Fun and Cheap Marketing

Recently, at work, I was asked to figure out new, cheap means of marketing in this fantastic economy. While marketing has always been a fascination of mine I am a little stressed out about finding cheap viable marketing options. We are currently using craigslist and a few other free marketing websites, but so is everybody else. What I need is a good way to get the word out and that way has to be cheap.

My immediate thought was to start a corporate blog. I could post once or twice a week with tips and tricks to being a good tenant. The only problem I see with this is that I would end up being the one doing the writing. Since I have been updating this blog as much as I have, I am trying to limit gaining other blog commitments. Especially ones that won’t pay me additional money. This method does have some great perks to marketing the business though. It is free and if I was able to leverage the whole social networking thing it could do a lot of good for the business. The only real difficulty I foresee is that I may have a hard time targeting it to this area of Colorado.

Another idea I had was to take the marketing to the street. This, again, would be up to me. I would just start hanging out on the college campus, handing out and hanging flyers, talking to people and giving away stuff. This would get are name even further embedded into the college students and, as a bonus, would get me out of the office. This would probably be the Mormon method. “Have you accepted our company into your life?” The only cost of this plan would be the flyers, the give a ways and my pride. I am not entirely sure that this would be the most effective method of marketing. On one hand it is not a method that is practiced by property management companies very often but on the other hand there could be a reason for that.

The last idea I have is some sort of tenant incentive program. We could provide our current tenants with the ability to get a rent credit for referring someone to us who signs a six month lease. This is the method that I think has the most potential for working, unfortunately it would also be the most costly to us. We would have to figure out the ideal amount of rent credit that would equal the most profit for us while still being enough to entice our tenants to refer their friends.

Have any other ideas? Please let me know.