Blogging for Property Management

Blogging to reach and engage customers has been a mainstay for digital marketers for about 20+ years. They still are.

Blogs offer fresh, informational, and motivating content containing news, trends, videos, offers, and more that connects with the emotions of audiences.

If you believe your business is dull and nothing would possibly interest your tenants or renter prospects, it just takes some imagination to turn it into a great business asset. And blogs feed into social media and advertising campaigns too. Blogs introduce new services and help celebrate your staff and accomplishments.

Blogs have the topics and reading style visitors want. The role of blogs is to help build a stronger brand, engage prospects emotionally, and then send them through to marketing pages motivated to pay attention and immerse themselves in your rentals and properties.

Blogs support your sales efforts and increase interest in your company (traffic and brand building).

Inexpensive but Highly Effective

Why are blogs so powerful?  They’re topical, interesting and current. They can contain any other type of content for a valuable experience.

When visitors reach your blog, they probably believe you’re relevant to them, and are looking for a reason to like you and take your company seriously. If you weren’t relevant, they wouldn’t be reading your blog posts!

And they might be ready to contact you.

Facts that Reveal the Power of Blogging

Important Blogging Success Stats – Screen Capture courtesy of Hubspot.com

Blogging Isn’t Easy or You Would Have Mastered it By Now

Plenty of real estate and property pros blog yet too often, we see posts that don’t accomplish much in terms of traffic, engagement or leads. Consider the self-absorbed, corporate «here’s our stuff» blog post, the tedium filler post, or the pointless news post aimed at a few people.

How about blogging in a way that makes your company a credible and vital asset to your audience?

Blog in a style that’s friendly, approachable, quietly authoritative, helpful, educational, timely, collaborative, and make your audience feel good. It becomes something they look forward to experiencing.

«Blogs can produce hundreds to tens of thousands of visitors per day. That’s 365,000 to 3 million visitors per year arriving via Google, Bing, Facebook, Duckduckgo, Linkedin, Twitter and other sites who mention your blogs. It’s your decision as to how much traffic you want.»

Cost to Acquire a New Renter or Landlord Lead

It’s no small thing to create a customer. In property management, it is difficult to reach landlords, investors, or even your own current customers. With pay per click ads costing up to $93 per click on top property management keyword phrases, your competition believe this traffic is worth it.

Screenshot courtesy of harborpm.com/blog/

How Do You Blog Really Well?

First, Prioritize Your Blogging Goals

• reach lots of prospects and expose your rentals
• build lots of visitors and people who will share your posts
• differentiate your company/brand and services
• showcase your services and leadership
• establish experience, authoritativeness, and solid service
• grow sales revenue

Prioritize the Content That Aids Your Objectives

• reliability — posts that show successful challenges faced and solved
• cost-effectiveness — case study showing how you lowered landlord costs
• service excellence — explain your approach and how it worked with a client
• confidence and leadership — new accounts won, trade show attendance, seminars
• relevance — specific key topics that related to landlords most vexing problem
• in-depth pieces — valuable insight, trends, industry knowledge, new tech services

Before you start writing, create a list of your goals and content pieces, ideas, keywords and objectives. This will help you avoid writer’s block and get focused.

How to Write Great Blogs

There are brief blogs or long, epic blogs and each has their place.

There is a standard layout using 3 or 4 paragraphs, that lets you present 3 main points. This style keeps it very easy to understand. However, these blogs may be dull to read, overly predictable, too short in length, perform poorly in Google rankings, and not get shared on social media.

Variety in depth, tone, and style can help provide variety for all readers and present your content as a valuable resource.

The Perfect Blog post was a template/concept developed years ago by Derek Halpern of Social Triggers.  If you’re struggling to hold readers, you may want to use this simple format to reconnect with them. Aside from great text content, pay attention to providing excellent visuals/images. Readers are deeply affected by eye-catching, relevant images.

Infographic courtesy of Social Triggers socialtriggers.com/perfect-blog-post/

Don’t worry, you can learn to surprise, delight, and engage them in whatever format you choose.  The point as you’ll read here is making an impact, being relevant, creating flow, and getting the key message across.

