Today’s customer expects a highly customized experience at every touchpoint in the buyer’s journey. Before you can deliver this kind of experience though, you need to develop multifamily buyer personas for your brand. Buyer personas help ensure your marketing strategy engages buyers and generates leads. Creating buyer personas and journeys allows you to determine what kind of content you need and should include delivery strategies. Understand where your buyers find and consume information and then tailor your marketing strategy to show up with the right message at the right time.

Why You Need Buyer Personas

As multifamily markets become more competitive, it’s important for your properties to stand out. Creating buyer personas allows you to target specific groups of ideal residents. Personas represent fictional, generalized characters that meet various needs, goals, and patterns. You need buyer personas so you can understand and develop marketing materials that align with their needs and interests. Multifamily marketing teams want to know who they are selling to in order to provide unique experiences for potential residents.

Creating buyer personas for your properties helps pre-qualify leads by targeting your ideal renters. Showing up in the buyer’s journey at the touchpoints they use most frequently makes it easier to market to them.

How to Develop Personas

Most multifamily brands need to develop more than one buyer persona to represent ideal residents. Buyer personas are developed based on a variety of factors including demographics, behaviors,interests, and your understanding of the challenges and motivations buyers face when selecting a new home. Use a data-driven approach when creating personas of your ideal customers.

  1. Identify factors about each persona’s personal background. Demographic information provides a great place to start drafting your personas because it’s easy to obtain and it paints a personal picture of your residents. Demographic information includes marital status, annual income, neighborhood, educational background, personal interests, and career path. Focus on customer interests when describing their personal background in your persona development.
  2. Discover their biggest challenges. You want to be able to solve a problem for your target audiences. What challenges do your ideal renters face in the current economy? In their personal lives? In finding a new apartment in general? Go into detail and illuminate how these challenges make them feel.
  3. Find out where your ideal residents go for information. Where do your residents go their research? What touchpoints along the buyer’s journey do they spend the most time? Knowing where your ideal residents spend their time online and where they research purchases will help you flush out a marketing strategy that appeals to the persona and how they shop for a new apartment.

Creating your multifamily personas should begin with customer and prospect interviews, as well as interviews with your sales and customer service teams. Sending out surveys also helps you in conducting your own research. Real quotes from customers and prospects can be used to bring your personas to life.

After defining your personas, create a buyer’s journey that will help your team convert them into customers. It’s important to understand the process your buyers go through when considering a new apartment. Based on your research and the buyer personas you’ve created, you can develop a content strategy that speaks to buyers directly.

Compliance with Fair Housing Laws

Remember, when developing your buyer personas you must be compliant with fair housing laws. Your personas should not discriminate based on race, religion, national origin, sex, familial status, or disability.

Customize Your Customer Experience

Deliver a highly customized customer experience by developing multifamily buyer personas for your brand. Qualify your leads by meeting your ideal resident at each touchpoint throughout the buyer’s journey with content crafted to speak to them directly. Knowing where and how your ideal residents consume content allows you to engage with them and nurture them through the buyer’s journey, leading to more conversions. Develop personas of your ideal renters as part of your overall branding and marketing strategy.  

Download the G5 branding checklist to learn more.