Marketing Multifamily Housing with Integrated Marketing Strategies

By Diane Leone

Renters have unique needs and preferences and unique hot buttons connected to finding a home. IMS—Integrated Marketing Strategies—blends communication, marketing, promotional, and environmental tools to create a highly effective multifamily marketing strategy. Learn unique techniques, get referrals, boost profits, and fill homes without using strong-arm techniques or inflated promises.Recommended reading for RAM and CLP.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BuilderBooks
• Release date: Jan 1, 2003
• ISBN: 9780867187052

Book preview

Specialist.

Introduction

Integrated Marketing Strategies

What is IMS?

Integrated Marketing Strategies (IMS) combines marketing, promotions, and environments into a cohesive system that positions your message and image to the targeted audience. Done well, the three elements will work together seamlessly without notice and appear effortless. However, it takes careful planning and research upfront to obtain a seamless look and feel throughout the three elements. If these three areas are integrated together seamlessly, you will have a winning plan.

Integrated Marketing Strategies

Marketing

Promotions

Environments

Marketing provides vehicles to express your message about who you are and tells your potential customers what your image is. This marketing element includes identifying your target audience, branding your image, and creating marketing tools.

Promotions create awareness about your community in a controlled and planned way. Hosting an event, sending a press release, or creating an advertisement promotes your brand and image to prospects. From an ad in a targeted local newspaper to an imprinted coffee mug, promotional tools reinforce your positioning statement within your key target market.

Environments include interior design and merchandising. While many marketing professionals don’t make a connection between marketing and interior design, it is critical in the multifamily industry in creating and developing your image.

Chapter 1

MARKETING

Targeting Your Audience

With increased competition in the apartment industry, the myth of Build it and they will come is long gone. No longer can you simply build your property, put up a sign, and wait for prospects to lease apartments. Your property should not look like all the rest—it must be as unique as possible. Remember, you want to stand out from the crowd and own a position in the consumer’s mind. You can’t do this with buildings and services identical to your competition, nor with just the typical amenities currently available in most apartment communities, such as jetted tubs, pools, tennis courts, and fitness centers.

Look at the marketplace you will build in. What are its characteristics? Will you find a target here? If so, what is the competition offering that you should also offer? But more importantly, what is the competition not offering that you should offer?

The first step in the Integrated Marketing Strategies (IMS) is to determine what hole in the marketplace you want to fill with your product. Identifying that opening, and determining the profile of the target audience that will fill it, is crucial to marketing success. For example, you will need to find the answers to questions such as these: How much annual household income should target prospects make? What is their average age? Are they mostly male or female? Are they blue-collar workers, or are they white-collar workers—in other words, do they work in a factory’s production line or in high-end computer jobs?

Target Audience Profile

You can gather some of this information from places such as your local Chamber of Commerce, local home-builder associations, and the Internet. Start with a look at demographic information. Research city and county growth data, and check available census details. Someone in the economic development arm of the Chamber will be able to talk with you about potential future growth in your area, including industries that are expanding or leaving, and corporations that are moving in.

You will want to capture a picture of the quality of life in your area. Find out what makes it special. Why do people live in this particular region? Look at the unemployment rate, per capita income, and average wages. Review the list of major employers. Identify and shop your competition, which will include other apartment communities and perhaps single-family housing communities that might compete with yours. From this information, you will be able to identify the ideal target area to build in, your target audience, and what your project should offer for that niche. Once you have found the pulse of your target prospects, you will be able to develop compatible marketing strategies with which to reach that target audience.

Industry Trends

Today, leisure time is at a premium in our society. And for some time we also have been enjoying an incredibly robust economy, which gives many consumers more disposable income. This combination of limited time and greater disposable income has led to many people making different choices about work/life patterns than in the past. Many more people now work part-time or telecommute. The number of home-based businesses has soared. In short, people view their leisure time as important.

In that context, apartment residents today are making choices that fit their current lifestyles.

Lifestyle Marketing

Lifestyle marketing has become an important way to market to savvy consumers who can afford to put value on lifestyle choice. In determining what you should offer in a community, you must analyze your target audience’s wants, needs, and desires in terms of your particular community. Finding out what customers want and filling those needs is called lifestyle marketing. Lifestyles are important. Trends tell us that people are working more, with less down time to enjoy themselves. They are searching for ways to meet their lifestyle needs. For example, people want to live in homes that match their lifestyles and make them feel comfortable.

Many people leasing apartments today could afford to own homes, but they do not want to spend their time off doing yard work, housework, and maintenance. And some want to be able to move quickly in the event of a transfer.

What do I really mean by lifestyle marketing? An ad that shows a beautiful apartment model home is great, but an ad that incorporates lifestyle marketing principles shows a family having a party or dinner in that model home. The scenario feels real. Advertising that shows people and their lifestyles is warm and touches the prospect on an emotional level (and to be consistent with what feels real, it is essential that such advertising show diversity).

Market to the lifestyle of your target audience. Do your potential tenants want to feel like they are at a resort when they get home? If so, consider offering a juice bar in the fitness center, or the services of a personal trainer. If it’s golf fanatics you are targeting, golf tournaments and memberships are wonderful ways to encourage prospects to walk in the door. Or consider sponsoring a golf tournament at which you would be allowed to hand out brochures, or where you would receive the participants’ names and addresses to use for future marketing efforts.

Lifestyle marketing is a new way of marketing that targets a specific audience, based on that audience’s lifestyle choices and preferences; those preferences become a consistent part of the IMS process.

Finding out what customers want and filling those needs is called lifestyle marketing.

If your community theme is based on young professionals’ lifestyles, your marketing efforts should focus on promoting the amenities that this audience will want, and amenities that will make your community stand out from the crowd. Such conveniences might include valet dry-cleaning, concierge service, or perhaps an on-site banking and ATM machine, postal services, personal trainers, and gas pumps. Your promotional efforts (we discuss promotions in later chapters) might include advertising on airport Kiosk signs to reach the traveling executive. Because lifestyle will play an important role in these individuals’ decisions to lease from you, you need to consider it when you are making your image/marketing decisions.

Matching the wants and needs of your prospects with your amenities also will make marketing to those prospects easier. To demonstrate, perhaps your planned community will be on a river that offers boat storage or slips. Naturally, your target group will include boat owners and people who want to live on the water.

Ultimately, developing a community that fills a gap in the marketplace is your goal. Whether prospects want to feel like they are on a tropical West Indies Island when they drive through the gates, or they just want to walk into their home and grab their tennis racquet, your community needs to represent something that they find important about their lifestyle.

Determine What to Offer

Is there a gap—a hole—in your marketplace, and a need that the competition is not filling? What lifestyle wants or needs are not being met? Do prospects want or need an apartment community with golfcourse access? Is there a need for a beach community? What about a community for college students to share apartments and expenses?

By identifying the needs that are not being met, you can go on to the next step, determining what you have to offer. Try to fill the hole in your marketplace so you will be the only or the first to offer this service or product. This approach is more effective than just purchasing property and deciding you will offer a specific product—and the same one everybody else is offering. When you take that approach, your job in marketing has just become much, much tougher. How will you distinguish your community in consumers’ minds if you look and feel like your competition?

The Bottom-Up Process

The bottom-up process comprises an analysis of your current situation, complete with competitive analysis, market conditions, and research. In this process, you are trying to determine where the want meets the need of your target audience. Figure 1.1 uses statistics from a sample marketing analysis to help you identify the hole or need in your marketplace and determine whether you can fill that need.

Next, you must identify who your prospects are and what they want from you, and then evaluate what you have to offer. As noted, you will determine your target audience (the people who have the want or need for what you have to offer) through marketplace analysis and demographics. These people might be families, single professionals, high-level executives, or college students. Before you can write a marketing plan, you must determine this audience. For example, The Heritage at Deerwood apartment community targeted young executives. Then it successfully relocated corporate executives by offering apartment homes with home-like accents, and by promoting the carefree lifestyle and luxury services the community offered. The community was built as small buildings on individual streets, which gives it a single-family community feel. Figure 1.2 shows the brochure from The Heritage at Deerwood community, demonstrating the carefree and luxurious lifestyle services the community offers.

Prospects and What They Want from You

A recent report from the National Association of Homebuilders (NAHB), What Renters Want, cites that, in general, most renters want to have a larger square-foot living space than they have now. Figure 1.3 is a chart from this report. The chart expresses the actual square footage people have and the amount they would like to have. Armed up front with this information, you can design your apartment space accordingly. The same report asked renters to rate the importance of different amenities in their apartment home. The findings? The top five amenities in terms of importance-not order in which they appear in the chart-are 1) the linen closet; 2) washer/dryer, side-by-side; 3) microwave