Create a Property Management Marketing Plan Step by Step
If you haven’t been thinking about your marketing strategy for 2021, it’s time.
Luckily, the Fourandhalf team is here to walk you through creating a property management marketing plan, step by step.
Step 1: Determine the Types of Owners You Want to Attract
Before you jump to budget and goals and contracts, you need to know your ideal client: what types of owners do you want to bring into your business?
Think carefully about this, because if you’ve already done this work and identified your “ideal owner client,” COVID may have had an impact on that demographic. How has COVID affected your target market? Have their needs changed? How can you provide solutions specific to the new problems they’re facing? Or does the onset of COVID mean that your ideal client has shifted entirely?
These are the questions you want to bring to your team. Get detailed about who your new ideal owner client is. Once you’ve got that in place, you’re ready for step 2.
Step 2: Decide How Many New Owners You Want This Year
Next, you need to decide how many new owner accounts you want over the next 12 months. Getting to this number is easier if you have some data from the last year that you can use to make a more educated guess at how you will grow next year. How did COVID affect your new owner client rate this past year?
Do not assume that COVID will magically disappear — but don’t assume that your business is doomed, either. We recommend coming up with two numbers: 1) Your most optimistic goal, and 2) Your least optimistic goal. Underneath each of these goals, write down some of the scenarios that would affect these numbers. Putting this information into writing creates clarity around what you’re going after, what the circumstances are that are out of your control, and what the circumstances are that are in your control.
Break down your annual goal into achievable chunks: 90 days, 30 days, and weekly targets. Make sure your salespeople have these numbers in their minds.
Step 3: Determine How Much to Spend on Acquiring Owners
Here are three important factors to keep in mind as you determine how much to spend on your marketing budget:
Location, Competition & Value
Your location makes a difference and it varies for each city with your property management firm. For example, areas like Phoenix and Atlanta are expensive places to acquire a customer. Whereas Albuquerque is quite reasonable, and Portland is somewhere in the middle.
You also need to look at your competition. Take a peek at how aggressively they are marketing their services and what kind of money they’re spending. The activity among your competitors can vary; you might have large franchises spending a lot or there might be very little marketing involved.
Finally, what’s the LCV (lifetime customer value) of the contracts you want? Knowing this number affects how much you spend on acquiring that customer. Owner clients with a high LCV may require you to spend a little more, whereas you should only be spending a moderate amount on clients with a lower LCV.
Plug Your Numbers Into This Property Management Marketing Formula
Because of the variability in different markets, the size of a property management company, and if, for example, your company also provides maintenance services, there isn’t a single formula that works for all property management companies.
But in our blog 5 Ways To Get More Property Management Leads, we broke down a general framework that can be useful for thinking about how much to spend. Here’s a quick snippet from that blog:
For every $3 you want to earn, you can expect to spend $1.
Let’s say you want to grow by 36 doors in a year, and you make $500 in profit per door. That means you’re hoping to make $18,000 in profitable growth.
36 doors x $500 profit per door = $18,000 in profitable growth
If we apply the 1:3 ratio to this number, you should be looking at spending at least $6,000 over the course of the year on sales and marketing.
Using this framework, and adjusting the numbers based on what you know about your area and the value of your contracts, you should be able to come up with a budget for owner marketing in 2021.
Step 4: Create an Action Plan
You’ve got goals, and now you know how much money you have to achieve them. It’s time to put a plan in place so that you and your team know how to get there. You should have both inbound and outbound marketing strategies as part of your action plan for 2021.
Inbound Marketing Strategies
In terms of inbound marketing, use these three questions as a jumping-off point for building your action plan:
- What educational content are we creating to answer our ideal client’s pain points?
- How frequently are we posting that content?
- Where is that educational content getting posted?
Outbound Marketing Strategies
In terms of outbound marketing, use these three questions as a jumping-off point for building your action plan:
- What consistent message are we sharing to address our ideal client’s pain points?
- How frequently is that message being advertised?
- Where is that message being advertised?
With this information in place, determine how much money you will allocate to your inbound and outbound marketing strategies.
Step 5: Execute Your Plan
With your strategy in place, it’s time to execute it. Call your team together and decide how you will work toward implementing your plan and achieving your goals.
Key to this part of the process is setting up a method of evaluating your progress. What KPI’s (key performance indicators) will you use to measure your progress toward your goal? How often will you review those KPI’s? What steps will you take if you notice you are not on track?
Finally, it’s important to remember that none of your marketing efforts will pay off if you don’t have a flawless sales process in place. When phone calls go unanswered or messages are left on voicemail, and you’re not paying the right attention to leads, your marketing plan isn’t going to work. If you cannot close the deals, there’s no plan that can help you.
Contact us at Fourandhalf if you need any help with your marketing budget or your planning process for 2021.
