7 Property Management Marketing Strategies & Ideas to Elevate Your Properties
Property management marketing strategies are crucial to increasing your property’s lead conversion rate. Without a plan in place, your marketing can fall flat and be inconsistent enough to not catch a prospective renter’s attention. Having a marketing strategy in place will help everyone from higher management to the onsite leasing team stay on the same page.
Here you will find ideas, techniques, and solutions to help amp up your property management marketing efforts. These ideas will help increase your lead conversion and help keep occupancy high. Let’s take a deep dive into the world of property management strategies and ideas.
1. Utilize Digital Advertising to Promote Your Properties
Property management advertising needs to be included in your property management marketing budget. Digital advertising, especially pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, can be a highly effective strategy for promoting multifamily properties. Without digital advertising, your property management website and individual property websites will be harder to find and likely surpassed by competing property management companies (PMCs) and properties in search results. Investing in digital advertising allows you to reach potential renters directly, drive targeted traffic to your community, and maximize your marketing budget.
Property management advertising has its own unique aspects. When you begin advertising, you need to set expectations of what you are hoping to get from it. Is it more leads, a higher conversion rate, all of the above? Similar to how all of your content needs to have a purpose, so do the ads you put out.Investing in ads, whether through Google, Facebook, or Instagram, is a great way to get your property management company in front of a broader online prospective renters.
Once you’ve committed to exploring digital advertising, the first step is choosing the right keywords. Start by researching keywords relevant to multifamily properties in your area. Identify terms potential renters might use when searching for apartments, such as “pet-friendly rentals”. From there, you’ll be ready to start crafting compelling and informative ad copy that highlights key features and amenities.
Be sure to emphasize factors like location, amenities, and pricing. After you’ve set a budget and started your campaigns, regularly review and adjust your budget based on the performance of each campaign.
Additional tactics to consider around digital advertising are geo-targeting, retargeting and mobile optimization. By implementing all these digital strategies for your properties, you can effectively use digital advertising to promote multifamily properties, attract qualified leads, and ultimately drive occupancy rates for your available units.
2. Optimize Your Property Website to the Fullest
One of the biggest assets a property management company has is their properties’ websites.
80% of renters say they visited a property website before signing a lease and more than 33% say they only visit one property before signing a lease. This means that prospective renters today are making their decisions almost completely online and typically research more than one property before signing a lease. This shows that multifamily websites need to be optimized for higher online search visibility and be an excellent online experience.
Your multifamily website needs to be optimized for search and include tools that help convert the online traffic that the increase in search visibility is giving your website into qualified leads and eventually leases. What ways can you make your multifamily website stand out?
Interactive Shopping Tools
Impress website visitors with interactive, fun tools that educate rental prospects, prompt them to engage further, and remember them on repeat visits. The menu should dynamically change as a visitor explores your property website to help move them through their renters journey. It will prompt them with personalized next best actions and welcome back messages.
Engagement with interactive experiences increases their understanding of your community’s features, elevates the overall prospect experience, and leads to more qualified and tours from your website without any additional work from your team. At the same time, you’ll be collecting valuable self-reported prospect data and put it to work in your automated and personalized nurture outreach.
And, ensures that the leasing specialists will have all the information they need for the initial conversation that shows that they are well-informed on the prospects needs and wants. Online prospects will be getting a more personalized customer’s experience on your site that’s related to what they were searching for and answering their questions as they are on the site taking in all of your content.
Conversational AI
Utilize conversational AI on your property website to handle prospect questions and requests to free up your onsite team for more valuable work, such as closing leases and servicing residents. Elevate your website chat to the next level with real-time responses to more questions using natural lanuage processing (NLP) chat technology. Whether originating from an SMS nurture outreach or inbound to a mobile number, reply instantly to prospect text messages with responses specifically styled for mobile messaging and allow your team to offer 24/7 coverage to prospect questions and tour scheduling.
Conversational AI should also automate discussions when a prospect emails a response to a nurture email or reaches out via an “Email Us” form which allows you to respond in the moment to emails with accurate answers 24/7, improving your conversions.
