Multifamily Marketing ideas
How to take your multifamily marketing to the next level.
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Multifamily is in the business of selling people a home for however long they need or choose. A lot of multifamily marketing ideas tend to forget that it’s more than just the property and units, it’s a community where people live their life, have kids and pets, go through transitional phases and more. When putting together your multifamily marketing strategy and plan, you need to keep the emotional aspect of renting in mind.
In this article, we touch base on technology solutions, content ideas, and outreach efforts to help you have a more well-rounded and successful marketing plan. The tech you invest in is important. These days, multifamily has seen a lot of innovation in property management software and lead management solutions. These solutions help onsite teams with their workload, nurture leads better, and collect insightful data.
When it comes to content, this is where the aspect of home discussed earlier comes into play. The kinds of content you post on your website and social media need to give off a warm, cozy feeling that most people associate with “home”. That means posting videos, photos, and blogs about the surrounding neighborhood and city. It means showing off your onsite team and residents.
Building the image of what life looks like at your property is just as important as having an engaging website. Reaching out to local businesses and fixtures in the community will also help boost your reputation and make your property more essential to the area. With purposeful content and a website with engagement in mind, your multifamily marketing will be a well-oiled machine. In the next section, we take a deeper dive into outreach marketing, and we continue later on about advertising and other solutions that can help your marketing efforts get the results you’re looking for.
Outreach Marketing ideas for apartments
What does it mean to be a part of a community? It’s more than just having property and providing housing. It means interacting with the local businesses and events, encouraging residents to explore, and creating the space on your website to be the hub of what’s what in the neighborhood.
Multi family outreach marketing is important because it really brings together the community aspect that property management companies say they want more of in their marketing efforts. Some outreach marketing ideas for apartments include:
- Pop-up Shop Event
- Resident Night
- Donation Drives
Doing a little pop-up shop event or inviting a local business to set up a pop-up during a resident event is a great way to create that community. Residents can bring their friends and shop the different local businesses at your property and meet people in the neighborhood. On national holidays like National Beer Day or National Cookie Day, partnering with the local brewery or bakery and offering a selection of beers or cookies on said day is a great way to spotlight a local business.
Offering to do Donation Drives at your property that benefit the local schools or non-profit/charity organizations is another way to do some outreach marketing. Be sure to take photos and videos of these events and occasions so you have that content to post on your website and social media. This gives you a variety of content and plays to the emotional aspect of renting talked about earlier. This content can be repurposed into ways that make your website more engaging as well.
Increase Traffic Apartment Community
There has been a dramatic increase in online leads recently, especially an increase traffic apartment community websites. Whether it’s the casual visitor just browsing, a prospect looking a few months down the road, or someone looking for a new place in a month, more people are looking at apartment websites.
You might’ve Googled “how to market to apartment complexes” and found this article hoping for ways to manage this increase of online traffic or get your multifamily website ranked higher up in search results. In order for those things to come true, you need to focus on SEO and creating copy and content with SEO in mind. What is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization and is a big part of digital marketing for multifamily, and business in general, today. It uses keywords and phrases that your consumer is typing into Google or other search engines to find what it is they are looking for. For example, “1 bedroom apartment for rent in Indy” could be a keyword a prospect in Indianapolis might use. Knowing this means you can write the copy on your website and blog to include these keywords. This way you rank higher up in organic searches.
No one goes to the second page of a Google search, especially those looking for an apartment online. In fact, you might’ve typed in “how to market to apartment complexes” and found this page. This is also why businesses with blogs have more monthly online visitors and more leads. Having a blog on your site gives you more chances to have keywords on your website, giving your multifamily property website more visibility when search engines are looking for pages.
Fun Marketing Ideas for Apartments
Now that we’ve gone into the more technical part of marketing, this section explores some fun marketing ideas for apartments. We’ve touched on social media content above and what sorts of posts you can be doing to make your social media more about the community. Now let’s dive deep into the world of YouTube and TikTok, two social media platforms that are only for videos sharing.
Apartment content on these platforms is incredibly popular, especially with renters. The content ranges from empty apartment tours, decorating tips and diys, to a day in the life videos. There are lots of creative and fun ways to market your apartment community through video! By putting your community in these tags, you are gaining more visibility and sticking out to renters more.
When thinking about apartment marketing ideas 2021 you need to work on your TikTok and YouTube presence. Many students housing multifamily companies have started using TikTok to promote leasing season, how to fill out maintenance requests, moving day tips, moving out tips, what life looks like in their community, etc. This is where your marketing can be more fun, and today’s renters have grown up using these platforms and watching this kind of content. It may seem foreign but for this generation of renters, it’s content that they love to consume.
Apartment Advertising Ideas
Apartment advertising ideas can also be fun, but this is where SEO comes back but this time the focus is more on PPC. PPC stands for “pay-per-click” and is a big part of today’s marketing and advertising. Using keywords that you’ve identified through SEO can help your advertising efforts by using those keywords in your digital ads.
You’ve got the copy through your SEO findings, but what about visuals? An apartment advertisement example that stands out is one that repurposes some of that social media content. Yes, you need some ads with property photos and the staged gallery photos, but every multifamily community does that. If the prospect has been on your website, they’ve already seen those photos. Using some of the more community centered content from your website or social media is a way to take your apartment advertising to a different level.
Having ads that promote the neighborhood is a great way to grab prospects’ interest while they are casually online. Especially for someone who is new to the neighborhood or moving from out of state, they are more interested in what life in the community is like once they’ve seen the property and unit photos. Advertise the community as well as the property.
Apartment Marketing Ideas During COVID
COVID-19 made it difficult for in-person events to occur safely. It also has been here long enough that consumer attitudes have evolved with the turn to a more digital world. People were able to work and learn from home, tour apartments from their couch, and do whatever it is that would’ve taken them a few hours out of their day from the comfort of their living rooms. Apartment marketing ideas 2020 and apartment marketing ideas during COVID we’re a huge topic. Some of the adaptations and lessons we learned can be used in 2021 and going forward.
Marketing ideas for apartments during COVID-19 all talked about how to do things virtually. From the rise of virtual leasing platforms to now AI Leasing Assistants, this innovation in multifamily tech should be carried forward. While great solutions when needed, they’ve proven their worth and the results are speaking for themselves. Check out our post on Unified Residential adding leasing AI to their property websites and how AI has increased their website conversion and lead to lease conversion.
With an increase in online leads and website traffic, onsite teams are overwhelmed with a dramatic influx of leads. Not all of these leads are ready to talk and not all of them are quality leads to begin with. AI Leasing Assistants take all of that lead management off leasing specialists plates so they can focus only on the leads that are ready to talk, tour, and lease.
Outreach marketing ideas for apartments during COVID can be kind of tricky with the need for virtual. Doing a virtual open house, 3D/interactive floor plans, virtual tours – pre recorded and live, are all ways to still do some outreach while keeping things online and not in person.
