Unlocking Success: The Critical Impact of Consistency in Content Marketing

We all know content marketing is king, but content is nothing without consistency. Organizations that produce engaging, steady content often achieve greater results. However, consistency is becoming an increasingly significant issue for many businesses.

With a solid content calendar, you can build stronger connections with your audience, hit touchpoints on the buyer’s journey, and position yourself as a trusted and valuable resource.

Why Is Content Marketing Consistency Important?

Grasping the attention of consumers has become a tough business. Traditional forms of mass marketing will no longer be an effective way to bring awareness to convert prospects into buyers.

Creating a few blogs or posting on social media here and there might help a prospective customer understand a topic better. Still, it will not help you hit all necessary touchpoints or build a meaningful relationship. If you are not a consistent content marketing creator, you are not fully connecting with your audience.

Consider your favorite actor, who probably stars in a few favorite movies. If she continues to select roles that you resonate with, eventually, you might find yourself interested in pretty much anything she is involved in. This is how to position your organization: as a well-known, trusted, and familiar resource consistently delivering great work.

How to Create a Strategy — and Stick to It

The solution to consistency is inbound marketing, a modern method that equips you to create content that drives buyer personas through your marketing funnel. The inbound marketing methodology will help guide the context your material should be used within and is based on four stages: attract, convert, close, and delight.

Attract

The attract stage is about building awareness and creating content that turns strangers into visitors. Thus, it would be best to focus primarily on blogs, social media, and white pages. The goal is to provide solutions to your persona’s problems. For example, for an urban apartment, you might write a blog highlighting “The Best Places to Eat Gelato” or “10 Interior Design Tips for a Loft Apartment.”

Convert

The convert stage is about converting visitors into leads. The type of content you are producing would be in the form of a call-to-action (CTA) or landing page. Create gated offers where viewers must provide minimal information valuable to your business (email, zip code, etc.). For example, offers can include infographics, fact sheets, eBooks, or how-to guides.

Close

In the close stage, your strategy should be all about turning leads into customers. In this stage, you should focus on your CRM, email, and workflows. It’s important to speak their language, meet their needs, and seal the deal.

Delight

In the delight stage, you will continue to provide value and show you care about your customers. In turn, they will become advocates and promoters for your business. Through social monitoring and surveys, you can see how satisfied your residents are, and if there is a problem, you can address it quickly. Happy customers are your best advocates for attracting new leads.

Knowing these stages and using them to create consistent and targeted content marketing can help you produce the right material in the right context for your persona.

The Key to Content Marketing Consistency

Running an inbound marketing campaign for your multifamily property can be difficult. Once you draft your buyer personas and map their journey, it’s time to create a campaign. But planning your social media calendar the first time is time-intensive, so we’ve put together this handy template to get you started.

Live Streaming, Chatbots, and Drones … Oh My!

The multifamily market has been a mixed bag, especially given the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic impact. These fluctuations mean that multifamily marketing is imperative for companies to edge out competitors.

Consider the following multifamily marketing trends as they should show positive returns for your company.

1. Let live streaming take center stage.

It’s a game-changing year for multifamily marketing, especially regarding how to reach prospective buyers in your area. Until now, the marketing landscape has remained more or less the same, with social media claiming the throne in every corner of influence. However, we are now seeing increasingly fast-paced developments in the form of new and updated features such as live streaming and instant messaging.

The way it functions within Facebook has made live streaming a growing trend, besides the capability to engage in real-time with clients. Facebook allows you to prioritize updates from friends and family rather than pages you like or follow.

What does this mean for multifamily marketing? Put simply, it means that content will have to be creative and engaging to gain more activity online. The update ranks content that receives the most activity and shares it closer to the top of the feed. A multifamily marketing team with experience in social media content will optimize results. And since live video is currently the most preferred type of content among Facebook users, it is an area in which marketers will naturally place additional creative efforts.

Social media features contain many great multifamily marketing opportunities, including the capability to broadcast a live house tour or announce real-time property events for clients or prospects. And the live features allow for specific market targeting across multiple platforms, such as Instagram and Snapchat.

