The type of person who shows interest in your property will reflect the style of your marketing materials, and the manner in which they are distributed. This is basic marketing, but I find that many people often overlook the basics and end up attracting the type of individual that they are trying to avoid.

Before designing a marketing ad, or a marketing campaign, you must consider both the type of person who currently lives on your property (if you run a multi-family rental property), as well as the type of person you are interested in attracting to your property.

This goes a bit beyond just making your ads look nice – but on a general scale, if your ads look professional then you are more likely to be attracting more professional type people. If you look expensive, then people who struggle for money are likely to not show interest in what you have to offer.

One type of tenant you may want to be wary of when determining your ad verbiage is the college student. This may or may not be a problem for you, but in my experience college students have a tendency to be more noisy and messy than the average tenant. The reason you will want to keep this in mind is that many parents will pay for their college student’s rent. This means that simply by having more expensive and professional looking advertising, this may not filter out everyone you want to avoid.

Your online marketing campaign will also bring in different people than your offline marketing campaign. Your online ads may be more targeted than your offline ads – that is, depending on what sort of ad campaigns you are running online, the people who run across them are likely going to be looking for you, your property, or a property just like yours in your area.

On the subject of targeted online advertising, Facebook provides a fantastic ad platform that allows you precision demographic targeting. In this way, you can have your banner ads displayed on the side of Facebook for people you are interested in being your tenant.

Offline marketing may be less targeted, and slower. If you chose to advertise in the local paper for example, your ad will be seen by a wide variety of people. Consider looking into local magazines or other offline print editions that allow advertising. One place you may consider is a local religious group – if you find that a local church or synagogue has the type of person you are looking for, you may be able to negotiate an ad with that group (most churches/synagogues always need money, and are often interested in placing ads within their weekly or monthly printings even if they are not looking for people).

Ultimately this is a combination of the verbiage you use, the style you choose, and the location you place your advertising. If you can get your advertising precisely in front of the person you want (and have it crafted in a way to generate interest), then that is ideal (see Facebook ads). If your targeting capabilities are more limited, then use the verbiage and look of your ad to target – an effect in which only your ideal customer is attracted to your business.