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Author: Stacey Feeney

Branding and Marketing Corporate Multifamily Real Estate

Written by Stacey Feeney on . Posted in All Articles, Branding.


Multifamily branding and marketing is fantastic. We love it. But it’s not all we do. We also work on branding corporate property management companies. All that to say: we speak your language, regardless of which side of multifamily you’re on, be it management, ownership, or development—or all of the above.

Zipcode creative is happy to serve everyone in multifamily communities, from the leasing office all the way up to the investors and owners, including the corporate side of things.

We work with:

  • Third Party Management
  • Owners and Operators 
  • Developers

Before Branding and Marketing Corporate

Your multifamily real estate company—even if it’s behind the scenes—is a brand, too. If you want to make a name for yourself, grow, and attract investors, a solid brand is key.

There are a few questions you’ll want to ask prior to branding and marketing the corporate side of your multifamily company:

Who is your target audience?

This question helps identify whether you need to speak to investors, if you need to reach the owners that are seeking third-party management, or perhaps you do it all in-house and the end customers are the residents at your communities. The answer to this question will make your message very different.

 

What is your goal?

When you answer this question, it can help determine the tasks and steps you need to take to achieve what you’re setting out to do. For example, if you’re hoping to develop and manage an apartment community until it’s leased up and then sell it, your tasks will vary greatly from if you’re trying to be resident-facing and be a sort of mini-ILS with your portfolio of communities on a website.

If you purchased a community to rehab it, a rebrand is the perfect way to make it very clear that it is under new ownership and management, showing that staff is helpful and interactions with residents are positive!

When we partner with the corporate marketing team at your company, we consider your audience and goals first. That sets the stage for what kind of branding and marketing you should ideally be doing—and how MUCH of it you should be doing.

How much attention do you want or need?

If you’re hoping to stay behind the scenes, then doing the whole kit and caboodle with branding and marketing may not be what you need. But if you want your brand to be known and recognized, you need to work on visibility and consistency.

At zipcode, we get your multifamily real estate company from all angles. Asking these questions can help us get you where you need to go.

Branding and Marketing Corporate-1Branding and Marketing Corporate-2Branding and Marketing Corporate-3

Details of Branding and Marketing Corporate

Depending on your answers to the questions above, you may have a couple of different options with your logo and usage. When you’re looking to bring your corporate brand to the community level, you’ll need to determine whether you should:


Stamp the corporate logo on all marketing materials, use your color palette, and create a standardized logo design for all your communities so they’re recognizable as “one of those Easy Street Communities” 

 

OR!

Simply place the corporate logo in the footer of all marketing materials, and let the communities stand completely on their own with unique branding.

It’s a choose-your-own-adventure type thing, but make a decision and stick with it.

If you want to be known for your beautifully branded communities, relocating residents can look for one of your communities—“you know, the ones with easy online leasing renewals.” Once you get to be known for something (if it’s positive) you want to keep that good thing going. 


DON’T FORGET

Branding and marketing corporate also means you need to create and brand the culture you offer to your employees (and prospective employees). You want to attract the right talent for corporate roles and roles on-site.

When Branding Your Corporate Side Won’t Work

Branding the corporate multifamily real estate company isn’t for everyone. For example, if your portfolio niche is C minus communities with less than desirable reputations, you may not have the bandwidth and budget for corporate branding (Think ROI.)

If you’re the owner/operator of a long-term hold and you’re managing your own assets, you might not feel the need to brand because you don’t have big growth goals. That’s fine, too. (Although, a beautiful brand will still be appreciated.)

Keep in mind: If you’re trying to acquire and purchase or grow and develop, you’ll want to dial in your company’s true brand, and then market the heck out of it for possible investors. When all of your communities are on the same page, it looks like it’s a tightly run ship—which is always a good sign to investors.

Depending on your needs, we can find a branding and marketing solution that pushes you toward completing your goals.

Outsourced Branding and Specialty Design for Multifamily Marketing

Written by Stacey Feeney on . Posted in All Articles, Branding.

