Property Management Leads

March 16, 2019

How To Generate More Property Management Leads

2020 is already providing plenty of challenges for professional landlords and property managers.

As profits go up and down through this period of the Corona Virus, accounts will be won and some lost. That’s why it’s important to have a lead pipeline to continuously attract leads. Keeping cost efficiencies is great, and it’s wise to optimize your cash flow, right through these tough times ahead.

Healthy property management companies grow landlord client opportunities by optimize their complete property management effort, guided by a good property management marketing strategy.

Check out ManageCasa’s marketing website application as part of your new property management platform subscription.

A Lead Funnel that Generates Great Prospects

I’m sure you’re aware you must fill the top of your lead funnel with potential prospects. Once you reach them, they become aware of your services, and after building trust and relevance you might be able to turn 1% to 3% of them into real profitable clients.

And we’ve discussed in other posts how to broaden your lead and sales opportunities through new services, net technology and better marketing. Your marketing is the future of your business.

You don’t need many good landlord clients to be successful. The right ones are critical to your long term success. Building your lead generation process to create this type of high quality landlord customer is important. Of all your business activities, this might be where you most wisely spend your time as CEO or property manager.

The Best Landlords Are Worth Targeting

Quality of lead sources and the type of prospects they deliver are key. You need progressive, ambitious, long term landlords with solid, growing property portfolios with potential. Isn’t this where the real money is?

Software and email campaigns won’t do it all for you because you need outreach to new prospects. Your prospecting strategy starts with your intent to get good leads. Then using high quality methods and channels, such as professional style case studies, informative blogs, great website marketing pages, a great property management platform, and a transparent value proposition they will believe, you will make the right brand impression.

Unqualified Leads: You Get What You Actively Target

I’ve worked for many companies who took whatever leads came off the street, with an “it’s all we need” outlook. Contrast that with a targeted lead gen strategy that gets you the best landlords and property owners with the right portfolios. Good landlords make everything better and easier for you.

Good Leads, Bad Leads

Have you ever had a bad client? Acquiring junk leads is a time waster, and in my years in marketing, sales people complain vigorously about calls from unqualified, poorly targeted prospects, even if it’s part of a successful, big picture sales success.

Signing unqualified, low quality leads can generate friction, disappointments, time waste, business losses, and reduce morale. Getting the exact, correct kind of leads makes salespeople, property management staff, and managers smile from ear to ear.

Top Must Haves for Capturing Leads

a clear value proposition and a lead conversion process that gives landlords or asset managers a laser clear message about why yours is the only one for them
a great marketing website with good visual branding and excellent content
company video visually demonstrating your value proposition/experience/expertise
Google, Facebook ad accounts
a clear, smooth lead conversion process to phone call
lead management software with good analytics reporting
good property management software solution to show them

Start With Your Goal/Purpose

Most real estate people miss this vital step. They skip it because they have a vague idea of what’s propelling them and their business. Vague is not a good foundation for success and results in confused messaging. You must be sure why you’re in business, what you’re doing, and which clients, contractors, tenants etc you want to attract.

Being crystal clear about your niche and revenue goals ensures you don’t get involved in the wrong solutions/clients.

That clarity will show through to your prospects and customers too resulting in higher lead conversion and customer loyalty. Here’s a fictional example of one entrepreneur:

Janet has been a property manager for only 3 years, but she’s impressed with the income potential in property management and the lifestyle. She loves the people side of the business yet doesn’t like friction, paperwork, and problem properties. She knows why property management companies go out of business.

She wants to grow her startup firm’s number of doors to 500 units by 2020. She loves the city and managing apartments/condos in her trendy area of Vancouver. It’s a beautiful area and she understands what residents want and why they choose to live in the city core. She wants to capture new clients in a 5 mile radius of her neighborhood in Vancouver, focusing on apartment buildings less than 20 years old in working class neighborhoods near transit corridors.

She’s hired a leasing agent and maintenance technician to work this local scene. She wants to dominate this 5 mile radius and become the Vancouver multifamily property management brand leader. Personally, she loves that she could be creative in generating revenue via client consultation on: property investing, her knowledge of the Vancouver market, renovation design to appeal to today’s renters, benefits strategy for tenants, and using property management software to streamline operations.

