Property Management Marketing Ideas and Strategies

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 everything is online. Digital marketing for property management companies does incorporate search engine optimization, social media, website content, and emailing.

Over 89,000 Google searches happen every minute. That’s over 89,000 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. 

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 property management companies 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.

While the first three results are typically ads, SEO is different from this as it places your website higher up without paying for ad space. That doesn’t mean SEO is free. It 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 SEO efforts without overworking your team. SEO isn’t something everyone can do but it is something that every business needs today. 

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 consumers likes and dislikes. Online shopping habits are important to know for any business. 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.”

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. Create ads that use those specific keywords and phrases and when a prospective renter clicks on the ad, it takes them to a landing page that is related to the keyword they were searching for.  

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. Other aspects of digital marketing for property management includes social media marketing and email marketing. We’ll get more into those in other sections of this page. 

Multifamily website leases

The National Multifamily Housing Council, NMHC for short, conducted a survey on renter preferences. They found that 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 have an accessible online leasing process. Multifamily website leases are becoming more and more common. In the year 2020, they became the norm of how multifamily properties were leasing. That year may have been different from others due to social distancing but virtual leasing is here to stay after 2020 as well.

Virtual leasing includes virtual tours. From pre-recorded to live videos, virtual touring took off in 2020. It’s a great way to stand out to prospective renters who are out-of-town or unable to travel in-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.

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
   

All these tips and techniques will elevate your virtual leasing. 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. 

Multifamily website leases include investing in solutions that help gather personalized data on your online prospects. Solutions like PERQ are interactive and seamlessly integrate on your 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 solution like PERQ’s.

Interactive chatbot that answers questions 24/7 helps keep prospects feel like they are being taken care of when a leasing specialist is unavailable. It also collects all the relevant data on the prospects while automating the lead nurture and follow-up communication with the information provided. This 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.  

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 making contact. 

Multifamily website

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. We’ve already talked about how you can optimize your website for SEO purposes and ways you can convert your website traffic, but what other ways can you make your multifamily website stand out?

A few ideas to get you started include: 

• Blogging 
• Videos 
• Neighborhood/City Guide 

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. Not having a blog is bad for business. It means less overall visitors and losing out on possible leads. You might be thinking “why does a multifamily website even need a blog?”

For starters, multifamily professionals love to keep up with industry trends through blogs and long form articles. Outside of the industry, renters and people in general love to read about housing. From decor to moving tips to storage ideas, apartment related content is very popular. Many millennials don’t ever see themselves owning a home, they are set on renting for most if not all of their lives. 

This means they have seen it all. They have seen many multifamily websites and having a blog, or any of the other content in that list, will make it stand out. Blogging is also a great way to keep residents entertained and more connected to the 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. This is a great way to boost your online reputation as it’s a lot more relatable than a testimonial or review. It is written in more natural language and the resident would be talking about living in your community in more than just a few sentences. 

Blogging will help boost your online visibility which will help your SEO efforts. Increased online visibility will get you ranked higher up on search page results and hopefully higher up than your competitors. 

Another way to make your multifamily website stand out is adding videos. We talked about virtual tours and virtual leasing earlier in this article. These videos are different from that. 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 and typically do very well. 

This is a huge area of opportunity and growth for multifamily properties. It’s great marketing and gets you and your multifamily website in front of prospective renters. It also is a great way to showcase your units and amenities through more natural videos. You can do recaps of resident events, share decorating tips and 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.  

These videos can live on your website as well as link out to YouTube. Outside of blogging and well vlogging, having a neighborhood/city guide on your multifamily website will increase your local search visibility and place your website as the hub of information on what’s what in your surrounding neighborhood. You can have an interactive map that shows where local businesses and attractions are in proximity to your multifamily community. You can also list out specific types of businesses like shops, restaurants, and bars. Ask residents to leave reviews of the local businesses on your page.
 

These three ideas will help increase your search visibility and make your multifamily website a place for professionals in the industry and renters alike to learn about apartment related content and what’s happening in the local community. 

Marketing for property management Companies

Marketing for property management companies has seen a lot of change within the last few years alone, not to mention the last decade. The days of Yellow Pages and radio ads are long gone. No business can survive today without utilizing digital marketing. Digital marketing for property management companies can take your established strategies from years before and adapt them to a digital world. There are new innovative technologies and solutions within the digital marketing world that have proven to produce results for multifamily communities. These solutions are even catered to property management companies making it easier for onsite teams to focus on the non–digital aspects of marketing like building relationships with renters. Implementing a digital marketing plan will help you enter new markets, increase your lead conversion and occupancy numbers, and improve your overall ROI. 

