How Property Managers Cut Client Acquisition Costs With AI and Better SEO - with Lacey Hendricks and Alex Zweydoff

We talk with Lacey Hendricks and Alex Zweydoff from ClearLead Digital about turning a property management website into a measurable owner lead engine. We break down what it takes to stand out, track real ROI, and stay findable as discovery shifts from Google to AI. 
• how Lacey and Alex built their SEO skill set inside real property management businesses 
• why tracking matters first, including CRM setup and lead-to-contract measurement 
• what drives low acquisition cost when inbound leads are built on strong fundamentals 
• taking control of website messaging so it sounds like you, not a template 
• narrowing to an ideal owner client profile and mapping the buyer journey 
• the core SEO stack: on-page, local SEO, technical fixes, and backlinks 
• E-E-A-T signals and why bad backlinks can damage performance 
• writing for AI and LLMs while keeping SEO basics intact 
• practical visibility tips, including consistent listings and platform citations 
If you've got something valuable out of today's episode, please share it with a friend or colleague. And don't forget to subscribe and leave a review so you never miss out on future insights and strategies and tactics.

visit pmsuccess.com for more value packed property management related information or to hire Tony as your property management coach.

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introductions

Tony Cline 0:00

Welcome to the Property Management Success Podcast, where we interview leaders in the industry to uncover the secrets to profitability, efficiency, and achieving true freedom, whether it's your time, money, or lifestyle. I'm your host, Tony Klein, and I'm here to help you build a wildly successful property management business. Let's get to it. Welcome back to another episode of the Property Management Success Podcast. Today I have Lacey Hendricks and Alex Zweidoff, and they are with Clearly Digital. So we're going to jump in and we're going to talk a little bit about their backgrounds and who they are and what they bring to the table. Why I'm really excited to have them on the podcast. You don't get people that have the level of knowledge of two fields intersecting like they do. And uh, and so I'm really excited to bring them on and have them share with our audience everything that they know about these two intercepting or intersecting topics. So, Lacey, Alex, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_02 0:56

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 0:57

Thank you for having us. We're excited to be here.

Tony Cline 0:59

Yeah, absolutely. So uh I have had a lot of respect for the both of you for quite a long time. You guys have been in the property management space, and I want to give each one of you an opportunity to share your backgrounds just so that our audience understands who they're talking to and why you have the authority to speak on the topics that we're gonna share today.

Two Paths Into Property Management

SPEAKER_01 1:21

Yeah, so I've been in the property management industry since 2011, 2012. Um so going on uh a long time, it feels like it's definitely changed since then. But um I am very much uh locked into the industry and the association, so NARPAM um have been in that for a very long time. And one of the things that I uh when I got into the industry, I said that if I'm going to do this, I'm gonna do this 100%, 110% at that. And so I really locked into the education and going to the conferences and meeting the people. And then I found my community within that. And with that, you know, it opened more doors as far as just like what I thought this could really be a career. Um, because I had my real estate license and I was I was doing this and it just never it was kind of that moment in time. But here we are almost 15 years later, and it's something that I have a true passion for. Me and Lacey met uh in the governmental affairs area of um NARPAM just because that's something I'm very passionate about, legislative prior legislative priorities, and it's a very great space to be in when you're looking to grow and learn because you learn a lot about the industry when it's changing so fast in front of you. But you know, just going from that legislative side of things and then now and then as a national board member, um, you know, that's really exciting to be, you know, in that in that path to kind of go all the way. And I'm very involved in a bunch of different social realtor associations. I do way too much. Uh my schedule is way too packed, but I love it. And it's because I truly love the people that were industry that we're with, and you know, that's why we started this company. Great. Lacey, how about you?

