Time is a precious commodity in property management. With so many things to juggle, putting a focus on marketing and sales can feel nearly impossible. But neglecting your client acquisition strategy can cost you valuable opportunities. Property management marketing automation can help ramp up your communications with prospective clients and residents without overwhelming your already busy team.
Making time for consistent, high-quality marketing efforts is essential for growth, as well as increased profitability. By automating marketing, you can connect with more investors and residents in less time with less effort. You can supercharge your go-to-market investments and see better returns more quickly.
This post will cover what marketing automation is, why it’s beneficial for property management companies, and how you can start automating your marketing.
Property management marketing automation is the process of using technology and software tools to manage marketing communications, lead nurturing, ads, social media, and other repetitive marketing tasks. It helps create more efficient processes, but also more personalized results.
There are nearly endless ways that modern marketing automation can help, but here are a few examples:
How exactly you put automation to use depends on your marketing strategy and who you’re trying to connect with, but there are tools and techniques for every business.
The benefit of effective marketing is fairly simple: you get more opportunities to grow your portfolio. But marketing automation goes beyond that. Let’s take a look at how automating your go-to-market strategy can provide a variety of benefits.
Part of developing as a property management leader is getting your mind out of checklist mode and into strategy mode. When you start automating routine tasks in any part of your business, you start to give yourself the time necessary to focus on those strategic activities,
In order to become more efficient, all small businesses need to embrace automation. For example, automating email communications to prospects can save you significant time on business development, which you can then spend upgrading systems or automating other functions.
Keeping up with day-to-day marketing also frequently involves task switching. You may have to post on social media, email a couple of prospects, respond to a Google Review, and record a marketing video, all over the course of one day. That task switching is inefficient; if you can write all your social posts for the week in a single sitting and then schedule them out with automation software, you’ll save a lot of time.
Ultimately, acquiring leads is the primary goal of marketing. It’s how you expand your business and grow your portfolio. Automation can accelerate that process.
Using webforms connected to an automation program, you can capture and qualify new leads instantly. When a potential client fills out the form, you immediately have key information about them, their business, and their portfolio, and you can use automated rules to determine whether they might be a good fit. If they are, you can enroll them in an email sequence that provides them more information about your company and encourages them to schedule a call with you. If they’re not, the automation tool can automatically send them a polite email stating that you don’t feel it’s a good match.
Qualifying (and disqualifying) leads can help you focus on the highest-value prospects, rather than spending your time on leads that won’t be profitable for you.
Advanced automation strategies can also use lead scoring, which weighs different attributes and behaviors to determine whether someone’s likely to become a customer. Segmentation is also key. For example, you can set up different communications for companies that own single-family homes and those who own multi-family buildings, with customized messaging for each portfolio type.
Automation also provides more consistency in your marketing efforts, which can present a more trustworthy brand across all channels. For example, if you’re only posting intermittently on LinkedIn, some prospects may see that as less professional. With automation tools, you can post more regularly and give a more consistent appearance.
Consistency is particularly important for property managers because, in many ways, it’s a core tenant of the job. Investors want to know that they can count on you to be consistently responsive and proactive in managing their assets.
And, in a world where many property owners see management services as very commoditized, a strong brand presence can help you differentiate your business. In areas with a lot of management competition, this can be the difference between winning and losing a deal.
While it may sound counterintuitive, automation can also help your communications feel more personal and help you build more meaningful relationships. Think about some of the marketing communications you receive on a daily basis. Maybe you get emails from a clothing store with recommendations of items you’d like based on your previous purchases. Maybe it’s a take-out restaurant texting you to let you know your favorite dish is discounted this week. Marketing automation can help you reach the same level of personalization.
Modern marketing tools can help you tailor communications based on resident or investor preferences and their past behaviours, which can lead to higher engagement with your content and increase the likelihood of getting a positive response.
Most marketing automation platforms also provide detailed analytics and reporting, not just automation. That means that property managers can leverage robust data to make better decisions and get more value from their marketing efforts.
