12 Holiday Apartment Marketing Ideas

This time of year apartment leasing traffic is historically slower than the rest of the year. That means leasing professionals have a little bit more time to focus on their apartment community’s residents and people who have not leased an apartment but may have visited or contacted the leasing center. In this article Tami Siewruk provides you with a few apartment marketing ideas to keep you extra busy.

1.    Get creative, follow the trend of personalization and send out a personalized holiday card or e-card to your residents and potential residents. While you are at it, why not reach out to the people who visited your community but did not lease? This helps your community stand out during the holidays and lets your current residents know they’re appreciated, especially this time of year.
2.    Create a limited-time offer to encourage your residents to refer their friends and family! You never know what’s on your residents wish list and that added incentive and deadline might be just the push they need to focus on referrals.
3.    Launch an apartment email marketing campaign. Think about what the people on your contact list need during the holiday season and offer something of value to them by email. Whether it’s a limited-time offer on a resident referral program or tips for holiday home entertaining, keep the message simple and be festive in your design. Share coupons from neighborhood businesses that you have set up just for them.
4.    Switch up your website design and social media images to reflect the holiday season. It’s a quick, simple way to connect with your resident base by reminding them of what you share in common.
5.    Get personal on social media. Share employee holiday photos, stories of your favorite holiday memories, family recipes, holiday playlists and other fun, personal anecdotes. This leads to a huge increase in engagement and friends, family and residents love seeing familiar faces. Plus, it is a great way to get the entire community team in on the holiday fun. Don’t let the communication be a one-way street.
6.    Encourage your residents to share photos of their favorite holiday moments and more to boost engagement on social media.
7.    Make charitable donations to organizations or initiatives your team cares about. Then let your residents know about it. Write and distribute a press release about your donation or post a photo of your team collecting items or dropping off donations across your social media platforms.
8.    Pushing a mobile and tablet-friendly strategy has never been as vital as it is this season. Because so many people will be out and about, shopping and visiting family, your holiday marketing must easily reach them on their smartphones. Make sure your email marketing is optimized for mobile devices and you have a responsive website design. Rest assured people will be looking for directions to your apartment community to visit friends so make certain to check how directions are given from sites like Map Quest and Google maps.
9.    Host a holiday kick-off event or open house to bring residents and their friends into your community. This could include a tree-lighting ceremony, holiday party complete with a visit from Old Saint Nick, or a “sneak peek” at a new apartment community that is being built.
10. Launch a holiday contest on social media. Contests are great ways to generate buzz about your apartment community while increasing engagement and fan count. This can be anything from a caption contest (i.e. Guess which sweater we have voted the ugliest and win ______!) to selecting a random winner once your page hits a certain number of likes. Choose a relevant prize, run your contest through a third-party app (Facebook’s official contest rules), and make certain you include social sharing options.
11. Write a blog post with advice on navigating the holiday season, as it applies to your residents and the apartment community’s neighborhood. Your audience is always looking for timely, valuable content, so make it easy for them to find on your website.
12. Last, but most importantly, make certain your holiday marketing is measurable. The goal is to track the return on your investment so you can create an even more profitable campaign next year. A landing page for the watersoftenermaestro.com email campaign, for example, can help you monitor and track conversion rates and fix what’s not working.

All of these apartment marketing ideas are tried and tested by Tami herself!