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While inflation has eased a bit in recent months, it’s still well above the rates everyone grew used to in the pre-pandemic days. That means costs remain high for everyone, which chills everything from grocery shopping to moving into a new apartment. Property management businesses may find filling some of their higher-end and pricier units difficult. If your regular marketing isn’t finished, keep reading for some key property management marketing ideas.
Drive Home Benefits
Potential tenants want factual feature-based information, such as square footage and amenities in the property listing. Yet, a cold list of amenities probably won’t do much to sway potential tenants unless one of those amenities was a deal-breaker for them in the first place. It’s also a missed opportunity.
For example, let’s say your units have older magnesite subflooring. That won’t mean much to potential tenants. What will mean something to them is mentioning that the subfloor is non-combustible and water-resistant. Anything that reduces the potential for fire damage is a benefit. Water resistance is a premium benefit for anyone who has ever lived through even minor apartment flooding.
Get Your Website in Order
If you're looking for property management marketing ideas that can help boost your business, you need to ensure your website is up to par. People have so spent so much time online in the last few years that they’re hypersensitive to anything that seems out of place or outdated. While you don’t necessarily need to revamp your site completely, you should give it a once over for some key basics.
For example, is your navigation simple? Do you have a clear, easy-to-find Contact Us page? Does your contact us page have the business's name, physical address, and phone number? Not only will visitors look for these things, but so will search engines.
Does your website use an out-of-date theme or look like a website from five years ago? If so, you should update the look and feel of your site. Look to major property management services sites to get a feel for the current industry standard design trends.
Polish Up Your SEO
A couple of things in the last section overlap with search engine optimization. Competition in the real estate market is almost always fierce, even locally. You need your site to rank well, or your competitors will snatch away business that could have been yours.
SEO breaks down into a few general areas of concern: non-technical SEO, technical SEO, and local SEO.
While it’s slightly oversimplifying, non-technical SEO deals primarily with customer-facing parts of your website. You can think of it as the user experience elements. This touches on keywords, functional links, content frequency, and seamless navigation.
Technical SEO, which covers a lot of ground, concerns itself more with what visitors don’t directly see. One common example is page load speed. Many things can influence page load speeds, such as oversized image files, excessive JavaScript, and hotlinking.
Other considerations for technical SEO include sitemaps, mobile readiness, and site architecture.
While less important than technical or non-technical SEO, local SEO often takes up more focus for brick-and-mortar businesses. Local SEO focuses on getting traffic from people in a specific geographic area. So, its focus is often on integrating location-specific keywords, getting listed on Google maps, and creating area-specific content.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is another strategy that covers a lot of ground. Yet, the basic premise is fairly simple. You create content that helps attract visitors to you and builds trust, rather than paying for advertising that interrupts and annoys your would-be customers.
Property management companies are in a nice position regarding content marketing because the nature of the business lets you straddle the various content types. Some of the more common content types include:
- Blog posts
- Infographics
- Video
- Checklists
- Podcasts
Property management companies can write blog posts focused on the concerns of tenants or landlords. They can create infographics about the concerns of either. For example, you can do an infographic focused on the benefits of using property management services for landlords for one week. Next week, you can do an infographic about utility cost-saving measures tenants can take.
For that matter, you can create videos on similar subjects. You can also create videos about the general properties you manage or specific units you’re trying to rent right now. Remember the earlier section about driving home benefits? Videos are a great place to do exactly that.
If you embrace content marketing, develop a content marketing plan or, minimally, an editorial calendar. Either of those options lets you set a pace for content creation, focus on topics and create deadlines. The advantage of a content marketing plan is that it usually encompasses more than just what will, for example, appear directly on your website.
Social Media
Many property management services have a mixed relationship with social media. On the one hand, it’s tremendously powerful. Pick the right platform, and you have access to a vast audience. On the other hand, it’s a constantly shifting landscape.
While social media can prove challenging, particularly when new social media platforms get big in a hurry, it’s not a communication you can ignore. The trick is to pick a platform or two that play to your strengths and your intended audience.
TikTok, for example, is really popular, but the user base skews incredibly young. Around 60% of its US users are under 30. Sure, some of those users might end up as tenants, but the amount of video work you must do to stay relevant on TikTok simply isn’t worth it for most property management firms.
Platforms like Facebook and Instagram have much better alignment with property management businesses. The user base skewed a bit older, which means higher income levels and more college graduates. They also let you move back and forth between images, videos, and text based on your current needs.
Referral Program
Word-of-mouth has always reigned as the king of marketing, but it’s also notorious for being hard to create. One shortcut for building a little word of mouth is to create a referral program for your tenants. The odds favor your tenants, knowing when other people are looking for a new apartment or rental property. You can leverage that by incentivizing your tenants to refer friends and family members to the properties you manage.
Property Management Marketing Ideas and You
There are a lot of property management marketing ideas out there that can potentially help you. The trick is to choose the best ones that align best with your goals. If you’re looking for short-term improvements, boosting your social media presence, focusing on benefits in your property listings, and referral programs might serve you best.
If you’re looking for long-term results, SEO, content marketing, and website improvements will probably do more for you.
If you’re looking to add something to your properties that can boost their value in the short term, consider getting new decking or replacing old decking with West Coast Waterproofing.
