Marketing for Property Management Companies
Marketing is the swiss knife of business tools. The value isn’t limited to external promotion.
Marketing today is more than branding, leads, sales and revenue growth. It’s a foundation for a winning property management company. It can breathe life into all aspects of your business.
Only 11% satisfied, and they’re only talking about direct ROI. Screen capture infographic courtesy of Lyfemarketing.com
The many unappreciated benefits for your property management firm include building broad market awareness, optimizing communications to tenants and owners, creating and harvesting important market data, cutting through the mystery of your audience’s preferences and needs, and keeping your business fit and healthy.
In this post, let’s highlight why you need to put more emphasis on marketing and discover how the best marketers are finding success.
Advertising isn’t Marketing
Spending your marketing budget on pay per click ads is not a sustainable marketing plan. In fact, common text ads may commoditize your business and brand leaving you to compete on price.
The best marketers look to maximize free organic avenues using great content on their website and promoting smartly via social media. The goal is omnipresence in your customer’s mind while continuously communicating your value proposition.
Never Limit the Benefits
In the 22 years I’ve been doing online marketing for companies and agencies, I’ve seen companies benefit in many unexpected ways. They opened up to big traffic, better impact, and deeper engagement. New, unexpected sales opportunities appeared, customer loyalty strengthened, and we saw support from a bigger group of fans and brand ambassadors on social media.
That’s important in the social sharing era where visibility is through other people.
What Do Property Management Companies Want?
- landlord and property owner leads
- brand image support
- persistent top of mind — keeping prospects aware of them
- attract the right rental tenants
- provide tenant and landlord support
- keeping compatible with today’s digital savvy tenants
These are good objectives however, why stop with them? What if marketing supported every single aspect of your property management firm? How about we take a step for a broader view of what you need to achieve?
Let’s List the Amazing Benefits of Marketing:
- greater visibility online and support for sharing across social media
- persistent top of mind awareness
- adds value to your unique value proposition
- compensates for lost face to face sales, seminars and trade shows (Covid 19)
- smooths the conversion funnel fortifying the customer journey touchpoints
- creates insight through analytics about your prospects and what they need
- raises your investors and employees belief in your company’s power and progress
generates leads - builds credibility, trust, and engagement with your brand
- optimize for both mobile smartphone users and traditional desktop users
It Takes Time to Build Familiarity, Trust, Relevance
It takes a lot of exposure and repetition before customers feel trust and see your company as relevant to them. They may believe one of your competitors is more relevant to them, but with repetition, that loyalty can be eroded. It takes persistence to win a new customer.
It’s more than advertising a recent rental vacancy or letting everyone know you’re still out there. There is a path from big visibility and customer loyalty and new business opportunities. Those who aren’t visible don’t get found.
Done Right, Marketing is Very Satisfying
In fact, to many top business people including real estate moguls and property rental managers, marketing is everything. I like to reiterate that as much as possible. Marketing can be an exciting and growth building experience.
If you enjoy communications, bringing more value to customers and see sales grow, marketing is a lot of fun.
Screen capture courtesy of Marketingcharts.com
You’re Creating Your Business Future Now
What you plan, work diligently on and execute now determines where you’ll be down the road. Coasting is dangerous, as is leaving the market to big companies who want to monopolize it. They’ll take whatever you give them, so don’t give them so much!
If you’re a new property management company startup in rural towns and cities, you’ve seen the potential of growth right in your city or and nearby locales. With the new construction that’s coming in this industry, you can capture a piece of it, via marketing. Landlords will need property managers in the next few years.
To that successful end, we should make a big commitment to marketing and discovering which mix of marketing activities creates the best results in visibility, leads and revenue.
Typically, business people don’t property fund marketing which is why they stay small, vulnerable and never scale up. Staying small or status quo never works, especially today. Many believe in the mantra of “grow or die.” Our costs rise, market changes, staff leave, rents get frozen, taxes go up, regulations steepen, and hungry competitors eat away at our market share.
Why Are Google and Facebook so Rich?
That’s why big companies plough a lot of money into online ads on Facebook and Google. It’s very expensive, but if you haven’t been advertising, you are leaving the market to to competitors.
