Oftentimes when I meet a multifamily marketer, we discuss their portfolio growth goals for their company. As with any goal, a strategy of execution is crucial to achieving success. However, within the multifamily industry, the strategy around marketing property management services to asset owners and managers is executed primarily through relationship building and referrals.  

While it may be true that you can achieve growth from referrals, you could be generating significantly more growth with a formal B2B marketing and business development plan.

There are some unique challenges inherent in marketing to apartment owners. Marketing to owners requires a more complex approach to audience segmentation, messaging, and channel selection, but the core fundamentals of B2B marketing remain.

Implementing the following framework could help your property management company increase unit count and drive more revenue by reaching portfolio owners more efficiently.

Who is your target customer?

Just as you define your renter base in terms of demographics and psychographics, you should define your target apartment owner. Who are the buyer personas in your market and which ones align best with your company’s services?

Define your unique value proposition and core message strategy.

Your unique value proposition should communicate what makes your services different and/or better than your competitors. Saying you provide great customer service or that you’ll maximize revenue isn’t enough—everyone makes these claims. Get more specific and share what differentiates your service offerings from others in the market. How will you grow rent or NOI more than your competitors?

Identify the channels you can leverage to reach your target buyer.

Reaching a business audience is different than reaching renters because B2B marketing channels are full of gatekeepers. Administrative assistants, coordinators, project managers and a host of others might be filtering messaging directed towards your decision makers.

Evolve beyond traditional methods to break through the clutter and impact your audience. Consider account-based/role-based digital advertising, website personalization, and even direct-to-digital mail experiences. Whatever you choose, choose it with your target customer in mind. Identify their habits and how they consume information. Then develop channel-specific content that they’ll not only want to consume but also feel like they have to. Deliver value up front and they’ll want more, particularly when you reach them in unexpected ways.

Leverage technology to track your effectiveness.

Technology can power your efforts from beginning to end. It will allow you to efficiently deliver the right messages to the right people at the right time and track the effectiveness of your efforts. Marketing automation and CRM tools - like Marketo and Salesforce.com - form the foundation of your tech stack. You can easily generate an ROI on those investments when you leverage them in the context of B2B best practices. Plus, you can extend them to work for your renter audience as well through database partitions.

These tools also align well with multitouch attribution technology, giving you hard data on every detail of every promotional campaign - both B2B and B2C - to determine effectiveness. You’ll know if a specific program was successful or if it failed, empowering you to pivot your strategy and quickly try an alternative.

Implementing this framework can amplify your growth this year and beyond so you always have plenty of units to lease.