One of the biggest issues we see with a lot of property management companies has to do with their online reputation. We speak to a lot of owners who are really focused on bringing in new doors using SEO, Google Ad words, content marketing, different forms of offline marketing. But they forget about the foundation and that’s your company’s reputation.
You have to try and put yourself in the mindset of a consumer. Imagine that you’re searching for a dentist and you go online and you find a few different dentists that you’re possibly interested in hiring.
So what are you naturally going to do?
You’re going to check other reviews online regarding those dentists and you’ll generally only pick up the phone and call a dentist if they have really positive reviews and a lot of people have told you, online, that the dentist is actually trustworthy.
So, property owners go through the exact same taught process. When they go online, even if they heard about your company offline, they’re going to look up your company’s reputation. They’re going to say, “Okay, what are other people saying about this company?” And if your company has a really negative online reputation, you’ll be losing a lot of potential leads. Because quite frankly, there’s not that much that differentiates a property management company as a consumer at first glance.
So, at first glance basically everyone has a website, they have some sort of social media channel but there’s nothing really distinguishes each company, other than reviews.
So, what they’re naturally going to do is they are going to go to Google, they’ll type in your company name and they’ll look and they’ll say, “Okay, what type of star rating does this company have?
Do they have a five-star rating?
Or do they have a two-star rating?
And they’re generally only going to call the companies that have really positive online reviews.
So, I want to talk to you a little bit about three distinct benefits that you’ll get from focusing on your online reputation.
3 Benefits of Focusing on Your Property Management Company’s Online Reputation
1) Increased Conversion Rates
The first has to do with increased conversion rates. So, as I just mentioned, if people find your company online, they’re not going to actually pick up the phone and call you if you have a very negative online reputation.
So, having a positive reputation, focusing on getting quality reviews to your company, is really going to increase the amount of leads that actually pick up the phone and dial your number and it’s also going to help increase your conversion rate once they do call into your company.
2) Increase Search Engine Rankings
The second benefit has to do with SEO. So, we all sort of hear about how it can be really beneficial to your company if you rank on the first page of Google. There’s a direct correlation between the quantity of reviews your company has and your local rankings, so where you show up in Google search results. Having a high quantity reviews is one of the criteria needed to show up on the first page of Google. There’s a lot of different factors but this is definitely a very important one.
3) Improves Branding
The third benefit of having a positive online reputation comes from a branding standpoint. So, if you’re a business owner, you really have to have a long-term mindset. You can’t be thinking how am I going to bring in all these new doors tomorrow?
It’s a process we all know that.
So, essentially having a positive online reputation is going to really help strengthen your brand. When it comes time to sell your company in the future, if that’s something that you have in mind, having a really strong online reputation is going to help your company’s sales price.
Would you rather purchase a company that has a hundred reviews and a one-star overall rating? Or would you rather purchase a company that has 300 reviews and a four and a half star rating?
I’d personally pay more for a company that has 300 reviews and a four and a half star rating because I know that when people are going online, they’re already establishing trust when they see that company’s reviews.
Where To Start
So, if you’re just starting out with your online reputation, you’re just starting to focus on it, there are three distinct websites you should really you should really pay attention to.
1) Google
The first and most important one is Google. So, Google is crucial when it comes to online reviews because it’s generally the first platform that people are going to do some research on.
2) Yelp
The second platform is Yelp. So, Yelp is extremely powerful. It’s a really important place to focus your efforts to gain online reviews.
3) Facebook
And then the third platform is Facebook. Facebook, I probably don’t need to tell you but Facebook is the biggest social media platform out there and a lot of people still go to Facebook when they’re doing research on companies.
So, if you just focus on these three specific websites you’ll do really well and you’ll see a very big return on your time spent just by having quality reviews on those three platforms.
Implementing Systems To Gain Reviews
And then the third thing I wanted to talk to you today about is just making sure that you have systems and processes in place in your business to encourage your tenants and your property owners to leave you positive reviews.
So, if you currently have property managers working for you make sure that they’re aware of this. And that after they go and see a tenant who they believe is happy with your company to entice them to leave a review.
You can do that through a variety of different ways. We’ll come out with a video shortly that will show you different ways that you can entice people to actually leave your company reviews.
If you prefer not to deal with this, we also offer a service where we help property management companies with their online reputation. So, feel free to reach out to us.
If you have any other questions regarding online reputation, don’t hesitate to send us an email or give us a call or leave us a comment below.
If you like this video, please, please subscribe and leave us a comment below and let us know what you’re going to do in the next six months to help improve your company’s online reputation.
Thank you very much for watching and we’ll see you soon.
