Part Three of the “Grow your rent roll” series by Aaron Clancy focuses on creating an effective marketing campaign.
In Part 1 we discussed the importance of understanding the client. Once you understand that your initial meeting with a prospect is about them and not you, your conversions will increase. A great opener that I use when meeting new clients is ‘What is the most important thing you are looking for in a property manager?’ Once you know this, you can focus your sales pitch on this area to meet your client’s needs.
In Part 2 we talked about building an effective team around you. At the end of the day property management is just another job, and it’s up to you as the owner to create that working atmosphere that means staff will want to turn up. We covered numerous ways that you can build up a team to be the best at what they do in your area.
In Part 3 we are going to talk about creating an effective marketing campaign to help you grow your rent roll. Rent roll building does not need to be difficult, but for many property management companies it seems to be the hardest part of running their business. The reason why owners find this area the hardest is because they don’t dedicate the time necessary to marketing their company utilising cost effective strategies.
Effective marketing strategies to grow your rent roll
Before we get into what marketing strategies you should consider for your property management company, it is important that you do go back and read Parts 1 and 2. The reason for this is that no amount of marketing will make you successful if your team is dysfunctional or your sales process is wrong.
Secondly, it is also important that you understand that the only way you will achieve great success with your marketing strategies is to test, monitor and tweak. There are too many property management companies who are still utilising radio and Yellow Pages for advertising because they have always done this – not because they track and know that these are effective marketing channels.
Marketing Strategies to get your business going
Direct Response Website
Don’t let the name put you off! Simply, a direct response website is where we get visitors to come to a website and take action. This could mean filling in their details to receive a report, filling in an enquiry form, talking with an agent via live chat or picking up the phone to ring you.
Traditional websites are known as brochure websites, and unfortunately that is what the majority of property management owners have. A brochure website worked 10 years ago; essentially it was set up so that people could see what services you offered. The issue is that the onus is then put on the prospective to pick up the phone and ring you. In today’s competitive market, this isn’t a strong enough call to action. Property management owners need to put their message in front of their prospective clients and get them to act on it. All it takes is one click back and you have lost that potential business which you could have had if you’d put some direct response attributes on your website.
Search Engine Optimisation
Search Engine Optimisation (also known as SEO) is when you rank in Google for keywords related to your business. This is known as showing up in the organic listing. Each page generally has 10 listings (go to Google and type in a phrase, and there will be around 10 websites with descriptions displayed).
Let’s use an example. Let’s say you are a property manager based in Suburb A. When someone types into the search engine (whether it is Google or another one, like Yahoo or Bing) ‘property management suburb A’ you want your website showing up. If it does not, then you may want to consider using the services of an SEO agency.
If your suburb is too small you want to rank for several suburbs. Or, if you live in a city where you cover the whole area, you want to rank for harder keywords like ‘property management city A’.