Virtual Apartment Tours
From pre-recorded to live videos, virtual apartment tours took off in 2020. It’s a great way to stand out to prospective renters who are out-of town or unable to travel person to the property until move-in day. Matt Weirich, CEO and Co-Founder of Realync, a virtual touring platform, has a lot of advice on how to make your virtual tours stand out.
“Humanize the experience,” advises Weirich. Don’t be scared to use the prospect’s name or other information you know such as if they are work/learn from home in the video. You can and should mention different work/learn from home setups that can be done in your units in your virtual tours. Knowing the specifics on prospective renters’ must-have list and calling out how your property can meet those needs in a virtual tour will help them visualize living someplace they’ve never seen in-person. Consumers in general want all the information they can get before making an online decision. With most renters making their decision online these days, you need to take that into account.
Here are some other ways to take your virtual tours up a notch is to:
- Use a stabilizer for less shaky videos
- Instead of walking and filming, stand and pan the camera
- Face camera away from windows
- Cohesive editing and style
An optimized website experience means investing in an AI solution that combines conversational AI, interactive conversion tools, automated nurture technology and more. The right solution will seamlessly integrate on your existing property website. It takes into account your brand colors so it looks cohesive and a part of your website instead of an add-on. Your leasing team will save hours of work and see an increase in lead conversion from website traffic with a marketing automation solution.
Your website has to be able to give prospects all the information they need to make a decision and collect the data on their journey on your website so leasing specialists know what to talk about when they are making contact. Utilizing your property website and integrating technology that seamlessly creates an exceptional online renter’s journey while collecting personalized, self-reported data that is accessible to the leasing team will convert that traffic into more qualified leads to signed leases.
3. Consistently Post to Blog to Regularly Engage With Your Online Audience
Blogging is great for business. Don’t believe it? Studies show that businesses with a blog have 67% more monthly leads and 55% more online visitors than businesses that aren’t blogging. Multifamily properties can benefit significantly from incorporating a blog into their property management marketing strategies. Blogging offers a dynamic and versatile platform for engaging with both current and prospective residents. Here are a few reasons why multifamily properties should consider blogging:
Showcase Property Features and Amenities: a blog allows you to showcase the unique features and amenities of your multifamily property. Whether it’s a new fitness center or renovated common areas, blogging enables you to highlight these aspects and attract potential renters.
Enhance Search Engine Optimization (SEO): regularly updating your blog with relevant and valuable content can improve your property’s search engine rankings. Search engines favor fresh, high-quality content, and a well-optimized blog can contribute to increased visibility, making it easier for prospective renters to find your property online.
Address Frequently Asked Questions: Use your blog to address common questions and concerns that potential renters may have. This can include information about leasing processes, property policies, neighborhood highlights, and more. Providing valuable information can help streamline the decision-making process for prospective renters.
Blogging is a versatile tool for multifamily properties to engage with your audience, enhance online visibility, and build a strong sense of community. You can even ask residents to guest write a blog. It can be a day in the life of living in your community or a post recapping the moving process. Regular blog posts also gives you consistent content to share on your social media platforms. By providing valuable content, addressing resident and prospect needs, and showcasing the unique aspects of your property, a blog can be a powerful component of your overall property management marketing strategies.
4. Incorporate Video Into Your Property Management Marketing Strategies
In the dynamic and visually-driven landscape of digital marketing, another way to make your multifamily property stand out is using videos. People love apartment related content. Just search “apartment” on YouTube. Thousands of videos will show up from moving vlogs to decorating to renter friendly DIYs, apartment videos are popular. Incorporating video into your property management marketing strategies can significantly enhance your efforts to attract renters, showcase properties, and build a strong online presence.
Videos don’t need to end with prospects on a tour, it can also be used to interact with residents. Sending a welcome video to new residents or videos highlighting events that a newsletter would typically mention is a great way to build a relationship between leasing specialists and residents. This is a huge area of opportunity and growth for multifamily properties. It gets you and your multifamily website in front of even more prospective renters. It also is a great way to showcase your units and amenities through a visual medium instead of just writing about them.
Additional video content could include: recapping resident events, showcasing the key features and amenities of your properties, sharing resident testimonials and providing renter friendly DIYs that residents have done at your apartment. You can even do moving in and moving out tips from the perspective of a leasing specialist.