She only wants owner/landlord clients who fit into that vision of herself and her business. She wants a limited number of clients with medium property portfolios so she can achieve $500,000 in revenue in 2020. She has a vision of connecting with top investors and landlords and establishing wonderful relationships with them.

Janet knows why she’s in business, what kind of property management business she needs, and that consistent lead generation can make it all happen. As yet, she’s not sure how to create a marketing machine that makes it happen.

What is your Personal and Business Goal?

⦁ launch your proptech startup or make more money with your property management business.
⦁ keep your clients and replace those who leave or who sell their properties
⦁ create a business I like with clientele I like
⦁ grow your business or revenue
⦁ find better, higher quality clients, to achieve better performance as a property manager

You can choose the high road or the low road when it comes to business success and lead acquisition. The low road is where you battle it out every day like a warrior, but never commit to an effective overall strategy to get leads. The high road is staying true to your goal or purpose for being in business and thinking longer term.

Of course, taking the high road doesn’t rid you of the challenge of prospecting and lead generation tactics. However, it can increase your competence and confidence.

Vagueness Kills: Before you prospect for new leads, you must know exactly what you want, who you’re targeting, and what your value proposition is. Without that clarity, your marketing dollars may go to waste.

From Building Visibility to Capturing the Lead

Whether your leads come from local connections or web marketing, the key is that you’re maximizing visibility of your firm — it’s brand and value proposition.

Building visibility, relevance and trust is foremost. Visibility helps you establish credibility, helpfulness, competence, trust and value — these come before landlords, investors, and owners contact you.

Lead Generation Channels:

1. website content (branding and communications)
2. social media and SEO (free organic traffic)
3. advertising (ppc, pay per leads) build visibility to targeted audiences and encourage lead capture
4. word of mouth/print advertising (local presence and relationship building)

Insource or Outsource?

You can insource and manage marketing and lead generation yourself or outsource to a marketing/lead generation specialist firm.

Is hiring an advertising agency or general web marketing firm a good idea? The problem here is that theyy will almost certainly not have the expertise and knowledge of your industry or your property management niche. Some will only do what you could do yourself, so you’d be adding a cost with mediocre results.

And even specialists with experience in the property management field may still not have the expertise or marketing skills to establish authority and create leads.

Property management is a niche business, requiring industry and local market expertise and experience. One of the reasons digital marketing agencies are disappearing is due to marketing automation and to a lack of specific industry knowledge. Audiences want credible, insightful sources and to deliver that, you have to be deep into property management and what’s trending.

Pay for Performance Lead Generation

Pay for performance lead generation models – This may be worth a try since you won’t have to pay upfront. You pay only when you get an actual property management lead. However, lead quality might be an issue. As it is with realtor lead generation services, the leads could be poor quality, already spoken for, or you have to jump through hoops to reach the prospect.

Some companies with pay per lead type services:

doorgrow.com
Google Ads
Facebook Ads
geekrealestatemarketing.com
managemyproperty.com

Do It Yourself Insourcing

More property managers are taking control of all aspects of their business. From property management software to hiring leasing agents, bookkeepers, and maintenance contractors, insourcing can reduce costs. Managing marketing efforts in-house is possible too. The trend today is via software automation and it gives SMB property managers tremendous power.

For instance (not as a recommendation) a software such as LeadSimple lets you manage and track your own lead generation efforts, regardless of the source. This software may integrate with your other software such as your cloud based property management software. You can import lead databases too, track performance, and follow up. The best thing about a solution such as LeadSimple is that the service specializes in lead generation which means they’re more likely to add value to your sales process.

If you already have a lead acquisition plan in place, then adopting software might optimize that process. If you’re doing it yourself, having a great website is important. One way or another, prospects will find your website. They’ll check you and your business out first. This is why reputation management is an additional service agencies offer.

Videos can be a key part of the persuasion process, whether animated or with real people describing your company’s value proposition.

Prospects have a lot on their minds and specific things they want to achieve before they call to hire you as their property management company.

Your content will tell them whether you’re modern (software usage), effective, and reliable. You’ll need to onboard a content creator and outsource content creation to specialists (e.g., video). Be prepared to train a person in something because it’s unlikely you’ll get a superstar content producer with property management experience.

