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Digital Marketing Tips for Your Property Rental

Finding tenants for your rental property has become a challenge during the pandemic. The word-of-mouth strategy, once effective, is no longer so these days. But fear not. There are plenty of digital marketing strategies to take its place. Without further ado, let’s find out what these are.

1) Know Your Clients

If you are a property manager or a landlord, get the ground running with demographic research. This study entails finding whom you should target.
Keep these variants in mind:

  • Age of the clients
  • Their location
  • Their income
  • Their gender

Once you have enough data, sit down to devise a competitive pricing strategy. For this, you should know what the industry standards are. Use a rent-estimate tool to arrive at this figure. Based on this, offer a competitive price that is attractive to clients and offers you profit.

2) Leverage Best SEO Practices

SEO still is the go-to strategy when it comes to marketing your rental property. You can carry out a basic keyword search on how tenants are framing queries to search for apartments. Use these keywords:

  • Content
  • Picture file names/captions
  • Title tags
  • Meta descriptions

Keywords in content help search engines pick your pages when matching queries appear. Use them to frame title tags and meta descriptions, and you will increase your Click Through Rate (CTR).
Also, if you are a property manager, you can commission blog posts based on these keywords. This way, you improve your online presence and goodwill.

3) Use Long-tail Keywords

Though a part of the SEO, this section deserves its own subheading. Long-tail keywords are phrases that users enter into Google to find rental properties. They are rich in intent and are often less competitive, and have less search volume.
For example, the query “2 BHK flats for rent on the.... road in ...... city” shows that the user is searching for a property to take on rent. As such, such keywords have high conversion rates.
You can find out popular long-tail keywords in your field using tools like:

Creating content on these keywords can consistently attract more clients to your listings.

4) Use Quality Photos

More than textual content, you need to focus on photos to attract clients. Quality photos taken from different angles help you with three things:

  • Help you rank high on SERPs
  • Appear in image searches
  • Save your time by finding the right client.

Points to keep in mind:
You need to optimize the photos for digital marketing. This is a proven way to show up on SERPs of both normal and image searches on Google. Here are a few methods.

  • Provide alt-text: Use keywords in your alt-text so Google can recognize what the photo is about.
  • Find the right format: JPEG, PNG, and WebP are some of the most common image formats. Of these, JPEG is arguably the most reputable. It keeps the quality of a picture intact during compression.

(But, PNG is better for graphics and illustrations)

5) Use Email Marketing

This is ideal for landlords with many properties and managers with a large client base. Send your tenants regular newsletters containing useful information like community events and vacancies. This will help you leverage referrals and fill vacancies faster.
Email marketing is also pretty cheap. You don’t have to invest anything apart from the time you spend creating content for the newsletter. Moreover, service providers like mailchimp can help you automate sending these newsletters.
Pro Tip : Email marketing is one of the oldest forms of digital marketing. Immune to the vagaries of algorithm updates, it depends on users' habit of checking inboxes once a day.

6) Make a Difference with Website Design

If you are a property manager, you should have a website. And not any kind of website, a well-designed one. That’s because the look and feel of your website can make or break the deal. Here’s what you need to keep in mind:

a) Easy navigation

Clients should not be overwhelmed when they land on your page. They should find important content within three/four clicks. Try to give a quick guide or map of your site to new visitors.

b) Visual appeal

It takes only one-tenth of a second for a user to create an impression of your site. So be sure to make your website as professional as possible. Use a good free template if you are short of funds, or commission the task to a professional designer if you are not.

7) Don't Shy Away from Advertisements

Never limit yourself to one platform when you are marketing your properties. Leverage the potential of search Engine Marketing (SEM) as much as the organic traffic. In fact, SEM can even improve organic traffic.
SEM comes in the form of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads. These are targeted ads that appear on the search results of a user. You pay only according to the clicks you receive, which is a great way to spend your marketing fund. PPC also contributes to organic traffic as it brings quality visitors to your website.
To optimize PPC, ensure you design the ad properly. This means finding the ad space of the right keyword, using catchy title tags and rich snippets. Seek professional help if need be.