SPEAKER_02 2:49

So I started working in property management in 2014. My husband's family started a brokerage here in San Antonio in like 1978, and they called us. I I we were up in Austin, and I was working at Facebook, and Kyle was a sound engineer, and they called and said, Come do this, or we're selling it. And we were like, Okay, so we did. I knew nothing about real estate. I um got my license, and I hadn't never worked in this space before. I was a fish out of water completely. Three weeks after I got licensed, I went to my first NARPRM conference and I was like, What is going on? I don't understand. But you know, here I am 12 years later, still standing. It's been quite a journey to get here. But back in 2023, my father-in-law passed away, and they had been established in the San Antonio real estate market for so long that he was our main our only lead source. We worked basically by referral only. We had no need to do outside marketing or anything like that. And we realized that if we didn't do something, we were going to go away because we weren't bringing in any new clients. And so I was like, well, I know how to build websites. And so I enrolled in an SEO course and community, and I've actually stayed in it since then. And that's really where all this came from for me. Alex and I we met, like you said, we met in the governmental affairs um committees. But then, like every Friday afternoon for about six months, we we like were talking and realized that we were doing the same kind of work and it just kind of happened organically. Like every Friday afternoon for the last two to three hours of the day, him and I would get on a Zoom call and just like help each other with content development, website structure, you know, all the stuff that goes into SEO. And and things just kept lining up for us. And we were like, if we don't take the opportunity in front of us, we're really going to regret it. Because if we don't do it, somebody's gonna do it. And we wanted it to be us because we both totally geek out on it. So that's how we got here.

From No Tracking To Measurable Leads

Tony Cline 5:07

So you both have over a decade of experience in the property management space. And the last decade, we've seen a ton of changes in consumer expectations, technology, legislation. And it's interesting to me that while all of that is happening, you all are looking at okay, what else can we do besides run our property management business that could actually help us move the needle, not just for ourselves, but for other people in the industry. And so I'm assuming that you both used yourselves as guinea pigs as you started rolling out and doing the changes. And so I'd love to hear just about some of the things results-wise, before we get into tactics or strategies, but just results that you guys were able to see from rolling these things out in your own companies.

SPEAKER_02 5:58

So we weren't tracking anything, we didn't have any systems, we didn't have a CRM, we didn't have anything. So while we were getting that all set up, because implementing a system like Lead Simple takes a long time. I mean, it's a it's a lot of tedious work. And because of my background, when we onboarded with Lead Simple, we hired them to do three processes in one pipeline. And I it was me, it would we would meet like weekly and we focused really, really hard on just getting that done as fast as we could, like our core processes and our and our owner's pipeline. Um and because of my background, I was able to implement those processes and procedures, like policies and procedures. And I I'm able to think very linear linearly. So, and a lot of people just don't have that, you know, XY brain where you can build the trees and and visualize it and make it come to real life and usable uh within your company. And then you know you have the issue of adoption, and and so we we worked really hard to get our employees to actually use it once we got it built. Um but so after we finally got all of our processes in place so that we could track what was going on with our website, that's when I started implementing all of the SEO. So we went from not knowing where anything was coming from to knowing where everything was coming from. And I need to measure it again because it's been a while since I've looked at it. But in Q2 of last year, I was my my inbound lead or my executed contract cost was eight dollars and thirty-three cents. And that is amazing.

Tony Cline 7:53

Okay, so I want to I want to stop right here. Two things. Two things. First of all, most of the people that are in the property management space, they either don't have a CRM or they don't know how to track and come up with the leads, come up with the conversions. So I want to emphasize something that you said that is like almost unbelievable. Like I believe you, but it's almost unbelievable that your conversion is $8 in in whatever sense you said in order to have these closed contracts. I know there are people out there that are paying like through all property management or uh other leads, they they look at their customer acquisition costs and they're $500, $700,000 to acquire a client. And so I mean, it really makes you perk up and say, okay, if I could do that for less than $10, where other people in my market are doing it for a thousand or you know, even eight hundred, that makes me want to hear more about what you're talking about. And how does how does all this come together?

SPEAKER_02 8:55

When I told Andrew Small with that, I thought he was gonna fall out of his chair. Um so basically, because I have I took I took the time to learn how to do it, we got it all set up, and like I just divided how many contracts we were closing, how much my my technology was costing us to support the tools that were required to do the tracking and support the website, and you know, over a period of time, and that's how I come came up with the the number.

SPEAKER_01 9:32

Well, and to be just disclosure, if someone she was hiring someone to do it, it would have been a lot more. But since she had the expertise in there and she did it herself, she saved Kyle and them a lot of money. Yeah, made them a lot too.

