How do you connect with your prospects? In most communities, members of the sales team call prospective customers and schedule appointments on a regular basis.
If you have a marketing program in place, you’re likely connecting with your prospects in dozens of additional ways every day. Conceived and executed correctly, the various components of your marketing plan clearly identify your customers’ needs and spell out the physical and emotional benefits your community offers.
Marketing serves as the bridge connecting you with your prospects. To effectively engage your audience, your marketing program should include four key components: advertising, public relations, community reputation and sales.
Advertising
You know an ad when you see one. It’s that popup on a website, or the pages in magazines between the content you want to read. For some people, it means time for a snack break during the Super Bowl. For others, though, the ads are the main event.
Advertising is ubiquitous in the modern world. It appears in magazines and newspapers, and it’s on TV, radio, posters, the internet, the sides of trucks and more.
Although it’s paid for by a sponsoring company or organization, advertising usually is considered to be an impersonal form of communication. Historically, the effectiveness of advertising has been somewhat scattershot — sometimes reaching extremely broad audiences like that of the Super Bowl.
But with new advertising technologies constantly emerging, your marketing agency now can provide you with multiple options for targeted messaging to reach specific prospects.
Public Relations
The purpose of public relations is generating publicity. Historically, public relations reps have worked to get stories placed about their clients — either by sending out press releases or working the phones. Positive results of PR efforts can include media outlets running press releases as sent or using the releases as a basis for a fresh print article or TV news piece.
Today, though, public relations goes beyond cultivating good relationships with media editors. PR professionals often act as public representatives of their clients, giving interviews and appearing on TV news shows.
As with other disciplines involved in marketing, public relations has moved online. PR pros still write their press releases, but they optimize them with the appropriate SEO keywords. And they send those releases to a much wider range of publishers, including social media platforms and podcasters.
Community Reputation
Closely related to PR is the reputation of your community. The public perception of your brand is one of your organization’s most-valuable assets. Keeping public opinion on the positive end of the scale requires a constant stream of relevant, positive content.
PR professionals promote your community reputation in a variety of ways, including:
- Your blog. By actively maintaining a blog with a constant stream of relevant, engaging and timely content, you keep your customers coming back to your site. Even more importantly, you encourage them to talk to others about you and share the content you post.
- A community newsletter, sent out approximately once a month, grabs your prospects’ attention with short items of interest. Many people have become immune to the constant stream of spam in their email boxes, but an attractive, well-designed and well-written newsletter can capture interest and encourage social sharing.
- Social media activity. Connecting with customers on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other popular social platforms requires frequent posting of interesting, relevant content. But it also requires engaging in a two-way conversation with your customers and prospective customers. An adept PR professional pays attention to the stream and jumps in quickly to respond to any issues. The same goes for review sites like Yelp.
Sales
The overall goal of your marketing program is to get prospects to move to your community, and sales completes the cycle. Your salespeople are among your most important team members, but you’re also part of the team. You must ensure that your sales staff has the information and answers they need to keep prospects engaged through the sales cycle.
In addition to your reps picking up the phone and scheduling appointments, what are other ways your community can make sales? Sales boils down to relationships and any method you can use to create and enhance relationships will yield dividends. Visiting prospects in their homes, writing personal thank-you notes and responding promptly to emails and phone calls are all ways of building human connections.
Pulling it all Together
For a comprehensive marketing program, you need all these crucial components: advertising, PR, community reputation enhancement and sales. What’s the glue that holds them together? Research.
Using customer surveys and other research methods, you gain feedback and valuable insight on what you’re doing right and where you can improve. With that information under your belt, you can build a marketing program to fully support your occupancy goals.
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