2. Understanding the continued rise of IM and chatbots.

Connectivity is another great advantage of social media. The simple ease of using direct messaging functions makes it easier to engage with your audience. However, property managers now face the conundrum of responding quickly and accurately to prospective buyers.

Cue marketing automation bots, also known as chatbots.

Today’s consumers want to engage with a company when and where it’s most convenient. This could mean losing possible leads for real estate if we cannot respond to needs instantly. Chatbots seem to have cracked the code, quite literally, on instant communication. According to Botpress, a chatbot is “any software that performs an automated task … the most intuitive definition is that a bot is a software that can have a conversation with a human.”

In addition to being programmed to have realistic, human-like conversations with prospective clients, chatbots can also gather specific information relevant to the seller or the marketer.

In the context of multifamily, a chatbot can mean providing 24/7, instant responses that do not require an individual behind a screen scrambling to answer a question. Chatbots also provide a smoother user experience for the buyer, and user experience is always critical.

Social media features such as live streaming and instant messaging are powerful tools that benefit both sellers and buyers. Multifamily marketing trends are growing rapidly, and their influences within the industry are rising.

3. Let drones offer a bird’s eye view.

Drones are a defining piece of technology for multifamily and commercial real estate. Several years ago, hiring a professional photographer for aerial shots of a property was conventional. With drones, on the other hand, you can capture stunning images and breathtaking videos of your property with camera-equipped drones, all while cutting back on costs.

Drones can depict a great layout of the entire property, especially when recording video. For larger areas, drones’ unique benefit is navigation beyond the property and into the surrounding area. They can capture incredible bodies of water, beautiful landscapes, and nearby neighborhoods. This particular feature can be optimized if paired creatively with live streaming.

Drones also allow high-rise apartment complexes to capture images of the entire building and attractive neighboring hotspots. Drones are one trend guaranteed to set your multifamily marketing apart from competitors and will surely spread within the industry.

4. Take advantage of virtual and augmented reality.

Though we have seen impressive and usable trends for multifamily marketing, virtual and augmented reality takes the prize.

Virtual reality opens new doors for prospective clients by providing a behind-the-scenes look or digital tour of a property. As the real estate industry rapidly moves forward, embracing new technologies, virtual has already made it into many multifamily marketing plans. Companies now design 3D models through the power of virtual reality. Prospects can walk a unit and experience property amenities firsthand without being onsite. This trend took a significant leap at the pandemic’s start, when many properties had to shift to a virtual-only touring model. Today, virtual tours are offered at many properties in addition to in-person tours, offering prospects even more opportunities to sign a lease from the comfort of their couch.

Marketers and realtors are also using augmented reality to bring blueprints to life. With the aid of smartphone and tablet cameras, AR technology can render a 3D image of a building from a blueprint or a completely interactive layout. This tool will prove useful in all stages of development by allowing clients to visualize the entire project.

Augmented and VR technologies, drones, and social media make the customer experience more convenient and engaging. With these trends in mind, your renters will be brought smoothly through the sales funnel and to that final decision.

Fostering Collaboration Between Departments for Enhanced Reach and Engagement

The dynamics between marketing and sales have historically been closely-tied and wildly different. At a basic level, marketing teams manage promotional tactics while sales teams fundamentally warm leads and close deals. Together, they go hand-in-hand to drive business for their company and impact the bottom line.

Despite some distinct differences between the two departments, marketing and sales should be strongly aligned with goals, projects, and analytics. Yet, when a business looks at its marketing and sales teams, it often finds this to be far from the truth. Developing a strategy that creates strong interdependence to optimize success is the key to bringing these two together.

Different Departments, Same Goal

Our previous blog outlined the clear differences between marketing and sales teams. While these differences exist in many companies, it’s important to empower both sides to work together cohesively to generate success in both departments.

According to HubSpot, 87% of the terms that sales and marketing teams use to describe each other are negative. This can only be counterproductive for creating a strong alignment. Marketing has been known to refer to sales as simple-minded, incompetent, and lazy. Meanwhile, sales use terms like “arts and crafts” and “irrelevant” to describe marketing.

However, this could not be further from the truth. Without marketing support, sales teams would not be able to get the warm leads they need to close a sale quickly. Without a solid sales team, marketing would not have on-the-ground insights from specific markets to create relevant content.

