Content Strategy for Property Management Companies
There are substantial customer-capturing and revenue-generating opportunities for property management services and software firms in 2025.
And to access them and harvest the opportunity, your online content experience needs expert love and care. Property management/investor customers are constantly looking for performance, reliability, care and value.
A high-quality content strategy helps you stand out as the most significant and trusted company they might choose. One blog post can’t adequately cover how to use content strategy to grow leads and revenue, but let’s review the core value of property management content strategy.
What’s Exciting About Content Strategy?
Marketing content is your conversation with prospects. It speaks for your company. Your content, from text and banner ads to landing pages, to blogs, downloadables and email messages, gives you a powerful voice with them. And if you’re able to focus the message of value, alignment and performance using content strategy it will enhance your entire business.
- reaches and impacts your prospects emotionally — preparing them to enjoy your brand/company
- increased leads and sales revenue — answers the right questions and builds their confidence/intent
- builds your company brand — retains your current customers
- helps you communicate the value of your product/service — does this via experiences, narratives and expert insights
- accesses high-quality property managers and rental investors — they’re difficult to reach
- helps real estate investors find solutions — such as your management brand and UVP
- it’s affordable — cost-effective marketing is possible
- it enhances your paid advertising — delivers the authority and authenticity needed
- feeds your entire marketing mix and customer service touchpoints
- builds credibility, trust, and comfort with renters and real estate investors
What’s exciting, is that when it’s supported and leveraged, it can offer continuous reach to the people you need to reach. In this post we take a new approach to content strategy and in another post, the content strategy guide for property management, we see a plan we can adapt and execute.
What is Content Strategy?
Content strategy is the planning, creation, and delivery of content pieces and channels to impact/engage the target audience, conversion activity such as subscriptions or new client contracts. Content management (images, text content, video, web pages) isn’t content strategy, although strategists may be asked to manage assets.
7 Key Elements of Content Strategy:
- Audience Insights – understanding who your content should reach, their profile and needs/pain points along with anything that affects their views and purchase decisions, and hurdles we must overcome.
- Content Goals – the purpose (e.g., awareness, lead generation, brand positioning, sales revenue).
- Content Types & Formats – high-quality, helpful, authoritative blog posts, videos, social media, whitepapers, product sheets, customer testimonials etc.
- Content Distribution Channels – Website, email, social media, Google search, PR, paid ads, etc.
- Search Engine Optimization – ensuring content is exceptional to rank well on Google.
- Campaign Schedule – A publishing frequency to ensure maximum impact and recall from prospects.
- Campaign Analytics — high-grade actionable reports on reach, engagement, and conversion activity which then inform the next iteration or campaign.
A content strategy is the part that builds cohesion to capture and move prospects through your sales conversion funnel. Without cohesion, they fall through cracks and gaps back to where they were. Strategy creates focus making each part more powerful. Content strategy should also raise leads, brand value, sales revenue and customer loyalty.
Search for Property Management Company in Austin, TX
When property owners and investors use Google to find management companies they find something like this:
In the above search results, they get a library listing about these company’s identities. That’s not impactful. Instead, they should see the value offer right away. Even if your listing is 5th, they’re going to click on your link. Instead, they should find crafted search results that look more like this below. It tells them only what they want to see and that this company is in tune with their needs.
Those companies managed to get seen, but the listings don’t excite the searcher. This is just one aspect of a more powerful property management marketing strategy. Everyone’s into ROI marketing now, and this approach suits that new focus.
Reach, Impact, Engagement, Persuasion, Commitment
Content strategy that powers up each component of it from research to design to production generates impact, engagement and persuasion to generate subscriptions and new clients.
Having worked with a property management software company for 7 years, I learned how challenging it is for a technology startup to reach, impact, engage and convert online visitors into rental property management software subscribers.
Sounds easy but it’s far from it. Competing against big companies is a challenge. As you do Google searches for property management solutions, you’ll notice how omnipresent the market leader Buildium is on Google. They have a large advertising budget and work to dominate Google’s organic search results too.
Buildium attracts about 20,000 visitors a month. With my client, I had built up to about 60,000 visitors per month. Buildium’s SEO ranking power was about 40x my client’s. What I found is that even a startup could pose a threat to these market leaders if they conducted their digital marketing really well — especially content marketing done with a cohesive strategy.
Revenues of the major property management software companies show budgets have a definite impact on performance too.
- Yardi Systems: Approx $1.3 billion.
- RealPage: Approx $1.7 billion.
- AppFolio: Approx $623.29 million.
- Entrata: Approx $446.6 million.
- Buildium: Approxi $50 million.
- DoorLoop: Approxi $14.9 million.
- Rent Manager: Approx $16 million.
- TenantCloud LLC: Approx $5.09 million.
- Rentec Direct: Approx $1.5 million.
- RentRedi: Approx $3.9 million.
Buildium and Doorloop are the two notables most prevalent in digital marketing. Competing with the likes of Buildium, RealPage, Appfolio, Yardi, and others who are well-financed and marketing-powered, is not for the faint of heart. Make your content exceptional, strategized, and promote aggressively.
