Published June 25, 2019. Updated September 19, 2023.
Do you want to build and execute a successful marketing campaign for your property management business? You've come to the right place!
Geekly Media specializes in inbound marketing and operational automation for property managers, and we're always happy to share our expertise.
In this blog series, we will cover all the elements of a successful marketing campaign and guide you through the process of creating one. As the first blog in the series, today we discuss how research is the backbone of any property management marketing campaign. Then, blog two will cover the campaign plan, and blog three will cover the execution of the campaign.
Let's get started!
The first step to crafting a marketing campaign is to set up your foundational marketing elements:
The "Why"
Brand Story
We will touch on each of these elements before moving into the creative aspects of planning your first campaign and why they function as critical components.
The first step is to create accurate buyer personas.
What is a buyer persona? These figures represent a collection of demographic and sociographic information built into a fictional representation of your ideal customer.
You will use your buyer persona in both sales and marketing; it is an invaluable tool. For this reason, crafting an accurate buyer persona at the start of your marketing efforts can make or break your entire campaign.
If you're having trouble rolling all the details about your target audience into one cohesive persona, that's okay! Make more than one.
Having multiple buyer personas can help property managers target different segments of their markets effectively. Each persona represents a unique set of needs, pain points, and motivations. By tailoring your marketing messages, product features, and customer service to each persona, you enhance engagement and boost sales.
Multiple personas also allow for more personalized marketing, helping to build stronger relationships with each customer group. It ensures that you're not putting all your eggs in one basket, diversifying risk and maximizing the potential for revenue growth.
Having more than one persona also helps when it's time to create content. More audiences means you have more ways to publish relevant content to build your SEO content library and drive more traffic.
After crafting your buyer persona, it is time to build your brand story. Before creating a brand story, however, you need one more piece of information: your company's "why."
The "why" is your reason for doing business.
Underneath the motivation of profit, why do you do what you do? Understanding your "why" and "how" will help you build a brand story in which your company can effectively communicate to your personas while developing trust.
Most property management companies already have their "why" built in the form of mission and vision statements. That's an excellent place to start when building your property management marketing strategy!
Take the time to update and revise these statements and bring them to the forefront while you work on writing your brand story and then creating content.
A brand story is a narrative that brings together your buyer persona and your "why."
It is not the story of how your brand came to be; it's the story of how your ideal customers (i.e., those buyer personas) meet your brand and how you help them solve their problems and avoid failure.
A brand story for a property management company might look something like this:
Your persona, Landlord Lily, is ready to move her family to a bigger home that will better meet their needs. Unfortunately, market conditions are weak. If Lily sells her home, she will be taking a loss.
However, Lily is not in a position to take a loss — but she also isn't in a position to pay two mortgages.
Then, Lily meets your company: Property Management Experts. Your company has experience with finding tenants and setting rental amounts that will help solve Lily's problem. Lily ends up working with you because your full-service solution is what she needs, avoiding the failure of ending up with two mortgages she cannot afford.
Seems pretty straightforward, right? It is.
However, completing this exercise will help you understand, from the customer's perspective, what messaging will be effective for your marketing strategy.
Now that you've taken the time to refresh your understanding of who your ideal customer is, what and why you do what you do, and how that all works together, you need a refresher on the buyer's journey.
The buyer's journey is how we describe the different stages a buyer goes through when they are deciding to make a purchase. It consists of three primary stages:
Awareness: A buyer realizes they have a problem and is researching to learn about it. The awareness stage is when a consumer does the most research and learning.
Consideration: A buyer is starting to learn about your service and company and considering you as a solution to their problem.
Decision: If a consumer is still considering you at this stage, you've made their shortlist, and they are taking final steps to choose their solution.
Your content marketing strategy must speak to buyers throughout their journey, meaning you'll need different types of content and CTAs (calls to action) to connect with potential customers and nurture them to a sale.
Crafting a successful campaign to support your property management marketing strategies is the result of bringing these elements together.
First, you must know who you're marketing to (buyer personas). Next, you must remember your "why" and determine how your "why" and persona come together in the brand story. Finally, you take these elements and create campaigns that target your persona at every stage of the buyer's journey.
This is the element missing from most of the property management websites of the clients we work with when they first come to us. Usually, a client will have some of these elements already — very rarely all of them — which is one of the biggest gaps we fill at the beginning of a client relationship.
The goal is to meet the buyer where they are. By understanding these elements and how they work together, we are able to craft campaigns that draw in traffic, answer the questions buyers are asking, and help them make informed decisions as they move through the buyer's journey. If you'd like to learn more about how we do this, reach out below to speak with one of our Geeks!
You'll also want to subscribe to our blog so you don't miss the next blog in this series, "Building a Marketing Campaign: Crafting Campaign Plans with Staying Power," or our blogs about other essential marketing strategies for growing your business!