Is it better to get the job done or not do it at all? Consider outsourced branding, for instance. Even if you don’t typically turn to an outside agency for help, you may eventually find that your marketing team is slammed. That’s when outsourcing the work could be just the thing you need.

Why Should I Be Outsourcing Branding For Multifamily?

BENEFITS

If you’ve never outsourced branding before, it might sound a little scary. According to Hubspot, “the best time to outsource [marketing] is when internal talent is stretched thin and in-house teams are struggling to get campaigns over the line.” There are quite a few benefits to outsourcing some of your (or most or all—we’re here to help, not judge) marketing for multifamily to an outside agency.


The best reason why you should be outsourcing branding for multifamily is, at its most basic, a good business decision. It can help you:

  1. Expand coverage: If your team is slammed and there’s no one to take on extra work (see also: emails from the boss that begin with “We need to get new signage up on-site for takeover and we close on Friday!””) This means that you can say “yes” because you’ve got someone to turn to for those last-minute projects…or you can offload something else to an agency so you can tackle the things that are due sooner. Having a backup team gives you not only the capability to prioritize, but also the ability to keep saying “yes” to whatever pops up in your inbox. Here’s to a bigger bandwidth.

  2. Extend capabilities: You’ve got talent on your team, but they may not be able to complete the job in the way that it needs to be. Some skills like branding design and copywriting take time and experience to get right, and you don’t have the luxury of either. In that case, outsourcing can extend your capabilities and give you the ability to create even more beautiful things.

  3. Bolster your brand: Making things pretty is what we do at zipcode creative. We know that it takes a lot of focus and time to really make your brand shine. And when we work as an extension of your marketing team, we make sure that everything looks fantastic.

Stretch your budget: Hiring full-time creatives for your staff can’t always work out. Calculate the cost of a full-time graphic designer, copywriter, social media manager, ad specialist, plus their benefits and you’ll see some red on your bottom line. Hiring for those roles isn’t necessarily realistic for every company. We’ll step in and be an extension for whatever you need.

Best Things to Outsource


IN-HOUSE TEAM

What are your current in-house team’s capabilities? Where could they really use help? What are they constantly pushing deadlines out on? Start with the squeaky wheels—the areas where you need more time, more help, or more expertise, and outsource branding to an agency.


WHAT WE CAN HELP WITH

Sometimes, you need a list to run down and see what needs to be covered. Here’s what zipcode creative can cover when it comes to outsourced branding in the form of a checklist to help you maximize efficiency in your marketing department.

 

Why Outsourcing Branding Could Work

It’s tempting to avoid outsourcing your marketing for multifamily. Keeping it in-house seems cleaner, less risky, possibly cheaper. But there’s a ton you could be missing out on, if you outsource with trusted partners:

KEEP YOUR FOCUS

Now you can focus on the essential responsibilities within your role instead of being spread too thin and worrying about getting it all done on time and done well. If you have a marketing team that’s running strategies to increase occupancy, resident events, social media, managing public relations, and crafting the next campaign, they probably don’t have time to create a mailer for your lease-up special. Don’t make them do that, too. Let them keep their focus on the big picture, and outsource the graphic design of a few marketing collateral pieces.


PLAY TO STRENGTHS

 

Graphic design, for example, isn’t everyone’s specialty. Maybe digital ads are, though. Find what you’re good at, and absolutely nail it. For brand messaging: voice, and persona, and for graphic design: logos, palettes, fonts, and related marketing pieces (and more), let someone help you. Wherever you’re going to spend more time learning how to do it, and then doing a C+ job, hire someone else. (And stay away from Canva.) We’ve got our specialty—we make things look pretty!—and you’ve got yours. Nothing wrong with learning, but sometimes it’s faster and easier to stay in your (multifamily) lane. Bottom line here: The best work being accomplished toward your marketing efforts and goals happens when you play to your teams (and your) strengths, and you allow your contracted partners to do what they do best, as well.

