The real estate market was projected to reach over $613 billion in 2023, reflecting the opportunities property management companies have to generate impressive revenues. However, without effective digital marketing strategies that attract high-quality residents, you risk having your communities taking longer to fill.
Not all online marketing strategies are equal. Depending on the asset class, community size, or even the management company themselves, strategies that work for private landlords might not work for property managers.
In this article, we uncover the seven best digital marketing strategies for property management companies. You can use them to attract and engage rent-ready residents for your properties. We also give you the steps to create an effective online marketing plan—and, ultimately, achieve a high return on investment (ROI) from your marketing efforts.
The role of digital marketing in real estate
Digital marketing involves promoting your properties to prospective residents through online channels such as social media platforms, websites and blogs, email, and digital ads.
Online marketing can help your company reach more prospects than you would with less effective property management advertising strategies, such as television or magazine ads.
The benefits of digital marketing for property management companies
Digital marketing is essential for virtually all industries. It has become a necessity in the real estate industry since most prospective residents can be found online. In fact, as of April 2023, there were 5.18 billion internet users and 4.8 billion social media users worldwide.
So, if you aren’t focusing on digital marketing, you’re leaving traffic and money for the business on the table.
Here are some of the main benefits online marketing can offer your property management company:
1. Higher ROI
According to 44% of marketing experts, online marketing offers a higher ROI than offline marketing channels such as print ads and direct mail.
Digital marketing strategies such as content marketing, social media marketing, and digital property management ads can offer an impressive return on investment because you can reach a large audience with a modest budget. Email marketing alone generates, on average, $36 for every $1 spent.
2. Enter new markets
Online marketing allows you to enter new markets and reach future residents you never would’ve been able to reach otherwise. This opens the door to younger or older markets or neighboring cities.
For example, you could run geo-targeted ads on social channels such as Facebook and Instagram to reach users in new areas that match your company’s target audience criteria.
3. Easy to measure
Online marketing lets you easily measure results and key performance indicators (KPIs). Digital marketing methods provide real-time insights into metrics such as conversion rates, website visits, and engagement to help assess campaign performance.
This empowers you to make more informed decisions, refine your marketing strategies, and maximize your results.
4. Get to know your customers
Data from Google Analytics and other tools can help you get to know your customers inside and out. You’ll gain valuable insights into their online behavior, preferences, and much more.
This means you can create marketing materials catered to their specific needs—making them far more likely to choose you over your competitors.
5. Reach people where they are in their journey
Not all potential residents may be ready to rent yet. Digital marketing gives you several touch points with them throughout their journey so that you’re top of mind when they are ready.
For example, their journey may look something like this:
- They’re considering renting an apartment sometime in the future, so they start searching for apartment-related questions online. They stumble upon valuable content on your blog, which provides them with the information they’re looking for.
- They decide to follow your company on social media and see your posts every once in a while.
- You run retargeting ads for your social media followers and website visitors, showcasing your available apartments.
- They’re finally ready to rent, and they choose your company.
7 property management marketing strategies to implement straight away
Below is a list of the seven best online marketing strategies for your property management company to get quality leads.
1. Audit your current marketing strategy
Audits are vital to a successful marketing strategy in all industries, including real estate.
Since occupancy fluctuates often, you should constantly evaluate your marketing strategy in order to increase NOI. This includes looking at your lead sources (the places you get your leads from) and the real estate technology you’re using at least once a quarter.
If not, you could be paying for and using services and products that bring little to no value to your business.
You can run an audit by:
- Confirming your marketing goals
- Determining your current performance and any gaps you need to fill
- Keeping track of your marketing processes so that they’re documented at every stage
- Summarizing your company’s current marketing performance
- Coming up with solutions
- Ensuring you have the budget and resources to implement new solutions
2. Leverage content to increase traffic to your website
There are tons of keywords residents look for that apply to apartment hunting, tips for renting, community events, and much more.
If you create SEO-optimized content, this can help you attract online traffic that can convert to new residents. You can create this content internally with the help of writers or by hiring a content production agency.
This part of your marketing includes using location-specific keywords on your website pages and highly informative blog posts so people in your target market can find you easily.
You can also boost your local SEO performance by creating a Google Business Profile so that whenever people search for properties in your area, your business shows up in the results.
Your Google Business Profile only needs to be set up once. It includes basic information, such as your address, contact details, and photos of your properties. You can also share updates on new properties by publishing Business Profile posts.
3. Automate processes for lead generation
In today’s fast-paced world, prospects are accustomed to immediate responses and access to information.
If you want to convert leads into leases, you need to focus on responding to prospective residents as quickly as possible while also offering excellent customer service and easily accessible information.