5. Excel at SEO for Your Properties
Over 99,000 Google searches happen every second. That’s over 99,000 consumers who are shopping, researching, and casually browsing the internet every minute. That number has grown every year since online searching was an option for consumers and it will only continue to grow as the world becomes more digital. This means that search marketing is becoming more important to have in your digital marketing efforts.
Digital marketing for property management companies is more than just SEO but SEO plays a huge role. It can be argued that online search visibility is the most important aspect of digital marketing. If your business can’t be found online, especially on that first page of search results, you’re going to find that you have pretty low website traffic and in turn, not nearly enough qualified leads.
Search engine optimization, also known as SEO for short, is the practice of optimizing your website to increase the quality and quantity of your website traffic. This produces more qualified leads for a property management business and increases your online search visibility. The goal is to be ranked high up on the search results page, and to be higher up than your competitors.
Your property website is where the prospect will get the first impression of your community. Most prospects begin their search for their next apartment through organic online searches. This means that your website needs to be optimized for SEO and your online presence needs to be constantly growing.
SEO uses keywords and phrases that consumers use to conduct their online searches. This means you first need to find the relevant keywords and phrases that your online prospective renters are using to find their next apartment. An SEO company comes in handy here because they can spend time researching this and report back. Once the primary and subsequent secondary keywords and phrases are identified, they need to be used on your website.Your property’s website needs to be optimized for searches, otherwise what’s the point if prospective renters can’t find you online. Using the primary keyword on your homepage, in the slug and snippet of your website page’s search URL is critical.
SEO can be complicated and requires attention weekly, if not daily. Luckily, there are marketing agencies and SEO strategy agencies that help with this. Investing in a partnership with one of these agencies will help boost your apartment search efforts without overworking your team. SEO isn’t something everyone can do but it is something that every business needs today. Sometimes it can be as simple as optimizing your titles and meta descriptions, but it can be more complex when technical SEO is involved. You should also think about optimizing your local SEO for better-localized search results. You can do this by completing and optimizing your Google My Business profile, for example.
6. Embrace Email Marketing to Current Residents and Prospective Renters
Email marketing is an aspect of digital marketing as well. There are over 4 billion email accounts while only just over 1 billion Facebook accounts. It makes sense that there are more email accounts than social media accounts. For starters, not everyone has social media but everyone needs an email in order to function in any aspect of today’s world.
Email marketing delivers your message while other forms could be a hit or miss on whether or not it was received. 90% of emails are received in the intended inbox they were meant to go to while only 2% of your followers will see your post on their Facebook feed. That is a huge difference. While Facebook and other social platforms are still important to use for other reasons we’ve mentioned before, email can’t be put on the back burner.
Email marketing also has higher conversion and ROI. The average click-through rate of a tweet is 0.5% while the average click-through rate of an email is 3% of total recipients. That means that prospects are 6x more likely to click through to your website through an email than they would a tweet.
As for higher ROI, for every $1 spent on an email marketing campaign, the average return on investment is $38. Now those are some numbers we all would like to see. Not only is the ROI and conversion high, but most renters according to data collected from PERQ want to be contacted via email. It’s clear from the data that apartment email marketing needs to be a part of your property management marketing strategies.
7. Up Your Outreach Marketing to Build Relationships
Let’s discuss how you can incorporate outreach marketing with some creative marketing ideas. Outreach marketing can mean both email marketing and community outreach depending on who you are talking to. Since we talk about email marketing above, we’ll focus on community outreach here.
As for other types of outreach or property management prospecting ideas that are a little more offline, interacting with and partnering up with local businesses and community centers are a great way to build trust with the locals and establish your property in the neighborhood it is located in.
You can ask local businesses to place your card or brochure at the checkout or even offer discounts to your residents. You can even partner up with local restaurants or shops for resident events. For example, on National Beer Day or St. Patty’s Day, having a local brewery send someone over to serve beers to residents. During a different resident event, you could ask the local shops if they would want to set up a pop up shop during the event where they could sell some of their goods.
