Property Management Companies Need to Blog

July 08, 2022

Blogging for Property Management

Blogging has been a mainstay for digital marketers for about a decade now.

Blogs offer fresh, informational, and even controversial viewpoints too. Blog content registers the emotions of audiences with information rich, flavorful, and exciting reading experiences.

Blogs have the topics and reading style visitors want. That’s not to say your marketing pages are useless. The role of blogs is to help build a stronger brand, engage prospects emotionally, and then send visitors through to the marketing pages or service pages which can capitalize on visitor’s buying intent. Blogs support your sales efforts and increase interest in your company (traffic and brand building).

Reach, Impact and Engagement

Blogs offer deeper, more impactful, engaging and search engine-friendly content which reaches readers just like you.

Traffic might be free, but we don’t want to neglect this opportunity. Let’s make the most of it and blog like a master. And you’ll appreciate the ability to blog as part of your property management software customer website via ManageCasa. It’s easy and you can synchronize it with your advertising campaigns.

Inexpensive but Highly Effective

Why are blogs so powerful? They’re topical and current. And readers know blogs are where the real truth, news or value is. It’s all about trust, transparency, authenticity, and relevance. Google, Bing and Facebook organic traffic is plentiful and free, a great way to reach customers, landlords, and important influencers. Who reads your content is very important.

When visitors land on your site, they check your product/service, pricing, and location. Then they read your blogs. If they do reach your blog, they probably believe you’re relevant to them, are looking for a reason to like you and take your company seriously. If you aren’t relevant, they wouldn’t be reading.

And they might be ready to contact you.

Facts that Reveal the Unappreciated Power of Blogging

Important Blogging Success Stats – Screen Capture courtesy of Hubspot.com

Blogging Isn’t Easy or You Would Have Mastered it By Now

Plenty of real estate and property pros blog yet too often, we see posts that don’t accomplish much in terms of traffic, engagement or leads. Consider the self-absorbed, corporate “here’s our stuff” blog post, the tedium filler post, or the pointless news tweet, or yet another selfie on Facebook (Facebook and Twitter are microblogs).

How about blogging in a way that makes your company a credible and vital asset to your audience?

Blog in a style that’s friendly, approachable, quietly authoritative, helpful, educational, timely, collaborative, and make your audience feel good. It becomes something they look forward to experiencing.

“Blogs can produce a thousand to tens of thousands of visitors per day. That’s 365,000 to 3 million visitors per year arriving via Google, Bing, Facebook, Duckduckgo, Linkedin, Twitter and other sites who mention your blogs.”

It’s no small thing to create a customer. In property management, it is difficult to reach landlords, investors, or even your own current customers. With pay per click ads costing up to $93 per click on top property management keyword phrases, your competition believe this traffic is worth it.

Screenshot courtesy of harborpm.com/blog/

Communicate Real Business Value

Don’t blog for marketing promotion. Blog for business strength. Consider how inundated real estate pros are with all the automated messaging they’re receiving today. They want something that helps them with challenges such as costs, industry trends, new technology, hiring, finances and accounting, as well as tenant and contractor management.

Landlords and rental property investors want a highly competent asset manager who grows revenues and cuts expenses. They want a top property management brand.

How Do You Blog Really Well?

First, Prioritize Your Blogging Goals

reach lots of prospects
build lots of visitors and people who will share your posts
differentiate your company/brand and services
showcase your services and leadership
establish experience, authoritativeness, and solid service
grow sales revenue

Prioritize the Content That Aids Your Objectives

reliability — posts that show successful challenges faced and solved
cost-effectiveness — case study showing how you lowered landlord costs
service excellence — explain your approach and how it worked with a client
confidence and leadership — new accounts won, trade show attendance, seminars
relevance — specific key topics that related to landlords most vexing problem
in-depth pieces — valuable insight, trends, industry knowledge, new tech services

Before you start writing, create a list of your goals and content pieces, ideas, keywords and objectives. This will help you avoid writer’s block and get focused.

How to Write Great Blogs

There’s brief blogs or long, epic blogs and each has their place.

There is a standard layout using 3 or 4 paragraphs, that lets you present 3 main points. This style keeps it very easy to understand. However, these blogs may be dull to read, overly predictable, be too short in length, perform poorly in Google rankings, and not get shared on social media.

