Out to Put a Dent in the Multifamily Universe

Apartment Marketing: Real or Just Great Storytelling?

March 21, 2012 By Leave a Comment

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

Filed Under: #apartmentmarketing, Apartment Marketing, Apartment Marketing Ideas, Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Apartment Marketing Brass Tacks

March 7, 2012 By 4 Comments
Apartment Marketing Brass Tacks

“You need the kind of objectivity that makes you forget everything you’ve heard, clear the table, and do a factual study like a scientist would.” – Steve Wozniak

Short and sweet question(s) post today.

Do you ever feel like using social media to marketing apartments is like trying to smash a square peg into a round hole? Do you get the sense that we are trying so hard to make it work just because we just want it to? As opposed to following the advice of Steve W. and clearing the tables for some hard-core study of the real impact it is or is not making?

Have we been clouded by the hint of success we have seen from any one of the many mediums out there? A lease or two from Facebook, a lead from Twitter or a conversation stimulated by a killer resident function and we are quick to tout the success.

Have you found the effort to be worth the result? Do you think the real successes are down the road and over time?

In the end, content is not king – people are. People move business. And, people in relationship talk about businesses they like to do business with. Believe it or not – they usually do that offline.

Is it time to clear the table?

Your brass tacks multifamily maniac,

M

photo credit: blog mosaic
Filed Under: #apartmentmarketing, Apartment Marketing Ideas Tagged With: , , , , ,

Apartment Marketing: Get Simple

May 10, 2011 By 3 Comments
Simple Apartment Marketing
Simple Apartment Marketing

Time for Simple

Read a great post over Brains of Fire Blog titled: Creating Problems (Instead of Solving Them). In the post Eric Dodds speaks the point of reinventing for the sake of the exercise. And, all under the guise of presenting the perception that we, as providers of service; be it branding, marketing, financial or otherwise, are creating value for our constituents. The otherwise obvious point for me is that simple stuff works. Simple stuff gets results. Simple gets participation. And, simple is simply a process of filtering out the noise.

 

In this excerpt, Eric sites a very cool example of an agency filtering out the noise in the way of building the right website for a brewery in the amazing state of Oregon:

…in a moment of absurdly common sense, we asked real beer drinkers what they really wanted from a web-site before we actually built it. –North blog (3)

What did they want? What all beer-lovers want. To know where they can find good beer.

Turns out, it’s two things. (A) Directions. (B) Mobility. Simply put: “Where can I find your beers and beer unveilings”. –North blog (3)

This hit me right between the eyes this morning as I grappled with our new media strategies and overall apartment marketing and branding efforts.

Righting My View of the Apartment Marketing World

Many times I am guilty of viewing our strategies based on what I want to see happen, what I want to participate in, what I want our Mills Properties participants to see, what I want them to do and experience. When the simple reality is that It is and has always been about getting heads on beds under a sharp curb to commode premise. Under the premise of people’s needs. And, people want simple things done in simple ways for simple results.

How To Create Simple

1. Create a culture that is conducive to very good but simple customer service. Say please, thank you and how can I help – always!

2. Create great partcipatory sales routines. Invite people to tell you their view of the world. Ask how you can make things simple.

3. Be relentless about follow up and follow through. Simple phone call. Simple thank you card. Simple thank you.

It’s that simple.

Major on the majors that get you to simple and guess what - You’ll ROCK!

Your getting simple contributer,

M

Filed Under: Apartment Marketing Ideas Tagged With: , , , ,

Apartment Marketing: @earlybird a New Way to Use Twitter

July 5, 2010 By 4 Comments
Apartment Marketing @earlybird

Have you ever wondered what the most appropriate way to use Twitter to market your companies Apartment Living Experience is? Now I’m not to suggesting that any one way is better than another but I do think there are some ways that garnish more attention. My only piece of advice is avoid using old school push marketing tactics.

It looks like @earlybird is positioning itself as a socially acceptable way to broadcast your current promotion. Brian Solis puts it this way in On Twitter, The Early Bird Gets the Worm

If you can imaging the possibilities for @EarlyBird, it goes beyond just one-off deals and specials through a generic account [push marketing], it can be themed into opt-in channels for almost any area of interest, food, music, entertainment, events, etc. [relevancy] emphasis mine.

As it relates to apartment marketing, I can see the value in an opt-in channel for apartments as a good thing -

What do you think?

Filed Under: Apartment Marketing Ideas, Using Social Media to Market Apartments, Using Twitter to Market Apartments Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Apartment Marketing: Gather the Group

July 2, 2010 By 4 Comments
Apartment Marketing: Gather the crowd

Over the next month or so, I will be reaching out to some of our apartment Facebook friends asking if I can  enlist them in a virtual ongoing open feedback Tell Dell like mechanism. The intent is to prompt the forum in the coming weeks, months and years as we move forward in building out Mills Properties improved web strategy. The friends are coming from a mix of our like pages that span across our 43 communities [Note: not all are published as of this writing] in Saint Louis. The only catalyst to their selection is  – on balance – they participate more than others. Our real hope – as part of a much larger strategy – is to build on the success of others in and out of our industry by including consumers in the process.  That said, it never ceases to amaze me just how easy it really is to get acquainted anymore. This quote below is part of a response I got to reaching out just this past week -

…..been here just over 5 years and really like it. My main interests include Conservative talk shows and Trance/Techno music. Odd combination……

I can’t wait to get some discussion going with this resident. 5 years – can you imagine the change she/he has seen in five years? Can you imagine the potential value he/she might add on the premise of that 5 years of history?