This is a great way to build your reputation as an asset to the local community. These sorts of things are great to show residents more of the neighborhood and it will make their time living with you stand out to them. Residents that enjoy living at a community will stay there longer and refer their friends and family who are trying to move into the neighborhood to live at your community.
Your outreach efforts can be turned into blog and video content. Be sure to take photos of these events and spotlight local businesses for your social media pages. It’ll show prospects what it’s like to live in your community and make you stand out from your competitors. All of these ideas are ways to elevate your content so it isn’t just about the floor plans and amenities. It should include snapshots of life at your community. That will give your marketing more of a human touch and leave a lasting impression on both prospects and current residents alike.
Property management marketing strategies should include several ideas that don’t live on their own. They should all blend together and continue to create more content and more satisfaction with residents. An email marketing campaign can include a link to your blog or a snippet of a video you’ve made. It can include a spotlight of a local business or promote any events you have coming up.
Strengthening your digital presence involves all of these different aspects of marketing. Many of these things can be done through external companies or you can invest in technology that will help with automating your marketing efforts. For example, a marketing automation solution can combine conversational AI, automated nurture technology, and powerful website conversion tools to help you achieve occupancy goals with less work and cost.
Digital Marketing for Property Management
What is digital marketing? Digital marketing is using tactics like social media, search engine optimization, and email to promote or sell your products or services. There are other forms of marketing, like outreach or print, but in today’s world so much of marketing is online. Digital marketing for property management companies and properties needs to incorporate search engine optimization, social media, website content, emailing, and more.
Digital Marketing Manager at J.C. Hart Company, Ryan Cox said “No. 1, even if you have to hire outside to do so, do a comprehensive online customer audit of your residents and potential residents. Men lie, women lie, numbers don’t” as advice to any property that is looking to improve their digital marketing efforts.
Cox is emphasizing how property management teams need to take an analytical approach to how they view website traffic and their prospective renters likes and dislikes. Online apartment searching habits are important to know for any PMC. He continues to explain, “just because you have a budget, doesn’t mean you’re spending it effectively. If you’re just throwing money at [digital advertising] and praying, you’re doing it wrong.”
Digital marketing for property management companies that is well thought out in its content, has a strong SEO plan, and uses tools to help analyze and convert website traffic is going to have a lot more signed leases and a better ROI.
Marketing strategies for property management companies need to cover all the bases while simultaneously collecting data on potential prospects.
“I think people are afraid of change. For some who have been in the business a while – even industry leaders – they have been successful at this prior to the focus on online marketing. They’re used to the traditional practice of selling over the phone, but newer generations don’t shop that way. There may be a bit of ‘I don’t know what that [technology] is,’ but the customers are ready to use it’”
Jeannette Cox, Board of Directors for the National Apartment Association
Incorporate PERQ Into Your Property Management Marketing Strategies
A property management marketing tactic that will set you apart from your competitors is utilizing PERQ’s multifamily marketing automation. Our marketing automation solution improves operational efficiency and profitability by increasing lead conversion, saving leasing specialists time, and collecting better data in the leasing process. This is done through combining a conversational AI, automated nurture technology and powerful website conversion tools to give properties a complete omni-channel solution that is easy to implement with no technology or process change.
Our automation solution helps property management companies with their digital marketing efforts as it centralizes all the data it collected from the online prospects journey on your website. It uses that data for better follow-up and nurture communications that is timed to be released with the given move-in timeline and allows for leasing teams to make better decisions around messaging, amenities, and marketing channels.
Don’t just take our word for it. Dalia Kalgreen, Director of Marketing at Unified Residential Management uses PERQ at her communities as part of her property management digital marketing plan. She says, “what PERQ has done for our business since the pandemic is just tremendous. I feel that way based on numbers, the actual data and it’s just, it’s good. You’ve just made my life a lot easier and it’s made me want to involve you more and more in my marketing plan.”
What makes PERQ’s marketing automation solution different from other chatbot or follow-up choices is that our solution is an “all in one” platform. By combining single point solutions, the platform cohesively addresses all phases of the leasing journey to increase overall results and deliver a better renting experience that is much more cost effective to the community.
Related Links
Apartment Marketing Blogs: Getting Started
Empowering Your Leasing Team: A Guide to Effective Digital Leasing