When you think about building a website for property management, what do you want it to accomplish? And once it’s up and running, how do you tell if it’s doing its job?
Your property management website works for you, so it’s reasonable to take a moment and think about it as being an employee of your company.
If your website was an employee, would you fire it?
This isn’t as crazy as it sounds.
Processes and Tasks in a Property Management Company
Your property management company could be described as a collection of processes that need to get done. Those processes are made up of tasks, and those tasks are handled by roles.
Those roles are filled by classic job descriptions, and it’s possible that they’re not just employees, but also a vendor or an outside organization or a computer program. A role can be filled by a website, too.
A website does jobs that are easily done by people, but they operate online.
Building a Website for Property Management:
Your Website’s Job Description
Let’s track that website back to the specific jobs that it has to do. What jobs would those be?
- Your website needs to be a Receptionist. You want to greet people efficiently and pleasantly and get them to where they are going.
- Your website needs to provide Sales Support. It should help your sales people close business.
- Your website is responsible for Marketing. It helps you bring the right people into the company.
- Your website is even a Leasing Agent. The vacancy page could be thought of as doing the work of an actual leasing agent.
So, if your website is responsible for these tasks, then how do you judge that the website is doing its job?
Establishing Website Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
You can evaluate the website’s work in the same way you judge an employee. You use KPIs.
For instance, you expect a receptionist to be efficient and pleasant. You can track your website’s performance with Google Analytics. Two particular statistics will tell you what you need to know:
Bounces. This reflects the number of people that go to the front page or any page of the website and then just go away again. There will be a certain amount of these because some people are just looking for your address or some particular piece of information. But, tracking the number of bounces from your website is a good way to see if your “receptionist” is getting the job done.
Behavior Flow. You also want to look at what people are doing when they get to your site. Where did a particular visitor go when they arrived on your site? Are they easily finding the right pages? Is your “receptionist” directing them where they need to go?
What about sales support? How do you know if the sales portion of your website is doing its job effectively? Well, if your sales team is receiving a lot of calls, and you’re gathering a lot of information from website forms, you can judge the quality of those potential customers. You can decide if your website is marketing to the right people.
Another KPI for your website is – how long are people staying on the site? Are they there for a while because they are engaged with the content? If you have a vacancy page, is this online version of your “leasing agent” finding you potential tenants? How long are people spending on that vacancy page? Are these potential tenants getting the information they need, and are they filling out forms and making calls to you?
These are all good ways to judge whether your website is doing its job.
The job of your website is not simply to be a website. It’s not just there to look pretty.
And remember, it can’t do all this work alone. You cannot rely on a website to get all your marketing done. It needs to be supported by products, services, and all those unique things you do inside your company to have a complete marketing program. You want to attract new people who are just learning about property management, and reach those owners who are ready to hire a management company, and they need to know why they should choose you rather than your competition.
If you have any questions about building a website for property management or anything pertaining to digital marketing for property managers, please contact us at Fourandhalf.