Marketing and Sales Feedback Loop

Developing an interconnected strategy that creates a feedback loop is the key to marketing and sales alignment. Marketing teams do heavy market research on a company’s target personas to understand their ideal customers’ demographics, lifestyles, and behaviors.

All information created and used to sell to the customer should reflect their specific interests, pain points, and concerns. Without this detailed research, both teams struggle to target the right lead accurately. While sales can use this information to address their customer better, their team receives feedback from regional markets that may differ slightly from the more generalized personas that marketing created. This regional-specific information is vital for marketers to understand their audience better.

This is just one way a feedback loop is essential to seeing positive communication and successful campaigns for sales and marketing. The feedback loop is where both teams communicate continuously, providing back-and-forth communication and adapting their approaches based on this feedback. To ensure communication, the teams must regularly meet through onboarding, weekly sales, and management meetings to review goals and analytics.

Incorporating marketing and sales alignment into the company’s culture and processes is a great practice to ensure this feedback loop stays strong. Therefore, leadership and managers must reiterate that neither sales nor marketing is the king of the mountain. Rather, they are both pivotal generals in the company. Ensuring an equilibrium between salaries of lateral sales and marketing roles will help the mentality.

Finding Harmony Through HubSpot

It is important to embrace the tools that facilitate marketing and sales alignment. Meetings are a great way to stay on track, but they aren’t enough to ensure your teams are in sync.

Marketing automation tools like HubSpot are built to blend marketing and sales teams into one well-oiled machine. HubSpot coins Smarketing, which refers to marketing and sales alignment created through frequent and direct communication.

Companies that practice Smarketing ensure that two departments have one goal and established measurements to achieve that goal. They also make goals together and review them frequently.

For instance, according to DemandGen, 74 percent of organizations that use marketing automation and CRM said their sales and marketing teams are aligned.

As the lines blur between marketing and sales, empowering both teams to be experts in their field is crucial. HubSpot separates its software into a Marketing Dashboard (complete with analytics, blog performance, and content creation tools), and a Sales Dashboard (highlighting deal forecasts, sales performance, and prospect tracking). HubSpot brings the two together while amplifying each with its productivity tools.

HubSpot’s tracking allows marketing and sales to determine when a lead visited a website, how long they were there, and what they searched for. Not to mention its ability to create complex workflows for email nurturing to ensure no lead goes unnoticed. This gives both teams more information to do their job better and convert the lead into a customer.

Marketing and Sales Alignment

As a digital multifamily marketing agency, we practice what we preach. We combine sales and marketing efforts to drive traffic, warm leads, and send a potential customer down the buyer’s journey. Through marketing and sales alignment, we can drive results and ensure success for our clients and our agency.

In the world of digital marketing, it can be hard to know which tactic works best. These days, a lot of businesses mistakenly focus too much of their digital marketing efforts on one specific tactic like blogging or social media.

However, each part of your digital marketing strategy should fit together as one cohesive piece. Your website, social media presence, user experience (UX), customer experience (CX), etc. should all work together to create a successful inbound marketing plan.

Bring Them to You

Digital marketing and specifically inbound marketing is all about the consumer. However, it’s not about bombarding them with interruptive advertisements. It’s about providing relevant and helpful information to your customers. The internet has truly changed the flow of advertising because consumers are now able to research a product before making a purchase.

As a marketing professional, it’s important to think of yourself more as a resource than a salesperson. People will want to come to you if you’re providing the right kind of information. When people see you as an asset, they’ll feel a sense of trust.

Research Your Audience

The first thing you need to do to serve as this resource to your consumer is to identify your audience. A multifamily property in downtown Dallas may know that a typical resident is a young professional between the ages of 23 and 30, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. Using market research, you can analyze who your target market is beyond the typical demographics, and begin to understand their needs, their pain points, and where they might seek out information.

A combination of market research and customer interviews can help you create buyer personas. Per HubSpot, a buyer persona is the creation of a semi-fictional profile. The persona profile should include a narrative of day-to-day interactions, demographic behavior, goals, pain points, what his/her search process has been, the type of experience desired, common objections, and a photo of your persona.