Tony Cline 9:42

Sure, yeah, and so that's a great point. So whether you're bringing in somebody, a a service like yours to come in and help with that, there's gonna be some additional costs, obviously. Then if you're trying to do it yourself, you're gonna have better results. But there's also if you have a BDM that's out there working, I'm curious how does that factor in? Because if a lot of these are inbound leads and our BDM is supposed to be doing some outbound, how all of that factors in? And I we don't need to go too far down that rabbit hole unless you guys have some really good insight you want to give around that, but just factoring the fact that if you have a BDM somewhere that has to that has to land in your in your uh in your numbers for acquisition.

SPEAKER_02 10:30

So at that point in time when I calculated it, it was just our director of operations that was um doing all of our BDM work because we had not built out the BDM position yet. So I didn't include her salary in that cost because that wasn't what she was initially hired to do. So um, but it was her and me and my husband. And then we had our property managers and stuff, but like really about six months after my father-in-law passed away, the three of us had a meeting, like a strategy meeting of like really just what are we gonna do? And the three of us just like buckled down and got it done as fast as we could because you know, we have a staff to support, we have our kids to support support, you know, we have our own livelihood livelihoods and we could see the writing on the wall that it wasn't gonna go well if we if we stood still. Um, it took about that about six months to really move on, like, you know, because we were going through the whole grief process, all three of us as my father-in-law. So there there was just a it was a really hard time in our company because he was the the heartbeat of it all. But then once we moved past it and decided this is this is where this is what we have to do, and everything got implemented. We were able to pull her out of the director of operations role and make her the official BDM.

SPEAKER_01 11:57

And while hers came out

Taking Back Control Of Website Content

SPEAKER_01 11:58

of survival, mine came out of revolt. And I say that because I would we were we were going through the whole building a new website and all these things and learning, and I started learning the basics at that point in time. And uh, as our new website launched, things weren't done that were supposed to be done. And I kind of went in and I did, you know, Lacey went the Lacey went very much the educational doing the classes throughout. I'm very much a I learn from hard knocks, I learned from trial and error. You know, it may take me a couple more times to get it, but I learn it my own way, and I'm able to get that um, you know, and process that information differently and through through that trial and error. So I kind of taught myself, I call myself a self-taught strategist because I wanted to see, I started looking at everything and I was like, everyone has the same content on their website as us, and um everyone had, you know, we're not following the basic meta descriptions, title tags, all the basic fundamentals. So what if we were doing that? And so my broker Maria, uh, she's amazing, and uh she let me kind of like take the she trusted me, she's like, you think you can take this, you know, reigns, go ahead and do it. And I and I did, and I kind of was orchestrating everything. I would send the spreadsheets, I would do it was kind of a very archaic way of getting the information to them, essentially, because of just the process in that time. But um, it was getting them all the information I wanted. And I'd say, Don't make any changes without me. And that's when I say it took the power back, and our uh we took the power back at that time because someone else was dictating, you know, everything about how our website worked. And I was going, I'm very much into all the networking groups, I'm in the chambers, I mean all the different things. And I was running crazy just trying to, you know, get leads in, you know, locally. And once I saw the power of like once you just optimize your website and you're doing regular content and you're really speaking to the actual client that you're looking to get, um, you know, and that's one of the things a lot of the times people's websites speak to like 17,000 different people. Um and when you really focus on the client that you want, that's when you're gonna start seeing a much higher quality client and uh, you know, a better um uh better actual valid lead rate that you're getting from your website, you know, not just tenants. And we took out at that time we took out all um we took out all paid uh marketing except one. Um and it was for a backlink essentially. So that's why we kept it. But uh, you know, and we started seeing success. We started seeing our numbers going up and the we were closing more deals. And we just saw that once we had that took that back, and that's one of the things I always say is people don't take the stop. And it's not usually vendors' prop fault. They don't take the time to stop and take the time to put that content into their website because no one can speak your voice better than you and knows your company better than you, and making sure your down to your FAQs are you know speaking to the truth of your company. Once you take the time to do that, the value you're going to get, the ROI you're gonna get off of that is unstoppable because no one's gonna be speaking the same voice as you. And you know, you can use the chat GPTs and all that with you, but making sure it follows, it's true to who your company is, that's gonna be a big outlier. And people are gonna see that because they the people owners that are looking for you, they're looking at all the property management websites. And when they see all the same stuff, you know, and then they you or you stand out and you have all this cool information and you're being a resource for them, answering all their questions, that's when you're gonna win.

