Putting together a successful commercial real estate marketing strategy requires more than having a sophisticated print brochure and pushing your listings online. In the innovative and evolving digital landscape, the industry is shifting and you need to be in front of where your clients are searching.
An exceptional commercial real estate marketing strategy should have a well-balanced marketing mix and should try and leverage: Earned, Paid and Owned media.
The idea of diversifying your risk also applies in commercial real estate marketing. Your marketing mix should be distributed across a variety of channels to help alleviate any down-side risk in the case of unexpected issues with a distinct marketing area.
Here are 15 essential activities that should be part of your commercial real estate marketing strategy:
Create A Professional Looking Company Website
For the most part, your company website is often times the first impression you give a potential client and a crucial factor to make potential clients feel trust and confidence in your brand.
It can also serve as a critical marketing outlet, giving you the opportunity to feature company news, demonstrate thought leadership through blog posts and research studies, and even help promote your properties.
Launch Individual Property Websites
In 2018, if you don’t have a strong digital footprint for your properties then unfortunately you just won’t win.
That is why creating a property website for your properties is a big step beyond a clean and seamless listing page on a company website or CRE portal. It will not only serve as a digital hub for your property marketing efforts, but can also add a dramatic “wow” factor to help captivate, engage and convert visitors much more effectively.
Send Targeted Email Marketing Campaigns
Putting together and segmenting a database of potential prospects for sending targeted email communications is one of the most important marketing activities you can do to aid in boosting your sales or leasing efforts.
In addition, there are a variety of ways to begin building your list through your site, blogs and lead capture pages. Whether you use a commercial real estate CRM, an email marketing platform or just simply store your contacts manually, make sure you have a strategy in place to help grow and nurture your user base.
Create Useful Content
Content marketing is one of the essential tactics to stay top of your prospects mind, by nurturing them until they are ready to actively engage with your business.
The key to content marketing is this: don’t just be part of the noise. Our Orange County Commercial Real Estate Photographers suggest that you create high-quality content that is useful, relevant or entertaining. This can be done in many different ways including blog posts, studies, infographics, videos and more.
Share Content On Social Media
Social media marketing is free and an effective way to assist in growing brand awareness and drive eyeballs to your website. Savvy commercial real estate professionals are also using social media to spark conversations and facilitate connections with potential customers and partners.
Get Press Coverage
Building relationships with influencers, journalists and bloggers can actually pay off quite LARGELY. Outreach takes time but press mentions can help propel your brand awareness and have a massively positive impact on your marketing efforts.
Having your own “black book” of influencers is a key asset and will save you thousands of dollars in PR agency fees who essentially spend most of their efforts around outreach.
Optimize Your Website For SEO
Our Orange County Commercial Real Estate Photographers suggest that you make sure you develop a SEO plan as early as possible. Visibility from search engines can have a powerful impact for your business and help drive tenants, brokers and investors to your website. However, SEO is a long-term process and requires can take months to start seeing impact.
Post Your Listings on Commercial Real Estate Listing Sites
Advertising your listings on commercial real estate portals is a great and effective way to generate visibility in front of a very highly relevant and targeted audience.
Besides Costar and Loopnet there are several other alternative CRE listing websites worth considering to promote your properties and drive leads.
Set Up Paid Google Keyword Campaigns
There are 500 million searches on Google every day and chances are that your clients are searching for keywords related to your property or business at this very moment.
Google Adwords is a very powerful acquisition channel to help you attract leads but real estate keywords can be very expensive depending on your target market. Nonetheless, if your budget allows it, our Orange County Commercial Real Estate Photographers recommend that you include it in your monthly marketing strategy.
Set Up Paid Display Campaigns
Display advertising comes in a variety of formats and can help raise brand awareness and impact thousands (or millions) of people very quickly. Working together with Ad networks such Adwords will provide you with very granular targeting and allow you to figure our what websites you want your Ads to appear on.
Target Your Visitors Through Re-marketing
Re-marketing goes beyond simple display advertising. When a user visits your website, a cookie is dropped on their computer so you can target them and show relevant Ads when they browse on different websites.
This can be an effective way to stay on “top of there mind” and drive visitors that engaged previously back to your property listing or company website.
Don’t Ignore Social Media Advertising
Another way to create and help raise awareness and acquiring visits through performance-based advertising campaigns such as: Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. These platforms can offer targeted campaigns, allowing you to select who, when and where your Ads are shown.
Develop A Marketing Plan
A real estate marketing plan provides a comprehensive structure for all of your earned, owned, and paid media assets. Additionally, it gives you the opportunity to document your marketing activities and define objectives so you have a clear and concise understanding of where you’re going and how you’ll get there.
Moreover, a marketing plan is a key component of any real estate marketing strategy as it helps you plan and manage both your timelines and budget.
Measure Your Success
The most critical component of a successful commercial real estate marketing strategy is measuring the success of your activities. Our Professional Commercial Real Estate Photographers suggest that you define key metrics for each of your marketing channels, setup a real estate marketing report, and make data-driven decisions to continuously improve your efforts.
Don’t let your strategy get stale. You should constantly be testing ideas and tactics to see what works and, more importantly, what doesn’t have any impact.
Overall, don’t lose sight of how your marketing strategies impact your business objectives. If you can’t quantify the direct or indirect impact on your lease-up, sales or tenant retention efforts (or whatever else) then you need to go back to the drawing board.
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