Most businesses have multiple buyer personas to understand the full scope of the audience that uses their product or service. Having a unique profile for each persona is important. Your buyer personas should inform everything you do and are integral to your digital marketing strategy.

The Perfect Content

Once you have a persona, the next step is attracting people through content creation. According to HubSpot, businesses should focus on “creating quality content that pulls people toward your company and product, where they naturally want to be. By aligning the content you publish with your customer’s interests, you naturally attract inbound traffic that you can then convert, close, and delight over time.”

Now here’s the caveat: According to SingleGrain, you should be spending about 80% of your time promoting your content and 20% of your time creating it. Think about it, If you have the world’s best content but people aren’t seeing it, what’s the point? It’s like the old adage about a tree falling in the forest when no one’s around to hear it — did it really fall? While creating relevant content is incredibly important, it’s the promotion of that content that is imperative.

Now, this is where the other elements of your digital marketing strategy can come into play. Each of these tactics should work together to build a well-rounded digital marketing campaign. These tactics are more effective in working together because the inbound methodology builds on each tactic to create a strategy.

Digital Marketing Elements: Email, Web, Social Media

Email marketing, for example, is considered to be one of the strongest tactics for nurturing leads. Integrating a strong email campaign into your digital marketing strategy is an important part of converting leads to leases. However, it’s most effective when pushing out sharable content that will lead customers down a purchase path.

Email marketing is also a great tool for tracking your target market so you can inform your content strategy. Based on the number of email opens and the clickthrough rate, you can see what kind of material your prospects are interested in.

This is also the case on your website. Automation allows you to track what your website visitors are doing on your site. Using this newly gathered information, you can help move leads along in a more personalized and effective way.

Knowing the content your audience is interested in is also helpful in social media as you’re able to show them what they want to see. Your user experience (UX) and customer experience (CX) also tie into this notion. The better the experience your potential clients have, the more interest they will have in moving forward with you. The same works for existing clients. About 83% of customers who experience positive interactions with brands are willing to offer referrals.

The integration of all aspects of the inbound methodology will differentiate you from the competition. You need more than a few social media pages or an automated email campaign to be successful. A full digital marketing strategy includes these elements and builds on them as a part of a comprehensive plan. It’s the combination of these strategies that will truly make your digital marketing strategy successful.

Cracking the Code: How Marketers Can Prove ROI and Win Over CEOs

As marketers, our role in contributing to a company’s ROI is a constant battle that requires us to justify ourselves and our agencies. Finding ways to prove to our CEOs and stakeholders that multifamily content marketing ROI plays a significant role in driving bottom-line results is crucial.

So, how can we accomplish this? Let’s explore some key strategies:

1. Be Relevant

While sharing statistics about retweets, follows, and website visits are important, it is equally essential to establish meaningful goals that directly align with the company’s bottom line. This involves setting up SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) goals, fostering open communication with the sales team, and focusing on activities that deliver measurable returns on investment.

2. Play Offense

Surprisingly, approximately 69% of CEOs believe marketing wastes time, money, and resources. To counter this perception, it is essential to proactively define clear goals, ensuring alignment and satisfaction between the sales and marketing teams. By emphasizing the purpose behind these goals, we can demonstrate the value of marketing initiatives in driving business growth.

3. Always Go After the 3 Hs

To gain support and foster buy-in from stakeholders, we must address their concerns emotionally. By appealing to their head, heart, and hands, we can effectively engage our teams and stakeholders:

• Head – Explain your plan of action. Defend your strategies with case studies, numbers, etc. Win over your team with proof!
• Heart – If people aren’t truly vested in your idea with their heart, you will lose them. Find out what’s important to them and how to tie your new goals to theirs.
• Hands – Now that you’ve won over your team, you’ve got to get them to get back to (or start) work! Play out those call-to-actions.

4. Prepare to Show Your Medal

In the business world, we will face numerous challenges and obstacles that may lead to criticism and scrutiny. However, viewing these experiences as growth and character development opportunities is important. Similar to a medal shaped and altered through intense heat, the obstacles we overcome refine our skills and resilience. By embracing calculated risks and driving positive change, we can propel our organizations forward and achieve exceptional results.

Take risks and be the change that will keep your organization moving forward.

