Marketing your Roanoke property is essential to let potential renters know about the features of the property and its location. Advertising the house to the right audience will help you find the right tenants and reduce the vacancy rate of your rental unit.
However, following the right marketing strategies and keeping pace with marketing trends is essential while promoting your home to ensure that your investment property gets the visibility it deserves.
Here are some of the best ways to market your Roanoke home property and boost your revenue.
Online Marketing Strategies for Your Roanoke Rental
Today, digital platforms have become one of the primary marketing channels. Social media is a powerful tool to reach out to and influence audiences. The 2020 market analysis report by the National Association of Realtors, shows that about 43% of buyers have taken the first step towards buying a property online, while searching for homes on sale.
While the real estate business is typically a brick-and-mortar one, property owners and investors need to understand and explore digital trends thoroughly to properly market your home and get more potential tenants.
Here are some of the most effective ways to market your property online.
1. List your home on a property listing website
Listing your property on a local listing website ensures that it is accessible to anyone, anywhere at any given time. It works like a virtual address for your property. Reports have shown that most renters browse for properties on listing websites first, while searching for a home in Roanoke.
Based on our experience, listed homes often rent faster than non-listed ones. Listing allows a larger tenant pool to know the features and availability of your house and provides them with all the crucial details related to the property. You can use trusted sites like Zillow or Trulia and also local listing websites to promote your home in multiple markets.
Adding the property on multiple listing sites is essential to reach out to the maximum number of renters.
2. Capture the best features of your property with professional photos and videos
Photography and videography help renters view your Roanoke rental, even before visiting it in person. This enables potential tenants to get a glimpse of all its features, essential appliances, amenities, and curb appeal of the home, creating a good first impression.
Some simple steps to enhance the virtual look of your home are:
- Educate yourself on how to take professional photographs and stunning pictures and videos of the house.
- Try to get more product-based photographs. Still-life photography is skyrocketing in social media trends.
- Get street or yard landscape pictures showing the curb appeal of the home.
- Do some event photography or videography to showcase how the home may look when decorated for any events or festivals like Christmas or Thanksgiving.
- Experiment with architectural photography, drone photography, and long exposure photography to take the photos and videos of the home to the next level.
3. Tap Into the Power of Social Media Marketing
Social platforms like Facebook and Instagram have started becoming excellent places to build a brand and start marketing your properties. There are several local groups where you can post about your Roanoke rental. In addition, you can also use hashtags to hyper localize your post description and reach out to the right target audience.
4. Enable Virtual Tours for Interested Tenants
Virtual tours offer the renters a chance to get a closer look at the house and help them in making informed decisions. It is convenient, useful, and fun for the visitors. You can use applications like Insta 360, Theta, or V360 to give the visitors a 360-degree view of every room of the home. It makes them feel like the property is familiar when they come for an actual visit.
5. Implement Email Marketing Campaigns
Email marketing is one of the best marketing channels as it has the highest conversion rate of 66% and has proven to yield the highest ROI in the last ten years. Build a list of your previous and current tenants, keep track of emails of people who have asked questions or shown interest in your property listings and send out attention-grabbing emails that advertise your home to this target audience.
6. Collaborate with Influencers for Marketing Your Roanoke Home
Influencer marketing is the endorsement and advertisement of the home with the help of social media influencers and has become very popular in recent times. All you need to do is collaborate with an influencer who is a known personality on a social platform like Instagram or YouTube, is knowledgeable about real estate, or has a connection or a trusted relationship with the audience. Depending upon their followers, your needs, and your budget, you can choose which influencer is suitable to advertise your home. There are five categories of influencers that you can approach:
- Mega Influencer- 1m+ followers
- Macro Influencers- 500k-1k followers
- Mid-tier Influencers- 50k-500k followers
- Micro-Influencers- 10k-50k followers
- Nano Influencer- 1k-10k followers
Collaborating with influencers can help you tap into their existing pool of fans who can be potential renters for your Roanoke rental. However, it is important to find an influencer who has the kind of audience that you are looking for. For instance, it won’t do to get an influencer whose fan base is teenagers as they will not have the financial capacity to rent a house.
Best Offline Marketing Strategies for Your Roanoke Home
Offline marketing has been and still is an effective way to promote your Roanoke property locally. It does not involve a lot of trends, but rather has some tried and tested strategies to help you reach local prospects. Some of the common offline marketing techniques are as follows.
1. Use Word of Mouth Marketing
Word of mouth marketing helps you create a buzz about your property in the local community and find tenants for your rental. Ask existing tenants to write reviews and give them incentives to send potential renters your way. Try to connect with as many neighbors, owners, property managers, contractors, HOA Board Members as you can. These people generally know if potential tenants are looking for a home in your neighborhood. Word of mouth publicity is beneficial as people generally trust it since the information is shared by a person they know.
2. Create a Referral System
Reach out to the new potential buyers by providing referral incentives to the existing ones. It is a win-win situation for you and the tenant providing a referral as they receive a reward in return. You can assign referral codes to know exactly which tenant has brought how many new visitors. The reward could either be gifts, cash rewards, passes to any movies, events or concerts, or redeemable gift vouchers.
3. Market the Community, Not Just the Property
If you have several properties in the same location, you can think of building a community-level engagement within the neighborhood to target several audiences simultaneously. People may have different expectations from rental properties, but everyone’s sense of community is very strong in Roanoke. Have a booth at the community festival, sponsor an activity in the schools of your neighborhood, or participate in the community parade to build new bridges and bring your properties into the public eye.
Effective marketing is an essential strategy to rent out your home as quickly as possible to the right tenants, for the right price. It allows potential renters to know that your house is desirable and has a good market value. Once you start creating a buzz about your property, you won’t have to be worried about finding tenants. They will find you.
However, considering the immense competition on the marketing platforms and the continuously evolving trends, it can be helpful to hand over marketing responsibilities to a professional property management company, like Lawson Realty Group.
We have been providing end-to-end property management services in Roanoke, Virginia for over a decade and we know the market trends inside out. Our experienced property managers can help you devise the best online and offline marketing strategies that will have maximum impact for your Roanoke rental and achieve a successful ROI on your real estate investment. For more information on how we can help you market your Roanoke property, connect with us at Lawson Realty Group.
