Creating a Successful Master-Planned Community Vision for Southshore

To create an impactful vision for the master-planned community’s branding, it’s essential to understand the prospective homebuyers and their lifestyle aspirations. With concrete homebuyer insight, home builders and developers implement intuitive branding that uniquely connects homebuyer desires to the distinct qualities of the master-planned community.

For the Southshore community, Milesbrand created an appealing new vision that illustrated the value of the master-planned community’s location for potential homebuyers. Here is an overview of the Southshore project from its initial background and marketing objectives to its successful results.

Background

Southshore is a master-planned community in Aurora, Colorado that is notably connected to the Aurora Reservoir and enveloped in nature. Southshore offers miles of community trails, parks and ponds, as well as amenities that include a lake house and boathouse. Before Milesbrand’s work with Southshore, this Colorado community had experienced previous sales success, however, Southshore began to experience a decline and was sold to a new ownership group. Southshore was in need of a community refresh to re-energize the community and raise awareness of Southshore to both prospective home buyers and local realtors.

Among the benefits of Southshore’s location are access to the top school district in Colorado, convenient highways, employment centers, shopping and other amenities. Despite these advantages, the master-planned community faced the obstacle of low visibility among its target audiences. This meant that the community was a destination location that visitors viewed as a place to go for day trips, likely due to its location on a large reservoir.

Marketing Objective

The leading obstacle for this Colorado community was that the physical location was not highly visible to visitors. Although Southshore offered exciting amenities including a reservoir, visitors viewed the location as an exciting excursion, not a place to call home. The community’s developers needed prospective buyers and visitors to realize that Southshore offers more than just a fun trip to the lake – it’s a lifestyle.

The objective of this campaign was to raise awareness and visibility for the master-planned community among its target audiences. Through the use of a comprehensive multi-media re-launch campaign, Milesbrand aimed to create momentum and generate new leads for the Southshore community.

Strategy

With clear marketing objectives set for the campaign, next Milesbrand worked to identify and communicate Southshore’s Brand DNA – its compelling differentiation to set it apart. As mentioned previously, Southshore has close proximity to a large reservoir, which was atypical for a Colorado community as large bodies of water are uncommon. Milesbrand immediately honed in on this aspect as a key differentiator for the community.

The new focal point of Southshore’s brand was simple – the Aurora Reservoir. The reservoir offers visitors astounding beauty, as well as many opportunities for enjoyment including kayaking, sailing, paddle boarding, fishing, gorgeous beach and boardwalk activities. The reservoir’s clear blue waters easily catch the eye of many consumers, which provided Milesbrand a prime opportunity to highlight the benefits of life at Southshore by showcasing the community’s top-quality amenities and homes.

Milesbrand planned to reframe the Southshore area as a hometown, where residents enjoy lovely homes and lake days are a common occurrence. Southshore was positioned as a unique opportunity where homeowners enjoy a daily lifestyle filled with lavish, lakeside retreats. Milesbrand illustrated how every day for Southshore homeowners is full of opportunities to enjoy fun-filled activities at the reservoir whether they take a bike ride around the lake, soak up the sun on the beach or take sail on the open waters. The brand strategy was to claim the reservoir as a major community amenity that is part of what makes Southshore home for its homeowners. From this strategy, a new community tagline was created: “Life at the Lake.”

Tactics

For the Southshore community, Milesbrand developed a community vision and branding shared through cohesive visuals and messaging. The new branding for Southshore incorporated bright colors including red, yellow, green and blue that are reminiscent of excitement, serenity and possibility. Community messaging for Southshore included slogans such as:

• “Make Every Day A Vacation Day”
• “It’s Not Just A Reservoir, It’s Your Lake”
• “Paddle Out To Your Backyard”
• “Nautical Miles From Ordinary”
• “Chart Your Course”

Southshore’s new branding was implemented around the community on community signage, wayfinding signage and sales and marketing displays within the sales office, as well as additional branding collateral offered to potential leads. The branding collateral for Southshore included both print and digital interactive brochures that enabled homebuyers to immerse themselves in the community and understand the entirety of what the Southshore lifestyle entails for homeowners. The intended strategy for the Southshore brochure was to offer new prospects a promotional piece that exceeded their online exploration after their first visit to this community.

Milesbrand also implemented a marketing strategy to promote Southshore that included both digital and traditional marketing tactics. The traditional marketing tactics included radio, print and outdoor advertisements. Digital promotion methods for Southshore were comprised of various tactics including:

• Website Creation and Maintenance
• SEM; Display, Email, Mobile, Video
• OTT/CTV
• Digital Radio
• Real Estate Information Portals

Results

By offering exciting new branding accompanied by fresh visuals and enticing messaging, the Southshore community saw phenomenal results! Throughout the campaign, Southshore received over 500 new leads.

The campaign led to incredible website traffic for the Southshore community website. The website received 90% new website visitor traffic as a result of the overall campaign and earned 75% new website traffic from its online advertising initiatives.

During the Southshore campaign, the community’s social media platforms performed very well in both reach and engagement. The Southshore social media platforms earned a combined reach of 200k and received 6.5k engagements through social media content.

The Southshore brochure led to great success in achieving increased closings for the master-planned community. This piece effectively contributed to the anticipated 93 total closings at Southshore in 2017 and a remarkable 202 projected closings in 2018.

This successful campaign continues to drive high volumes of web traffic consistently producing over 800 new online leads a year. Year after year the marketing and positioning strategy has contributed to Southshore being one of the top 10 selling master planned communities in the Front Range of Colorado.

This campaign also received three Nationals awards from the NAHB, as well as three awards from the Major Achievements in Merchandising Excellence (MAME) Awards.

Develop a Vision for Your Community Branding with Milesbrand

Creating excitement about your master-planned community among homebuyers is all about creating a vision for the lifestyle offered to the community’s homeowners. Community branding should center around this key focal point to illustrate the community’s strong appeal and values to potential leads.

Milesbrand can help by identifying and communicating the key differentiator for your master-planned community. Discover the most compelling element of your enterprise and share it with homebuyers through our extraordinary brand positioning, effective marketing strategies and compelling creative design.

Voice your brand’s unique value proposition by contacting our team to learn more about our branding process and services.