Zipcode Creative is a creative agency for multifamily branding. If you came here wondering about the difference between branding vs. marketing, you’ve come to the right place.
Branding Vs. Marketing At A Glance
First off, let’s get clear about what’s what.
Branding is a cohesive identity system around a company and its products or services. It’s a way to stand out visually and verbally and build up/maintain your reputation.
Marketing is the promotion of that company and its products or services. It’s a way to get leads, prospects, and customers.
If you want something more fun to identify how it all works:
You’re hosting a dinner party, and as the host you want to be recognized as the Hostess with the Mostest.
So you set the date, create the menu, and invite the guests. You set the table with amazing centerpieces and decor. You welcome every guest by name when they come in. All through the night, you’re talking with your guests, sharing stories, including everyone that’s there.
When your guests leave, they want to come back for another dinner party, because it was such a wonderful experience. (They might even try to get their friends invited.)
Marketing makes the connections by knowing your guests’ needs. Your branding is how they felt, both before and after the dinner. They know if they want to have a great dinner, they can come back and get something similar to that experience.
Now, as far as multifamily branding and multifamily marketing are concerned, that requires a little more detail.
Understanding Branding
BRANDING, AS A CONCEPT
Branding in the multifamily industry is Zipcode Creative’s reason for existing! We know that most communities today are trying to find a way to stand out and attract their target market resident. It’s difficult to do without marketing, but it’s even harder to do without solid branding. People will always need a place to live—but they don’t have to pick you!
Think of it this way:
If a brand were a person…
- The name and logo are their face and facial expressions
- Visual identity is their body language and fashion style
- Brand voice is how they talk: What they say and how they say it.
All of these things make up how we understand a person and decide if we vibe with them or not.
Good branding defines who you are as a company and clarifies for prospects what makes your company special or different. The efforts are focused on building up the reputation of your community (or property management company) and maintaining it.
BRANDING IS MORE THAN A LOGO
When done right, multifamily branding can create culture and movement. Think a logo can make you stay top-of-mind? Maybe for 1 second. Then, it’s onto the next thing. Logos can’t do everything. But, with thorough and consistent branding, you can brand everything, STARTING with your brand’s personality, which is formed to attract your ideal resident. Your mission, vision, and values are the backbone of the whole thing, and the brand guidelines you create fall in line with it.
That means you’ll have all of this outlined with your brand guidelines:
- Verbal Branding: Brand positioning, brand attributes, an ideal resident profile, and brand voice and tone
- Visual Branding: Logo mark and usage guidelines, color palette, typography, and design elements (like iconography, patterns or illustrations)
MULTIFAMILY BRANDING SETS COMMUNITIES APART
Branding is exactly what you need to set a community apart, and make it distinct from all the other 2 bed, 1 baths around town. By using creative brand messaging, you can stand out in a crowded market, and edge out the competition by developing a brand that connects with your prospects.
Doing Both in Multifamily: Branding and Marketing
Multifamily industry marketing is the methodology behind reaching your ideal residents, using multiple channels for advertising campaigns, product and service information. This could be through your website, through social media, through mailers, through paid advertising. Every effort is made to obtain leads or get prospects.
You can’t do marketing well without solid branding. You want to stay top-of-mind, and you want to get residents in your communities—and have them stay there. By using branding, you can create a link between how you look, what you offer, and the reality of living in one of your communities.
The thread that seamlessly brings it all together is when branding and marketing are in harmony.
Branding in multifamily builds brand recognition and increases trust and loyalty (if the services line up with the offerings). Marketing creates brand awareness—so if you don’t have a brand, it’ll be tougher, and not really worth it, to market your community. It will look like everything else out there. With well-branded marketing collateral your image will be cohesive, with a consistent look and feel. Handy when you’re trying to create hype around a grand opening—and the color palettes and fonts are recognizable from your social media feed and website.
HOW ZIPCODE CREATIVE PAIRS BRANDING WITH MARKETING
We are the brand development and positioning experts (and your in-house marketing staff brings the strategy and implementation). Together we’ll make amazing things.
Our services at Zipcode Creative help bring branding and marketing together. For example, apartment marketing campaigns are the perfect place for your brand messaging and vibe to come together in front of your target audience.
Once you have your brand identity completed, you’re ready to put out amazing ads (for your market-researched audience). Using your well-crafted apartment branding in PPC advertising shouldn’t be overlooked—it helps build trust, and leads to more conversions.
If a brand is part of how you feel about your community, the clearest way we see branding teamed up with marketing is through a referral program! Beautifully designed flyers handed out to your current residents, allowing their experience with your brand to extend to their friends through—you guessed it—word-of-mouth marketing is a perfect pairing.
Is apartment branding worth the cost? If lease-ups and higher retention rates sound good to you, then yes. Beautiful, effective branding can help your reputation through recognition. Trust, credibility, differentiation—all part of the branding picture. And marketing helps you put it out there.
Brand well
&
Market better.