Tony Cline 15:03

I always say that when the when the public is looking at property management companies, we're all the same to them. We're all the same until we're different. And what makes you stand out, what makes you different? And if you are putting all of the same stuff as everybody else, focusing on, you know, here's here's our our five core things that we offer. We do tenant placement, we collect the rent, we do maintenance, we it's like I just want to throw up when I hear that because it's you should do that. That's the basics. Those are that's table stakes, that's what people assume that you're going to do. Now, what makes you different? I want to give people a little bit of grace because there seems to be a couple of different camps out there. So I spend way too much time learning how to do WordPress, learning how to do the all of the different plugins, learning that. And then at the end of the day, that was not the best use to my time because as the business owner, I really should not be doing that as we talk about, you know, the $10 an hour work or even the $100 an hour work. I should keep my head up, focused on where the company's going, making sure that all of our teammates are aligned with the vision, where we're headed, and making sure that I'm looking at the new technology that's coming out, looking at consumer expectations. But there's if if you're not digging around on your website and you're not learning about H1s and meta tags and all of these things, it can be overwhelming to say, well, I want to put my own voice out there. I want to have my own website that makes me unique, but I don't know how to do that. And we're not just talking about websites at this point, because websites is sort of like step one of how you actually generate

Why Most PM Websites Blend In

Tony Cline 16:43

these leads. But what if somebody was looking at, okay, I know my website needs work and I know I need to be able to speak in my voice, I know I can't help everybody. I can't be all things to all people, or I'm nothing to no one. How do they go through that process? Is that something that you guys offer? Is it something that you have templates for? Is that something that they just need to come to the table with? Because I do agree with you a hundred percent. We call it the target client profile, the center of the bullseye. Other people call it the ideal client profile. Very similar. But take me through that process of

Defining The Ideal Owner Client

Tony Cline 17:20

if somebody was working with you, what you would do to get them to be able to understand what should be on their website.

SPEAKER_01 17:27

Let me say this: nothing we do is templated. Um, that's very much something that we pride ourselves in. That's another problem in the industry, is everyone is doing the same thing on the not only the website side, but the content and then the the keywords and you know, just putting property management in front of your city doesn't do it anymore. You have to give those those you know, those really high-intent keywords to find your owners that you're looking for that are looking for you. And we when we meet with, we kind of go through a process, and it's probably for our time, we we put a little more time, energy, effort than most. We're meet the first meeting we're meeting with someone, we're doing in a very high-level strategy call. So basically just looking at what we've pulled on all the audits and seeing where there's they could have some quick wins and what processes go forward with that. Then we're kind of reaching out and talking to them in that moment and saying, what are your goals? Because something we always say is we can we can let the fire hose all the way open. And but if your business can't support that and you don't have the team to support that, it's gonna do no good. We're not trying to ruin your business, we're trying to help you grow your business. So we can kind of gauge the strategy going forward with what aligns with your goals and your processes and the build availabilities of your company. And so we go through that process there, and then we go back and we do like a deeper strategy once we understand that a little better. Most of the time we're talking to clients, they have no idea who their ideal client is. They're talking to, again, 17,000 people. And uh, like you said, Lacey has put together a really great um ideal client worksheet for them that they can kind of work through and she'll work through that with them as well to kind of get them there. And they don't, they don't, it's it's a hard, it's harder than most think to get that down because you think you want like we have we did updated ours at Allegiant um probably like two weeks ago, and we ended up making two. Because you can have two, uh you know, but you just have to have that's two different messagings. That's two different you know, marketing campaigns. And so it's just you know, if you want both, you can, but you should have that ideal that one, but uh you still make that space for two if you feel like you need that. And especially in our market, we're very much there's no uh investor, accidental landlord, you know, balance here. So you kind of have to go, especially you know, in this market, you need to be specific with who you want, but you're you can have a little way wiggle room with that. And with us, we're out there creating that strategy for them, and then we're coming back to them with a full proposal of kind of like this is what we think you should do. Um, you know, we give them a couple different options at that point, but we kind of um point out, you know, this is basically aligns with your goals, it lines with what your you know budgeting is, and then we go ahead and we start the onboarding process, and we then that's when we really dive deep into the their bread, their brand, their messaging, their voice. Um and we can write help with the idea of the content, but you're still gonna have to be involved in the process because we don't know um uh we don't know your city in you know Chicago that's has the these very specific boroughs or whatever, you know. So that's why we rely on you to like say what are the areas, what are the things that are talked about, what are the laws that are going on, what are the regulations you have? And then we're able to kind of structure that out. But the main thing is is that is a piece of it, but it's also the keyword research. What are people looking for? Um, what are your competitors ranking for? That's what's big. And then we tailor that content around that um because you could talk about, you know, there are stray cats in your neighborhood, but if no one's searching that, then you're not gonna um, you know, you're not gonna rank. So it's being very strict uh specific on that strategy so that you're able to one rank and then two, you know, and always say this you always know who you think you know who your competitors are, but you don't know who your competitors are really, because the Google's competitors are much different than who you think they are. So we always ask for who you think they are, and we tell you who they are, and kind of match those together.

