Mills Properties
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
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Fill Your Marketing Balloons With More Than Air
JHerzog · · 14 Comments
I was recently given the privelege to co-moderate a brainstorming session on the topic of marketing. The session was held for members of the apartment management industry at various stages in their careers, from leasing agents who have been in the industry for 2 months to property managers with 10 years of experience. My topic was old school marketing. Old school referring to anything not social media. More specifically, tools such as resident retention, outreach marketing, Craigslist, etc. The idea was to get creative juices flowing, discuss what’s working, what’s not working and maybe learn a few things to take back to the rest of the team.
I was surprised by the lack of marketing knowledge…and for that matter, the lack of creativity. I heard the same 3 “best practices” from a majority of the groups: Generic signs and balloons for drive by traffic, generic Craiglist ads and monetary resident referral incentives. I heard questions like: “What do you say when you’re marketing to a business?” and “It’s ok to send thank you cards and gift baskets to businesses who refer someone to you?” Leasing agents and PMs who had no knowledge of free additional ILS marketing template tools like VFlyer and Postlets, who had never thought past posting a flyer with a resident referral rent credit in terms of using residents as a marketing tool, and those are just building blocks. It’s as if they were told that marketing is something only a rocket scientist can figure out.
First let me say I’m not exactly saying the 3 best practice items listed above are crap, I’m simply saying that they shouldn’t be IT. Also, I’m in love with social media and believe it’s an insanely valuable tool, however 1. It was not my topic to discuss and 2. I also think that personal touch and those face to face human interactions through outreach marketing and resident appreciation events are valuable, and combining the 2 forms is fabulous! (Read Urbane Media’s QR Codes blog). But I’m not sure I believe you can be effective with social media if you don’t even know the basics of effective old school marketing tools. And if no one is teaching or motivating their team on the basics of marketing, then I doubt that there is any social media marketing in place anyway.
So I guess what I’d like to learn from this eye opening experience is: Am I way off base in believing that some old school marketing techniques are still a valuable tool in the industry? Is someone teaching your staff about marketing? Do you believe that one can effectively use social media tools without ever having learned/practiced old school marketing strategies?
Title courtesy of Melissa DeCicco
Photo credit bloggingoutloud
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Apartment Marketing: Paying Rent is a Social Act
Update: 4.30.12 – Social gifting, the new buzzword in e-commerce
I wrote about an idea along these lines sometime ago and Wrapp just might be the early way to get it done.
Original Article
Ran across Pepsi’s Social Vending Machine Story while I was in the process of purging some old files and it got me thinking about ways that we could make paying rent an even more social experience.
Is it reasonable to think that Facebook, Twitter, G+ or even resident portals could be robust enough to allow payments by third parties unassociated with lease contracts and the such?
Following the concept of Pepsi creating a the experience of sending free sodas to friends; could you see the same thing apply to rent payments? If my buddy knows that I have fallen on hard times and wants to help; could he go to our website, log in without disclosing his identity [at least to me] and pay my rent? Or, a portion?
It already happens in the analog world. Or not, if leases are written such that you can not take third party payments [not smart in my opinion]. In the former case, parent’s pay their student’s rent via various payment methods. A process, at least at Mills Properties, that is usually administered by our onsite teams. Can we make it DIY for third parties with technology? Do you employ such a service today? Tell us about it.
Your looking to make paying the rent a more social experience multifamily maniac,
M
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#apartmentmarketing: Blog Format Question
Short and sweet today –
One of my favorite blogs, one I read everyday without fail, is Valeria Maltoni’s – Conversation Agent. First rate content always.
Apartment Blog Trunk
I gave up on RSS feed reading about a year ago as I spend more time in my inbox. Nearly every blog I read is done through Outlook now and as such I give more time and attention to the things I read. In other words, I generally do not skim the headline and move on.
About a month ago Valeria made the decision to truncate her email subscription delivery meaning we only see a portion of the message and are forced to click on a link to see the rest.
Result: I read fewer of Valeria’s material to the end. Sorry Valeria.
I understand the reasons for cited in her Saying it in 200 Characters post back on Aug 10, 2011.
My question – should apartment marketers truncate their blog post offerings? We are trying it a Mills [Shameless plug – the Mills Blogging Team is Putting a Dent in the #STL market place].
Would love to hear this communities thoughts? And, thank you in advance for taking the time.
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#apartmentmarketing: Twitter
The biggest mistake we see companies make when they first hit Twitter is to think about it as a channel to push out information. – Tim O’Reilly & Sarah Milstein – The Twitter Book
For those veterans out there in the media space this seems like a no brain-er but in a world steeped in tradition, it seems like the right thing to do. Take a new medium, insert old practices and principles and voila, we experience success. Except that we don’t.
Apartment Twitter Marketing in Saint Louis
Just this week, I followed up some new #STL Twitter handles [new apartment deliveries in the city proper]. I will admit, I was very encouraged to see their use of the medium included push marketing. Special after special, floor plan after floor plan, us – us – us & look at me copy – it all makes me smile inside.
It makes me smile because I don’t think it’s what those who use the space expect or even want to see. In other words, it’s a big turn off and at best it’s ignored and left to rot in a digital dump-ground way off over there in the dark ‘Cloud.’
Not that we at Mills Properties have it all figured out and are knocking it out of the park as a result. That being said, we do seem to experience a ton of participation from the people that work with and for us, the people that they serve in our some fifty properties in the Saint Louis Apartment Market and our coaches and mentors in the multifamily industry. All by using just the opposite approach and all for which we are immensely thankful. We keep experimenting, failing, learning, tweaking, experimenting & thanking those who give us feedback along the way.
Push Marketing on Twitter
Back to the point at hand; is there a time and place where this works? Have we reached that point or are we approaching a time where the masses that frequent Twitter, Facebook and the like expect, heck even desire to see some push marketing for goods and services?
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