'Should I Invest in Outbound for Property Management Marketing?'

Outbound marketing, also known as "interruption-based marketing," isn't the tool it used to be. The advancement of tech has made it easier—and to some degree, normal—for potential clients to do their homework on and reach out to the companies they resonate with. Consumers are rapidly becoming less and less accepting of marketing that is focused at them instead of to them.

You might be wondering if you should even invest in any outbound marketing at all at this point with how much we love to talk about the future of property management marketing with inbound! The truth is, most marketing plans can benefit from a mix of both inbound and outbound marketing—you just need to choose the right methods that will work together with inbound and with your business model. Here are some points to consider when wondering whether you should invest in an outbound component for your property management marketing.

1. 'Do I Have the Budget?' 

A lot of outbound methods rely very heavily on quantity, and that can sometimes clash with your available budget.

• A mailer program with only one hundred postcards is unlikely to be worth the setup fee to print it.
• A thousand mailers might not even be enough to get the returns on your investment.

Ultimately, the value of an outbound method like mailers is dependent on the quality of the list you have:

• Is it recent?
• Is it a list people opted into—or one you are data mining?

In our experience, radio ads are one of the best performing outbound methods because of the brand recognition it creates—but it requires a budget significantly higher than that of inbound marketing, and not everyone can afford it.

When it comes to how outbound might be put to work for your property management marketing, there are so many variables. Dig in to determine whether the ROI is expected to be worth the expense before taking on an outbound marketing approach.

2. 'Do I Have the Time?'

Sometimes outbound marketing means making a ton of cold calls or going to events and networking to put yourself in front of your potential clients.

• Do you have the time to manage it?
• Do your employees? 

If you're working with a paid leads provider, your calls will be more successful because they've already done the outbound marketing for you and teed up the lead. If you are cold calling from a list, you will not only have to spend the labor resources to create the list—you'll have to also spend the time working the leads and then working them through your sales pipeline. 

3. 'Do I have the Resources?'

• Inbound marketing is something you can put on autopilot when you have marketing automation tools to back it up.
• Outbound marketing can be—depending on the method you choose—"greedy," and require a lot more employee hours.
• Inbound marketing helps bring you leads that are hot and ready to convert: outbound might bring in a lot of "tire-kickers" who just aren't ready to make the leap to clients.

Using Inbound and Outbound Together

We've made outbound sound like a lot of work because it can be when you don't have the tools in place to make the most of your leads. When a new lead comes in, you need to nurture them—or sell to them based on where they are in the funnel.

Inbound marketing helps you identify where leads are in a cycle so that you can either move them to automated marketing meant to nurture or sell at the opportune time for conversions. How else can inbound techniques for property management marketing help outbound marketing perform better for you?

• Inbound marketing gives users a reason to return to your site to learn more.
• Inbound marketing presents additional conversion opportunities that help create a relationship with your lead.
• Inbound marketing ensures your website is a wealth of information and resources.
• Inbound marketing builds you into the authority on property management in your area to create trust.

Inbound and outbound are both strategies that can work alone—but the best results come from a mix of both. Outbound can help to accelerate the leads coming into your funnel while inbound converts them better. Outbound can also bring in leads that might not be searching for help in the same places as your inbound marketing is. Combining the two creates maximum exposure with room for closing opportunities!

Geekly Media specializes in inbound property management marketing, but we also provide outbound marketing services for clients who are interested! Using HubSpot to manage our clients' marketing means we can track and measure the results of all of our marketing efforts so our clients can determine what they want to invest in and what they want to change

If you'd like to learn more about our inbound and outbound marketing solutions for property managers, drop us a line! We have multiple marketing options for every size property management business, from start-ups to franchises with thousands of doors. A great place to get started is with a quick discovery call: this gives us a chance to get to know the unique marketing needs of your business and see if we're the right fit for you.