Digital marketing is really wrapped up in keywords and SEO. Understanding the importance of keyword and search marketing will improve your digital marketing efforts and get your property more online search visibility. What are keywords and why do you keep hearing about them? Keywords and phrases are the words that prospective renters are typing into search engines like Goggle to find what they are looking for. Whether its products, services, or solutions, this is how consumers look for answers to their needs and wants today. Once you’ve identified which keywords prospective renters are using, you can start to tailor your marketing and advertising efforts to include those keywords so they show up in those searches. 

This is how your property management company’s properties’ websites will appear higher up on search results. No business wants to be on the second page of a Google search because no one really looks that far and your competitors are the ones who are ranked higher up and are more visible. It’s not enough to know who your competitors are. You need to be analyzing their digital marketing strategies to understand why they are or aren’t performing better.  

You can look to see how high up they are on search results when you look up the keywords you are trying to hit. Are they higher up than you or lower on the page? Do you see them struggling in the same keyword searches or are they succeeding? Check out their website and sign up for their newsletter to see what kind of events and content they are sending out. Check out their social media pages and even give them a friendly like or follow so you can see what they are doing differently from you and how it is or isn’t working for them. 

This might seem silly, but you need to see how your marketing for property management is holding up in comparison to your own competitors. Marketing is all about getting the word out and promoting your business to consumers. You need to see if your competitors are ahead of you when it comes to this or if they aren’t. It’s a great way to see if your efforts are working or not. However, this doesn’t mean to copy their efforts if they are doing better. The point is to learn from your marketing mistakes and find the areas of improvement in your plan.  

Any effort in your marketing for property management can amount to nothing if your online reputation is bad. Reviews are so important in a prospective renter’s search for their next home. Adding testimonials and resident quotes to your website and featuring them as visual graphics on your social media is one way to build a good online reputation. Another way is to check the Google reviews and reviews on other third-party sites. Negative reviews need to be addressed quickly and publicly in a professional and genuine tone.  Prospective renters will see how you try to take care of residents or prospects who had a bad experience and they’ll factor that into their decision making. 

Most negative reviews from current residents tend to be about maintenance issues. Having good communication between the leasing office and maintenance office will help get rid of this issue and ensure that residents are satisfied.  

Implementing a referral program for current residents is a great way to encourage residents to invite people they know to live at your property. This can also help keep your turnover rate low as people will love living nearby their friends and family and feel more connected to your community.

Marketing for property management encompasses a lot but when done right, will increase your online traffic and lead conversion. It’s surprisingly easy to fall into a the same old plan for your marketing but you need to  analyzing your strategies and efforts to make sure it is working for you and not eating up your budget.  

Property Management Marketing Ideas 

We’ve talked a lot about different property management marketing ideas to help increase your online search visibility, lead conversion, and resident retention. Outside of blogging, website content, and city guides, what other property management advertising examples are there? 

Let’s start with outreach marketing and how you can incorporate some creative marketing ideas for property management into your efforts. Outreach marketing can mean both email marketing and community outreach depending on who you are talking to. We will talk about both in this article to cover all our bases. Email marketing is an aspect of digital marketing as well. Emails have a larger reach than other forms of media like social media and website content. 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 email marketing needs to be a part of your property management marketing plan. 

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 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. It also gives you plenty of content to write or vlog about on your website. 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. 

Property management marketing ideas don’t have to be things that live on their own. They can 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.  

Your outreach efforts can be turned into blog and video content. Social media marketing ideas for property management can use content you already have to your advantage. 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 up your content so it isn’t just about the floor plans and amenities. It needs to 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. 

How PERQ can help you with Property Management Digital Marketing 

A Property Management Digital Marketing solution that will set you apart from your competitors is PERQ’s AI Leasing Assistant. Our AI Leasing Assistant improves operational efficiency and profitability by increasing lead conversion, saving leasing specialists over 10 hours of work weekly, and collecting better data in the leasing process. This is done through combining a chatbot, lead conversion widgets, and automated follow-up to give properties a complete omni-channel solution that is easy to implement with no technology or process change. 

Our AI Leasing Assistant 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 cleaner follow-up 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. PERQ’s AI Leasing Assistant will give you a 2x – 4x increase on qualified leads and a 40% increase on tours and lead-to-tour conversion 

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 AI Leasing Assistant different from other chatbot or follow-up choices is that our solution is an “all in one” platform. By combining single point solutions, the AI Leasing Assistant 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.

Want to involve PERQ in your property management marketing plan or talk to someone about adding PERQ to your tech stack?