It isn’t enough to get lots of people visiting your website and social profile – you need to turn those visitors into customers. Getting traffic is only half the battle, converting is an entirely different game. As a property manager you have the additional challenge of not just converting your web based visits – but taking them from online to offline and physically visiting your properties (and becoming your tenants).

So how do you take an online visitor and convert them into a tenant? The other thing to consider is that when your website starts becoming popular, you are likely to get many visitors who aren’t going to fall under the umbrella of potential tenant – they may not live in your area or may just not be looking for an apartment. That doesn’t mean that you should ignore them or simply let them go – you just need to find a method for taking advantage of that particular type of traffic (tune in tomorrow for part 2 on non-tenant visitors).

For your potential tenants

Most of the time, as a property manager, your goal for creating/promoting a website is going to be to increase the traffic looking at your rental properties – an addition to your lead generation funnel. So much of your content may be tailored towards helping those kinds of people. Just because you have a website with articles that are helpful for people looking to rent doesn’t mean that when they visit your site they are automatically going to consider renting at your properties.

This is about creating a compelling offer and combining it with a call to action – these are just basic marketing principles. Most importantly this means getting your visitor to simply see what you have to offer when they visit your site for the articles. The most common way to do this sort of thing is to have a section of your site built to showcase what you have to offer. And I don’t just mean point your visitors to your list of properties.

Create a page that creates emotionally pleasing reaction with your visitors – one which elucidates upon your most appealing offers. For example: “Are you looking for a quiet luxurious yet affordable home? We have just what you are looking for – the properties we manage are well respected…” etc. Combine this with beautiful pictures of your different properties and on that page include a call to action: “Click here to find our available units” (at this point they would be taken to your available rentals page).

Once you have a beautifully crafted page, it’s important to make sure your potential tenants find that page when they visit – yet you also don’t want to alienate those who are not interested. This is quite a fine line to walk. There are several different unobtrusive yet clear methods for catching the correct eyes. Some people use popup plugins (if you are using wordpress, this entire process is much easier) – I prefer to avoid popups and instead will use something less obtrusive but still quite obvious. You can include in your sidebar a call to action button that stands out – “Looking for an Apartment in {City}? Check us out here” – and they get sent to your landing page.

There are other plugins that allow you to display notifications to first time visitors within your articles and at the top and bottom of your website. These are sort of like inserting ads for yourself, but they are much more elegant and don’t intrude upon the casual reader who may be not interested. Ultimately you want to catch the eye of your visitors and send them to a friendly elegant landing page that entices them to come see your properties.

Tomorrow I will talk about a few ways you can serve visitors on your site who don’t wish to become your tenant – but still like what you are offering online.