BRAND CONSISTENCY

If you have a brand style guide, awesome. If everyone on your team follows it, even better. Those colors, fonts, logo options and graphic design rules are there to keep things consistent. But we’ve got even better news for you: When you partner with an outside agency, we’ll be even more strict about brand consistency, because we have no reason to do otherwise. After all, consistency and cohesiveness is our number one goal as an agency, aside from creating attention grabbing messaging and visuals, of course!

 

FRESH PERSPECTIVE

Maybe your marketing team can’t get it all done, and you’ve had to reach out to a partner agency to help you make it all happen. That’s totally okay, as long as your partner is good! You’ve been looking at the same palette, logos, amenities, layouts, for a little too long. But outsourcing also gives your team the opportunity to see something new—a creative vision or opinion or idea. Now, a new set of eyes can see something you might have missed all along. 

That’s completely worth it.

Brand Promise – The “Vows” of Your Apartment Community

Written by Stacey Feeney on . Posted in All Articles, Branding.

What is a Brand Promise?

Everytime your brand shows up visually or verbally, there is a specific association with what your apartment brand offers as an experience to its clientele or residents. That’s the brand promise. Each time your brand messaging and visual representation show up, like an ad or a mailer, you’ve set up your brand to deliver an experience you have vowed (or promised!) to give residents…which they now know to expect.  It’s not always spoken or written—but it is a form of mission and values and the feeling that your residents get when they think of you. It will certainly come out in different ways through your verbal identity.

In short, it’s a public benchmark. It helps recall why you’re doing what you’re doing in the first place, sprinkled with what you value most.

I TAKE THEE, COMMUNITY

Brand promises can get tricky, though. Like a marriage vow, you might not want to go fully traditional—because that’s not unique or interesting, per se. However, if you write your own vows, things can go a little off the rails. 

Here’s some guidance for your brand promise that will have prospective residents flocking to your apartment community.

In Your Brand Promise, DON’T:


OVERPROMISE

When you overpromise and then subsequently underdeliver, that becomes an epic disappointment. It’s also a total misalignment of expectation versus reality. If you’re overpromising something, like “We’ll always make it right, no matter what” and then your service director or management staff aren’t trained with how to fix the problems at hand, you can count on a broken brand promise. Only promise what you can actually achieve—it’s not the time to be aspirational or overly inspiring. Be real. Be good. But don’t overpromise.


BE SELFISH

Wedding vows aren’t about the person speaking. Likewise, brand promises are not strictly about the brand itself. It’s what you offer. It’s what you’re promising as a service. Instead of being selfish, tell your residents what you can do for them. (A certain JFK quote comes to mind here.) Look outward instead of in, and you’ll have painted a better brand promise.


GO OVERBOARD WITH THE WORDS

Hey, here’s an idea! Make your brand promise easy to understand, read, and have it grab attention. Kind of like your other multifamily copywriting (if you followed our advice in this blog.) Don’t be flowery. Don’t be fluffy about it. Say what you mean and be clear. 

 

DO WHAT’S BEEN DONE

More word advice here. When you use phrases that have been seen before, they don’t offer the same weight or meaning. Your residents and prospects will skim right over it. So when you say “unique solutions” or “outstanding customer service” they hear “blah blah blah.” That’s a bad promise.


Instead, it’s best to keep the focus where it should be: On the resident

Watermark

In Your Brand Promise, DO:

HIGHLIGHT THE RESIDENT’S NEEDS

When you put the resident’s needs first, they feel drawn in. By subtly calling out your experience and differentiators, they don’t feel sold to, they feel their problem being one step closer to a solution. 

WRITE “THE STORY” TO FEATURE THEM

The resident is the main character. They’re the hero of your story. And your apartment community is just the tool to help them get what they want. Once you pull your brand out of the top billed credits, you’ll have a better shot at creating a brand promise that’s focused on the most important piece of the puzzle: The Resident.


