Located in the heart of Midtown Sacramento, the L Street Lofts are a 92-unit for sale loft property.  The first of its kind in Sacramento, the Lofts needed an agency that could tackle both general  product marketing as well as educating the general public on the benefits and features of loft living. 

When the Lofts hired 3Fold in February 2007, the project was struggling to get traffic to their website and Sales Studio.  With the building still under construction, 3Fold needed to create a picture of loft living without having a property to show potential buyers.  Creating a lifestyle/character based campaign, we created advertisements centered around the key demographics the product was built to serve: young professionals ready for an urban lifestyle, empty-nesters looking to downsize, and older professionals tired of or not interested in the suburban lifestyle.  In addition to launching the campaign in various regional publications and billboards, we integrated these characters into the building signage to help people make a quick and easy association with the ads they were familiar with seeing.

The ad campaign was only the beginning.  Midtown Sacramento has a strong social scene and network. To utilize the neighborhood to the fullest potential, 3Fold Communications developed and implemented a six month strategic outreach strategy centered around a community based awareness campaign that included :

• The “Lost Rubik’s Cube” scavenger hunt –3Fold strategically distributed thousands of Lofts branded Rubik’s cubes in area businesses and brokered a partnership with Midtowngrid.com and the Sacramento News and Review to get the word out about finding them.  Paired with “Lost” posters (visualize a lost dog poster, but branded!), we had over 100 people bring their lost Rubik’s cubes to the sales studio where they received a free t-shirt and learned more about the project.  To this day, we still see Lofts t-shirts being worn around midtown.
• A neighborhood referral program – The Lofts were changing the skyline in Midtown, and naturally caused a flurry of questions as people were sitting down at tables and bars in the neighborhood.  To capitalize on this natural interest, 3Fold created an incentive program for the servers and bar tenders in the neighborhood to help drive interested traffic to the Lofts Sales Studio.  We developed referral cards that the neighborhood employees could fill out and hand to their clients to send them to the Sales Studio. In turn, we had a series of incentives for those that participated.
• Cocktail napkin campaign – To help inspire additional interest in the project, and to leverage the neighborhood referral program, the 3Fold Team coordinated with area restaurants including Zocalo and the L Wine Lounge to provide Lofts branded cocktail napkins to be used at their bars.  In the end, 100,000 cocktail napkins were ordered and used in the neighborhood bars over the course of two months.
• An event strategy – In addition to a grand opening street fair including live music and vendors, 3Fold Communications developed a mini-event strategy that included “Loft Living Workshops” that provided that sales team an opportunity to invite their more promising leads into the sales studio for intimate workshops on various topics that pertained to loft living.  These topics included design strategies, urban gardening, and space organization.  The events were developed not only as a sales strategy but also as another way to help educate potential buyers about what it would be like to live in a loft.

Results: Prior to March 2007, the Lofts were receiving an average of 20 visitors/calls to the sales studio a week, this increased to an average of over 80 visitors/calls per week to the sales studio in April – August 2007. In addition to increased Sales Studio traffic, their website hits grew by 147% which is representative of a heightened level of general awareness.