There are great tools in this space to help automate lead nurturing and lead-to-tour conversion, including:
- Elise AI: An advanced AI technology that manages hundreds of conversations and your company’s operations so your team has more time to do other tasks
- Hyly AI: An AI software that provides an efficient tour site experience for prospective residents—from setting up apartment tour slots to sending drip campaigns
- PERQ: A multifamily automation tool that communicates with and nurtures prospective residents, helping you increase your website conversions
The faster you can support prospective residents, the better.
For example, Elise AI is a chatbot that ensures your leads get answers to their questions in real time (while they’re in the mindset of renting). This increases the likelihood that they’ll book tours, apply, and become residents.
4. Create ads for your communities
Digital ads on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Google Ads are one of the most effective ways to generate leads for your real estate company.
With these ads, you can target people who are actively searching for properties (based on their online behavior and past search history).
While Facebook, Instagram, and Google ads are generally what most companies use, YouTube ads can be even more effective since they have low competition. Only 26% of real estate companies use YouTube ads in their business. As an added bonus, low competition generally correlates with lower ad costs.
Ads also allow you to retarget people who visit your site or social media platforms—often considered your “warm” audience—to help reach people interested in renting.
To do this, you can consider running Facebook ads to “lookalike audiences” or displaying ads on Google to increase visibility.
5. Build an online reputation via social media
The best way to “sell” your community’s lifestyle is through social media. The National Association of Realtors found that 66% of real estate businesses find social media impactful in their marketing.
Social media channels offer you an excellent opportunity to post lifestyle content that makes potential residents excited to join your community.
Lifestyle content consists of posts that highlight:
- Community events
- Local attractions and amenities
- Updates
- Resident testimonials
- Design and decor inspiration
- Maintenance tips
- FAQs and how-to’s
If you’re wondering what kinds of things your property management company can post on social media, take a look at what Avenue5 Residential and Waterton have done for inspiration.
While social ads are great for helping generate leads, organic social media content is useful for establishing a reputation.
However, good customer service is the key to making this work. You can have great posts, but if you have poor follower engagement and neglect answering queries, your followers will get a bad impression of your company—and possibly leave.
Since you’ve freed up your team’s time by implementing automation into your lead generation processes, your team can now create excellent organic social media content that will sell your community’s lifestyle.
Remarketing is re-engaging a lead based on their past interest in a property.
Sometimes, residents become a lead when they’re starting to look for properties but may not respond to the follow-up from the leasing team. The lack of response then causes the leasing team to stop following up.
However, this is a big mistake since these leads are considered “warmer” due to having shown prior interest in the property. So, the best way to retarget your leads is to pull those received in the previous 90 days and continue to follow up via email or text messages, whatever is best for your business.
Another great strategy is to revisit “old” leads—or those from the past 12 months. This is because 12-month leases are the most popular choice among residents—so their lease is most likely ending soon if they’ve chosen to not renew.
These leads or prospects are in a renewal phase and could be in the market for a new rental property. By sending them an email following up, you can get them to re-engage.
7. Leverage reputable partners for more leads
Listing your available properties on real estate sites is a great way to attract rent-ready residents. They can get more views on active listings and facilitate communication with prospective residents. For example, Realtor.com delivers 1.8 million monthly leads to current partners to make it easier to fill vacant units. Seventy-five percent of our rental visitors don’t opt for other rental sites, which can also help in increasing high-quality traffic to your site.
Once prospective residents land on our site, they can filter listings based on size, location, property type, and more.
How to create a digital property marketing plan
While all the individual strategies mentioned above are important, they can be even more effective when used together. This is why setting up a plan for your digital marketing efforts and budget is so important.
Follow these steps to set up your digital marketing plan:
- Identify your ideal resident: Perform market research to understand what social platforms they’re using the most. For example, can they be found on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube? Generally, older audiences use Facebook, and younger audiences use Instagram.
- Determine your budget: You need to know how much you can spend on digital marketing and advertising. As of March 2023, most companies spend around 12% of their overall budget on marketing.
- Incorporate paid and organic marketing strategies: A mixture of organic and paid digital marketing strategies will bring about the best results. This is because organic marketing, such as social media posts, is excellent for building a community, while paid advertising generates leads.
- Find reputable partners: Listing your properties on listing sites will help you get rent-ready leads. It allows you to reach prospective residents you wouldn’t have found otherwise.
- Focus on marketing to both “old” and “new” leads: Incorporate retargeting marketing into your plan. This includes targeting people who visit your website and social media platforms and “old” leads (those from the past 3 to 12 months).
Without good marketing, you risk missing out on high-quality residents. There are several effective marketing strategies you can start implementing now to see better results. From SEO and social media marketing to improving the user experience on your website, there’s so much you can do to put your properties in front of the right people.
By partnering with Realtor.com, you’ll get quality leads delivered daily. We offer budget-friendly subscriptions, empowering you with the best marketing solutions to grow your company and achieve higher profits. Contact our team today to get started.