BRING THE BEST WORDS

Break out the thesaurus and find a new way that truly underscores what you’re promising—the feeling that residents can expect whenever they interact with your brand. Using the right words helps shape perception and gives you a direction to go.

How does one do this?
Try this on:

Example: Our caring staff and beautiful grounds will help you feel at ease in your new home, so you can fully relax—your biggest worry will be what to wear to the community mixer each month.


Just like a mission explains what you do, which is mostly for internal use, a brand promise is outward-facing, to tell your residents what you’ll do for them every day of your existence. Don’t break the promise!

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Creating an Apartment Brand: The Secret Sauce

Written by Stacey Feeney on . Posted in All Articles, Branding.

Look under the hood, pull back the curtain, call it what you want…we all want to know what’s behind the scenes of creating an apartment brand. Creating something that’s beautiful, memorable, and effective.

Let’s go step by step.

Brand Questionnaire

We’re asking the questions here. And the answers you provide in the zipcode creative brand questionnaire will help us catch the vision for your community’s brand or rebrand. Boxes for you to fill in with logo inspiration, color likes/dislikes, location of your community, and resident demographics give us the insight needed to work with you in achieving something spectacular.

Next up:

Client Creative Call

During a call with zipcode, you can expect to discuss your vision along with your “dos and don’ts” in regard to your ownership’s preferences—this last one is particularly important when rebranding your community. Sometimes a few things are rolled over for a brand identity, and it’s always better for us to know those specific requests up front.

In our conversation, we’ll get to know you a little more, and we’ll open it up to any questions you have about the process or about our thoughts. We’ll verbally summarize what we’ve heard, and what we’re going to do next. (We’ll be hitting the books.)

Research and Discovery

In the research and discovery phase, we get into the thick of it, and make sure you know who you want to reach, and which options would work best for your brand.

WHAT WE RESEARCH

Identify your ideal resident profile, and plan to market the heck out of it. Using geographic, demographic, psychographic, and behavioral patterns helps paint the picture of who we’re talking to. In addition to “audience” we also look closely at the community offerings in your area—we’re talking hotspots, attractions, and history. This all plays into the larger brand idea, too.

And let’s not forget competitors—knowing what you’re up against gives you the ability to meet what they offer, and then go a little further and set yourself apart in one way or another.

DIGGING DEEPER

When we dive into discovery, and start seeing the options, it helps narrow things down. Sometimes you have to chip away at something until the final idea is revealed. And then, the fine-tuning can begin.

Architecture – We love any architectural theme and style that can give us a hint of what’s to come. Branding that’s inspired by the physical building brings it all together, as though it was always meant to be.

Moodboards – If we can use the renderings and moodboards from the interior designer, fantastic. Beyond that, we’ll also create our own mood board to curate the look, feel, and, well, mood to fully capture your brand visually.

Parallel and Adjacent Industries – Looking at what others are doing is helpful. Do they have the same kind of ideal resident? How did they capture that resident with how their brand looks and feels? We also love to explore adjacent industries, like the hospitality industry—hotels make beautiful brands. The multifamily industry could learn a lot from exploring the depths hotels go to in creating an immersive brand experience.

Concept Time

Strike while the iron is hot, make hay while the sun shines, and design while creativity is flowing.

We always go to the drawing board when we’re in the flow, so we can work out concepts. Throw it all on the canvas and see what sticks. Sometimes you have to get through some less-than-good ideas to circle around and land on something great.

Brand Concept Presentation

WE MAKE THINGS PRETTY

We love this part. We take all of the pretty stuff we’ve made (in a beautiful slide deck) and present it. We include logo concepts, color palette concepts, and preliminary design elements, along with a hint of lifestyle stock curation.

VIBES FOR DIRECTION

After we show the pieces, we sit back and allow the vibes and visuals to speak for themselves. Nothing new-agey here, we just think it’s great for our clients to be able to marinate in the concepts and then converse with their own team after our meeting. That way, when they come back with feedback, they have a clear picture on the direction that feels right for their brand. It’s always fun to hear what clients have landed on!

