Best Ways To Grow Your Property Management Firm

Property management marketing can be a very effective way to gain new business. These top marketing strategies can provide a positive ROI for your property management firm.

If you’re looking to amp up your digital marketing presence for your property management business in 2024, here are a few digital strategies you can use to grow your business and bring on new accounts.

These days digital marketing plays an important role in representing your property management firm in the best possible light. Search engine results dictate which companies come up at the top of results, and even if you rank on the first page, you need to impress prospective associations and communities who are seeking association management services. If you’re looking to amp up your digital marketing presence for your property management business in 2023, here are a few digital strategies you can use to grow your business and bring on new accounts.

Build & Improve Your Online Reputation

Once you’ve got an updated website, start networking. Use tools like Google My Business and Yelp to create public profiles so if prospective communities are searching for property management firms in your area, your business will stand out from the rest and also have a better chance of ranking higher on Google. In this way, your management company increases its digital visibility for potential new customers. You can also use these resources to interact with existing homeowners through reviews, bulletins, and comments. Search engine algorithms take website traffic into account when populating results. Frequent traffic on your website with both new and existing customers is a great way to promote visits to your site and work your way to becoming a top result. Your Google My Business, Yelp, and other social network accounts will not only help you build your reputation and increase digital visibility, but they’ll also help you grow your business as a whole.

Protip: Review growth is a marathon, not a sprint. Develop your reputation strategy about consistency and longevity. A handful of great reviews each month is going to provide more long-term benefits than a ‘one and done’ mass request.

Targeted Drip Sequence

A fair percentage of the time, the association management firms we work with receive inquiries for service and requests for management proposals. However, upon responding they find out the board is ‘just not ready to make the switch yet’. Or the request was premature and they are just ‘seeing what else is out there’. While this is not the ideal scenario, it does not mean the lead is dead. Someone was impressed enough by your reputation, your website or another factor and went through the effort of reaching out to you. Just because they are not ready now, does not mean you can’t start a conversation with them. Building out a series of automated emails that get sent to any ‘cold lead’ that falls into this category is a great way to maintain communication with them so when the timing is right, your firm is top of mind. Developing an automated email series could include an article your firm has written on a particular topic, an award you’ve received or statistics about a community you greatly improved. Send them informative, educational content. Then after some time, maybe one with “Let’s grab coffee?” in the subject line.

Protip: You’re playing the long game with these accounts. Maintaining conversations is important to keep the relationship alive, but time-consuming. Building a series of emails that can be automatically sent out can help save time so you can focus on other things.

High-Performance Website

Prospective associations will be inspired and geared towards an aesthetically pleasing and modern style website. Go with themes, colors, and images that read clearly and remove superfluous text or content. Design a site that is up-to-date with user-friendly features. Strive for concise but informative information. Include various links for easy contact directly to your property management firm. We recommend showcasing some of the properties you manage, highlighting the before and afters and improvements your property management firm has been able to make. A clean, crisp, modern website is now mandatory in today’s age, it acts as your businesses 24/7 marketing brochure, it’s also a great way to show prospective board members your company is staying up-to-date with the latest in technology.

Protip: Is your site designed for conversions? Adding a clear call-to-action to the navigation menu so prospects can contact you the moment they are ready to is crucial. We recommend a “Request A Proposal” in a noticeable color in a fixed navigation menu.

Grow Your Citation Listings

People no longer use physical Yellow Pages or phone books to find a service provider when they are in researching potential options. They are going online, to Search Engines and Directories. Making sure your association management firm has a presence on all of the most common citation listings, both general and industry-specific is a quick way to boost your firm’s exposure and funnel in some incremental RFP’s. Different people have different means of conducting research and, search engines and directories are two of the most popular. While increasing your search engine rankings can take time, you can relatively quickly make sure your business is listing on all the local directories so prospects can find you.

Protip: Adding new listings is great, and helps with search engine optimization. But it is also important to make sure your existing citations are still accurate. Check the address, phone number and name of the company on each profile to make sure your firm’s contact details are consistent.

