Recent statistics say Gen Z spends about seven to nine hours a day on their phones. When marketing to this cohort, specifically college students, it’s important for owners to be thinking about how to meet them online. This year’s marketing and advertising grand in the 2024 MFE Awards does just that.
When it came time to advertise preleasing for Rambler, an 817-bed student housing development near the University of Texas at Austin (UT), real estate investment firm LV Collective knew it wanted to deploy a full-funnel, mobile-first marketing campaign to reach its target audience of UT students, particularly the early adopters and the socially savvy campus influencers.
The campaign started in July 2022 for an August 2023 move-in and included three key strategies. The team wanted to educate, engage, and build trust with the student audience on social media, including Instagram Reels, TikTok, and YouTube; amplify their reach with TikTok advertising; and develop a mobile-first website and email campaign to drive conversions.
LV Collective first started by educating on social media.
“TikTok trends and giveaway campaigns are common in student housing,” says LV Collective. “But, using social media for education and trust-building—answer questions, transparently talking about pricing, process, problems, and even competitors—that was uncharted territory.”
In order to make its educational videos engaging, the team caught attention with the right hook, created a knowledge gap by asking a question the audience wanted to know the answer to, was authentic, kept it short with concise messaging, used visual variety, and skipped high-production video.
Over four months, roughly 40 videos hit 300,000-plus views across TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts, indicating a wide reach and strong interest.
With organic TikTok success, it decided to test the waters on advertising.
“The results proved that when done right, TikTok can bring meaningful awareness for a fraction of the cost of alternatives,” says the firm. “We boosted timely, relevant videos that answered our audience’s questions and found both clicks and impressions to be cheaper on TikTok.”
Last, the team decided to take a mobile-first approach to designing Rambler’s website., opposed to designing for a desktop first and then adjusting to be responsive on mobile.
By putting its entire focus on mobile marketing, Rambler saw unprecedented velocity, says the firm. Leasing kicked off in August 2022, and, in one week, Rambler leaped from 6.85% to 27.78% preleased. The following week it jumped to 41.37%.
The project achieved 95% preleased by January 2023 and delivered 100% preleased for the 2023-24 academic year. Of the leases, 52% were signed by people who never took a tour, signaling 100% digital interactions.