Tony Cline 20:54

So I was out at the systems conference and I sat in on one of Lacey's presentations, and she actually did that example real time and had somebody say what their who their competitors were in their city, and then she real time live pulled up and put in the city for property management, and Google returned a different list than who they thought. And I think that was really insightful because yeah, sometimes we get in our head of I'm trying to compete with this other company, or this other company is getting the mind share that I'm having to explain how I'm different from them, but it could be somebody totally different. Lacey, when I was out there, I was really, really impressed with that presentation that you did. And I almost want to have you come back and just do that presentation as a webinar with us. But let's take it a little bit further. In that presentation, we we talked about websites and what needs to be on it and how to set that up. And again, you know, this this isn't just about websites. The only reason we have a website is to have the phone ring. I don't really Believe in having the website to be an educational piece because they they can get educated anywhere. But what we do is we use that education to get the phone ring, to get them to send an email, to send a text, right? So we want to be careful about putting so much out there that they say, okay, I know what these guys are all about. I don't need to call them. But you have to put something out there that says, these guys are speaking my language, they get me. This is the management company for me. So walk us through what happens. We go through, we work with the website, and then what because I know you guys have some other services on the back end just from sitting in on that presentation. There was a whole bunch of other uh other pieces to it.

The SEO Stack That Drives Calls

SPEAKER_02 22:45

Yeah, so that specific one, um, I focused on how to write a blog. But basically, everything that you put on a blog, it's just best practice for structure and content for all of your pages. You need to focus on your user or yeah, user journey, buyer journey on your website. So once you have identified your your target audience, you need to make sure that they're there's pathways for them to get into your sales funnel on every single page. And then we so we do content creation, we do local SEO. So making sure that your Google Business profile is optimized and it's matching all the other listings on the internet. Like your Yelp profile needs to match it exactly. Like all of those listing sites, they all have to be the exact same. Like you can't have streets belled out on one and then ST on the other because it confuses Google. So you just need to make sure that like everything matches. So local is another thing that we do. We do our technical, um, our technical review and implementation. Um, then we do off-page, which is building out your backlinks. I mean, there's different strategies for that. Um, a really easy one is doing press releases. You just need to be careful about which companies you do your press releases through so that you're not getting junk backlinks because that can actually hurt your your website performance with the way that Google or any other search engine qualifies it as being an authoritative and ex so it's ET, E E A T, um, experience, expertise, authority, and trust.

SPEAKER_01 24:34

And we say it like every day. That's the sad part.

SPEAKER_02 24:36

Yeah, that's the funny part. Um, but so you know, each each search engine and each LLM has an algorithm to grade your website. And whether or not you're demonstrating your EAT to them, you know, it determines whether or not it's going to use you as a citation for that. So we want to make sure that you have those backlinks because backlinking is a really good way to increase your domain authority so that you do demonstrate eat to whatever search engine or LLM the person is using. Um, we can do Google ads. Um, we do on-page SEO, obviously, and that's just like going through your content, making sure it's structured the right way, making sure all of your keywords are optimized. We'll do Legion magnets for you. Pretty much everything up until they submit their contact information to you. We can do we can build your website if you need somebody to build your website. Everything before the actual or yeah, after they submit their information, like that's where our job ends. And then it's you can build out your pipelines on your own if you want to, or you can hire, there's tons of consultants out there, they're amazing people that will help you get that set up if you need help with that part.

