Targeted Marketing Vs Branding Marketing - Rentping media minute

Thanks for joining us today for this Rentping Media Minute, our series of short apartment marketing videos. Today we are going to be talking about a topic that I've been getting a lot of questions about recently concerning the issue of targeted marketing. We recently held an hour-long Apartment Marketing Masterclass Seminar on just this topic of generating qualified leads through targeted marketing, but in this video I wanted to break down the basic issue at stake, and then recommend just a couple other resources that you might like for doing further research on the topic. My name is Jacob Gerber. I am the Senior Marketing Director for Rentping Media. You can follow me on Twitter @JacobGerber and I wanted to plug--our marketing team has developed a ton of free apartment marketing resources that are available on demand at http://resources.rentpingmedia.com Again, at the end of this video I'll mention some specific resources that you should definitely get ahold of if you want more information on the topic of targeted marketing. So, what is targeted marketing? The basic issue is this, that in the past, apartment marketers typically only had at their disposal marketing tools that would allow them to do branding marketing. To understand what branding marketing is, think about what it would mean for you to buy a billboard on a busy street in your city. Obviously you are going to get in front of a lot of eyeballs in your city, but a lot of the people who won't rent from you, who aren't going to ever rent from you, who can't rent from you for a variety of reasons, who just are looking for a completely different kind of apartment than what you have to offer. I mean, you have people passing down that road that are just traveling through the city. You have people passing down that road who already own their own home. All kinds of people that you are getting in front of--and that you are definitely paying a premium to get in front of--but people who really aren't the kind of people who can and will do business with you. Well, the idea of targeted marketing is to turn this kind of traffic generation technique on its head--that instead of trying to get in front of as many eyeballs as possible, instead we are focusing our marketing attention and our marketing dollars only on the most highly qualified, most likely to sign a lease-people. Those are what the red people signify in this graphic. We understand that not everyone is actually going to sign a lease like the green person signifies, but the point is you are focusing as much as you can only on the most qualified people so that you are going to increase your likelihood of success, not waste as much money on your marketing dollars, and your leasing staff is going to have a much easier time because they just aren't going to have to sort through as many unqualified leads. In fact, you know this, but you can't rent to just anyone out there. The apartment marketing business is fundamentally different from, say, the business model of Coca-Cola or Chipotle. Those businesses sell high-frequency, low-risk products. You know, any time you are hungry, you can eat at Chipotle. Any time you are thirsty, you can drink a Coke. But an apartment is a low-frequency, high-risk scale. You can only really sell to, at any given time, a very tiny sliver of the population. It's not all people in general who are your target market, but you need all people who are in your city--you can't ship your apartment to another city. You need all people in your city who rent and don't own their own home. All people in your city who rent and are not currently in a lease. If they just signed a 12-month lease, then really you don't want to invest your marketing dollars in them right now. You want to get in front of the people who are looking to move right now. That's the point at which it makes sense to invest your marketing dollars in someone. But obviously, just because someone is looking to move doesn't mean that they are looking to move to your community. Really, it's an even smaller sliver of the population that you are looking to reach. Someone who's looking to move into your exact geographical area, for your pet policy, a place that's in your price range, that offers your kind of amenities, to enjoy your lifestyle. When we are talking about targeted marketing, we're talking about reaching this tiny, tiny, tiny sliver of the population because that's where you are going to have the most success, and that's where you are going to, as little as possible, waste your leasing staff's time. So, when they are interacting with prospective residents, they're really spending their time closing, and not having to sift through a bunch of unqualified people. If you'd like to learn more about targeted marketing, I want to recommend just a few resources where we have spent some time writing some eBooks that might help you out as you are working on this project for your company. In Survival Guide for the Solo Apartment Marketing Team, we spend some time talking about how to build the kind of buyer personas to inform your marketing efforts so that you can reach most effectively the people who want to live at your community. In Google AdWords for Apartment Marketing, we lay out a strategy for how apartment marketers can leverage Google's marketing capabilities to get in front of the most precise segment of the population that wants to live with you. In The Future of Apartment Marketing, that's kind of an introductory, general, big-picture overview of the kind of targeted marketing that we are talking about. And in The Signal and the Noise: Apartment Marketing Metrics that Matter, we're honing in on how to use your analytics and the metrics that you have available to you in order to define the people who are most likely to rent from you, and to find out whether your marketing is actually reaching those people or not. As I mentioned earlier, I also did a one-hour presentation called "How to Target the Most Qualified Apartment Shoppers Online" in our Apartment Marketing Masterclass Seminars series. Every month we produce an educational seminar on various apartment marketing topics, and the very first seminar we produced was on this topic of generating highly qualified leads, because the only thing worse than generating no leads would be to generate the kind of bad leads that still never sign leases but that waste your leasing staff's time. This seminar is now available on-demand, and you can download the slide deck, and get access to a bunch of other resources--some that we have produced, some that other people have produced--right on our website. That's all for this video, but thanks so much for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to the Rentping Media YouTube channel to get great new apartment marketing content as soon as we publish it, and be sure to head over and subscribe to our blog on RentpingMedia.com to stay on top of everything that's happening in the world of apartment marketing. Again, I'm Jacob Gerber, Rentping Media's Senior Marketing Director, and I'll look forward to talking with you more next time.