Bringing Occupancy from 83 percent to 95.5 percent in one leasing season took some strategic thinking about marketing for The Collier Companies, whose portfolio consists of 37 communities and 9,800 apartments in the Southeast. Collier’s Director of Marketing, Jason Velazquez, offers student housing managers five lessons he’s learned to send occupancy soaring.
1. Your instincts cannot be trusted. If you are over 25 years old, the notion that you are no longer “cool” or “hip” can be hard to swallow. A good test to determine your “coolness” is if you actually use the words “cool” or “hip” to describe something. If so, your time has passed. My job as a marketer is not to find what is currently cool, but to find what is at the cusp of going mainstream. If I find out about the latest social networking website through the news or hearsay, I’m probably too late because it already is mainstream. I try to be well-versed in mediums that “early adaptors” are attracted to. My rule of thumb is if I don’t understand why something is cool, I’m probably on the right track.
2. Floor plans first, community second. Sure, marketing a strong sense of community is important, but rarely is it the determining factor when a student chooses where to live. Google Analytics suggest more than half of visitors to our website go straight to the floor plan page, while only about 8 percent click on “community events” or other similar links. We make a conscious effort to make floor plans the centerpiece of all online and print advertising and save the community branding for when prospects walk through the door.
3. Master your online brand. Having a community website with pictures and a “contact us” form is no longer enough. We focus on having a strong and sophisticated online presence. Designing our website with a clear “call to action” that stands out and encourages visitors to contact our communities was an important piece to the puzzle. We attempt to drive traffic to our websites by advertising where our demographic spends most of their time online. I find the most effective way to discover where our demographic is spending their time online is to simply pay attention. What links are people posting on popular networking sites like Facebook, Digg, or Stumbleupon? What website does my 22-year-old sister go to when she’s procrastinating with her college homework?
4. Be quicker than the market. The student housing market changes daily, so it seemed silly to rely on pre-lease data that came out once a week. We knew going into the most recent leasing season that success would rely heavily on the ability to make well-informed decisions quicker than our competition. We were able to efficiently roll up a daily leasing progress report for all communities, which helped us adjust rate and strategy as often as needed.
5. Price over concession. We realize that our residents would much rather have reasonable and competitive rent rates than an iPod or a complicated concessions structure. Focusing on lower rent rates rather than concessions also made us more agile in adjusting strategy. This way, we don’t have to worry about ordering and tracking gift cards or whether the latest gadget was in stock or not.
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The Psychology of College Student Marketing
When marketing to prospective student residents, it helps to get inside their head. Following are seven things students think about your
marketing campaign.
We think for ourselves. It may take a while to win us over. We don’t give our trust or show respect just because we are told to by mass media. We need to be won over and held onto with consistently good services or we will move on to the next guy.
Get to the point. Just tell us what we need to know and forget the “fluff.” We don’t have time!
Keep it simple. Visually, that is. Use one large photo, one large headline, one or two great offers, an address, website, phone number and anything else that is a top priority. We want you to keep our attention and at the same time still get your point across.
We like buzz. We want to be a part of anything that is new and really relevant, such as an event on campus, a new place to check out, or the hottest new product/service/food around. Offer us an incentive and we are there. We are very brand conscious—we want the newest and the best.
We like free! Give us something to try for free and we will come back to
buy more. (College students do have a surprising amount of disposable income, since many still rely on their parents for cash.)
We talk. If something or some place on campus catches our eye, we talk about it. If we like you, we tell our friends on Facebook, Twitter and around campus. We care what our friends are saying and word spreads quickly.
Get fresh with us. We enjoy funny and edgy words in advertising. It’s OK to walk the line of “tasteful” with headlines and photos. It draws us in. We will want to know more and will keep reading. But be careful—don’t try too hard to “speak our language.” We’ll see right through it.
Kim Cory is Sales and Marketing Manager, University Village, Columbus, Ohio