From Content to Clients: How Property Managers Can Win More Doors Organically

Paid leads are expensive and unpredictable. Learn how blogs, videos, and strategic content marketing can position your property management business as the go-to choice—without breaking the bank.

Growth always seems to be the hottest topic in residential property management. Yes, people are always happy to hear about new fees and revenue opportunities, but above all else, PMs are obsessed with their door count. One might say it’s just misplaced envy of the size of other PM companies, but whatever the reason, PMs want more doors. But doors are always so easy to come by. At least not cheaply. And a lot of PM companies who haven’t taken our course on maximizing revenue simply don’t have the spare cash to spend on paid lead sources to get new doors. So how can you bring in organic leads without breaking the bank?

Content is King

If you read my last article about the rise of accidental landlords, you’ll remember that I mentioned the importance of building trust using your content. This concept is really the bedrock of bringing in new leads and doors economically. If I want to bring in leads using pay-per-click advertising in a crowded market like Atlanta, I’m likely to spend at least $100 per valid lead. And with paid leads being “colder” than other leads, the conversion rate is likely to be around 10%, which means I’m spending $1,000 just in marketing costs to acquire that new client. That just isn’t possible for many property managers who don’t have the marketing budget for it, and it’s just not advisable for anyone as your only marketing strategy. At the very least you need to be supplementing your paid leads with much more cost-effective organic leads.

And when it comes to organic leads, content is king:

• Content positions you as the expert, which builds trust with people before you’ve even spoken to them for the first time.

• Content, when it’s well-designed, can be a significant boost to your SEO (search engine optimization), bringing you up in more search results and getting you more leads.

• Content makes it easier for you to work with the client later after they’ve signed up, because they already trust you and view you as the industry expert.

• Video keeps people on your web site longer, and the longer someone stays, the more that Google thinks you’re providing good content, which makes them send more search results your way. It’s a virtuous cycle.

Start With Blogs

Many of you just recoiled in disgust as I mentioned video content. I get it, I absolutely hate being on camera. That’s why most of my PMAssist Insider content is just slides and screen shares. I’d rather be off camera if possible. So we’ll talk about video later on in this article. For now, let’s do what you’re likely much more comfortable with: written content.

Blogs have been around forever. I’m old enough to remember when the term was first coined in the late 90s (for the record, it originally stood for “web log”) and it was mostly political content and random people posting about their day, but blogs have evolved nowadays to be a necessary component of any company’s marketing strategy.

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The great thing about blogging is that it allows you to target certain keywords that will resonate with Google search results for owners looking for help with managing their rental properties. And when done effectively, it will capture the attention of landlords who aren’t even looking for professional property management. They’re just looking for an answer to a question about being a landlord, and then they stumble across a great article you’ve written on the subject and they realize that they could just hand the property over to you instead and stop worrying about it.

Some key elements to remember when blogging:

• Use “long-tail” keywords. This is very different than traditional keywords we think of like “Atlanta property management.” I’m talking things like “how do I evict a tenant in Georgia?” Or “what am I required to repair on my rental property?” Yes, people actually use Google this way. If you’re my age and a tech nerd, you probably are a little more polished in how you use search engines, but the average person using Google just types in what they’re wanting to know in the form of a question and looks for the best result in the list. If you try to put yourself in the mind of that consumer and design the titles and keywords in your article around it, you’ll play right into Google’s little game and come up much higher in search results.

• Be consistent with posts. This ain’t gonna work if you’re just posting here and there when you think about it. This needs to be a religion for you. You post every Tuesday and Thursday, for example. Put it on your calendar or setup a LeadSimple process to remind you each week. Only consistent blogging will yield consistent results.

• Include internal links and CTAs (calls to action). Ever found yourself in a Wikipedia rabbit hole? You see something interesting on the news about Cuba, so you pull up Cuba’s Wikipedia page. The next thing you know you’ve clicked on fifteen different links to other Wikipedia articles, it’s a half hour later, and now you’re reading about spongecake somehow. This works, folks! Have links in your blog posts to other blog posts. Someone can find your post talking about evictions and then end up clicking on a link about rent collection which leads them to another link talking about late fees, and before you know it you’ve had that person on your web site for 15 minutes clicking on different links and driving up your SEO. Use this to your advantage! And don’t forget about those CTAs. Your articles should have several buttons throughout them for things like “Get a Free Rental Analysis” and “Schedule a Consultation.” Yes, you’re providing valuable information to people, but you’re trying to leverage that into contact info for potential clients. That’s what those CTAs are for. Use them.

• Use location-specific keywords. If you’re trying to boost your search results for “Mobile AL property management,” then articles titled “how to evict your tenant” aren’t getting you the best bang for your buck. Instead, use “Alabama Law and How to Evict Your Tenant in Mobile.” You’ve now dropped both the state and the city you’re targeting into your title, and you can drop these same keywords in the text of your article. Google is going to see this and rank your page higher. Maybe at first it just moves you up from #60 in the search results to #56. But after consistently doing this twice a week for months, you’ll see yourself starting to move significantly up the list.

Bite the Bullet and Record Video

Until a few years ago, Alex Osenenko was THE marketing guru in property management. As the CEO of Fourandhalf until around 2020 or so, he was the leading voice in the industry on these kinds of topics. He left the industry to relax and pursue a passion project in an outdoor sporting goods company, but most of us “OGs” definitely remember him well, because he was the original marketing evangelist for the industry.

