Advertising Your Property Management Company Online: Pay-Per-Click

Today at Fourandhalf, we are going to help you become an educated consumer when it comes to advertising your property management company on the Internet. The first thing you need to do when choosing how to market your business on the Internet is to identify your goal or purpose. Marketers often focus on a number of things such as exposure, branding and reputation. The bottom line for most of us is growth. If you are looking to employ digital marketing services, you probably want to grow your business.

Why is the Internet the Right Place for Growth?

When you use the Internet for marketing, you use a pull strategy instead of a push strategy. As property managers, you focus on a specific segment of the population. You try to reach people who own homes that are not owner-occupied. You look for people who manage properties themselves as well as reluctant landlords and property investors. An example of a push strategy would be a television commercial. You pay a lot of money to get a commercial on television, which gives you exposure to a lot of people you don’t want, and cannot possibly target all of  the people you really want to reach. So for businesses like property management companies, this is the wrong method.

The Internet uses pull marketing. You cater your content and information to people who are already searching for property management in your town. You get targeted access to people who are searching for questions you can answer, such as how to rent a house, how much rent to charge, etc. There are different avenues of digital marketing that can be included in your strategy. One such avenue is pay-per-click.

Pay-Per-Click

Pay-per-click advertising is a quick shot of adrenaline for your business. You tell Google that you are willing to pay $2 to $5 per click to be on the front page for particular keywords. For example, if you’re a San Francisco property manager, you want to be listed near the front anytime someone searches for “San Francisco property management.”

Having a strategic landing page will help you tremendously with pay-per-click. You want to make sure that when your potential prospects click on the company listing that you paid for, they will go to a specific landing page. Don’t send them to the generic front page of your website. The landing page should outline the advantages of your company specific to the customer your ad is trying to reach. We always recommend having a brief video that pitches your business, as well as a phone number and a “Contact Us” form or button. The landing page alone will increase your conversion by up to 50 percent.

The company you hire to help you with pay-per-click needs to understand your business and the keywords that equal money to you. Your digital marketing company also needs to understand and respect your budget. You should get to determine whether you want to spend $10 a day or $1,500 a month. The beauty of pay-per-click is that you can adjust your budget as you go. It gets you real clients, but it requires an investment from you. You need to hire a pay-per-click company to manage your campaign, and you also need to pay Google or Facebook or whatever platform you choose.

Attend Fourandhalf Classes at NARPM

I hope this overview has helped you understand a bit about the lay of the digital marketing land. We will be speaking about digital marketing services and how they benefit property management companies at a number of upcoming conferences. Check out our schedule:

  • Pacific Southwest Regional Conference in Las Vegas February 21, 2014 – Fourandhalf’s class is at 2:50pm (RSVP on Facebook)
  • Eastern Regional Conference in Nashville March 28-29, 2013 – Fourandhalf’s class TBA
  • Northwest Regional Conference in Tacoma April 19-20, 2013 – Fourandhalf’s class TBA
  • CALNARPM Conference in Napa April 21-24, 2013 – Fourandhalf’s class TBA
  • Central Regional Conference in Chicago May 23-24 – Fourandhalf’s class TBA
  • NARPM Florida State Chapter Conference in Orlando September 19, 2013 – Fourandhalf’s class TBA

Register to attend NARPM conferences here

Hopefully you’ll be attending one of them, and you can stop by and meet us. Our presentation is about an hour long and we’d love to share more of our information and ideas with you. Our plan is to delve into each element of digital marketing and help you understand what kind of results to expect from each type of Internet marketing campaign and how much you should expect to pay.

If you have any questions before then, don’t hesitate to contact us. We’ll see you soon.