When property owners and landlords are searching for a property management company, they’re keenly interested, perhaps ready to hire you. They could be trying to solve a tax problem, financial challenge, or looking for a property management firm just like yours. Being visible consistently gives you an opportunity to capture a new client.
When your site is ranked highly on Google or Bing search engines, you’re capturing a prestigious position. Being ranked at the top suggests quality, credibility and even trustworthiness. And if you’re number one, visitors see your site, brand and content before your competitor’s messaging. You get to shape their buying experience. Number one rank is the holy grail.
Social Media Reach
Social media platforms bring more opportunity for visibility and sales. They’re very popular with tenants for sure. You’ll find landlords are active on Facebook and Twitter. Facebook’s user base is in the billions with users spending a fair bit of time on the platform.
Just as with search engines, there is a big challenge. Facebook and Linkedin have made visibility on their platforms difficult. They severely limit exposure organically.
In order to grow connections and visibility, you must engage with users and actively connect. Engaging with thousands of people is obviously time consuming, so content and postings must be done in a way that invites responses, to which you can respond.
Social Media is Not the Same as Search Engines
Social media such as Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin are very different environments from search engines. It has its own challenges.
Search engines focus on information, locations, product reviews, service reviews, whereas social platforms focus on personal issues, likes and dislikes, emotional expression and camaraderie.
Social Media requires a different mindset and strategy, however both can be used together to generate much better results. For instance, most social media views begin with a search on Google.
Because of the complexity of online marketing channels, they are also exciting, challenging and they can help you become a better business person.
Nurturing prospective landlords and prospective renters through from first awareness to a phone call is something your property management website content can help with. For the sake of building credibility, it’s wise to bring prospects to your website where they can be immersed in your brand promise.
Social channels can be good for building trust, since a more intimate view of you, your staff and relationships can be presented.
Do you have time to do Marketing?
Your answer is likely no. So you avoid it. Well, there’s tools such as content generation/copywriting tools, web and sales analytics tools, advertising tools, and social media tools that can ease the time crunch.
You’re a busy person, so delegating marketing activities is important. If you’re stuck in this, and unsure of how to approach it going into the new post Corona virus era and 2021, you could send me your inquiry. I’d enjoy helping you out.
ManageCasa offers a property management website with your paid subscription to our property management software platform. So you don’t need to find a web designer and struggle with website coding and compliance issues. And yes, that is a big hassle today.
You can create your content and SEO, and your new website is located as a subdomain on a top, successful, highly visible website: ManageCasa. That has value too.
Having your marketing website integrated into your property management platform saves a lot of time and keeps you and our staff more organized.
And the cloud based property management solution is state of the art, fast, and secure.
Online Marketing Tools
There’s a world of landlord apps and property managements apps out there, and you’ll find even more online marketing tools and platforms to help you organize.
Notable names are Hubspot, Salesforce, funnel.io, Brightedge, Pathfactory AI, and Hootsuite. There are new artificial intelligence marketing platforms however they are expensive. It may take a little time before you have enough confidence in moving to that level, and building the expertise in them you’ll need.
What’s Working for Top Performers
Contentmarketing Institute conducted a survey about what’s working and what’s not really.
Here’s what they found:
Quality is more important that quantity. I’d agree that your very best content is the cornerstone, but we also know that those who post content a lot, tend get more awareness. So, it’s a case of quality vs quantity and how you’ll spend your time.
Marketing Charts chimes in with their report on top performers and how they orient themselves:
- Over half of top performers say their customer experience (58%) and account-based content (55%) is excellent
- Top performers say their marketing content is everywhere their customers are (74% vs. 40% for average marketers)
- top performers are very confident that their content is better (68%) compared to the rest of the sample (22%)
- top performers are more likely to focus on long-term metrics (88% vs. 73% for average marketers).
The key message about marketing for a property management company, is that quality content generation, not junk, SEO, video, strategic email programs, and PPC ad campaigns are their go to channels.
The content wars are fierce, but even with a modest budget you can fashion content to be very relevant to your audience.
As you build your online marketing strategy and see results, you’ll realize there is an opportunity to carve out a niche. And for some ambitious entrepreneurs, an awareness that they could be a major player in property management.
Keep your mind open about online marketing and start making that shift to being a marketing first business. You’ll like the rewards.
Don’t forget to check out ManageCasa as your power business platform. Begin your journey into better property management now.