Re-envisioning Your Content Strategy
If yours isn’t, then you might re-envision, re-strategize, and execute better. If you lack ideas, just put all that behind you, and start fresh with a new approach. Hopefully, I can help you develop the content that reaches, impacts, engages and helps convert visitors no matter where they are in their path to fulfillment.
Focusing on Talent: Research, Creative, Analytical and Production Power
I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve avoided digital marketing due to costs, complexity, and lack of skill in it. So, the value proposition hasn’t crystallized for you so far, but if you’re reading now, you’re thinking that having a content marketing strategy is wise.
Don’t hire people because they’re local unless you want to buy convenience. Specialized talent is a better choice especially if they have experience and outstanding key skills you need.
These freelance pros have powerful skills and versatility to help you orchestrate a winning content marketing strategy. No one provider has all the advanced skills, so be patient and develop the great talent you find — this is wisdom. You don’t need an agency as agencies have the very same problems — without experience in property management or SaaS software you need and they’re expensive and not responsive.
The freelance property management content strategist, content creator, SEO expert, web/graphic designer, web developer, or analytics expert you need can be brought in when necessary. It’s possible you may need a brand consultant too for a one-time engagement. If they are a remote freelancer, they’ll have more freedom to be more creative. You should put an emphasis on creative prowess as a theme of your staff management. With your freelancer marketer, you can focus on building creative, strategic and ever-improving campaigns.
Big Marketing Budgets Just Means Thorough Promotion
As the SaaS property management software company I formerly worked with expanded and better-funded an all-around digital marketing effort, they saw subscriptions and revenues increase. Sometimes, the final missing piece activates the complete marketing plan and harvests the brand awareness built up.
With respect to attracting and engaging prospects, it’s your web/social content that’s the medium of exchange — what they consume. It must reach, impact, engage and persuade an almost doubtful audience. It’s more about communication that captures and builds a special loyalty between customers and the software brand. And it’s the brand that sells and it takes time to create trust and comfort to make a brand they love.
The property management marketing strategy guide describes how to: create impactful/engaging ad landing pages, product pages, blogs, success stories and experiences, case studies, customer testimonials, product information sheets, help files, software use guides, videos, photos, graphics and other material that makes an ideal content experience that builds a picture of your company being the only one they should work with.
Disengaged, Bored, and Skeptical Audiences
The content challenge is that information today is blasé, overconsumed, and doesn’t succeed on a lot of different levels. It’s hard to make impact in a valuable way anymore. Leading content 10 years ago wouldn’t get 5 seconds of read time now. Property managers and property owners have seen all the promises and issues thus their attention level is very low.
Not Up To Their Expectations
A tough part of property management marketing to property managers is their mindset. Some have fixed attitudes (status quo, more leads, marketing is a big risk ) and we must compete with those fixed ideas.
And rental property owners and investors have gobbled up all of Buildium’s and Appfolio’s marketing messages. Those two companies have skewed the perception of property management, value, software power, and how it all should be done. Understanding that brainwashing is a challenge too.
At present, your content strategy may not:
- use concise messages to get the brand value proposition across laser-clear
- be strong enough to compensate for a weak brand or a faulty brand
- be clear, scannable, easy to consume, enjoyable and comfortable to engage with
- have a narrative that’s powerful enough to move property managers
- make the software compare favorably against property management companies or software firms
- be creative visually enough to engage and impact
- demonstrate corporate strength and credibility (image of power and financial strength)
- relate the right experiences, benefits, features and promises
- address real business issues (e.g., software integrations, migration, subscription pricing worries)
- make an emotional impact on property management decision-makers
- be significant enough for property management staff to pass onto the company owners and managers
- be effective in building traffic via Google
- be enjoyable or sharable on social media
- be a sufficient information asset such that property managers want to savor and save it
- have the right visual impact to perk attention and interest
- be supported by a complete, integrated digital marketing strategy
- capture prospects at different stages of the path to purchase
- be credible, persuasive and convincing
- give that extra push to commit to trial or purchase
The point to make then, is that in 2025, content has to be exceptionally vivid, persuasive, attractive, valuable, and be supported with a well-conceived brand and digital marketing strategy to work. Sometimes you have to get the idea of switching service providers or software solutions to yours. The switch is an important image to instill. It takes a great UVP, creative presentation, offers and persistence to get the sale nowadays.
Experience and Lessons Learned
What I learned about the large property management software market leaders is that leadership image is the top requirement. People feel confidence in that even if the company’s solution isn’t the best. Image is important. And your highly polished content strategy can focus on that too — to make your brand and company look powerful.
If you appear to be a follower, it tells them they’re not getting the best product available. So all your content strategy efforts, promotions and conversion funnel activities might be in vain.
It’s important to bring in a good content strategist and provide the support to be the strategist they need. No one is great out of the box. Part of the strategy is to develop the strategist and marketing team, empower them, and guide them to market leader status.
On that note, let’s dive into the property management content strategy guide next.
With me, you have an affordable, key wild card to help you weave together the content strategy to make your property management marketing work. Let’s take the risk out of it and get the result you need.
Call Gord at 416 998 6246 to launch your project!