Building a brand: Marketing 101 for property managers

At the Property Management Excellence (PMX) Conference, Gardiner said that it was essential for property managers to define their target audience, carefully plan content such as social media posts and emails, and use systemised lead generation to grow their clientele.

Additionally, with the rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI), Gardiner advised property managers to leverage the technology to automate the marketing process and increase efficiency.

During her keynote, she shared the marketing strategies of major brands that understand their future buyers, tailor their marketing messages, and do not leave anything to chance.

“They have spent a lot of time both back then and now consistently on a daily basis – they have a marketing team looking at their market segmentation, their targeting, how they're positioning themselves in the market,” she said.

Identifying the audience

Gardiner said that before scaling their businesses, property managers needed to identify exactly who their audience was, narrowing down their prospective clients to create the most suitable marketing content.

She said that property managers can tailor their marketing differently depending on the investors’ circumstances, long-term plans, and level of experience.

“What's the difference in who they are? And we can design the messaging that speaks directly to them and their pain points and their challenges and their goals and their aspirations and the lifestyles that they live,” she said.

Identify key marketing channels

According to Gardiner, property management businesses can then identify the key marketing channels, saying major brands usually choose their platforms based on the different audiences.

“So they have clearly defined marketing channels, they know where their future buyers are going to be, and they strategise different vendors in each of those channels,” she said.

“They don't leave it to chance. They create systems, processes, whole teams and departments around those marketing channels.”

Carefully plan and schedule content

Once property management businesses have established their target audience and channels, Gardiner said they should carefully consider their content strategy.

She said they could use AI tools to help schedule content, saving time and avoiding the need for a million-dollar marketing department.

According to Gardiner, AI can be programmed to help property managers find their ideal clients, define their messaging, and assist with developing branding and marketing channels.

“If you use something like this, all you have to do is schedule it, or ideally, that's a delegation task that can be something that you get a team member or a PA to do for you,” she said.

Be consistent

While posting content has been key to growth, Gardiner said businesses needed to be consistent with their marketing strategy.

She said that consistency allowed the audience to become familiar with the brand and increased the likelihood of generating leads.

“It needs consistency because consistency breeds trust – they used to say that people needed to see your messaging seven times before they think about using [the service],” she said.

“Now [with] all the messaging we see in the database, I heard it's about 12 or 13 times. We're seeing lots of messages every day, and so I think that we're unintentionally just being invisible to our ideal customer.”

Systemise lead generation

To ensure business growth, Gardiner said systemising lead generation was essential for keeping the company at the top of potential clients’ minds.

“When most people who come and interact with your brand, whether that be just checking you out, 97 per cent of those people are not going to be ready to buy right now,” she said.

“Stats show in most other industries that within 12, 24, 36 months, they'll be ready to buy if they're nurtured.”

She said that PMs should follow bigger brands like Nike, which can predict the level of lead-generation activity they would get in any month with a high degree of accuracy, enabling them to adjust their tactics.

To nurture clients, she said Nike used pop-ups, interactions, and other built-in tools on its websites to encourage customers to connect with it and remain in its system.

“They're continually marketing to me now because I'm in the ecosystem.”

Diversify your offering

Additionally, Gardiner said that property management businesses should try to market their other services, including selling rent rolls, to set themselves apart in the industry.

She also said many businesses failed to use marketing to convince investors with multiple properties to transfer all of them to the management of a single company.

“There's no offer, there's no incentives, there's no marketing of the additional benefits as to why they would bring them across to us,” she said.

Gardiner encouraged businesses to recognise opportunities to expand their marketing into areas they may not have initially considered to increase their clientele.

Focus on leading metrics

To assess the success of their marketing tactics, she said businesses needed to focus on key metrics, such as the number of calls and emails they received, their social media followers, or the number of referral partner meetings.

She said these were different from lag metrics, which do not reveal anything about future results and can include occupancy rate and tenant turnover.

“If we don't know what those leading metrics are and factor them, we can't accurately predict things, and we don't know what to focus on to fix them,” she said.

“If you want predictable growth, you have to measure the whole story, not just the ending,” she concluded.