What are you doing to leverage the power of your networks?

Filed Under: Apartment Marketing Ideas Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Apartment Community Amenities: Promote Mystery

June 12, 2010 By 2 Comments
IMG_2517

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?

Filed Under: Amenities, Apartment Buzz Marketing, Apartment Marketing Ideas Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Apartment Marketing: How to Use Facebook Like Pages to Lease Apartments

June 11, 2010 By 18 Comments
Using Facebook to Lease more 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

Filed Under: Apartment Marketing Ideas, Multifamily Marketing, New Media Apartment Marketing, Using Social Media to Market Apartments Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apartment Marketing: Invite the Thirty and Learn the Dirty…

June 8, 2010 By 15 Comments
866529_feedback_form_excellent

I love what Mack Collier had to say a couple days ago in his post titled: The next evolution of social media for business is…

The following quote from his post struck me most…

Here’s the twist that makes this event so interesting to me; The 15 customers Dell will meet on the 15th are customers that have issues with Dell, and want to voice those issues to the company.  The 15 customers Dell will meet on the 17th are evangelists of the company.  So over the course of 2 days, Dell will be meeting with 30 of its most passionate customers, from both ends of the spectrum.  I think this event is also an example of the next evolution of social media for companies.

Invite thirty and learn the dirty

The dirty little chatter that could work to make the your apartment living experience [read: offering] one that escapes the hand-cuffs of commodity. More times that not we as operators gather our troops in our conference rooms across this great land and decide on the next best thing for employees, prospects and residents alike. Imagine if we brought the thirty in like Dell is doing? That is once we have taken the time to understand who they really are.

Being a part of something bigger than yourself

Play along with me on this for a second – remember the last time you felt compelled – really compelled as a result of something you participated in something bigger than you? Remember how you felt leading up to, during and after the event? Do you still talk about it to this day? Did it shape your view of the world? Do you feel compelled to share not only the event but the organizer or organization that put on the event?

There is, innate in all of us, an underlying need to belong, to feel appreciate, to feel heard, wanted and important. As marketers – it’s not our job to exploit that but rather harness it and use it for a greater good.

Is it possible in our business? You bet it is. The questions is – are we willing to get those people in a room where there is no monitor to hide behind – where canned corporate speak is left to improv at the risk of authenticity and transparency? The second half of the thirty could be fun – it’s the first half I would be anxious about.

We have done our fair share of surveys and focus groups over the years but never did we go after the downside hardliners. Mack and Dell have me thinking hard about the obvious value of doing so…what do you think?

Filed Under: Apartment Marketing Ideas Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Apartment Marketing: Creating Community

June 7, 2010 By 13 Comments
IMG_2508

Meet Lisa Zagoren – Property Manager at Mills Properties. She is responsible for the amazing and over the top performance of a 758 unit asset in North St. Louis County named Oak Park Apartments. This summer she has taken on the responsibility of producing a full on kids camp. She and her team are hosting twelve children from in and around the community and running them through all kinds of fun and educational activities aimed at keeping them off the streets and actively involved in her apartment community.

The camp runs daily from 9 to 4 and each of her team members to include herself are responsible for facilitating the activities. I got my first chance to observe the Kid’s Club last Thursday during a weekly site visit. At the time the kids were playing musical chairs and having a blast. The program goes beyond just having fun, however.

As you can see from one of the fliers created to promote the program, they are offering math, reading, language and arts, exercise programs, entrepreneurship training along with a host of other activities aimed at helping the children. Many of the educational programs are facilitated by four high-school students who also participate in the Kid’s Club. Their participation will yield them school credit for participating in a community service over the summer.

I had the privilege of meeting one young man who definitely exuded a community spirit. His firm handshake and confident demeanor assured me that he was aiming for a bright future somewhere in the world. It jazzed me to know – in the mean time – that he would be serving the Oak Park children this summer.

I got the real sense that this program is just the beginning of something of something really special as it relates to building community. And the marketing benefit? A whole host of kids and parents are talking about the Oak Park Kid’s Club and how cool it is…as such we will be checking in and reporting out often.

I’d be remiss to avoid sending out some major crazy cool – hat’s off to the Oak Park Team! Great Cause! And, thanks for rocking the house – always!

Filed Under: Apartment Marketing Ideas, Cool Leadership Ideas

Apartment Search On: Google Commercial

April 11, 2010 By 7 Comments

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:

Filed Under: Apartment Buzz Marketing, Apartment Marketing Ideas, Apartment Word of Mouth Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,