8) Social Media are Here to Help

Social media are also a great place to find tenants. Put your property listings on the Facebook marketplace and groups and make them shareable. Ensure you update your contact info such as work mail, phone, and physical address.
Use Instagram and Twitter to post quality pictures of the property. These platforms, especially Instagram, are ideal for highlighting the amenities on your rental property. Amenities like washing machines double your chances of landing a deal.
Also, create an activity calendar to help you time your marketing strategies. Use a tracking tool to measure your performance and make improvements, if needed.

9) Help Others to Make Them Help You

Success comes not only from competing with others but also from helping others. If you are into real estate, you are sure to know those connected to your industry. They may include realtors, investors, real estate attorneys, and even other landlords.
Find out their accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Share some of their posts while you are marketing your listings. Give it some time, a few months maybe, and you will likely see that such parties are also sharing your listings. This increases your reach and trust.
It can also help you tweak your listing strategy as you are in contact with people in the industry.

10) Make Use of Videos

Most want to consume video and visual content than text these days. And with the outbreak of the pandemic, video has become the frontline content format.
So, adding well-recorded videos to your listing puts you a cut above the rest. A good video, wart and all, also help a potential customer to check the property thoroughly. This will help avoid any misunderstanding later. Also, if your listings have only photos and text, those outside your city may not reveal interest in them.
Extra : If you have a website, videos can increase user experience (UX) and score on metrics like dwell time.

11) Virtual Showing Event

This serves the same purpose as a recorded video tour, except that it’s live. This helps you show your apartment to many people and can see and respond to them live. The process is simple:

  • Create an event on Facebook and invite your contacts to attend it
  • Ensure you leave sufficient time before you go live. This time can be anywhere between 24 and 72 hours.
  • Keep a reminder on your phone so you don’t miss the time

When you go online, spend a few minutes introducing the property and give a tour of the yards (if any). Once that’s done, take the viewers inside the property for a virtual tour.

12) Get the Reviews Up

User-Generated Content (UGC) is the hot cookie in digital marketing these days. As a landlord, you too can leverage it, provided you address tenant concerns.
If you do, you can confidently ask your tenants to leave a review on Google Reviews, Yelp, or Facebook. You can also request them to leave links to your website in these reviews to give you some link juice as well.
Extra: Don’t force your tenants to write reviews. This is against the policies of the websites and platforms mentioned above. Moreover, such reviews are likely to be half-hearted attempts that don’t serve the purpose.

13) Do Guest Postings Right

You might know the content publishers related to rental properties in your area. These can be anything from a local news website and a real-estate blog to a business journal or a newspaper.
Find out whether they have a program wherein members contribute content. Most will have. Contribute a piece of content around one of your listings to that organization. Being on such platforms furthers your exposure.
An example of such an article is “10 things to know before you sign your rental agreement.” Not only is such a topic evergreen, but it can also attract a large number of visitors if put on the right website. Moreover, this can also act as part of your link-building strategy.

FAQs on Digital Marketing for Property Rental

1) What’s the Best Way to Promote My Rental Property?

Digital marketing. People turning to the internet to search for properties have risen sharply recently. The pandemic served as a booster in this regard. Within digital marketing, you have many options to explore. These include SEO, social media marketing, and guest blogging.

2) How to Market Vacation Rental Property Online

You can use websites like Airbnb and Trivago to increase the reach of your listing. Try to list the property in as many such hotel-management platforms as possible. Provide them with quality photos, write-ups, and videos to make clients consider you.

3) Why Should I Choose Digital Real Estate Marketing?

It entails the use of SEO, emails, and social media to attract clients. Its advantage over traditional marketing platforms of print, broadcast, and outdoors is cost. Digital real estate marketing is cheaper and has a higher reach than other methods.

4) How to Market Luxury Rental Properties?

Having videos accompanying photos and a 360-degree view will attract more clients. The perfect format is high-quality video tours. These videos, made by a professional, can bring the features of the property into sharp focus. You can either appear in the video or be the voice-over.