Tony Cline 26:02

So at the systems conference, during that educational presentation that you did, you did touch on the LLMs and how to create content that is found so that they recommend you. And and so I know that that's another service that you guys offer. And we don't have to get deep into it here unless you want to, because I know that that's something that you guys have developed a skill, and so I'm not sure if that's part of the uh behind the curtains type of stuff once they hire you or not. But I was really impressed with what you showed there with the I say simple changes on the websites or simple changes in your public-facing information. Uh simple but not easy. As you mentioned, making sure that things line up where your address is spelled exactly the same each time and all of those little things contribute to that. But I do think that Google is is one thing, but we're going to wind up needing to be found in all of these large language models or the AIs and finding being found in all of those different services. So I don't know if you guys want to touch on that or if that's something, again, that's the secret sauce behind it. But I was uh

AI Search Still Needs SEO Basics

Tony Cline 27:16

I was impressed with that piece as well.

SPEAKER_01 27:18

Let me say this. We don't really keep anything secret. We're really bad at that. Uh we give away, we probably give away a lot, we probably give away a lot too much free, uh, I would say. But it's because when we started this business, it was to help other property managers, help our friends grow their business. And um, you know, just AI SEO is very important and it's just a piece of SEO. And but everyone always is saying SEO is dead. AI is the new way to go. But without the basics and the fundamentals of SEO, you're not going to be found on the LLMs. So you still have still a very big piece of it. And there's, you know, there's ways to go about it with you know how you're structuring your content differently for AI. You want short, simple, concise bullet points, want stuff it can digest very easily. You know, making sure that you are one thing everyone always forgets is, and when this is when I started doing content, this is where I went wrong. It was I was writing too high, too high of a level. So I was writing at a college level, and most of America or most of anyone reading on the internet is about at eighth to ninth grade reading level. And that's the truth of it all. And so making sure that you're writing at that readability that people are going to understand. You're not putting these big words, long sentences, long paragraphs in there, short, sweet, and to the point is very much going to get you a lot further, but still creating um, you know, still creating content that has a a heightened, heightened um, you know, understanding and I guess with your ranking factors as far as authority. And but it's making sure that you're really just speaking to you're speaking in your own voice. That's the thing. A lot of times people are just going to AI, you can see it, you know who they are, you see their blog, you see their blogs coming out, and you know, you look at their links. Okay, the biggest tell, guys, this is how I break anything out today. When you copy from ChatGPT and there's a link in it, it has a UTM in that link. And it says that ChatGPT is the source of that link. It's the biggest tell in anyone. If you look at start looking at people's links in their blogs, and you're gonna see the UTM for ChatGPT, and you're gonna be like, well, hey, put a little effort into it, you know, change a few things, put your voice to it, because that's what's gonna get you to rank. AI is just consuming everything that everyone is talking about at that topic. So it's not anything original, it's not anything that hasn't but put a story in it about you know, uh an actual story. They want human, they want human, you know, nature in it essentially. So if you had a, you know, you're talking about security deposits and you talk about a secure deposit to where you know you advocated for the tenant and the you know, where the the landlord was being, you know, a little uh greedy in that sense or whatever it might be, just something that's touching on it. And they love tables and they love you know graphs and data. That's like really big in you know all of that. But making sure your basics of SEO are there and your citations are gonna be your biggest thing. So it looks like listed the listings. So more out there, Quora, uh Yelp, Yelp is back, Yelp is back, and it's 2026, and I'm like, get away. But um, you know, it's like that brings back so many, like those uh brings back so many like mm terrors from the restaurant days back in the day. But um making sure those are there, and Quora is like great. Uh Reddit, all those are, you know, that's changed a little bit for Google, but all those ones that have websites have been around for a long time that you can put your link on. And I always this is the one tip I always give to every person we talk to. If you don't have a Pinterest, get a Pinterest. It's one of the it's one of the top domains in the world. And you can and they actually allow you to verify your domain via your DNS, and that's like a sweet follow link from Pinterest, and that gives you a good jump um with your authority. So definitely if you don't have a Pinterest, you should get one.