For example, if you have data that shows one email nurture program gets more opens and clicks than another, you can divert more leads to the high-performing option, and prioritize revising the low-performing cadence. If you know that it typically takes a prospect a month from the time they first visit your website to the time they request a meeting, you can better estimate your future pipeline based on web traffic.
In the era of big data, being able to see objectively how your marketing investments are performing is essential.
Because there are so many different tools available that execute so many different tasks, the possibilities for marketing automation are virtually endless. Let’s look at a few ways to properly automate your tasks and set you up for go-to-market success.
Lead generation and nurturing is the process of gaining someone’s initial interest in your services, and then providing them with valuable content and information that helps convince them to work with you.
There are plenty of marketing automation platforms designed for just about any type of small business. However, there are also lead generation and nurture functions in many property management accounting softwares, like Buildium, AppFolio, and Rentvine. These are particularly advantageous because they integrate directly with the rest of your daily operations and don’t require adding a whole additional tool to your tech stack.
There are also automation tools designed specifically for the property management industry, like LeadSimple. LeadSimple integrates with the most common property accounting software tools and includes tools like AI-powered communications.
Email marketing can be as simple as sending a single message to a handful of contacts, or as detailed as a multi-touch email sequence based on interactions across your website, emails, and social media channels.
Some of the most common use cases for property managers are lease renewal notifications and new resident welcome messages, but email marketing can do a whole lot more. For example, you can set automated emails so that when someone watches a video on your website, they receive an email the next day with recommended follow-up content. This can keep them engaged and aware of your company while also providing value, rather than just asking for a sales call.
There are plenty of popular email automation tools out there—MailChip, ActiveCampaign, and Klaviyo are among the most popular—so we recommend shopping around. For smaller property management companies, it may make sense to be budget-conscious. For larger companies, you may be able to take advantage of some of the more advanced features, so opting for a more enterprise-oriented tool could be worthwhile.
Most property managers already realize the importance and power of social media, but many are still posting manually without an overarching strategy. Modern social media tools can help you schedule out your posts, and some can even provide recommendations for the best days and times to publish new content to maximize engagement. Automation tools can also syndicate content across multiple platforms, like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, all with just one button click.
Some of the most commonly used social media tools include Buffer, Hootsuite, and Sprout Social, which all offer similar feature sets. We also recommend pairing them with Canva, a simple web-based tool for creating graphics, images, and short videos for social media. We use Canva here at Second Nature, and it offers built in templates for all different social media platforms to make sure your images are the right size and resolution for each channel.
You might also like: Property Management Companies that are Winning on Social Media
Reputation management is a critical but often overlooked piece of the marketing equation for small businesses. Especially in people-focused businesses like property management, your reputation can be make or break when trying to connect with new clients.
Reputation management is the process of curating the way that you’re talked about on the internet, in person, and at industry events. It’s how your audience thinks and talks about you to others. Reputation management tools are focused primarily on managing, responding to, and collecting customer reviews across various websites like Google Business, Facebook, and Yelp.
Birdeye and Reputation.com are two of the most popular reputation management tools, both of which offer AI-powered tools to flag negative reviews and determine the tone and intent behind them, as well as craft recommended responses to those reviews.
Property listing syndication is the process of sharing new vacant properties across multiple channels, all with the click of a single button. For example, you may choose to post all of your listings across Zillow, Trulia, and Homes.com. A syndication tool can do this automatically as soon as you publish a vacancy.
Many property accounting softwares include basic syndication functionality. If you’re looking for more advanced options, tools like ShowingHero and Tenant Turner help automate the process of listing vacant properties, scheduling showings, and managing communications with prospective residents across several different sites.
Just as marketing automation frees up more time for you to focus on high-impact, strategic activities, outsourcing resident benefits can also create room for growth. In particular, outsourcing the management of renters insurance, pest control, and air filters can minimize service calls and maximize flexibility for your team.
For more information on building a Resident Benefits Package that can give you the flexibility to get strategic, request a demo today.