we go pro? It’s not a simple answer but a necessary question to consider. And, the reasons run concurrent with trends in the way we influence, are influenced, how we consume and how we distribute information as a society.
The Niche is Coming Into its Own
With the absolute proliferation of platforms that host and syndicate blog content along with the opportunities to narrow our focus by creating lists and circles on the likes of LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and the king of the them all Facebook, we all have a niche to serve in some way.
Niches are not a new concept but they themselves are new to the likes of being served information in a passionate and pointed way. And, in mass from marketers, friends and acquaintances. And, thus the need for a professional or an amateur but passionate writer…
The Simple Case For
I am very much a visual person so I took the time to draw this out on a piece of paper. While visual, I am clearly not artistic so feel free to toss fruit from the front row…
Be it you advocate professional content producer/managers or the Sunday driver version; I think you would agree that you need a guru…[term used very loosely – in fact I hate that word – let’s go with…] someone who knows what they are doing.
I have been reading the book: Grouped by Paul Adams the Global Brand Experience Manager at Facebook. You might recognize my pic as an adaptation from the book. He makes a much deeper case for what I am trying to loosely convey in this post so buy his book – it’s a goodie. (The link is not tied to an affiliate account).
As we further fragment based on interests and or outright fatigue, the ability to connect via influencers (seemingly more a myth than realistic) is waning and or presenting itself as more of a fallacy. Small groups connected by someone who cares and someone who knows what they are doing will be the way to continue on with the conversation. Continue down the current path or seek the alternative and we’re just creating noise for ourselves. And, as the number of outlets increase, we have to ask ourselves are we just being noisy in more places? Instead, be a conduit and bring together the small groups that will move business in the future.
See that person in the middle of my pic – for the theory to work, that person must know (intimately) someone in each of the four outcroppings. The way this works is that this person is the conduit of/for information (influence) to flow between the outcroppings or small niche groups. Without the conduit, the potential potency of this group is never realized. They will never have the chance to know one another because they will have no real reason to do so.
The job of that someone who knows what they are doing and cares enough to do it is to bring the groups together in a way that is appealing to the individual members. He/she gives them a reason to believe. A reason to be merry. And, a reason to be intimate with one another. Intimate in a way that moves business forward.
Experiment
As I flesh this concept out in real life experiments – I’ll be sure to post updates.
Your – interested in interest graphs – multifamily maniac,
M
What Apartment Marketing is Not
Apartment marketing is not thinking about every person as a renter or a renewal –
Apartment marketing is not about viewing people in the context of residing in your apartment communities –
Apartment marketing is not about getting people to celebrate you through a; Like, G+, Tweet, RT or the such –
Apartment marketing is not about broadcasting the right message at precisely the right to the right influencers –
What you’re saying in all of this is that people mean nothing to you. And, when they don’t respond you just don’t understand why….
Your thinking people-centric multifamily manic,
M