Tony Cline 30:34

That's interesting. Yeah, I wouldn't think that Pinterest would be a a uh good site for property managers, but uh it's for anyone.

SPEAKER_01 30:42

Yeah, with a website.

SPEAKER_02 30:44

I was trying to find the the book and I couldn't find it. But it's a book about giving generously and um never eat alone. Never eat alone.

Tony Cline 30:57

No, um they is it they ask you answer?

SPEAKER_02 31:01

That was one of them. I know I've bought it and I've read it, but but basically it says it talks about people talk about how this industry is all about building relationships, and that's absolutely true. Alex and I both came from governmental affairs, we are both advocates, and you know, we came to this with giving hearts because we wanted to see everyone succeed and get what they deserve as as they're pouring their energy into their businesses. And so when it comes to gatekeeping information like that, the secret sauce, I feel like property the property management industry in general is not good at keeping secrets from each other. You know, we're we're all givers in that way. I guess you could even say it's like the givers gain philosophy from BI. But when I came into the SEO community, there was a very similar, there's a very similar feeling in that community about everyone just sharing. And maybe it's because we're all content creators too, but people give away the secrets so easily. So if you can break into that industry, um, just like follow them on LinkedIn, you can get so much great information. And I've learned learned a ton from that just alone. Um but yeah, to gatekeep that information, that's just not who we are. And and so, like, you're going to get nuggets from us, even in that very first phone call you have with us, just because that's our nature. So, like usually I end up giving away some sort of resource, and maybe it is like some psychological way of getting business. I don't know, but that's not what motivates me to do it. So it you know, it may reward in the end, but but it is truly just because I like to help people that that I've that I do the things that I do. Um, and and it goes back to those books, you know, overgive and and it helps build trust with people. Like there's so much to there's so much to go around. Like, why I don't I don't need to I don't need to hold my cards that close.

SPEAKER_01 33:21

And we one thing that we always said this week, one thing that makes us different is we already have the trust of the industry when we started this business because we have very good reputations and we are always giving back to it. And me and Lacey have always said we were not gonna mess that up. And so we're gonna do whatever it takes to you know make sure we keep that word. And I said, if I have to go dance out in a chicken suit on the street to help you get leads after this, I will. I have no, you know, no, no pride in my game. And like I said, we've done a lot of free blogs, we've made videos for people, you know, just like I can't, and especially me when I see something, like if I see something that comes across their Google business pro and I'm like auditing it or something like that, I can't, I can't stop. I just it just comes out and I always start a conversation with like, you know, I'm a very straightforward person. I'm gonna tell you what's some things that are gonna help you. It's coming from a place of love, but like, you know, if you're responding combatively to reviews, that's not helping you. That's not that's that's don't do it, you know. And like I always like, and I also when I see those things because I see these patterns, and let me say that I've probably said this my background is in business development. I've done that for that's what I've done for most of my career. And so I have been the one out there on in the field doing the things. And then to be able to have your website, uh, we'll say this website work while you sleep. My I have so much better use of my time now. And I'm not having to run around. I was running around, my schedule was packed all day, and it still kind of is, but in different ways. And it's just it's a better quality of life because you're getting that, and like I said, you're not having to search for those people. It's a little, you're not having those long-term, they're people that are looking for you right now. And if they don't find you, they're gonna find your competitor. And I think that's something you gotta think of is if you're not doing this now, and I always say if you know, you can wait, the people are like, oh, we're gonna wait a year to do this. We don't have time for this. In a year from now, things are gonna have changed and you're gonna wish you started a year ago. Because it takes, you know, in all honesty, the for see any kind of like true effect takes about six months from the time you implement. Um, because Google takes that time to get your, you have to earn that. So it's around six months, you're gonna see that going. And it's with strategy. And just, you know, I always say this if your website is not performing, it's most likely three things that it's doing it. And we can probably tell point this out to where we get it to where we're doing it. And if you're having troubles with your current provider, that's where we really strive to come in to like make a difference and help them see the leather side of things.