Final Brand Style Development

Last step: When clients come back and tell us the way they want to go, we put the car in drive. We take the agreed-upon direction, and we expand on it to source the full library of corresponding lifestyle stock imagery, bringing the patterns, shapes, textures, stamps, graphics, and logo variations to life. We take it all, package it up, and create a full brand style guideline. Check these brand style guidelines we’ve recently created.

New Construction Lease-Up Branding and Marketing—By Development Phase

Written by Stacey Feeney on . Posted in All Articles, Branding.

Four phases of development directly inform how we handle our new construction lease-up branding and marketing. 

The logic behind this? It’s optimal to align your apartment community’s branding and marketing with construction—because that’s what drives timelines. For example, you can’t create stationery before you have the final address or phone numbers for your community. Think about it: you’ve created a brochure, but you don’t have images or even a leasing office to distribute them from! Go in the right order.

Let’s break it down into each phase, so that you can see how we’re able to keep our clients on track, and drive them to the finish line. 

If we can stay ahead of construction on the branding and marketing side, we can begin pre-leasing and be that much closer to occupancy goals right at first units delivered.

Phase 1 – Early Construction

12-18 months before the first phase of completion, or at groundbreaking.


NAMING YOUR APARTMENT COMMUNITY

The perfect name for your community should embody your values, style, and audience. Make sure you’ve got a good one picked out before you begin with Phase 1. You’ll want to get legal documents in order with the city and county as you set up your web domain and social handles, too. (Beyond that, how can we create a brand identity without a name to pull from?)

FOUNDATIONAL BRANDING DESIGN

The voice, the visuals, we need to get it all dialed in. What do you look like and sound like? Once that’s nailed down (along with your brand’s taglines, headline library, logo design, color palette, typography and lifestyle stock imagery) we can get moving on your floor plans, your renderings, and a landing page that feels consistent with your brand. A consistent brand that extends to your landing page gives you a legitimacy that’s vital in the first phase of your lease-up. Also! Pair your identity with your interior: Architectural plans and mood boards motivate and inspire us. Aligning with where you’re headed helps us work together even better, narrowing our focus so we can go with exactly what you’re envisioning.

Phase 2 – Coming Soon

6-12 months before first phase of completion

YOU’RE HERE—OR YOU COULD BE

This is the moment to make marketing start-up items. Think signage design, rack cards, and maps. We love to help create a property sitemap (we make it pretty—we’re well-known for our beautiful sitemaps!) or a point of interest map that shows nearby freeways, shopping, eateries and the like. 


SIGN UPS

Launching an interest list website is also helpful in order to start developing SEO for your location. During this time, we typically encourage our clients to put “Coming Soon” on their marketing pieces and direct prospects to a landing page with a contact form as the primary CTA.

Phase 3 – Pre-Leasing

3-6 months before first phase of completion

PEOPLE, GET READY

This is when the magic happens—units get reserved, leases get signed. We can help you transition your branded marketing message from “coming soon” to “pre-leasing” as you start up your unit reservations. When you have big goals, you need better branding. During this phase, we like to create business cards for your property manager, leasing agents, and your maintenance supervisor. You’ll also want to have handy a thank you card (with a pre-written message) and a move-in gift note card. When you’re this close to opening, you don’t want to be waiting on printed pieces at the moment your residents step foot in their new home. Plenty of other pieces help bring the “welcome” for any pre-lease signers.

Most of all—get your full website ready. Websites are a huge representation of your brand; get it launched in time for the next (and final)…

Phase 4 – Now Open

At time of first phase of completion

IT IS TIME

Finally, your first move-ins are permitted! And you get to unfurl the “Now Open” banners and signage—we got you covered on that front. We’ll make sure you’ve got building banners, yard signs, boulevard banners, and enough directional signage to make even the most directionally-challenged resident find their way with no problem.

