Property Management Marketing | Part 3 | How Owner Marketing Has Changed

Summary: In Part 1 and Part 2 of our Property Management Marketing series, we discussed various aspects of property management tenant marketing. Today, we’ve invited our own John Bykowski, CEO at Fourandhalf to discuss some of the big changes he’s seen in owner marketing. We’re talking about how property management companies can keep up with the times and attract more property owner clients. Key Takeaways: * Internet marketing has exploded in the last nine years for the property management industry. * Google Ads, websites and content marketing are crucial for owner marketing these days. * Changes in consumer behavior are affecting owner marketing strategies. * There are more things vying for our attention these days – your job is to capture owner’s attention, and provide value to them once you have it. Catch our full Property Management Marketing series: Property Management Marketing | Part 1 | The Rise of Zumper & Facebook Marketplace Property Management Marketing | Part 2 | Building Waitlists & Pre-Marketing Remembering Property Management Owner Marketing in 2012 John started in internet marketing about nine years ago, when it wasn’t really a thing. There were websites and homepages, but they were little more than a placeholder or calling card. Think of a glorified Yellow Pages ad for a company, with the addition of a few pages. Most property managers were getting their websites from their software companies. It was still more common to spend marketing dollars on print ads in the Yellow Pages or on billboards or bus seats. Maybe a property manager would purchase a radio ad or a television ad if there was money and ability. The internet was not the primary marketing platform for property managers when John got started and Fourandhalf was arriving. He remembers his first NARPM National meeting, which was in Washington, D.C. in 2012, and he had to explain to people that you can get business from the internet. Some people understood this but a lot had not thought about it. Leading an Industry Towards Different Thinking The world at large began to change and a huge part of life moved online. YouTube was around and that’s where people went to watch videos. Netflix had just started streaming but it wasn’t very popular yet. More information could be found online and eventually, there was no reason to explain to property managers that it was a good idea to advertise on the internet. The number of ways to advertise had grown more sophisticated. When Fourandhalf started, content marketing and video blogs were very new. The best ways to market your property management services to owners were through content marketing, social media marketing, and reputation management. These were the products Fourandhalf focused on and they looked nothing like they look today. With reputation management for example, John was simply teaching people how to respond to reviews. There were no automated systems in place and Yelp was far more popular than Google. In some markets, Yelp wasn’t even used yet. Now, things have evolved and Google stars are far more important than Yelp reviews. As marketing moved online, banner ads were available but it didn’t take long for marketers to realize that no one was clicking on banner ads. Pop up ads weren’t working either. It was time to learn how to leverage the data that could be gathered by a person’s online presence. Valuable Owner Marketing Tools Today