I was a Fourandhalf client for years while Alex was still there (and I still would be if I hadn’t hired my own internal marketing staff), and he kept beating the drum telling me that I needed to do video blogs. But no matter how much he told me it was necessary, I kept resisting because I hated being on camera. This was, without a doubt, one of the dumbest things I’ve done in business. I was letting my personal discomfort with being on camera hold my entire business back. As a result, I was almost entirely dependent upon paid lead sources, which meant I was spending as much as $10k a month on paid leads during peak growth. Now, we could afford it, but I sure would have preferred spending only a couple grand and getting most of my leads organically instead.

I finally bit the bullet in the late teens and started doing video blogs. And you know what? It really wasn’t all that bad. I started off being very rigid about it. I would write up an entire script, put it in a teleprompter app on my phone, and record it in front of a green screen, then having someone do post-production work for graphic intros and outros. It was all too much and unnecessary. Eventually I realized that I just needed to frickin’ relax. Time for a blog? Just turn on the webcam and start talking about it. I just need a few minutes of me chatting about the blog topic, and since this is what my area of expertise is, that’s always pretty easy. Just like it would be for you. So do the same thing! Just turn on your camera and start talking. I promise you, the accidental landlord who stumbles across your blog article on a Google search doesn’t care how fancy your production values are when you’re teaching them about evictions or rent collection. They just want solid info. If you provide it to them, and you come across as knowledgable and trustworthy, then you’ve accomplished your goal. Sure, your production quality will get better over time as you fine-tune your system, get someone on your team who can help with post-production, and invest in better audio and video equipment, but that’s just icing on the cake. For now, just record the videos. You’ll be glad you did, and you won’t have to listen to me tell you how stupid it was to wait for years like I did.

Newsletters & E-Books

Blogs aren’t the only game in town for content marketing, they’re just the foundation. After you’ve laid that foundation, you can expand into other content marketing opportunities. For example, my PM company sends out a monthly market update newsletter to every lead we’ve ever received in our database, currently sitting at just under 10,000 owner leads. We provide them the latest info on how the market is doing in Atlanta, we answer a FAQ, we link to our recent blog posts, and we feature a good investment property that’s for sale. Very simple content that it’s easy for a member of your team to put together once a month and send out from something like Mailchimp.

Another option would be e-books. These are great lead capture opportunities. Use ChatGPT to help you outline a book, and then go through and customize it in your own voice. Throw in some good graphics and photos using something like Canva, convert it to a PDF book, and voila! You’ve now got a great freebie you can offer on your web site as a lead capture tool. “Get our FREE guide to rental property maintenance by submitting your name and email using this form.” Works like clockwork.

Repurpose Your Content

One of the great things about content marketing is that it can be used over and over again. Once you record a video, that video can be used not only in your blog post, but also on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on YouTube, etc. That one piece of content can be used multiple times over the next few months, and it will hit a different audience each time with new opportunities for lead capture.

Webinars are on the best ways to leverage this. Do a live webinar for your clients on a key topic for landlords. Then later put that webinar recording on your YouTube account. Then write a blog post for it and use it as the video for that blog post. Then send it out in your newsletter to your entire lead database. Then post it on social media. The possibilities are endless! All from one hour of your time recording a webinar.

Tracking Your Success

Now, I never recommend just throwing time and money at problems. I am overwhelmingly confident that if you do what I recommend here, you’re going to have great success with organic leads. But I’m never so confident as to not track results. In everything you do, you need some way to track whether it’s working for you or not. When it comes to content marketing, we can measure it in several ways:

• Average search position on Google

• Number of keywords you’re ranking for on Google

• Followers on social media and YouTube views

• Valid leads generated (you NEED to track this by source)

• Conversion rate of leads generated

Ultimately, what we’re wanting to accomplish here is new doors brought on as a result of our content marketing efforts, so we want to know how many leads did we get from our content, and how many of those leads converted to a door under management. This means that you absolutely must use a system like LeadSimple to track your leads, and you must track every lead source individually. And I mean pretty granularly when I say individually. It’s not enough to just say “lead from website” as the source. I want to know whether it came from my Free Rental Analysis CTA, or whether it came from a blog post, or whether it came from the “Contact Us” form. All of these are different sources, and we need to measure them all individually to know how they’re performing, what we need to tweak, and what isn’t worth our time and effort. If we’re finding that e-books are producing no results but video content is converting tons of leads, then you know where to focus your efforts. And what works for one company will be different than what works for another, so I can’t just sit here and tell you which ones to focus on. You’ll need to test it and see where you get the results.

Get to Work

I know this might seem overwhelming to those of you who haven’t ventured down the content marketing path yet. But don’t get overwhelmed. As Bill Murray famously kept repeating in “What About Bob?”, it’s all about “baby steps.” Take just one baby step. Write a blog post. That’s it. Start with that. Write a blog post this week and put it up on your web site. Then put it on your calendar as a repeating task twice a week. Or even once a week if that’s all you can fit in. You’ll fall into a comfortable routine on that, and then you can add a video down the line. And then an e-book a few months later. And so on. But most importantly, just take that first step. You’ll find it’s not as difficult as you think, and years down the line when 90% of your leads are coming from organic efforts instead of you having to pay for each lead, you’ll be really glad you took that first step.

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