Adding An Emotional Context to Sales and Leasing Offices

CPS SalesTouch: Adding Emotion to the Sales Center!

No matter how the numbers and facts line-up, a good portion of the home shopping experience is based on emotion.

Humans are Influenced by Emotion

It's in our nature. It's worth considering how to add emotion to your marketing messaging as sales/leasing offices are often the first place visitors encounter the full range of your brand and product.

Include Storytelling Features

Storytelling is one of the best content strategies for creating an emotional connection. Stories are tactile and create a visual picture.

No doubt you've heard stories and imagined yourself within that context. That's what makes a good story as it pulls listeners in and actually makes them a co-creator of the message. Stories make content more interesting and more memorable. 

Make Sure You've Maximized Color

While there are many psychological studies as to color messaging and impact, it's enough to say that color has an impact and should be a major factor to consider as part of your emotional context.

Incorporate Social Proof

We've mentioned collaborative consumption when discussing today's empowered consumers.  Today's home shoppers bring friends -- just as they always have.  But, in many cases, they're "cloud" friends! These advisers are available through social media -- providing feedback, offering reviews, providing info as to sales and trends. 

Your story needs to be part of this social cloud.  One of the easiest ways to provide social proof, if you aren't displaying social media onsite, is to incorporate testimonials. 

Get Interactive!

Scroll back to the top -- emotion is tactile! Take a look at Cornerstone Communities' interactive SalesTouch kiosk: can you imagine the conversations? What a gorgeous sunset! Do you like fishing? I'd love to walk that every evening! Are there restaurants on the pier?

Interactive touch presentations encourage emotional connections. Did you realize using touch generates entirely different (and more positive) brain activity than using a mouse? Take a look at Bob Musa's book, Creating Customers with Interactive Touch Screen Digital Signage, for more on the power of touch!

Multifamily: Doubling Down on Marketing Effectiveness

From a multifamily perspective, 2018 has experienced positive economic growth. There's near-term confidence, according to a recent RCLCO Sentiment Study, in the underlying economy despite background concern regarding increasing interest rates and the equities markets.

CPS SalesTouch: Marketing Tools for Your Connected Consumer

Adam Ducker published a thought provoking article in Builder and Developer Magazine titled Outlook Landscape. He suggested asking if there's an upcoming correction in the multifamily market and what developers should consider in advance.

It's Very Difficult to Time Any Market

Ducker commented that while it's always alluring to try to outsmart market cycles, it's very difficult to do so. He did suggest, however, that multifamily developers take steps now to be prepared for any change in market conditions.

One suggestion makes sense in any market: double down now on marketing effectiveness and customer knowledge tools.

In Ducker's opinion, it's too late to start looking at the latest marketing tools when things get competitive.

Engaging, Interactive Marketing tools are Available!

CPS has been offering SalesTouch, an interactive touchscreen system, to multifamily developers since 2010.  They're an engaging marketing tool, designed to connect with today's consumer and particularly effective in areas with weather (and it doesn't matter if that means too hot, rainy, or freezing cold!).

Why not offer a virtual tour of the property -- and surrounding neighborhood -- when it's frightful outside?  You're already prepared with property view images, virtual tours, drag 'n drop furniture and neighborhood hot spots! Add in on-demand brochures and the ability to display the presentation on your website on on tablets and..you've combined marketing effectiveness with customer knowledge tools! Your leasing office has just been kicked-up from static signage and stacks of pre-printed brochures!

Invest Now When Cash Flow is Healthy

Ducker makes an additional point: when markets get competitive, it's too late to up your game.  Now is the time to invest in these new tools: when cash flow is healthy and equity partners are open to exploring new directions.

How to Leverage Your Social Media into Engaging Experiences

There's a great recent article in Multifamily Executive featuring an interview with Holli Beckman, VP Marketing at WC Smith.  She's distinguished herself as one of the industry's leading social media experts.

One of the takeaways was this question/response:

Start Social Media conversation in your sales/leasing office!

Q: Is Social Media more about engaging with current residents or attracting new ones?

A: Both. Social media is where your customers are every single day and multiple times a day. 

Take a look at CPS' Social Media Wall and consider how it creates opportunities for leveraging your social media content creation and conversation to your community location.

The Wall takes traditional marketing copy and content (think video, images) and integrates social media content to create an ever-changing, constantly evolving story about your brand, community and audience -- Instagrammable moments, engaging experiences.

Everyone in your audience (current residents, home shoppers, your marketing staff) can join the conversation with a post to specific Twitter and Instagram hash tags -- and you have the ability to curate posted content before it displays on the Wall. Now, your social media content is available to everyone walking into the sales/leasing office.  You're creating a new conversation space!

Some hashtags will always display -- as will traditional marketing copy and images.  But...have a St. Patricks Day event coming up? Create a special hash tag and generate specific audience content just for a couple days. Same for your upcoming Spring Special Savings event and Homeowner's Friday Night Mixer!

Have you seen the recent Reevoo study finding 70% of consumers place peer recommendations and reviews above professionally written content?  Take advantage of 2016's marketing hot topic, CGC (consumer-generated content), to engage your audience and start conversations in your sales or leasing offices with CPS' Social Media Wall.

