*A recent study indicated that 90% of renters searched the Internet for a rental.
It should be no surprise that more renters and property owners are turning to the Internet for help finding a home or management company. If your business is not readily available on the Internet, you are drastically reducing the chance of acquiring new customers. Better yet, in these challenging economic times every single dollar spent should produce a measurable Return on Investment (ROI). While many property management companies recognize that a website can be the best tool for generating new business, it is what they don’t know about simple marketing strategies that keep them from getting ahead of the competition when customers search online.
When searching through local and national websites your customers are bombarded with countless options. To grab their attention and convert them into leads, you will need to learn techniques for properly segmenting and targeting those customer segments. Over the last 10+ years I have developed a list of “Best Practices” that will help increase the number of leads generated from your website and cost very little to implement. Some of these techniques will seem like common sense, yet countless people still seem to ignore them and the incredible impact they can have on the volume of leads generated from online marketing.
Property Management Professionals typically cater to two audiences with very different needs: property owners and renters. The reason why a large majority of these customers use the Internet to search for a home or property management company is the ease by which they can find information. Unfortunately, website visitors only invest an average of four seconds when scanning a web page for information. If your website makes it difficult to find the information, they will click away to the next website in the search engine results.
Your biggest challenge is to provide each target customer segment relevant information with regards to their search and a clear “call to action” that will capture them as a lead. Examples of relevant information for prospective tenants include professional photographs and descriptions of the available rental with details of the surrounding area. For owners, on the other hand, relevant information could include a description of your management services, fees and testimonials from other customer. It’s important to convert website visitors into leads, so make it easy for them to connect with your management team with a phone number to call or an online form for more information. As a general rule you want your phone number to be visible in the same area of each page. It needs to be bold, and above the fold, so website visitors do not have to scroll to see it.
Even with your number placed correctly, bold, and perfectly sized, you really need to have a call to action. These special offers can be a free consultation, one month of free rent or a similar incentive that your company can offer at a low cost that yields a high value. These offers should be located near the phone number with a form for the website visitor to complete online. You should try to make your messaging clear and to the point.
Since it is hard to measure the effectiveness of the messaging on your website, many companies that successfully advertise online use “landing pages” to test various messages or offers. A landing page is a targeted webpage that typically contains a mixture of images and a promotional offer with a clear call to action. This call to action can include an online form for the website visitor to complete or a phone number to call. Using a variety of unique landing pages with different promotional offers allows your business to test several different messages to see which ones generate the most leads.
Property management solutions like Propertyware can generate rental listing pages and landing pages to easily test different messaging and allow the user to update the message in real-time.
By using an online form as your call to action, your business can easily track how well your messaging worked and additional information about the origin of your website leads. If you advertise on Google Adwords, you can implement conversion tracking on your form which will allow you to track how many leads Google has generated for you.
By simply following these proven guidelines you can take your existing website and make it an effective lead generation machine.
If you would like a free evaluation of your website I will be at Booth 19 at the FARPM Conference and would be happy to schedule a one on one time to review your site at no charge. Evaluations typically take about 15 minutes please come by the booth to reserve a spot. If you are not attending the show please feel free to email me at tomf@propertyware.com and I will be happy to do an email review.
Thomas M Fanelli is the Director of Interactive Marketing for Propertyware, LLC, The Leader in Online Property Management Software. He has over 13 years of online marketing experience and is committed to bring the very best marketing tools to the Property Management Industry.
*Apartments.com Research Study
