Cardinal Group Management received Gold at MHN’s Excellence Awards 2022 for Best Marketing Campaign, which was aimed at its student housing segment—”Home Is Where the Beat Drops.” The idea behind the campaign played upon the young generation’s “lust for life.” Specifically, Cardinal offered its student residents the chance to win a four-ticket all-inclusive festival package to an event of their own choosing. The concept proved a solid winner, especially after the stringent social distancing measures enforced during the height of the pandemic. There was only one rule to participate in the ruffle: Be a Cardinal resident by signing a lease, or remain one by renewing.
To what end did this campaign help Cardinal Group’s portfolio of student housing properties, which at conception time was in its early stages of recovery from the pandemic? According to analytics, the leasing rate was up 7 percent annually, and concessions were down by 60 percent. More so, even better than the nearly 1 million impressions generated by the campaign is that it has a long shelf-life, with users still generating content to this day.
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Avery Lewis, marketing manager at Cardinal, talked to Multi-Housing News about their award-winning campaign and the company’s overall marketing strategy.
What are your responsibilities within Cardinal Group? What stimulates your creativity?
As manager of marketing services and programs, I oversee our campaigns, marketing platforms and vendor relationships. CGM marketing also works closely with AgencyFIFTY3, our very own internal marketing agency, with which we constantly share ideas to stimulate innovation.
We regularly have brainstorming sessions within our teams, letting fun thoughts lead us to takeaways of action and conceptualized ideas. We also lean heavily on our onsite team members to spark new concepts since they work most closely with our target demographic.
What are the key elements of Cardinal Group’s marketing strategy?
At Cardinal Group, the best idea always wins. We encourage our teams to be creative and innovative, and most importantly, to have fun.
We use our proprietary business intelligence platform to assess data points pulled from multiple sources to help us identify what is and is not working in our communities. From there, we curate what marketing channels we need to invest more into to drive the results we need at each asset. At that point, we highly encourage creativity with our teams to think outside the box and utilize all our platforms in a new and exciting way.
What makes a marketing campaign successful?
Ultimately, the buy-in and engagement from our team members is what has made our campaigns so successful. When our onsite teams are excited about the themes, it translates to prospects and current residents through organic social content, resident life events, messaging, and so on. They’re constantly pushing out new, fun concepts that continue to resonate with our resident bases across the country.
Let’s zoom in on the award-winning “Home Is Where the Beat Drops” campaign. What inspired this marketing campaign?
As we all know, COVID periods drove everyone to spend more time connecting digitally. These isolation periods had a heavy, negative impact on mental health. So, as we were brainstorming for the upcoming year’s campaign, we thought of routine things Gen Z was doing to help combat this, such as listening to music and scrolling on TikTok. Since our residents couldn’t attend thrilling music festivals in person, they were spending hours a day on TikTok, listening to viral sounds and watching others dance, simply for fun. We were hopeful that in 2022 we’d be able to gift one lucky resident and three of their friends with a trip of a lifetime, to a music festival of their choice as they began to be hosted again.
What resources has Cardinal Group invested in this campaign—time, people, technology and finances?
From start to finish, campaigns that run during a small portion of the leasing cycle can take around two years to fully complete and involve hundreds of team members including team members from accounting, operations and legal.
Almost two years ago, CGM Marketing and AgencyFIFTY3 partnered with Benson, a marketing solution vendor to take our campaigns to the next level. With their innovative technology, we had a dedicated campaign “store” where teams could order branded collateral, edit e-blasts and flyers and more.
Did you measure the impact the campaign has had on Cardinal Group’s student housing portfolio? What do the analytics show?
Impact tracking throughout our campaigns is extremely important for us. Although we look at similar statistics year-over-year, such as renewal percentages and leasing velocity, this particular campaign had a heavy social media presence, which was also something we constantly had our eye on.
Through the “Home Is Where The Beat Drops” campaign, we saw a portfolio-wide increase in prelease by 7 percent year-over-year, while the total concession spend decreased by 60 percent. Our shared incentive/concession was able to help drive down this individual community cost.
With social ads and video results, we saw a total of 892,472 impressions, 78,890 clicks to the campaign ads and an impressive clickthrough rate of 7.5 percent.
Will you be repeating the campaign?
Each year we conceptualize campaigns based on what we believe would best resonate and capture our target demographic. Although the concept of “Home Is Where the Beat Drops” will not be repeated, we will be taking successful strategies from that one to our next.
Tell us about “The Open Door” project.
“The Open Door” project is Cardinal Group Management’s passion project, where we connect our residents back to the community by ownership groups donating money on their behalf when they sign a lease to live in our communities. We then take these donations and partner with a non-profit organization that helps identify incredible human beings that have dealt with obstacles in life and deserve to have their “door opened.”
When budgets are tight, how small a budget is big enough to invest in marketing? What solutions are there for smaller companies that cannot afford to spend much on paid marketing?
At Cardinal, we pride ourselves on doing more with less, and love for all our communities to be included in our initiatives, despite smaller budgets. Completing campaigns at a national scale lets us share the design and production costs across more than 115 communities instead of a singular one. Not only does this save on spending, but it also helps deliver consistency while sparking inspiration through shared ideas nationwide.
What’s in store for Cardinal Group’s marketing in 2023?
Our team’s got a lot of fun things in the works for this year! Our department is continuing to focus on innovation and technology in our marketing strategies. We will be onboarding some new products and platforms to help automate processes so that our onsite teams can truly focus on providing the best resident experience.
Learn about the 2023 MHN Excellence Awards