Infographic courtesy of Social Triggers socialtriggers.com/perfect-blog-post/

Don’t worry, you can learn to surprise, delight, and engage them in whatever format you choose. The point as you’ll read here is making an impact, being relevant, creating flow, and getting the key message across.

Creating A Blog That’s a Workhorse

Creating a theme for your blog might be wise, or you can modestly present it as an extension of your business — no fan fare, just real value, ideas, and solutions from competent and likable people.

A good blog needs post with interesting topics and a good angle. You have to answer the question about why this would be useful and of interest to users. They’re pulled in by the intrigue of your title so it should be interesting.

The topic is most important thing. As long as it’s on a topic they’re interested in, you won’t have to work too hard to get them to read it.

It’s essential that you use a good title because this gets seen in social media and Google search results. That title and your graphic might determine whether your post gets read or shared.

blog

An Example Post

Let’s say your blog is about management challenges in apartment developments on the city’s tough east side. Your title could be:

Title: Landlords Find Unique Solution for East Side Apartment Management Problems

First Heading: Evictions, Unit Damage, Unpaid Rent, Crime and more Plaguing Landlords

1st Sentence: The city’s east side is no place for property management wimps. The challenges for landlords and apartment building owners face makes these communities tough to generate a profit in. In fact, without help, many landlords face big risks and losses in face of looming rent controls.

2nd Sentence: Yet, Atlantic Property Management is taking property management to a new level, and its preventing these same problems and lowering property management costs. Atlantic’s new property management solution helps screen out bad tenants, collect better tenant information, streamline payment, report issues in real time, and make eviction quicker should landlords have to act.

Before using Atlantic property management’s solution, Ben Simmons, owner of 240 West 42nd St. apartment development was doing it old school…..

Catching and keeping readers before they bounce is important. Before you publish, take a look at your draft blog in a browser and see if it would please a reader.

Readers Scan Quick for Relevance

Landlords will see the value in reading it. Everyone scans a blog before reading. They’ll see the title first, see words like landlords, solution, unique, eviction, maintenance, technology, systems, development, revenue, issues, or streamline, and believe it’s worth it to invest the time to read further.

So the first part of your blog post captures attention, uses a variety of relevant words, and establishes that it’s worth reading.

Supporting Content

You’ll need customer service stories, photos, charts, data, and videos if you can find or create any. Creating such content is a challenge but there are tools available to make it easier.

Before you create this material, consider how it relates to what you want to achieve — build brand, differentiate, point out essential services, remind clients of their biggest pain points, costs, revenue growth, and whatever gets them excited.

Within the post, it’s okay to use a call to action to show them you want their business. They may never act on these obvious CTA’s as they’re called. They just remind readers of why they’re reading — to acquire a solution.

Edit Strongly for Flow and Coherence

Writers’ should spend time more editing. After you’ve created the main content you must rewrite several times. The goal here is to make points clear, create a nice flow, and cut out extraneous material that just confuses readers.

It’s a cleanup job. You want it to be clear and to flow. People will stop reading when the flow is interrupted, or they get confused. Sometimes we writers can’t see the gaps in our story or presentation so it’s nice to have someone else read our drafts. Don’t forget to add some feel-good comments or even dry humor to make it appealing.

“Negativity is dangerous because it gets readers in an analytic frame of mind, and that defeats your goal of making them feel good enough to hire you.”

Don’t publish your blog right away. Let it sit for at least a day, so you can come back to it fresh. This can really enhance the coherence and impact of your blog. Run through the details and ask yourself how this impacts and what details support your blog purpose.

The headings, keywords, photos, layout, all add to the impact on the reader. If you can present interesting topics, get a little newsy, and introduce the topic in an interesting way or angle, you can make a big impact as a blogger. Then when you post it on social media, the end results are even better in likes, shares and engagement.

Consistent High-Quality Posts Build Reputation

One blog won’t achieve your goals. It’s the persistent message of unique value that makes an emotional impact. That’s how you build a brand. It’s important to encourage comments, feedback and responses. Readers like to express themselves and you can moderate comments as the author/admin.

If you add value to readers over a long period, you increase their intent, trust and desire to hire you. That’s the best property management branding you can achieve — sustained long term relevance and value.

Be impeccably professional, optimistic and helpful and your blog will be a key business asset.

Remember you don’t have to be EPIC and move mountains with every post. Readers will enjoy your intent to share and help.

Are you ready for cloud property management software? The advantages of being on the cloud are endless, from lower-cost to enhanced services. Check out ManageCasa now.

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