If you don’t already have a marketing plan for your company, you need one. Successful property management marketing will help you bring in new business, continue nurturing the trust of your current customers, and set you ahead of your competition. How do you get ahead of your competition in an age of marketing saturation?
You build a marketing plan.
Random acts of marketing will only confuse and broaden your message. To cut through the noise, your message needs to follow a plan built to crush the voice of your competition and convert.
Here are five ways to out-market your competition in 2020!
1. Know Your Brand
You should have a clearly defined and unique value proposition (UVP), brand voice, visuals, and theme that remains constant throughout all of your marketing efforts. These unified elements help your potential customers to remember you and build familiarity with your brand.
The unknown can be a little scary—so your priority is to begin building trust with a consistent message. Plus, the more familiar and comfortable potential customers are with your brand, the more likely they are to remember you when they need a property manager or are looking for a new rental!
- Just as designers rely on a style guide to keep your website's appearance consistent as your site grows and changes, your content should have something similar—a content style guide of sorts.
- This should outline your UVP, your main talking points, who your primary buyer persona is, your tone and readability, and more.
- By defining these elements, you make it easier for multiple content creators to make content that is cohesive and on message.
2. Know Your Competition
Keep your friends close—and your enemies closer. While the competition isn’t your enemy, that same concept applies here.
- To set yourself ahead of the competition, you need a benchmark of what that competition is doing.
- Research your competition thoroughly—learn what is and is not working for them.
- Take the parts that are working and improve upon them if those elements that are working also apply to you.
This “if” is pretty important: if your competition is ruling the market because they are vastly undercharging for services or aren’t billing for fees that they should be, you don’t want to lower yourself to that level. Instead, use your unique value proposition to communicate to your customers why your service is the better value—fees and all.
What else should you know about your competition?
- How they are marketing: Where on the web has their name popped up during your searches? Start your investigations here.
- Whether they use paid ads: Run a few Google searches for your keywords, look at who is running paid ads, and what keywords they are running as well. Would it be worth it to outbid some of their keywords?
- Are they taking advantage of radio: Are your competitors advertising on the air? Not everyone can afford radio advertising—but it brings great returns.
If you can't afford to compete in the same spaces, think creatively about what you can do in a less-dominated space. Measure the ROI on all activities, so you know what sources of spend are worth it.
3. Embrace Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is a crucial tool in your toolbox—which is why every time we talk about property management marketing, we mention it. Inbound marketing for property management helps owners find you, instead of you having to hunt them down. If all of your competition is still marketing the old way, you will take a huge leap ahead of them by launching an inbound marketing campaign for your property management business.
Most property management companies use the same types of marketing and the same types of web layouts. By embracing inbound, you can stand apart from your competition with your unique and helpful content offers, your timely and relevant email campaigns, and your targeted lead nurturing.
4. Create Winning Content
Winning content goes hand-in-hand with inbound marketing; in fact, you cannot have inbound without content. However, if you’re still not running a full inbound campaign, you can still create great content for your audience.
Establish yourself as a thought leader in the field! Through creating worthy content, you will attract owners and tenants who are online asking a question. Be the one to provide the answer for them, and you will earn instant points. Anyone can blog, especially property managers! Your admins can even manage your blog if they have been working with you long enough.
If you do choose to blog, be sure to use these elements for maximum effect:
- Use headings: Save the H1 heading for the title though—H2 and lower are the way to go.
- Link to other pages on your website: This gives your reader more things to click on to go further into your site and learn more.
- Use a diverse set of images: Think of your clientele and be sure to represent all types in your imagery so they can relate to your content.
- Don't sell, sell, sell: Blogs are not an appropriate place for a long-winded sales pitch. Users read for informative or entertaining content. Provide this, and you'll be able to gather return visitors.
- Cover the topic thoroughly: If it is only a few paragraphs, it can probably live on a FAQ page or in your Knowledge Base instead of in your blog. Blog content should be long enough to show expertise and authority on a topic.
5. Provide Better Service
Finally, property management is a customer service-centric business. If you delight your customers regularly, their reviews and feedback will add credibility to your marketing efforts. Placing compelling reviews on your social media and home page are great ways to provide social proof that your company is the one to partner with.
Further, find ways to provide services that your competition is not offering that will continue to delight your customers and set you apart. These services don’t have to be elaborate or break the bank. A filter replacement program that owners can add for a fee or a lawn care package that you can offer to your tenants as part of a tenant benefits package can both be a way for you to earn a little bit more while also providing exceptional service that others in your area are not delivering.
Finally, always track your marketing budget. You need to know your customer acquisition cost so you can learn over time which of your marketing efforts are the most successful. You also want to know what the return on investment each of your marketing strategies brings in. This way, you can allocate more of your spending to the most cost-effective measures and amplify the power of your marketing budget.
Do you have a marketing budget? Use our free marketing budget calculator to determine how much you need to spend to get the results your business needs. Then, schedule a consultation call with our marketing and website specialists who will help you pick the perfect mix of Geekly Media services so you can spend more time selling and less time marketing.
Updated and republished 6/15/20.
3 min read