Proving That Content Marketing ROI Matters

As marketers, it is our responsibility to demonstrate the impact of our work on a company’s ROI. By focusing on relevance and embracing challenges, we can effectively showcase the value of multifamily marketing in driving tangible business outcomes. Let’s take the necessary risks and become agents of positive change, leading our organizations to continued success.

Understanding Millennials: A Generation Shaping Multifamily Marketing

In the ever-evolving landscape of the multifamily industry, staying attuned to shifting demographic trends is paramount for success. Among the most influential demographics shaping the market are millennials — individuals born between the early 1980s and mid-1990s.

With their unique preferences, values, and behaviors, millennial renters have become a driving force in shaping your multifamily marketing plan.

Understanding Millennial Renter Preferences

1. Embracing Technological Connectivity: Millennials have grown up in a digital age, where technology is deeply embedded in their lives. They rely on smartphones, tablets, and social media platforms to stay connected, conduct research, and make purchasing decisions. As a multifamily marketer, harnessing the power of technology and embracing digital marketing strategies is crucial to engage with millennial renters effectively.
2. Prioritizing Experiences Over Ownership: Unlike previous generations, millennials emphasize experiences more than material possessions. This mindset extends to their housing choices, as many millennials prefer the flexibility and convenience of renting over the commitment of homeownership. Highlighting the experiential aspects of your multifamily properties, such as amenities, community events, and convenient locations, can be key selling points to attract millennial renters.
3. Sustainability and Environmental Consciousness: Millennials are environmentally conscious and seek sustainable living options. Incorporating eco-friendly features into your multifamily properties, such as energy-efficient appliances, recycling programs, and green spaces, can resonate with millennial renters who value sustainability. Communicating your commitment to sustainable practices can differentiate your property and attract environmentally conscious millennials.
4. Authenticity and Transparency: Millennials value authenticity and are adept at detecting multifamily marketing gimmicks. They seek transparency in brand messaging and prefer genuine interactions. Building trust through honest and transparent communication is crucial in multifamily marketing. Share authentic stories, highlight the unique aspects of your properties, and engage with millennials through personalized and meaningful interactions.

Multifamily Industry Implications

1. Shift in Property Amenities: Millennial preferences have led to a shift in property amenities. Millennial renters increasingly seek out fitness centers, communal workspaces, outdoor recreational areas, pet-friendly facilities, and smart home technology. Incorporating these amenities into your multifamily properties can attract and retain this target demographic.
2. Rise of Digital Multifamily Marketing: Traditional marketing channels are no longer sufficient to reach millennial renters. Digital marketing, including social media for apartments, influencer partnerships, and targeted online campaigns, has become instrumental in effectively engaging with this tech-savvy generation. Investing in a comprehensive digital marketing strategy can yield significant results in attracting millennial renters.
3. Enhanced Community Engagement: Millennials value community and social connections. Creating opportunities for community engagement within your multifamily properties, such as hosting resident events, organizing volunteer activities, or facilitating social platforms for residents to connect, can foster a sense of belonging and enhance the overall resident experience.

The Technology Factor

Millennials are the first generation to grow up around the internet. Interconnectivity and information explain much of what makes millennials who they are. By looking at specific digital trends among millennials, we can understand what drives their behavior and how they make purchase decisions. Because of their large purchasing power, marketers are changing their tactics to get in front of this generation. New social media advertising tactics have evolved due to millennials spending more than three hours a day on mobile phones.

While millennials are evolving online marketing, their lifestyles define the multifamily space. As millennials tend to wait longer for marriage and kids, they delay homeownership and rent longer. Multifamily communities have to adjust their marketing tactics to attract these sought-after renters.

Understanding Millennial Renters to Craft an Effective Multifamily Marketing Plan

Understanding millennial trends is crucial for developing an effective multifamily marketing plan. By embracing technology, prioritizing experiences, emphasizing sustainability, and cultivating authenticity, you can align your marketing efforts with the preferences and values of millennial renters.

Leveraging these insights can help differentiate your multifamily properties in a competitive market, attract millennial renters, and position your brand for long-term success. Stay attuned to evolving millennial trends, adapt your marketing strategies accordingly, and embrace the transformative opportunities presented by this influential generation within the multifamily industry.