10 Ways to Create a Powerful Marketing System for Property Managers

Crisis brings opportunity. With economic and business changes this year pressuring landlords, some may seek a new business focus, and look for new providers and new solutions.

If you broaden your exposure online and offline, your best landlord client accounts may be just ahead.

Whenever a landlord experiences business problems (costs are growing too fast) or growth opportunities (they buy or take on new properties), they visualize a new situation where these are resolved.

And while they’re within this mental transition, you have the opportunity to connect with them via marketing. In fact, by being top of mind, you actually get to help them build their new business situation.

In this environment, those who conduct great marketing are most likely to attract high quality, lucrative landlord leads, and reach large scale investors looking for a property management company or HOA company. Those with no marketing are invisible, thus leaving the market to competitors, which is deadly for your outlook.

Growth Changes Landlord’s Values and Outlook

Threats and opportunities: Inflation and taxes are eroding profits, new multifamily construction is creating new opportunities, and rising rents are giving landlords more money to take care of business. These and more events change landlord’s outlooks and so they make new plans.

Industry sector growth is strong, further supporting the opportunity for property management company marketing efforts.

“The property management market is projected to reach a revised size of US$27.5 Billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 7.5% over the period 2020-2027. Property management solutions are projected to record 7.1% CAGR and reach US$17.7 Billion by the end of 2027” — from ResearchandMarkets report.

Landlord’s Hunt for a Better Property Management Services Provider

Rental properties can’t be managed like they used to which is why the new tech-enabled startups are doing well. The industry that’s been last to adopt digital business tools may launch full speed into them this year. They’ll be looking for talented, modern, tech savvy property managers ready to scale up. Are you communicating the value proposition they want to hear?

It’s the perfect time to risk improvement — from software technology to sales systems.

Bringing Clarity to Your Value Proposition

You might think what you do and offer is obvious and transparent, but to landlords and real estate investors, it’s not at all.

When they seek solutions and find your website, they want your solution and UVP to be clear and succinct. And it has to be inviting and make an impact as the most significant service available.

Your marketing is what delivers that important message.

Sometimes, the medium doesn’t need to be pretty. It just needs to be seen first, regularly and be believable.  This company in LA, California achieves good exposure and gets their value proposition across fast: “premier, full service” and with a rental house in the background.  Simple and eliminates confusion.

10 Steps to Marketing Transformation

A simple step by step process ensures you have the basics in place to build visibility and generate conversations with worthy prospects.

Being number one on Google for instance is important as an example because prospects may therefore not check out other providers. Top ranking sites enjoy the highest lead generation success and the leads are higher quality. It demonstrates that simply showing up first and foremost in marketing can do most of the lead generation legwork.

68% of B2B marketers believe that increasing the quality of leads is their biggest priority. Quality leads are easier for your sales rep to close.

10 Steps to Excellence

Each of these 10 activities supports each other, thus creating a much more powerful marketing and lead gen program:

1. build a detailed profile of your ideal landlord or investor – this guides your targeting, choice of channels and your content strategy. What type of properties do they have, how do they make their revenue, what are their business struggles, what technology do they use, and what management flaws do they suffer from? Dig down to identify the precise pain points where they lose money or can’t deliver expected results via their properties.
2. build your new property management services profile — which services do you need to offer to make your company relevant, competitive, and what do landlords need in terms of efficiency, cost controls, profitability, and growth? Your services profile has to be about what they want, not what you want to sell.
3. determine which new services they need — what value-added service will help them progress comfortably? How does the service they want fit within the overall service you provide? Which service area are they awful at? How does your service mix deliver the “packaged solution” many landlords want?
4. build a new responsive website — or use the marketing website provided in your property management software solution — how can you build marketing into your business rather than having look like something outside and alien? How can your marketing website perform actual work (listings, new leads, advertising, self-serve help, etc.)?
5. build a brand promise – redesign your brand or UVP to resonate with landlord’s actual needs and preferences. It’s all about them not your company. Consider your reputation, management expertise, resources, systems, and more which represent the assurances they’re looking for. Prioritize which services really make a difference for them and create a unique value proposition which will be the most significant/valuable one they will receive from all your competitors.
6. make your web content unique, significant, and provide an amazing experience — take high quality, relevant photos and videos which make your company real and relevant. Okay, this is something you may need a content specialist to do, however you have insights, stories, and can contribute content to portray the kind of experience landlords want.  Lay out your value offer in order of priority so they get the exact information needed, and in a smooth, orderly, non-distracting fashion to stay engaged and interested in your offer.
7. create your Google My Business listing — many searches on Google are converted to local listings via Google Maps. Geography is relevant. Landlords need to see your business among the many listed.
8. build up your Linkedin page — property management services are high involvement long sales cycle purchases. Landlords want to see professionalism and that is best communicated via Linkedin. Linkedin is underused and could be your best lead pipeline. Your personal and company profile should be organized with info that matches your value proposition to build a reputable brand. You can post news and more importantly connect with landlords and engage with their online postings.
9. advertise and promote strongly — free organic visibility used to be available, but Google and the social media channels have throttled that back and are forcing companies to pay their way.  Besides, your organic exposure is affected by your overall marketing and relationship building. There’s a price to get into that party.  Targeted PPC keyword campaigns, successful Facebook post boosting, Youtube advertising, local radio advertising, select billboard ads, public relations, mobile advertising, content sponsorships are the many media you should be promoting (on a very targeted basis) to make your brand known (and drown out competing property management companies). Every message that reaches the audience helps to establish landlord perceptions and thoughts first and be in control. First and most frequent give you a big edge.
10. web and social analytics – adopt a powerful analytics solution to help you gauge the performance and effects of your multi-channel marketing efforts. Marketing analytics is not the forte of any property management software and 80% of marketers say understanding marketing program effectiveness is their number one challenge.Salesforce Pardo, Adobe Marketing Cloud, Hubspot, and others might be good solutions, and all have their price points. They can help you understand how your marketing mix is contributing to leads and revenue, and to help you keep lead scores on prospects to perform better account-based marketing. Some have predictive analytics tools to help you identify prospects exhibiting buying behavior beforehand so you can prepare your content and your sales reps to capitalize on potential leads.

Marketing Automation

With the right automation tools (e.g., syndicated advertising) and great prospect targeting features of rental listing sites, Google, Facebook, and Linkedin advertising programs, you can certainly reach good prospects.

As your final step, you’ll need to ensure you have a smooth sales process and don’t lose a great prospect. Typically, on all your pages, a sales phone number should be visible. A responsive salesperson is the best, most engaging, and comfortable experience for prospects who often don’t have time to read text, or ads, or watch videos.

Those time crunched prospects will want fast info on services, skills, and are open to consider your value proposition if it hits them at the right time. They’re there to buy unless your sales team doesn’t get it right. The beauty of your sales analytics tools is being able to cull out the highest quality leads and spend your time nurturing them.

The goal of marketing is generate big visibility to attract leads. From then on, your sales staff make the magic happen.

There’s a lot happening this year in rental property management and it will generate opportunities to capture clients. Good luck with your landlord lead generation in 2023.

Check out more on ManageCasa’s marketing websites and how it can be the foundation of your digital marketing campaigns.

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