When you hold your soft opening, have marketing collateral handy. When you have your grand opening, have swag and giveaways handy. When (or if you can) do unit delivery by phase after your clubhouse and community amenities are complete, you’ll still want to have everything ready. You won’t miss a thing, if you’re using our checklist.

A checklist?

A Lease-Up Marketing Checklist for Every Phase

Oh, yes. We provide our full branding package clients with a comprehensive project brief—a live google doc that shows the scope and timelines for a new construction, lease-up community. This added benefit includes a lease-up marketing checklist that covers everything you could want to do to set your community up for success. After being in the multifamily industry (on the property management side) for many years, we know what’s most vital and what’s optional when it comes to creating a successful lease-up strategy for your community’s brand.

Behavioral Marketing for Apartment Brands

Written by Stacey Feeney on . Posted in All Articles, Branding.

Behavioral marketing for apartment brands deserves its very own blog post. Buyer behavior (or in our case, resident behavior) is the best indicator of purchasing power and timing. It’s the thing that you can target and use to segment your audience and reach them more easily and efficiently based on where they are in the funnel.

Get ready for step one.

Identify your Ideal Resident Profile

TAKE A LOOK

Who are the perfect resident types to live in your community based on the amenities, floor plans and location you offer?  Take into account the companies they work for, their hobbies, their favorite brands, their interests, and their intentions. This goes above and beyond their gender, their marital status, age, and other typical demographic factors. Instead, it dives into their passions and desires!


HOW TO RESEARCH PROFILE DETAILS

It’s not the who—it’s the how. That sums up everything about resident behavior. You can predict what they may do based on other factors, such as shopping and spending habits. Hubspot picks out a few ways you can create an analysis of your customers to see what they might do next:

1. Segment your audience

2. Identify key benefits

3. Source resident trends

4. Compare data

The items that fall under behavioral marketing for segmentation include:

  • Benefits sought
  • Purchasing habits
  • Brand loyalty
  • Occasion or timing
  • Buyer readiness
  • Engagement level

The goods that count as psychographic segmentation are:

  • Belief systems
  • Values
  • Goals
  • Attitudes

See more on that with our blog on research and discovery for apartment brands.

Ready for step 2?

Target Your Ideal Resident

Take those behavior demographic categories and create a campaign that works around it. If they’re looking for an apartment for the future, start small. If they’re searching for an apartment community that offers fitness classes, ensure that segment is getting the message that you offer exactly what they’re looking for.

Again, you can base your apartment branding and marketing on those demographics, especially if you have identified your IRP (ideal resident profile). That sets up the structure to guide the rest of your marketing choices. 

Did that gym class example get your attention? Next up:

USE WHAT YOU KNOW

Some people love yoga. (And other people haven’t tried yoga and they don’t love it—yet.) Those yoga lovers are probably members of a local yoga studio. Perhaps they’ve purchased clothes from LuluLemon. Consider offering a yoga membership with a one-year signed lease. Advertise your onsite, all-inclusive yoga studio. Attract the demographic you want by tailoring your marketing (messaging and campaigns) to that particular resident behavioral segment.

Behavioral Marketing for Apartment Brands Helps Tell Better Stories

You are marketing to a lifestyle, and you’re selling a feeling. When you can look at the audience (your ideal resident) then you can tell a better story. If you don’t know who you’re talking to, or look at your results, it’s a little like telling a joke on zoom to black screens on mute—you’re not sure if they weren’t listening, didn’t get it, or just didn’t think it was funny. When you can see and identify who you’re trying to target, you have a much clearer picture of their problems, and therefore how you can solve it with something they need or want! Don’t make it complicated—just do the research and solve the problems.

In addition to this, when your visuals align with their favorite brands, it can fit right in with the flow of their regular life. It feels like it aligns with the brand of their life. Using behavioral demographics helps us be both better storytellers and branders for apartments. Because the #1 thing we focus on with our stories is lifestyle—what they want, and what they need, and how we can offer it to them!