Catalyst was engaged to create a campaign to drive new leases and lease renewals across the Campus Advantage portfolio on one specific day — Cyber Monday. The campaign needed to resonate universally with 18- to 24-year-old college students, as well as both prospects and residents in 20 different marketplaces across the country. It was imperative to create easily interchangeable collateral because each property had two offers they were promoting — one to prospects and one to residents — and no two offers were the same across the portfolio. Additionally, since this was the client’s inaugural Cyber Monday campaign, each piece of collateral required highly granular tracking in order to test the effectiveness of different offers and the effectiveness of the different collateral promoting each offer so future campaigns could improve upon the foundation of this one.
The Solution
The creative pieces employed a retro-computer theme to appeal to students across all the marketplaces. Since today’s college students were born in the 1990s, the term “cyber” has a retro ring to it that was played up with old-style Macintosh computers, DOS-style logo treatments for each property, and visual images of outer space. Catalyst created templates that allowed content to easily be changed based on each property’s specific offer prior to deployment. This included social media headers and posts, emails, and landing pages, all of which were branded for each individual property. By creating templates, Catalyst was able to reduce setup time for each property’s individual branding and create a cohesive campaign that was easily recognizable in markets with multiple Campus Advantage properties. Additionally, each piece of collateral was assigned a promotional code that the resident or prospect could enter on application forms to allow Catalyst to track engagement and conversions across different collateral and provide reporting at the conclusion of the campaign. These promotional codes were unique to each of the 100+ pieces of campaign collateral.
The Results
The Cyber Monday campaign resulted in 643 inquiries submitted on landing pages and overall increased website traffic across the participating properties. The top two performing properties experienced an increase in sessions of more than 300%, as well as an increase in conversions of over 200%. Across the portfolio, 401 residents renewed their leases, and an additional 108 new leases were signed for the 2015–2016 academic year. As a whole, this put the properties 233 leases ahead of where they were during the same time period in the previous year.
The Challenge