Selling New Homes? How Your Neighborhood Can Win Over Resale

Home shoppers today can find many reasons to purchase new: improved construction processes (think structural reinforcements if you're selling in tornado- or hurricane-prone areas); energy efficient appliances and related savings, customization choices...no doubt, much of your sales and marketing attention focuses on these tangible items (and it should!).

Close to Everything: Take a Look at What Interests You!

At the same time, Marilyn Lewis' article, 20 Signs You're Buying in a Great Neighborhood, reminds us "a great neighborhood sells a home"!

What are you doing to promote your new neighborhood? Lewis' article (you can read it here) suggests the first thing you can do is: get out and learn about the neighborhood! Take a walk, pick up a latte, locate school resource guides and, soon, you'll feel comfortable talking-up the area to your home shoppers.


Lots going on in this walkable neighborhood!

Of course, there are brochures, guides and the like but...why not put technology to work introducing your neighborhood to your home shoppers?  Make it an engaging exploration; add personalized touches (we love the John Marshall's "Must Try" pick for their dining examples); Go Interactive!

Take a look at the SalesTouch interactive touchscreen presentation location displays above and to the right: you're able to view the local  area map and select a topic of interest mirroring

What Builds a Customer Relationship? Conversation!

We all can recognize an essential fact about conversations: it's really difficult to have one with someone you don't know!  Where do you start? Do we have a common interest?

Interactive Touchscreens Engage & Start the Conversation

That's one reason we champion interactive touchscreens for use in sales and information centers: they get conversations started.  Between home shoppers, between consumers and sales agents, even between prospects and a touch monitor!

People walk up to a touch monitor when its visually inviting.  They've seen a message they're interested in and want to start engaging.  In other words, they're starting the conversation with your brand!

Take a look at the image above: the home shopper has viewed Camberley Homes' Lakeshore floor plan and taken time to personally note they love the Open Kitchen.

What can we gather from this interaction? We'll suggest that a conversation has been started, the sales

Interactive Touchscreen Systems: Encouraging Discovery

If you're a regular Solutions reader, you've seen our blogs regarding the value of interactivity.

We've talked about engagement, narrowcasting, the value of touch in decision-making and how using technology in your sales offices/information centers keeps your brand in synch with today's consumers. Whether Gen X, Y or Boomer, today's homebuyer is connected.

Recently, a CPS SalesTouch client posted a YouTube video highlighting their new Grand Palm Discovery Center located in Venice, Florida.

Go Interactive: take discover to an entirely new level!

Their SalesTouch presentation actively encourages the home shopper to explore and discover Grand Palm. The presentation, so colorful and full of life, provides actionable touch points: it encourages homeshoppers to visit the surrounding neighborhood, learn about Grand Palm's amenities, find a floorplan that meets their needs and customize it with desired options, as well as select and place furniture in the selected floorplan.

Take a minute and compare this experience to a buyer walking into a sales office with passive signage and a static brochure.

Everything about the Grand Palm's interactive system involves an action verb -- designed to actively engage the home shopper from the minute they walk into the Discovery Center.

And, when you think about it, shouldn't the homeshopping experience encourage discovery? Your buyers are looking for something new; interactivity actively encourages the process, helps answer questions and encourages the homeshopper to imagine living in this community!

Doesn't this type of marketing tool build your brand, as well?  Your brand is part of the connected world; it recognizes how critical the exploration part of home shopping is to the consumer.  And, take a look back at the Grand Palm presentation, above: wouldn't you want to start touching to discover  what this is all about?

Interested in finding out more about CPS' interactive touchscreen system, SalesTouch? We're available at www.cpsusa.com.

Get Your Audience Engaged; Do Something That Really Stands Out

We're readers: books, magazines, blogs, you name it!  What's new in technology, marketing, the user experience, computer and mobile hardware ... all the areas we touch on with CPS' software products and our interactive touchscreen product, SalesTouch. 

And, we like to highlight articles we think others would enjoy, as well.

Power of Touch: Engage Your Prospects; Stand Out!

A recent Multifamily Insiders blog by Brittany McBride titled Let's Give Them Something to Talk About: Getting Your Audience to Engage with Your Brand is worth checking out; you can read it here.  Tongue-in-cheek she asks if anyone would every say, "Nope, I don't want anyone talking about me or engaging with my brand, said no one ever!"  She talks about the value of "word of mouse" as an influential tool.

We'll suggest the "power of touch" is equally persuasive.  Studies go so far to say as people touch, they make decisions.

And, if you're utilizing an interactive touchscreen system as a marketing tool in your sales or leasing office, consumers are touching your product!  And making decisions: I like Plan 2 better than Plan 1, for example.  Interactive touchscreens get consumers engaged and making decisions..who wouldn't want that?

Jeff Shore, the sales training guru, suggests (in his May 15 blog entitled Why You?)  that every sales person needs to ask, "What will make my product stand out?" to a home shopper as they go from community to community, looking at seemingly endless possibilities.

Shore suggests your sales presentation is key. What is different? What will really stand out in your buyer's mind?  What can you do to make your buyer feel differently about your community than all the others they have visited?

Again, we'll suggest the power of touch!  Let them browse through floorplans that meet their criteria, check out what's going on in the neighborhood that meets their needs (walking trails for one; nearby medical facilities for another), move some furniture around to see how things will look ( we've illustrated the Move it/Move it feature offered by SalesTouch above).

Engage your consumer; stand out in the marketplace; it's all possible with touch!