How to better market a property management business?

You might be a new property management business, or an established one; the only thing that might haunt you is “how to better market a property management business?”. Well this sounds easy when we think it out aloud, but it needs your heart for marketing to work.  We have identified 9 easy and cost effective ways for you to better market your property management business. You must be one of 300,000 property management businesses in USA & Canada, but these strategies can help you get enough eye balls in a short span of time.

Traditional marketing channels such as print, snail mail, TV/Radio advertisements might put you in front of lots of eyes, but at the end of the day its like shooting in the dark. You do not know who has reacted to your ad. Digital marketing for a property management business is what we are recommending, and what this article is all about. Don’t worry about the cost, these methods will give you greater ROI than traditional channels.

Know your target audience

Even before setting up your budgets, the first thing you should ask yourself is

-Who am I selling to?

-Who will need my services?

-Where is my customer?

-What is my customer currently doing?

-What challenge is bothering my customer?

-Where is my customer looking for solution?

-Where does my customer go everyday when he/she is online?

And so on. What we were trying to say is that, the more you know about your target audience, lower will be the cost of marketing. There is a reason why this is the first step towards a successful marketing plan, and we will discuss it in the below strategies.

Content marketing for awareness

Writing a blog on your favorite topic will get you satisfaction, but this will not put your business in front of your target/prospect. Also writing a blog on your website will not pull in customers to your website. Content marketing means content plus marketing the content for a purpose.

The first step

You know everything about your target/customer, now its time to put pen to paper. Pick a topic you think will catch your customer’s attention. After finishing this blog post, think of channels where your customers will go to for content consumption. When I say channels, it means websites.

The seconds step

Now its time to promote your blog/content. Write a synopsis of this blog in all the websites where your target/prospect goes to for content consumption. Websites can be social media sites such as Facebook (Company page, Groups, Chats, and so on), Twitter Chats, Whatsapp groups, LinkedIn Blog, Medium, Vigyaa, and so on. Make sure you give a link back to the blog on your website. In fact some of the best content promotional channels are Medium, Quora, and Wikihow. Write synopsis of your blog post and give a link back. This should bring you some referral traffic along with some link juice (we will talk about this when we are discussing about website authority).

Content marketing and SEO go hand in hand, the only differentiating factor between them is the use of keywords. In content marketing we choose topics to write on, in SEO we pick keywords for creating landing pages. We will talk about SEO in the later half of the article.

Local SEO for capturing local/immediate customers

Now you know your target, and your constantly writing blogs on your website to pull in relevant audience. But this will get you website visitors from all over the world (since you will share his content on platforms that are not physical location specific). You will need to use or implement Local SEO to pull in ”near me” customers/prospects.

Here are 3 steps in local SEO, one needs to follow for this channel to work.

• List your business in as many business listings as possible. Such as Google My Business, Bing for Business, Yelp, YellowPages, Waze, Hot Frog, and more. Simply search for “business directories” in Google.com, and you will get this list.
• Ask your customers to leave you a 5* Google review along with feedback, so that Google and your prospects know that your business is popular in your area.
• Add “near me” and location specific keywords in business description section of your business listings. Ex:- Canada Mats services areas such as Vancouver, Burnaby, Banff, and so on. This will indicate Google and other business listing websites that you are relevant to searches happening in the cities specified by you in the business description.

Affiliate marketing for referrals

Even though the above methods do not need you to use this channel, it is always good to test every available cost-effective marketing channel. Affiliate marketing is one channel that should never be ignored. Plumbers, Realtors, Investor organizations, and vendors can also be used for prompting your business for a referral fee for every new client.

Word of mouth and reputation management

As a property management business, you should keep in touch with your local community by visiting local gatherings. Churches, public events, social circles, are few of the places where you can find referrals for your business. A prospect would more likely convert if he finds you through a referral when compared through an add or content.  Many a times you don’t need to give a referral fee, but if you do; then quality leads will keep flowing in.

One more very important step you could do is by using custom mats in all your existing properties that you are managing. Having your brand mat in all your properties will create a brand recall from the property owner, and the property tenant. This is cost effective and a proven solution.

Social media marketing

Social media has penetrated ever nook and corner of this world. Right from millennials to veterans; all are influenced by social media.  Create your business’s social media accounts and share relevant content to grow and engage audience. Example, for Facebook you need to share clickable articles once a day. While Instagram will require attractive pictures to be shared twice a day, and finally twitter will require more than 3 updates a day along with relevant hashtags. When you create a channel, you might have few followers, but those few followers can bring in more follower. More followers can result in prospects landing on your website or contact information.

Search engine optimization

We spoke about content marketing, and how it helps in awareness. Search engine optimization/ SEO is the process of optimizing your website with the help of content to rank your website higher in Google for certain search terms. As a property management business, use SEMRush for pulling out search terms/keywords that are being searched on Google and are relevant to your business.

Once you have these keywords, list them according to their volume, and competition. Pick keywords that have competition less than 0.63, and make sure you have a landing page for all these keywords. SEO is kind of complicated, if you have a budget hire a marketing agency for this. Else use Automatic SEO websites such as Wordpress+Yoast SEO Plugin or NowFloats.

Pay per click marketing or PPC

Well generating relevant traffic to your website takes time and patience. If you want to see immediate results, you need to spend money of paid advertisements such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, or Taboola. From our experience we feel that Google Display ads can be cost effective, and gets the job done.  Google’s new ad platform does not require you to hire an agency to run your ads. You need to spend a day or two on it, and you can run ads by yourself. Attracting traffic through PPC will indirectly improve your website’s ranking in Google (not sure about Bing).

Website authority

All the above methods are good to do, but this method is a must for improving your website’s authority. You need to work on getting some websites talk about your business and link back to your website. The more links your website gets, higher is your website’ authority. Moz defines this as Domain Authority. This score is out of 100. Any website that has more than 40 DA is authoritative as per Moz’ latest blog. Only media websites have DA of 80 and above, since they have high traffic, that attracts content sharing (which in turn generates backlinks).

How to better market a property management business is finally answered.

Here were 9 activities a property management business should do for building online presence while marketing their services in an effective way. All 9 activates are not a must, but its better to be safe than sorry. Traditional marketing is expensive in 2019, so if your still doing traditional marketing; pull some budget out of that to invest in these digital marketing strategies. You can see an immediate jump in your efforts in 3 months.