Most property management companies don't understand the power of marketing automation to change their business. To operate efficiently in PM, you need to have a plan for timeline lead followup...and that plan can't mean you need to hire more and more people. That's where automation comes in: it gives you the ability to translate your business rules into a set of automatic actions that engage your leads and help convert them into new tenants.
Let's look at the property management marketing automation process in detail so that you can see where automation might best benefit you.
The first step in the lifecycle is for a visitor to become a lead. This can happen either through a member of the sales team entering their information into the CRM (usually in the case that the prospect calls the office) or through the website when the user fills out a form (like they would with a content offer).
It is important to take the time when designing your forms to ensure that you are gathering enough information about a lead to be able to automate in the first place. You'll want to gather a name for personalization, an email address for marketing emails, and what their contact type is. This is crucial: without a contact type, you won't know what kind of marketing should be directed their way.
We typically include a field similar to this:
I am a...
This lets us segment the users into categories to ensure we don't send marketing emails directed at property owners to an audience of renters. Property management marketing automation done right means that only the people the messaging is intended for will receive it.
Once a contact is assigned the appropriate contact type (such as a property owner looking for assistance), we can start sending that contact targeted marketing that corresponds to the contact's lifecycle stage. To do this, we use lead scoring, the automated process of determining how likely a property management lead is to convert into a client.
At the most basic level, lead scoring works by assigning points based on interactions. In general, you can expect the lead that opens a lot of emails and visits your website frequently is more interested than a lead that only opened two emails and stopped engaging. Thus, the first would have a high lead score—and the latter, a low one.
On this same principle, you want to direct a different message to the more engaged lead (the lead with a higher lead score of lifecycle stage), such as messaging encouraging the lead to schedule a meeting with your sales team. The less-engaged lead would receive a completely different message—perhaps a long-term drip aimed at educating them about what property managers do.
Once the targeted content starts, you should see the engagement of the leads start to increase. Effectively, your property management leads are receiving relevant content at the right time when they are the most receptive to it.
Over time, this lead will learn more about your company—and how you can help solve their pain point. With the right content, a lot of the selling should be done by the time the lead talks to sales. This means that your sales team just needs to talk about the finer points of the agreement and send it to the prospect.
No matter how good your property management marketing is, not every lead is going to be ready to sign the moment they talk to sales. People can be fickle, and an algorithm such as lead scoring takes some time and data to refine. This is where the sales pipeline comes into play. Much like other popular CRMs out there, you can deliver targeted sales content based on the stage the deal is in, such as 'Attempting Contact' or 'Meeting Scheduled.'
Based on how the lead responds to these communications, you can use your property management process automation to automatically move them to the appropriate stage, such as 'Meeting Scheduled' when they click a link to schedule a meeting. This keeps your sales team from having to spend time looking at every contact record every day. Automation helps keep property management leads organized and in the appropriate stage.
While this is a very high-level overview of property management marketing automation, there is so much more it is capable of! In our next blog, we'll explore some of the more advanced automations. Power users with enough content can build on these process automations—and create value by doing so.
If you'd like to learn whether marketing or operations automation will work for your business, schedule a discovery call with Geekly Media! We'll take some time to get to know you and learn whether your property management company can benefit from our services. Just use this link to get in contact, and we'll be in touch with a meeting link so you can pick the time that works best for you.