The holidays are coming up, and you need to put together a campaign that will work for your entire portfolio without breaking your budget and missing your deadline. How do you incorporate so many properties into a campaign? Where do you draw the line in personalizing every piece? At Catalyst, we have been working on a portfolio-wide Cyber Monday campaign that was able to do that with a little outside-the-box thinking and by going back to the basics.
Here is the video that serves as the central focus of the campaign:
So how do you get your campaign together efficiently and effectively?
- Keep It Simple
We’ve all heard it before: Don’t overcomplicate your campaign strategy. For our Cyber Monday campaign, we knew we wanted to include close to 35 separate properties, but we also needed to manage our budget and time so we weren’t redoing everything 35 different ways. Consider keeping your campaign strategy simple with an overarching message that applies to everyone so you don’t have to make changes for each individual property.
- Get Everyone Involved
When keeping a campaign of this size simple, it may be harder to get everyone on board and feeling that they’re getting their money’s worth. Make sure you’re still involving every property and working their branding in somehow. We made a video as part of our Cyber Monday campaign, and since we couldn’t shoot a separate video for each individual property, we worked their branding in very subtly. Every property has a piece of swag, a print piece, or a picture of their amenities worked in to the video.
- Consider Additional Uses
While including every property in our Cyber Monday video allowed us to make sure they felt included, it also has an added benefit of additional promotion. Properties can post the video on social media and encourage residents to find their logo in the video for a prize or to count how many times their pieces show up throughout the course of the video. It doesn’t have to be a large reward, but this gets residents further engaged with the campaign and, hopefully, results in higher conversion rates at the end.
- Recognize Your Strengths
Although our budget was limited in creating our video because the campaign involved so many other people, it made sense to send team members to the nearest property and shoot the video ourselves. Sure, we could have used stock video and imagery that would have looked decent, although oddly forced together. We could have even asked property staff to shoot different scenes and provide them to us. However, the time it took to send team members to get exactly what we needed for our purposes saved time and allowed for a better outcome.
No two campaigns are the same, nor should they be, but these tips can help to get you thinking about how your campaigns still tie in to your overall branding and the bigger picture your company is trying to portray. Just because you tend to follow the same calendar every year doesn’t mean you have to keep doing the same campaigns. Try incorporating different ideas into your next campaign to give it new life and see how it does — you may just find that, by mixing things up a little bit, you were able to get more residents’ attention and, at the end of the day, more leases signed.