Multifamily Marketing
The Making of an Apartment Company Mascot
We are always looking for new and creative ways to start conversation at Mills and we think our latest adventure is sure to be a hit. While we understand this will not resonate with everyone; we are certain there is a niche that will appreciate it and be moved by it. Some people just love to have fun!
Millsy Becomes a Real Boy
Our newly appointed Marketing Director & Communication Strategist, Melissa Preusser (we have an interview lined up – stay tuned to learn more about her) borrowed from the world of athletic mascots to come up with Millsy! Millsy is our Apartment Company Mascot. Millsy will accompany our media teams to any and all company and community functions, festivals, sporting events, partnership gathering and networking events. His chief aim? Give people a reason to talk about Mills. And, what better event could there be for his coming to life party than the annual St. Louis Mardi Gras Parade. Millsy becomes a real boy on Saturday March 5th 2011. We will be sharing a lot of the highlights and pics in future posts.
For now, I thought it would be fun to share some pics of Millsy in the early stages of coming to life…
Apartment Community Amenities: Promote Mystery
About two months ago we decided to install a dog park at Brookside Apartments – one of our student properties in Carbondale, Ill. In lieu of printing, posted and plastering the thing all over our social media streams – we just let the process play out.
Power in Mystery
After working through the logistics and contract negotiations we settled on a spot and let the construction begin. What happened next was pure entertainment – are you building a pool? Are you building a new building? Volleyball courts? – Wait, it’s too big to be a pool! Arg, what is it? All the common questions begin to filter through the wifi lounge, the community and into our leasing center. That is until we could not take it any more and we disclosed.That said, we learned a real time lesson as it relates to WOM.
Apartment Marketing Stimulants
Tell them but don’t tell them. We have a number of other amenities and improvements that we are doing to this property over the next one to three years with each one major in scope. Taking the lesson from the dog park mystery – we will leave the community to – guess it out – if you will. I can see some cool social media apartment amenity mysteries playing out over Facebook and other social platforms. In the spirit of – give them something to talk about – mystery takes a front seat. And, besides who doesn’t like a great guessing game or mystery? Who can resist talking about it with their friends, family and otherwise? Which is part of the point, right?
Apartment Marketing: How to Use Facebook Like Pages to Lease Apartments
I love emails like the one below -but before we go there:
Over the past few weeks we have started to quietly roll out some of our Facebook Like Pages as we gear up for the Get Social with Mills Initiative . One of the issues we’ve run into with this slow roll out is anxious PMs and MSs like Teresa and Mike at Park Clayton Apartments. They were ready to run – so, we let them go and in just over two weeks they took the like numbers from 7 to North of 225.
How to grow Your Apartment Facebook Like Page numbers
How did they do it? To make a long story short Mike brought an orphaned stuffed yellow duck to the leasing office for Teresa to see and each time they tried to put the duck away – residents asked to have it back as a mascot. With that T and M – [I often use the first letter of peoples names – with that T is for Teresa and M is for Mike] decided to have a – Name the Duck – contest . In conjunction with that contest they decided to give away a few fun prizes for the resident who yielded the biggest number of Likes to our page in a weeks time.
The Apartment Like Page Results
T and M put on North of 200 Likes inside of two weeks time. Not only that – they yielded something much more important in my opinion – check out the page and I think you will quickly discern what I mean. That point brings me to the email below –
How to use Facebook Like Pages to Rent Apartments
I will let the email speak for itself –
Have a compelling weekend – M
—–Original Message—–
From: Park Clayton <parkclayton@millsproperties.net>
Sent: Thursday, June 03, 2010 12:55 PM
To: ‘Mike Brewer’ <MBrewer@millsproperties.net>; ‘Tracy Seubert’ <TSeubert@millsproperties.net>
Subject: Great news!
Hey guys,
I have some awesome news about our facebook fans. One of my residents came down to tell me that his friends in Taiwan are watching us on facebook and they think it’s great that we do resident events and have contests. He says they told him they want to move here when they get to town just because of what they see online!
Also, he brought down his laptop and we spoke with a couple of his friends in Taiwan who want to move here in August. The program they use to chat/talk internationally is called, “skype.”
Teresa Richardson
Property Manager
Park Clayton Apartments
photo credit: blog.hubspot.com
Apartment Reviews – This Wall was Not Made for Conversation
See this wall -it’s the Mills Properties Kudos Wall in our central office in Clayton, MO. Only one problem, it’s calendar year 2010 and I can’t converse with the people that took the time to write out their thoughts and mail them to our office.
I am certain that many of you can imagine the missed opportunity. My hope is that there are not others out there that have walls like this one in their offices. My plea to you if you do is to get digital fast –
We will be doing as much as we kick of the Get Social with Mills Initiative. Keying off what others have done in the industry, we feel it will be a necessary and fruitful piece of our on-line branding presence going forward.
Would love to hear your thoughts –
Apartment Search On: Google Commercial
I read about this a couple of weeks ago and just found the time to check it out. It might be a colossal waste of time or a uber-cool thing to share on one of your social networks.
If you recall the Google commercial that ran during the Super Bowl you will have a really good sense for what this is. Google has created a way for you to mimic their Search On commercial. It’s really ingenious if you ask me. And, simple to do.
Here is a link to the site where you can build your own. And, here is the one I built for Mills Properties:
