Multi Family Apartment Real Estate Growth:
The Experts Guide
A comprehensive guide to increase brand authority, website traffic, and lead generation for your multi family apartments in record time.
So you’re an investor who is building new apartment buildings and/or purchasing under-performing apartment buildings. Do you have plans to renovate or transform the experience, dramatically increase property value and pair that experience with a new brand and marketing to attract tenants? If so, this guide is for you! Read more to learn the secret sauce on how we help recently acquired buildings launch new brands and websites that are specifically crafted to build excitement in the community and online, followed by marketing that generates quality leads and tenants.
Table Of Contents
Chapter 1: Build Your Brand
Every good business starts with a strong brand, and real estate multi family apartments are no exception. Your brand sends signals to potential customers about what kind of property you have and whether it’s a good fit for them. Your brand is made up of several components:
- Brand Strategy: includes target market definition, positioning, brand attributes and voice, and messaging.
- Identity: includes your logo, monogram, fonts, textures, and any other brand elements.
Brand Strategy
Target Market
Start by identifying your target market. This is WHO you are marketing to, but, it’s not just a demographic identification. Through this process, you should aim to really get into the mindset of the customer.
Things to think about:
Are you a luxury property or a family friendly one?
Are you for college students, baby boomers, young families, Section 8?
Once you have narrowed down your target market, think about who these people are. What they like, and where do they go for information? What social platforms do they use and how do they use them? All of this can help build a profile or persona of a person or people and allow you to cater your brand specifically to communicate to this audience.
→ Buyer Persona Story Example: Nonprofit Marketing Manager
Positioning
Identify your position in the marketplace. What helps you stand out? Why are you different? Think hard about your position and craft that into a “positioning statement”. Use the positioning resource below to get started!
→ How (And Why) To Write a Positioning Statement
Brand Attributes & Voice
Your brand attributes and voice contribute to the tone and style of your brand. When this is identified, it allows your brand to remain consistent and resonate with your target audience. Identifying your brand attributes isn’t just helpful, it’s becoming necessary as brands are continuously expected to be more transparent, relatable, real, and authentic. Identifying your brand attributes is actually a way to help you achieve these expectations strategically.
It can also help to define the brand personality for new employees so they understand what the brand stands for and how leadership envisions it coming to life.
→ How to Identify Your Brand Attributes
Messaging
Once you have all your strategy pieces identified, it’s time to pull it all together in cohesive, concise, and brand voice friendly messaging. We have used the “Message Map” model for years as a way to distill down messaging for our clients and create elevator pitches too. Try it in the link below!
Need more comprehensive brand strategy resources?
Identity
Your identity is the visual representation of your brand strategy. It takes all the elements you crafted above, and helps to communicate them on the visual side in conjunction with your messaging on the verbal side.
→Learn more about the role identity plays in branding
If you don’t already have a professional graphic designer to help you out, now would be a great time to find one! The identity is essentially your visual strategy and is just as important as your messaging when interfacing with your customer.
Enlist your graphic designer to create a logo. Using your strategy, give them some examples of emotions you’d like your logo to invoke. Start by focusing on what you want your logo to convey and the emotion you want to communicate. Often businesses will dictate imagery that they like or other things that are personal opinion, this is not an opinion type of exercise. Tell your designer specifically how you want people to feel when interacting with your brand and leave the designing to them. We get our best results this way and if your designer is familiar with logo design they will too. Trust the process!!
Work with your designer to select a typeface and color(s) that help bring your strategy to life. Make sure you specify headline fonts vs. text fonts and choose a legible, aesthetically pleasing font to use consistently on all branded material.
Think: is your brand a lime-green-and-pink fun-loving type of brand? Or is it a stoic corporate blue and white? Choose carefully – the psychology of color can have a bigger impact than you might realize.
Once you have your logo design, complete with typeface and color, think about how it will be used. Specify some useful but not burdensome #LogoLaws to ensure your branding remains consistent throughout multiple formats.
For example, can you put your logo on white, or should you avoid certain color backgrounds? Can you tilt or add effects to your logo? What should your square monogram look like? And how much space do you need around it?
Are you in the market for new branding? Our branding quiz can help you evaluate!
Chapter 2: Your Real Estate Website
When building a website for your real estate business the goal is quite simple, capture leads and support sales effectively. This might seem like a no-brainer, but over time we have come to see many clients with websites that are holding them back. Â
→How Effective is your Real Estate Website?
The first step to knowing what you need for your real estate website, is to dig into what you have. In the same way after several years we go through our closets and get rid of old clothes, reassess what is still relevant, what fits or doesnt, before you start buying new clothes, you need to do this with a website. This practice is called a Website Audit. While there are a million different ways you can accomplish this, I am a fan of the old adage KISS – keep it simple stupid.
Start with the homepage.
This is where most people land when they find you. Â
Your website audit should really center around SEO and UX/UI. We want to make sure that first and foremost the focus is on getting found and then driving better ROI once people get to you. An audit centers around a full analysis of factors that impact a website’s visibility for search engines and ease of use for users. But a full website audit is not always necessary.
Ask yourself these top line questions:
Your Message
- Is your message still communicating who you are and what you do?
- Is it clear?
- Is it succinct?
- Is the location and phone number featured prominently?
- Are your amenities featured prominently?
- Do you describe the property and the surrounding area?
The Website Experience
- Do you employ a funnel concept?
- Are you leading your visitors down a specific path to easily apply or schedule a tour?
- Do you have clear calls to action? Ie. Schedule a tour, fill out an application, apply now
ImageryÂ
- Does it look good?
- Is the resolution correct on your photos, or are things blurry?
- Are words on top of images rendering them illegible?
- Does your imagery make sense in the context of what you are selling/saying
Mobile Friendly
- Is your website mobile friendly?
- Does your site adapt to a mobile or tablet environment and scale differently?
If the answer to any of these is “no” you probably need to upgrade your site.
Easy Updates
Take a look at your website, do you think it could use some tweaks to bring it up to speed?
There are quite a few options you have when it comes to updating your existing website. The issue you may run into is deciding which option is best for you. There are some easy fixes and some that may take quite some time.Â
Need help deciding whether your website needs an easy fix or requires a complete redesign?
→Ready To Update Your Website? Here’s How To Bring It Up To Speed
Chapter 3: Marketing Your Multi Family Real Estate Property
Once you have your foundation in place – branding and a website poised for conversion- it’s time to generate some traffic! As with everything above, marketing starts with a strategy. We call it a game plan, but essentially, it’s a document that helps you identify the best route to start generating leads.
3 Steps to a Marketing Gameplan
A Hey Now! Media Marketing Gameplan combines tried and tested methods using social media, content marketing and paid advertising to:
- Increase brand authority
- Increase website traffic
- Increase lead generation
We customize each Marketing Gameplan to target specific demographics, unique to our clients organization, in order to reach the right audience, deliver the right message and attract best fit leads into their sales funnel.
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Step 1: Research & Strategy
The first step is to learn about the business, its competitors and ideal customers.
Using research tools, aim to uncover performance metrics that:
- Analyze how your competitors are marketing
- Show areas of opportunity in your specific industry for SEO and paid advertising
Then create buyer profiles that:
- Specifically define your ideal audience
- Provide insights on how this audience researches, solves problems and makes buying decisions
The final step is to apply these insights to target these buyers.Â
The Hey Now! Media Marketing Gameplan includes:
Social Media Calendar
Content Marketing Strategy
Paid Advertising Blueprint
Step 2: Creative Production & Set-Up
This is where you flex your creative muscles and produce the messaging, campaign themes and full suite of creative assets that bring the Marketing Gameplan to life.
TIP: Audit your digital platforms to ensure they either exist and/or are set up properly for ongoing marketing before you start disseminating content.
Depending on what you have outlined in your plan, here are some articles that speak to marketing in specific arenas geared towards lead generation for Multi Family Real Estate.
→Email Marketing for Real Estate
→Real Estate and the Power of Event Marketing
→Social Media for Real Estate Success
→Real Estate Marketing on Youtube
→TV and Streaming — the New Wave for Real Estate marketing?
→Google Marketing and How it Can Impact Your Real Estate Business
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Step 3: Launch
The final step is to launch your marketing campaign! Deploy, manage and deliver results on a monthly basis. Each of our clients gets a live dashboard that shows their marketing metrics in real time, and we also provide monthly meetings to report on performance and make ongoing adjustments. We use Google Data Studio to create these dashboards. Â
Ready to Rock Your Apartment Marketing?
We hope this has been helpful and provided you with tons of resources to dig in and generate results. Who knows, you might just wind up with a waitlist like several of our clients!Â
