The Secrets of Award-Winning Multifamily Marketing Strategies
Past MHN Excellence Awards winners share their insights on creating marketing strategies that work for multifamily.
An eye-catching property can be a very beneficial asset to make you stand out in multifamily. Still, dynamic marketing strategies are the ones that draw in potential renters and keep their interest in your company. The most effective campaigns usually combine tried-and-true actionable steps with innovative ideas, while maintaining the company’s values and core.
Last year, at its 17th annual Excellence Awards ceremony, MHN honored the best leaders in multifamily, including the best marketing campaigns and strategies.
So, we’re now asking: what makes or breaks a good marketing strategy?
There are some key factors every marketer needs to know when it comes to effective strategies. The first one of those is having a clear, coherent plan that supports your objectives and having a thorough grasp of your target audience. Additionally, evolution and adaptability are important, especially because of the dynamic nature of the multifamily industry, which is continuously changing due to evolving renters’ preferences and new technologies.
PeakMade Real Estate’s “Happy Place Campaign” has focused on gathering students’ feedback and creating a strategy that covers the full renter cycle, thus creating a seamless experience. By focusing its efforts on renter personas, the company managed to work across different markets with unique value propositions, according to Raymond Brown, the firm’s marketing communications manager. Additionally, PeakMade worked with on-site teams and encouraged them to customize brand messaging based on specific targets and goals, resulting in reduced costs. “The campaign was built to be sustainable, long-lasting and fully customizable,” he said.
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Understanding the core problem and addressing it strategically is another critical element of a successful marketing strategy. The Snaplistings team encountered a challenge when doing the campaign for 30 Kent St., a community in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, which came from confusion with 30 Kent Ave. in nearby Williamsburg. Due to the similarity of the names, the team created a workaround that differentiated the community, thus increasing pre-leasing numbers and exceeding revenue targets by 21 percent. When talking about the firm’s approach, CEO Erica Sachse notes that “by identifying pain points early, they set themselves up to not only overcome these challenges but to turn them into opportunities for strategic differentiation and creative marketing.”
When marketing luxury communities, a successful approach should go beyond simply showcasing amenities and features. “In our experience, effective marketing strategies require a combination of associate training, creativity and a deep understanding of the target audience. By investing in all three, we created an unparalleled lifestyle experience,” mentioned Fogelman Properties’ Director of Marketing Tammy Yeargan. The company worked on a campaign to increase occupancy rates for a luxury property, and the first goal was to invest in associate training, making sure they understood buyer personas and the community’s unique selling points.
Rather than relying solely on traditional channels, the team focused on creating a narrative that speaks directly to the needs and desires of prospective renters. They launched immersive virtual tours, allowing renters to explore the property, and they partnered with local influencers to showcase the community’s lifestyle. This creative approach and data-driven strategy enabled the team to refine their efforts based on real-time feedback and analytics.
Crafting an award-winning marketing strategy involves more than just knowing what works—it also calls for practical and doable steps that can be followed consistently. By breaking down the process into manageable parts, you can build a strategy covering all essential marketing aspects. Although every marketing team out there has its strategy, in the end, it all comes down to a few major points: ensuring a tailored approach, focusing on storytelling, gathering resident feedback and having a strong commitment to innovation.
Build a solid foundation by mastering the basics
When crafting successful strategies, every marketer should go back to the basics to ensure that their plan has a strong foundation. That can include refining their renter’s persona or brand identity, ensuring that everything is optimized for both online and offline and even crafting high-quality content.
“To truly stand out in multifamily, it all comes back to the fundamentals of marketing: understand your target audience and their pain points, demonstrate the value of your brand and the solutions your community offers, craft measurable strategies and lean on the channels that amplify your unique selling propositions,” said Yeargan. “Then track, measure, refine and optimize.”
Understanding your target audience and their needs is paramount in multifamily. Through its feedback-driven approach, PeakMade Real Estate managed to identify that its renters, Gen Z, value practicality, a genuine message and are tech savvy, so the company was able to create a campaign that speaks to their needs. “During campaign creation, we examine where touchpoints with our renters already exist and think of ways to seamlessly integrate our campaign design and messaging into those activations,” said Brown.
On the other hand, ensuring a customer-centric approach also helps you stand out in the market. “By meeting people where they are and truly understanding our audience, we’re able to facilitate genuine human interactions, which have become a cornerstone of our marketing success,” added Sachse. She also mentioned that this way, you can guarantee that every aspect of your strategy aligns with the expectations of prospective renters and ensures experiences they can resonate with.
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Leverage the art of storytelling
Storytelling is a powerful tool in multifamily marketing because it humanizes your brand and creates an emotional connection with your audience. Rather than just listing amenities, you can tell the story of how your property enhances the lives of its residents and share testimonials that highlight the community spirit and unique benefits of living on your property. Additionally, sometimes storytelling blends well with a multi-channel approach, enhancing the brand experience and creating a meaningful connection with potential renters, as Sachse highlights when talking about their Pagani Residences campaign, crafted with the Development Marketing Team.
