As a real estate investor, you know how to find properties. You know how to rehab them. You know how to manage them. And you know how to sell them for a profit.
But do you know digital marketing?
Digital marketing can really help you fill vacancies. For people with just a few rental properties, digital marketing might not seem to be that complicated. Rental markets are doing well across the country these days. Many smaller investors can be successful by just listing their vacancies on Craigslist, Zillow Rental Manager (formerly Postlets) and Padlister.
For larger investors with apartment buildings and other multifamily properties, or for investors who might have other types of rentals, it’s not so easy. With many vacancies to fill, larger investors will want to have their marketing everywhere.
That’s where it gets complicated. Besides the sites mentioned above, the big boys (and girls) will have to start thinking about:
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Maintaining their websites
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Managing social media
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Placing high in search engines
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Referral marketing from past tenants
All of this marketing costs money. Potentially a lot of money. The larger investors will also want to know what advertising works, and what doesn’t for their market.
Can You Afford an IT Department?
Naturally, you don’t want to hire a full staff to run all your marketing. What about outsourcing to virtual assistants overseas? A possibility. But you will still have to find the right group of people. You may have to hire:
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A web designer
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A search engine optimization (SEO) expert
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A social media person
Then you still won’t know how to measure your results. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could find one company that manages it all for you?
Of course, we have found one. Why else would we write this lesson? Mogul to the rescue…
The company is called G5. It’s a digital marketing company specifically geared toward helping real estate investors decrease vacancies and increase profits.
They are not for the little guy - it just wouldn’t make sense. But if you’re a bigger fish, G5 may be a great fit for you. G5 specifically gears their business toward investors with:
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Multifamily Apartment Buildings
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Assisted Living Facilities
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Self-Storage
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Student Housing
If you have a property management company who manages these properties for other investors, they may be a good fit as well.
G5 creates a cloud-based platform for its customers to create, customize, analyze and optimize the entire digital marketing campaign. Because they can run similar systems for multiple customers, they can do it for a fraction of the cost of customers doing it on their own.
They divide the digital marketing into different areas:
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Sites
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Search
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Social
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Advocacy
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Analytics
Sites are the customer websites. G5 will create your website with integrated SEO. The website will also be compatible with any device. G5 knows that more and more people are searching for apartments and other rentals using their mobile devices. Today’s short attention spans means people will quickly leave your site if it looks bad on a phone.
G5’s web software also allows you to quickly update your website to take advantage of the latest trends. Your site won’t go stale and be obsolete as customer tastes change.
Search means ranking in search engines. G5 considers your search engine rank the single most important piece of marketing for your website. Therefore, they work really hard at helping you to rank high. They use a combination of tools to maintain your ranking:
Social services for G5 are not the child welfare or unemployment department. G5 works with you to make sure you are all over social media. They will show you how to optimize your presence on places like Facebook for Business, Google+ and Yelp.
Social media allows you to target your marketing to very specific people. The people most likely to fill your vacancies. With social media, you can:
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Drive high-quality traffic to your real estate website(s)
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Converse directly with your most qualified prospects
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Improve your website’s ranking in various search engines
G5 can manage your social media for you. That way you can manage your rentals, instead of constantly updating your Facebook page.
Advocacy is another important part of your online presence. Think of buying a book on Amazon or checking out a local restaurant on Yelp. Aren’t you more attracted to the businesses or products that have great reviews?
G5 helps to manage the referrals you receive from your satisfied tenants by:
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Aggregating and notifying you whenever someone writes a review on the web about you
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Helping you respond to any review written about you
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Push the good reviews to your website and around social media to ensure they receive the maximum exposure
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Automatically ask your tenants or residents to write a review about you
Of course, you could promote the heck out of your real estate portfolio (and spend a lot of money doing so) and not see much in the way of results. The trick is to know what advertising works and what doesn’t.
To figure out what is most effective, G5 provides a host of analytical data:
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Metrics showing website traffic, return on investment for paid traffic, and device usage
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Reputation scores for your properties, and measurements to see how you stack up to the competition
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Tracking which advertising is generating the most website, email and phone leads
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The all-important ‘cost-per-lead’ and ‘cost-per-lease’ calculations to see if the money you are spending makes sense
It makes sense for most investors have some kind of presence on the internet. Having a full-blown internet strategy might make more sense for you. When you are everywhere on the internet, your different types of marketing can feed off each other.
If you are not sure whether a big marketing strategy is right for your portfolio, maybe it makes sense to look at some of the case studies G5 has compiled. Even reviewing how G5 creates a web presence for your competition might give you insights into improving your advertising strategy.
Something to Add?
If you have experience with G5, we want to hear about it. Tell us about it below.
Create an advertising strategy – Even if you just have one rental property, it can’t hurt to come up with a system to fill vacancies quickly.
Use different forms of advertising – Try to link them together. Put your website on Facebook. Remind people of your social media pages on every email you send out. Keep linking everything together.
Advertise both online and offline – There are lots of people who are still not connected to the web. Or just happen to drive by your properties. Make sure you are going after them as well.
Test, test, test – You never know what works until you try it. You also don’t know what works unless you measure it. Try something new and check out the results. Then make a decision whether to use it.
JP Moses
is a real estate investor in Memphis, TN, with experience ranging from land lording to note buying, rehabbing, and wholesaling. However, wholesaling is the area that he enjoys most and where he bring the most experience and expertise to his students.