Thought Leader Series: 3 Things to Automate in Your Marketing

As a property manager, you wear a lot of hats- including Accountant, Maintenance Expert, and Marketer. It can be challenging to find enough time to focus on any specific area of managing multiple properties, and it's easy to let marketing fall by the wayside when you're busy elsewhere. Thankfully, there are marketing automation tools that at least take some of the marketing work off of your shoulders.

Here, we look at a few essential automation tools that make marketing your property management company much easier.

1. Email

Whether you're looking to stay in touch with past vacation renters or maintain a relationship with current long-term renters, email is a great tool for the job. But rather than having to log in every week and craft an email, you can set up auto-responders to do the work for you.

Email marketing platforms like Active Campaign let you easily set up a series of emails to be sent to your contacts whenever you like. For example, you could have the series triggered by an inquiry about a property. If the person did not end up booking, they could receive several emails nudging them toward the property or even offering a discount for renting.

For existing customers, you can create a monthly newsletter that gives them updates on your company, lets them pay their rent online, and provides additional resources they need.

2. Blog

If you're regularly writing content for your business blog (and you should be), you might be frustrated with how frequently you need to sit down and write blog content.

I've got a few tips here: first of all, block off a chunk of time and write several posts at once. I find the content is easier to write when I'm committed to writing several posts at a time.

Next, schedule the posts. WordPress lets you set a date and time for each post, so spread them out over an even schedule (like every Tuesday and Thursday).

And to promote your new blog posts on your social media profiles, use a tool that automatically publishes them to all your social accounts, like Twitterfeed.

3. Social Media

The more active you are on social media, the more you'll attract new followers. But who has time to be on Twitter, Facebook, and the rest all day long?

A variety of social media tools are available to help you schedule content in advance, as well as curate content your followers want to read.

• Hootsuite lets you schedule social updates in advance on multiple social platforms.
• Buffer is great for easily sharing interesting content from the page it's on.
• SproutSocial makes it simple to schedule content across platforms and to see insightful analytics.
• TweetJukebox is ideal if you have a campaign you want social shares of for a period of time

Even with automated tools, social media is a major undertaking- and you want to get it right. Propertyware's digital marketing solution provides comprehensive social media support, from posting to monitoring and reporting. Let Propertyware experts help you eliminate stress and grow your online presence.

The more aspects of your marketing you can automate, the more time you free up to work on other aspects of your property management business.

Want to make running your property management company easier? Propertyware can help. Sign up for free tour today!

Susan Payton is the President of Egg Marketing & Communications, a content marketing & social media firm. She's written three business books, and blogs about small business on sites including Forbes, AllBusiness, and The Marketing Eggspert Blog.