Tony Cline 35:28

So there's so you guys have a couple of years into the property management. Well, you've got a decade in property management, over a decade, and then you've got a couple of years of this intense

Generosity Marketing And Starting Now

Tony Cline 35:39

focus in SEO business development, creating new leads for the property management space. So somebody could, I mean, you guys have proven it, somebody could sit down for the next two years and try to figure this out on their own, or they could hire a company like yours that is already at the place where you're ready to go and help them. And so there's always a do-it-yourself option. You just got to weigh out the costs, pros and cons, and there's lost opportunity costs. If you're doing that, it means you're not doing something else. And so if somebody said, I'm I'm curious about what they have to offer, I'm interested in having somebody help me generate leads. I I, you know, growth is everybody is talking about growth. It seems like there's it's never not a topic, but it seems like right now, as the market's changing, it it seems to be louder, at least to the people that I'm

How To Work With Clearly Digital

Tony Cline 36:33

talking about. People really want to know how to grow. So, how would they get in touch with you? What is the sweet spot for clients that you work with? Just help us figure out for the audience who should be giving you a call and what they should expect as part of the results or part of the services that you offer. Because we've kind of talked about a lot with LLMs, blogs, websites, website evals. And so, what does that look like for somebody that would like to engage with you?

SPEAKER_02 37:05

You can email us at hello at clearlydigital.com. If you go to our website, you can read the information that's on there. Or you can just contact us directly and ask us what if we can help you and how. We really try to um tailor what you need to be successful in that moment. And so while we do have tiered packaging, it's going to be specific to each company and each company's growth goals. Obviously, we're always dealing with churn. I think that's why growth is always a top of mind subject for property managers because of churn. Um, so even if you're trying to just maintain moving into this new space where everything is going from Google over to AI, if you're not doing the bare minimum on your website, your website's not going to be found at all. Unless they go back to a traditional search engine. So even if you don't have huge growth goals, you just want to make sure your website is technically sound and you're doing the bare minimum to maintain those rankings so that way somebody can find you in the near future. You know, we can do that too. It just depends on on what you are. Or if you want to close 100 doors before the end of the year, you know, we're full steam ahead if we need to be.

SPEAKER_01 38:34

And one of the things that we we have is we have, you know, two of our two of our kind of products is one is what we call the P it's the PM growth engine. So it's this full, it's this full gamut of how you can grow and add more doors. And for us, it's not about the vanity metrics that most companies have is you know, they're giving you impressions, they're giving you clicks, they're giving you those things. But is that closing, turning into closed management? Is that into adding doors to your business? So another thing that we do in the beginning is we look at your leads, your lead flow, and we track that as well to see if it's going to, you know, if you're seeing improvements throughout that. And that's what's important to property managers is are you getting more owners? And we put up together a framework, basically an owner growth framework, that's anyone can get. It's on our website for free. And it really gives you a great pathway to, even if you're doing it yourself, uh just kind of understanding the all the different buckets that it goes into to like grab get a new owner and what they're looking for in that journey.

Tony Cline 39:22

Uh that's really good that you have that resource up there. And I'm sure that uh when when this airs, we'll have a bunch of people that will go and and grab that. Anything else that you guys want to wrap up with here as we bring it

Final Takeaway And Closing CTA

Tony Cline 39:35

to a close.

SPEAKER_01 39:35

You can take the power back out in your website, and I think that's one of the most important things is don't let someone else run your business because and don't let anyone else speak in your voice, because that's when things get misconstrued, and you can see a lot of power in doing that, and you feel a lot of power when you do that.

Tony Cline 39:52

Lacey?

SPEAKER_02 39:52

I'm good. Double down on that. Okay.

Tony Cline 39:55

All right, guys. It was great chatting with you, and I look forward to seeing you in person again real soon. And with that, we'll wrap it up. Thanks. All right, thanks, Tony. Thanks for tuning in to the Property Management Success Podcast. We'll be back with another value packed episode to help you level up your property management game. If you've got something valuable out of today's episode, please share it with a friend or colleague. And don't forget to subscribe and leave a review so you never miss out on future insights and strategies and tactics. Until next time, here's the your success.