Lead Sources:

Internet Advertising:

Google Ads and Facebook Ads. These two major portals create a good portion of leads for property management companies. Facebook and Google have tremendous audience targeting capabilities because they know so much about their user base using their “Big Data” access. They are key marketing sources to leverage.

Google Ads appear on millions of websites including property management websites. Adwords is the most efficient lead source. Facebook has around 2 Billion users and generates almost $7 billion in advertising revenue (10% of ad market). They’re making money because everyone is using these two channels.

These services use artificial intelligence systems which can present ads at extremely opportune times because FB/Google can see what users have seen and therefore know what they’ll likely want and need next.

Whether it’s leads for tenants, landlords, or property owners, they’re pivotal in giving you targeted reach to the exact audiences you want, a overall visibility, since leads sometimes come from strange places. Remember, being at the right place at the right time is a key part of your marketing success.

There are strategies and tips for each advertising platform and this is something your marketer/content strategist must manage. They look similar, and function similarly, despite the confusion might experience when you open an ad account. Google is easier to understand but with a little help from their customer service people you’ll iron it all out.

The Lead Conversion Process

You could have a marketing agency set up your website content to welcome and convert the leads that arrive from Google and Facebook. In fact, the rate you pay them will depend on the quality of your ad writing and landing pages. A digital marketing agency can help you with visual branding, page design, and organizing the complete sales conversion process.

It’s a complicated process with many facets and therefore unlikely your inhouse team can do this professionally. You’ll need to outsource some of it to an agency or specialist who knows what they’re doing. And this is an ongoing process requiring performance feedback. There is no “set it and forget it” automation here. You need to find out what works and what doesn’t work, to reduce costs, and increase lead quality. Your effort will pay off.

Hopefully, the software (e.g., Leadsimple, Pipedrive, Google Adwords) and other lead generation services you choose will provide the lead conversion stats you need to improve. It’s very similar to the process ManageCasa delivers using visual statistics to optimize your property management process.

Some managers are glued to performance reports and optimizing performance through them.

The process is very similar to that used by real estate agents. A lead conversion service that provides detailed segmentation of your lead/contact list is best.

SEO and Social Media Leads

You can generate leads yourself online. Google, Facebook and Linkedin are three free or organic sources that should be tapped. The beauty of these lead acquisition sources is that the prospects are looking for you. They’re likely in a good phase of their solution seeking cycle. Whether they’re ready now or are collecting insight, being visible paves the path to your company. The easier it is for them to reach you, the better.

Of course, the big media giants have a variety of advertising programs that can run simultaneously with your non-paid tactics. The ad services offer analytics insights and conversion data that can help with your free strategies. Don’t get cheap about paying for leads because it will help you learn about what draws and captures leads.

Its unlikely that SEO and social media will pay off quick. Search engine rankings and social media connections take time to build.

To Prospects: You Are Your Web Content

Before you build your website, review your goals, purpose and your branding objectives. Then you can begin planning your content strategy. Content strategy guides the creation of your key product and marketing pages, videos, property listings, services, social posts and your blog posts. Prospects get immersed in your content to visualize how they could work with you.

Your content strategy is built on: your goals/purpose, value proposition, specific target audience and the keyword phrases they type into Google or use in their social media activity.

Your content person could be your SEO/Social Media expert too. Build blogs, and post on Linkedin, FB and Twitter to keep top of mind with your connections. Keep finding new connections and don’t worry about knowing people beforehand. Don’t be discouraged, but be moderate. It will take months or years to accumulate connections.

Social Media can Work Well with Your Content Strategy

Use Facebook and Linkedin’s tools to find real estate people. Make sure your profile is relevant to them. You may want to target a specific type of prospect each month (landlord, Realtor, investor, property owners), and ensure you have the right blog and social media content they’re interested in.

Social media is very helpful in getting your content shared/distributed online. Those shares will increase your Google rankings, and Google will always be your key source of website traffic.

As it is with real estate agents, success is often a game of numbers. Build your full lead generation funnel with the right services and software, and you’ll pan out some “gold quality” leads that will shape your business success. Because in a real sense “you are your clients.”

Good luck with your lead management activities and may all your leads be gold. Check out ManageCasa and start streamlining your property management for better ROI.

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