Making Cents: Let’s Talk about Marketing an Asset…
There is little to no point in having something of value if you cannot share it.
To set the tone for the rest of the discussion, we wanted you to feel the importance of marketing in our overall investment strategy.
In our stream of various topics over the past months, we have touched on many of the details related to CF Capital’s process, strategy, and execution. All of these topics are foundational to the “value” that we create as a firm when making an investment in a property.
Some say, “Build it and they will come.” While there are cases in which we would agree with this quote, however, we must not forget that tenants won’t initially discover nor continue to discover our property if we don’t cover our bases with marketing. Awareness is always the first step, but from there it comes down to delivering beyond expectations to our target residents.
“What if people drive by and see the newly renovated and beautiful apartment complex from the street -- couldn’t that help people find your property?” The answer is, “yes.” In that case, one is actually talking about marketing, and what many don’t realize is that curb appeal is a small part of the equation. We certainly make curb appeal decisions into account with marketing, but it’s only one small component to an overall comprehensive and integrated approach.
Let’s mention another quote to touch on our philosophy as it relates to marketing:
“The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” -- Oscar Wilde
The fact is, nobody would buy into something -- at whatever price -- if they didn’t see the “value” being demonstrated as part of the transaction. Price is one thing, but value is everything.
At CF Capital we communicate value in our apartment complexes in our marketing, but that is backed up with what we’ve strategically implemented to make the property attractive to tenants in a certain market. The perceived value in marketing is actually bigger than whatever we are “selling” to tenants. It is about creating a brand. A narrative, position, or cause that tenants can accept, appreciate, and align themselves with. A community they can be proud to call home.
Essentially, anything done before marketing is an attempt to tailor to market demand. Once we do this, we must craft and execute a strategy to inform the market, “we have built what they’ve been asking for.” When plans are executed properly and we deliver units that are in demand, marketing has a way of supporting itself.
With that said, if our readers have learned anything from our past posts, we hope you’ve gathered that we refuse to accept mediocrity -- we will not settle for just being “good” at marketing.
With a value add strategy, there is an automatic reason to implement some sort of marketing. In our case, we need to let the tenants in our market know what we’ve done in terms of capital improvements.
This is a perfect time to market the property, as it provides a way to completely shift existing sentiment toward the current asset, attract potential new residents, and strengthen resident retention by communicating the vision for the new, improved resident experience.
So what about some examples of the types of marketing that we do?
Curb Appeal
As we mentioned above, one example is the curb appeal. This is essentially the new brand that is visual to the outside world without having to see what’s inside each unit or each part of the apartment complex.
Reveal Announcements
Another example of marketing is launching a reveal announcement with an event so that existing and potential residents understand what they can expect from new ownership. This generates excitement around impending improvements. Individuals today crave community and a sense of belonging and want to be included in conversations regarding improvements or updates.
New Brand Messaging
Building off the last example, a re-brand would make a clear statement to the market that “we're not what we used to be.” In order to execute on the correct re-brand delivery, we must capture what people are saying to shape our messaging around how our new team is poised to solve the problems we are hearing.
The most critical part of the messaging strategy is differentiation. It’s about generating a new identity, or a new essence and feel to the community. This is immeasurable in the purest sense.
Understanding how we rank against our top competitors and how we are viewed in the market allows us to establish the focus of your updated key messaging and can often shape the approach for a new property name, look, and feel. With a new brand in place, a proactive marketing plan can then be shaped to address (not hide from) historical reviews.
One example of brand messaging could be that we provide the best tenant service available in the city. If this is the case, our marketing materials and promotions should incorporate service themes and our pricing should reflect the improved service offering.
Marketing Channels
In this area, we take the newly repositioned brand (see our Asset Repositioning post) and reach new audience groups. On the digital side, social media allows us to communicate to individuals based on geography and demographics, but also interests. Google Ad Placement tactics can be targeted to areas, and are appropriate at times if we’re making a big push for certain leasing initiatives or otherwise. Geotargeting and Geofencing would allow us to target groups around certain areas, businesses, and are tactics we sometimes employ when targeting a certain demographic to begin a conversation about our community and the benefits we have to offer.
Given our asset’s location, unit types, finishes, amenities, and planned capital improvements, we consider the demographic and psychographic of your current and potential residents. We always approach the conversation (and tailor our messaging as a result) from the vantage point of what will make our current and future residents feel safe, experience convenience, and ultimately value as important with regard to where they will call home.
We take the time to define the attributes of the individuals we're targeting. How do they search for housing, and through which communications channels are you most likely to reach them (i.e., social media, search, mobile, etc.)? Where do they shop, eat, live, and work? Are there anchor businesses or resources in your vicinity that are likely to attract your potential residents? Oftentimes, it starts with being in touch with the community and getting a true understanding of what's most important to the people who choose to live where we are. We lean on our property management teams to help us gain this critical insight of the behaviors and ideals important to our desired residents.
Beyond the technology, our goal is to deliver a safe, clean and private home to our residents, so they enjoy their time with us and recommend us to people they care about. While advertising and technology strategies are valuable, what’s most valuable for us is long term relationships and communities built through referrals and delivering exceeding value.
Our extra diligent and thoughtful efforts help us to maximize our return when marketing an asset.