The bank of mum and dad: how to market your BtR scheme

With inner city areas seeing an increasing rise in apartment prices, how are you expecting young professionals to be able to afford accommodation in your BtR scheme?

These days, it’s rare that young adults are able to move away from home and buy or rent their own apartment as the expenses are too high. For this reason, it’s important that you tweak your strategy to market your BtR scheme towards their parents.

Parents hold the purse strings and are the decision makers in most economical family matters, as more often than not, they’re supporting the move financially. So, now that you know who you should be targeting, where do you find your new target audience?

News publications

What news publications do your target audience read? If you’re based in Manchester, for example, the Manchester Evening News would be your target readership – with a 16% growth in web readership last year, the MEN remains the country’s most popular online newspaper.

Newspaper and online advertorials are a great way of targeting your parent audience as they still primarily use certified news outlets to obtain information or news of current affairs.

Whilst this may be a good way to reach the intended audience, it’s a costly way to advertise so may only be suitable for projects with a higher budget.

Facebook advertising

Did you know that 72% of 50-64-year olds use Facebook?

And did you know that you can use Facebook targeting to specifically market your BtR scheme directly onto the timelines of your intended audience, using filters including age, sex, location, profession, salary, hobbies and interests? You can even be as precise as to target people who identify as parents on their social media platforms!

For this reason, Facebook advertising is a sure-fire way to get your scheme in front of mums and dads. Oh, and the beauty of Facebook adverts is that you can throw as much or as little money at it as you want, and therefore it’s a much more accessible advertising method.

To find out more about how to use Facebook advertising for the property sector, read our blog here.

Broadcast advertising

And finally, for those with a brave budget, you could always consider advertising your brand new BtR scheme via broadcast advertising.

If you’re targeting parents that are aged between 40-55, you should do a bit of research to find out what their viewing habits are – do they love their soaps or are they more prone to a bit of Gogglebox?

The cost of a 30 second TV ad varies entirely on the viewing numbers – so for anything after midnight you’re looking at around £3.85 per 1000 viewers, a lot more if you’re aiming for a primetime slot – between 5-10pm on a weekday – and if you can’t get rid of your money quick enough you could advertise during the World Cup Final and be set back around £2 million, but we wouldn’t advise that.

Perfect!

Overall, these are three of the best routes to drive your brand’s awareness and market your BtR scheme so it’s seen by all the right people.

If you need help with your own property marketing efforts or would like to discuss other PR and marketing activities, get in touch with us at Roland Dransfield and we’ll be able to help you out.

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