Creating A Blog That’s a Workhorse

Creating a theme for your blog might be wise, or you can modestly present it as an extension of your business — no fan fare, just real value, ideas, and solutions from competent and likable people.

A good blog needs post with interesting topics and a good angle. You have to answer the question about why this would be useful and of interest to users. They’re pulled in by the intrigue of your title so it should be interesting.

The topic is most important thing.  As long as it’s on a topic they’re interested in, you won’t have to work too hard to get them to read it.

It’s essential that you use a good title because this gets seen in social media and Google search results. That title and your graphic might determine whether your post gets read or shared.

An Example Post

Let’s say your blog is about management challenges in apartment developments on the city’s tough east side. Your title could be:

Title: Landlords Find Unique Solution for East Side Apartment Management Problems

First Heading: Evictions, Unit Damage, Unpaid Rent, Crime and more Plaguing Landlords

1st Sentence: The city’s east side is no place for property management wimps. The challenges for landlords and apartment building owners face makes these communities tough to generate a profit in. In fact, without help, many landlords face big risks and losses in face of looming rent controls.

2nd Sentence: Yet, Atlantic Property Management is taking property management to a new level, and its preventing these same problems and lowering property management costs. Atlantic’s new property management solution helps screen out bad tenants, collect better tenant information, streamline payment, report issues in real time, and make eviction quicker should landlords have to act.

Before using Atlantic property management’s solution, Ben Simmons, owner of 240 West 42nd St. apartment development was doing it old school…..

Catching and keeping readers before they bounce is important. Before you publish, take a look at your draft blog in a browser and see if it would please a reader.

Readers Scan Quick for Relevance

Landlords will see the value in reading it. Everyone scans a blog before reading. They’ll see the title first, see words like landlords, solution, unique, eviction, maintenance, technology, systems, development, revenue, issues, or streamline, and believe it’s worth it to invest the time to read further.

So the first part of your blog post captures attention, uses a variety of relevant words, and establishes that it’s worth reading.

Supporting Content

You’ll need customer service stories, photos, charts, data, and videos if you can find or create any. Creating such content is a challenge but there are tools available to make it easier.

Before you create this material, consider how it relates to what you want to achieve — build brand, differentiate, point out essential services, remind clients of their biggest pain points, costs, revenue growth, and whatever gets them excited.

Within the post, it’s okay to use a call to action to show them you want their business. They may never act on these obvious CTA’s as they’re called. They just remind readers of why they’re reading — to acquire a solution.

Edit Strongly for Flow and Coherence

Writers’ should spend time more editing. After you’ve created the main content you must rewrite several times. The goal here is to make points clear, create a nice flow, and cut out extraneous material that just confuses readers.

It’s a cleanup job. You want it to be clear and to flow. People will stop reading when the flow is interrupted, or they get confused. Sometimes we writers can’t see the gaps in our story or presentation so it’s nice to have someone else read our drafts. Don’t forget to add some feel-good comments or even dry humor to make it appealing.

«Negativity is dangerous because it gets readers in an analytic frame of mind, and that defeats your goal of making them feel good enough to hire you.»

Don’t publish your blog right away. Let it sit for at least a day, so you can come back to it fresh. This can really enhance the coherence and impact of your blog. Run through the details and ask yourself how this impacts and what details support your blog purpose.

The headings, keywords, photos, layout, all add to the impact on the reader. If you can present interesting topics, get a little newsy, and introduce the topic in an interesting way or angle, you can make a big impact as a blogger. Then when you post it on social media, the end results are even better in likes, shares and engagement.

Consistent High-Quality Posts Build Reputation

One blog won’t achieve your goals. It’s the persistent message of unique value that makes an emotional impact. That’s how you build a brand. It’s important to encourage comments, feedback and responses. Readers like to express themselves and you can moderate comments as the author/admin.

If you add value to readers over a long period, you increase their intent, trust and desire to hire you. That’s the best property management branding you can achieve — sustained long term relevance and value.

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