Produce Educational Content

In a world of one hundred thousand search results on almost any search result page, we cannot stress enough how important educational content is. Marketing, especially digital marketing, is about building trust. Your property management firms web presence and interactions with consumers should span the online and offline ecosystems. Whether a prospective community looking for a new management firm or a homeowner from an existing community, help them get answers to the questions they have by providing a knowledge center for them to use. Share information that is informative and helps homeowners find the answers they are looking for. Talk about the process for homeowners to complete tasks, promote local businesses or vendors you work with who can be of service to homeowners, post videos of common ‘how to’ or ‘emergency’ situation quick-fixes. People like to gather information online. If you share good information with people, they trust you, and when it comes time to find a new property management company, they’ll think of you. The term “Blog” may not seem like something an association management firm needs or should invest in, but between the SEO benefits of producing new content and the aid you will be providing community members, the return on investment is high. Aim to build a resource hub on your website that can act as a library of knowledge for both board members and homeowners alike. Become their one-stop shop for everything they need to know. To double up on your investment, you can also share your newly written articles on your property management social accounts.

Protip: Struggling to figure out what topics to write on? Make a list of some of the most common questions your front office staff get asked. Each of these can be turned into a blog article and posted on your site. Now when someone calls in with that question, you look like an expert and can direct them to the article.

Incorporate A LiveChat Feature

We need to accept we live in a digital age now. Given the chance, many people would prefer to communicate via text over a phone call (or even over a face-to-face meeting). What has not changed is that consumers and prospective accounts still have tons of questions they want to be answered. Your management firms job is to provide them with these answers as easily and conveniently as possible…Enter LiveChat communication. Put simply, a LiveChat is a tool you add to your website, that acts as an instant messenger for homeowners, board members, and prospective communities to reach you. It cuts out the delay of email and is not as ‘abrasive’ as phone calls or in-person meetings. With the advances in LiveChat services, you can even pre-populate your LiveChat messenger with answers to frequently asked questions. This way when a website visitor has a question is looking for a document or form or wants to know where they can pay their monthly dues, your LiveChat system can answer all of these questions. Not only does this provide the homeowner/visitor with a quick and painless answer, but it also saves your staff time, by not having to answer the same question for the 734th time.

Consistent & Informative Social Media Campaigns

Similar to building your reputation, social media plays an important role in today’s market, no matter the industry. When marketing through social media for property management services, try to post content that is relevant and meaningful. Share information with current homeowners about upcoming events, post content about progress on large scale projects like remodels, or major landscape changes. Social media is an important digital marketing tool because it builds trust with your current homeowners and thus presents a good image of your services to potential accounts who are searching for a new property management firm. Social media helps get your business out there and on the radar. By sharing the latest news on communities, HOA’s and general real estate and property management updates, you are becoming a source of knowledge for your current accounts and prospective ones. Positioning your firm as an authority in the industry is a great way to stand out amongst your competitors.

Develop A Community Portfolio / Showcase

Many other industries use past and current projects as a way of showcasing the quality of work they provide, and association management firms should not be the exception. In fact, a well captured and put together portfolio of communities your firm has managed is an excellent way to show a prospective association what they can expect.

Pro Tip: To really set your property management firm apart from the competition, take your portfolio to the next level by not only including photos of the finished results. But before and afters of how the community looked prior to you taking over the management aspects. Did you improve the value of the community by adding a front entrance sign, updated landscaping, revived the clubhouse? Include statistics and graphs if you can. The more ‘proof’ you can showcase, whether it be via photos and images or numbers and charts, this is a sure way to stand out from the pack.

Referral Program

We’re calling on some ‘old-school’ marketing tactics here and giving them a digital spin. Grow your property management company with a digital referral program. Offer incentives to your current accounts if they can spread the word about the fantastic property management services you have provided them. Consider including links to your website on your current association accounts websites. If the link gets clicked, and the lead turns into a signed account, offer something in return. You can also get homeowners involved. Use your website, reputation and social media to incentivize homeowners. Offer individual homeowners something if they direct you to leads, or signed account. Some of the largest companies in the world have grown to the sizes they are through strategically executed referral programs. Put in the time to develop a solid, easy to scale referral program for your property management business.

Growing Your Property Management Business

Growing your association property management firm is not an overnight thing. It will take time and dedication to build your business. But implementing these important marketing strategies will set you on the right path to greater exposure in your area. Work down the list and implement as many of these techniques as you can in order to put your firm in a position to drive as many leads into the top of the sales funnel as possible. After that, you just need to worry about closing them!