“In this initiative, we seamlessly merged tactile, physical elements, such as hand-drawn sketches, with innovative digital strategies, including the use of QR codes,” Sachse explained. “This strategic fusion effectively bridged the offline and online customer journeys, creating a cohesive brand experience that leverages the best of both worlds.” When talking about storytelling and combining effective strategies, she concluded that it all comes down to blending “the art of brokering plus the science of marketing,” which ultimately achieves higher occupancy rates and drives engagement.
Yet, you can also leverage the art of storytelling by paying attention to details such as high-quality visuals or videos that depict vibrant experiences within communities, Yeargan added. This type of content not only depicts amenities but also conveys moments that define residents’ lives, helping them visualize themselves as part of that community and making it more appealing or relatable.
Innovate your strategy with a digital presence
Its no secret that today’s digital age calls for leveraging online platforms, which have become essential for effective marketing. Innovating your strategy with a strong digital presence helps you engage with your target audience effectively. From an operational perspective, applying your campaigns sustainably across all digital platforms and channels can help you in the long run. “This helps keep portfolio-wide campaigns scalable and more efficient, opting for a campaign that has built-in long-term strategies that provide a better year-over-year comparison of key metrics and KPIs,” Brown said.
When it comes to your digital presence, a resident-centric approach is crucial, ensuring that your online platforms are designed to cater to user needs and preferences. As part of this strategy, Fogelman Properties integrated a floor plan assistant in their strategy, which helps users find units that best fit their needs and budgets by answering a few simple questions. “Additionally, we have 24/7 communication options on our sites with an AI-powered chat service and now offer three unique tour types in our communities: virtual, self-guided and in-person,” Yeargan added.
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Track the right KPIs
For marketing, tracking KPIs is important and they provide insights into what’s working and what’s not, allowing you to make data-driven decisions. Fogelman Properties exemplifies this approach by combining storytelling with data to guide their campaigns. Essential KPIs for the company include lease conversion rates, website traffic and engagement, lead generation and conversion, cost per lead (CPL), social media metrics, online reviews and ratings, as well as resident retention rates. Alternatively, Snaplistings “prioritizes not just broad KPIs but zeroes in on conversion rate optimization across every touchpoint, ensuring that every aspect of the marketing efforts is fine-tuned for maximum efficiency and effectiveness,” Sachse explained. Key metrics such as Return on Marketing Spend (ROMS), lead generation, conversion rates and the ratio of tours to signed leases are critical and those are the exact milestones they tracked for the 30 Kent St. campaign.
At PeakMade Real Estate, the focus is on the synergy between digital marketing and the on-site customer experience. With over 86 percent of renters signing leases sight unseen, the company focuses on analyzing the digital experience of its renters, said Brown. As each interaction from digital ads to social media and website conversions is tracked, they can understand the full lead journey by monitoring lead generation velocity, market trends and lead quality.
Become social media savvy and boost your online presence
In multifamily, social media channels and your websites can sometimes be the first thing renters look for when searching for communities, so an online presence can either help your marketing efforts or break them. Consistent posting, interactive content and timely responses to comments and messages help foster a strong online community. For instance, sharing behind-the-scenes photos or hosting live Q&A sessions can create a sense of transparency and engagement.
The most important thing to keep in mind is that content creation must be tailored to the unique characteristics of each community, avoiding a one-size-fits-all approach, Yeargan explained. The company partnered with Show My Property TV to create detailed fly-through videos of the clubhouse and amenity spaces and is working with local photographers to capture lifestyle images of residents enjoying the community. She also believes that ensuring your content aligns with each community’s brand is mandatory. “Consistency in brand colors and tone is fundamental to the success of our campaigns as it reinforces our brand and simplifies the decision-making process for prospects, who are already decision-fatigued and overwhelmed by the options,” Yeargan said.
The marketing team also focuses on promoting user-generated content through platforms such as Fogelman’s Community Reward, which curates genuine content from residents, including reviews and images from community events. According to Yeargan, this authentic content is often more persuasive for potential renters than professional photography.
PeakMade’s feedback focus group concluded that social media is seen as an accessible representation of a community’s brand and lifestyle. Usually, prospective renters check out the community on social media to get some insights into its lifestyle. Thus, the company focuses on creating authentic user-generated content on platforms such as Instagram and TikTok to create a sense of relatability for them.
Hidden gems: Lesser-known marketing strategies that work
If you’re searching for more out-of-the-box ideas that could help you craft an even more compelling marketing strategy, we’ve asked the winners for some tips and tricks that you can employ to take your efforts even further.
- Offer your onsite teams opportunities for campaign customization, integrating into on-site events and experiences to enhance engagement throughout the renter’s journey.
- Partner with influencers with fewer than 5,000 followers to reach highly engaged local audiences.
- Foster authentic engagement by promoting user-generated content from residents.
- Improve content visibility by optimizing for voice search queries.
- Use chatbots to provide personalized interactions and assistance for potential renters.
- Utilize augmented reality and virtual reality for immersive property tours, offering detailed visualizations from home.
- Continue optimizing for local SEO to attract prospects from nearby areas.
- Employ geofencing for hyper-targeted marketing, reaching potential renters based on their physical location and journey stage.
Also, don’t forget to enter your noteworthy achievements, whether in multifamily or commercial real estate in this year’s MHN Excellence Awards and CPE Influence Awards.
