Although every successful business thrives on effective marketing, there’s no foolproof marketing plan for all businesses. Rather, as a property broker, it’s crucial to create an effective and unique market commercial real estate strategy for your company.
Nevertheless, the presence of diverse marketing software and solutions might serve as a problem a property agent may encounter while building an effective marketing plan due to the inability to choose the right tools. With these constraints, it’s pretty easy to lose focus on your business core objectives and stretch your game plan thin.
As a savvy property agent, ensure you create a unique commercial real estate marketing plan. While we insist that it must be unique, it shouldn’t be complicated. Your real estate marketing plan will be your blueprint for every property marketing effort your business engages in, covering a specific timeline while being open to adjustments over time.
That way, it’ll enable you to organize and document key activities, track progress comprehensively, effectively manage multiple tasks and communicate your marketing plans succinctly with all stakeholders.
The following is a complete guide on making a commercial real estate marketing plan. Here, we’ll address various strategies to help you land more clients and grow your agency.
Commercial Real Estate Marketing Strategies
While there’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to commercial real estate marketing, the following are some of the strategies you might want to consider to get the best results.
1. Develop a Marketing Plan
Start your commercial real estate marketing strategy by developing a comprehensive marketing plan covering your target audience, unique selling point, overall mission, process, and metrics for measuring your success.
A great real estate marketing strategy must leverage Owned, Paid, and Earned media.
- Owned Media
Owned media includes your personal media assets like blogs, websites, email marketing lists, and social media profiles.
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Paid Media
Under this option are any paid advertising or performance-based channels, including banners, cost-per-click, or remarketing.
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Earned Media
This term entails marketing activities you generally earn due to your brand’s online presence without payment. They also include free channels like Social Media and SEO.
Consider distributing your marketing plan across various channels to enable you to mitigate any downside risk if things don’t work in a particular marketing area. With this marketing plan in mind, decide on the elements needed to implement your strategy. You might also consider other marketing materials and CRE marketing efforts, such as traditional offline methods involving giving out your business card at networking events.
Effective marketing depends on the target audience and the property type. Thus, you’ll need to plan the kind of content you post there. Marketing multifamily properties is different from advertising retail properties, and their presentation budget and content may differ.
2. Online Marketing Campaigns
The sheer number of online marketing channels makes it hard for agents to differentiate between effective and ineffective strategies when planning a rewarding online marketing campaign.
However, establishing a visible online presence for your business is essential. Here’s some online marketing formula for your commercial real estate agency.
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SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most impactful and efficient ways to give yourself an edge over your competitors in the commercial real estate industry. Set up a Google Analytics account and install an SEO plug-in into your website’s backend while optimizing your site’s technical aspects, such as alt tags, page titles, and meta descriptions.
Suppose you’re looking for a professional service provider to manage your social media channels, optimize your websites, and generate more leads; Ardor SEO is the leading marketing company. Ardor SEO offers different online marketing solutions to satisfy clients with its in-depth understanding of multi-channel CRE marketing strategy.
Each of the commercial real estate marketing packages in Ardor SEO includes web development and website management, content generation, SEM, SEO, and social media.
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Website Development
As an agent looking to grow your agency, consider creating a custom-made website allowing your users to discover and view vital information once they visit your site. With nearly 80 percent of tenants and investors beginning their commercial property search online, it’s crucial your website looks great and easily found.
Hence, you might want to work with a professional online advertising agency like Ardor SEO to handle your marketing issues or visit reputable websites like 60secondsmarketer to learn more advertising strategies.
Websites should be informative, user-friendly, visual, and easy to navigate. Consider breaking up the text with unique features like high-resolution images, downloadable floor plans, and quality brand videos to distinguish your company from competitions.
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Email Campaigns
One effective commercial real estate marketing plan you might want to consider including in your plan is email marketing campaigns. However, to ens e your direct mail and broker alerts aren’t sent straight to the trash, it needs to speak to the specific client you want to target.
Include vital information about the property and relevant industry updates while linking back to your company’s social media pages and website.
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Social Media
One vital tool every serious business person, especially a real estate agent, must utilize is social media. Never underestimate social media’s power. Sites like LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter are now widely accepted real estate marketing tools where experts informally demonstrate their professionalism, allowing users to drop comments while opening up discussions.
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Performance-based Advertising
Cost-per-click (CPC) based campaigns or paid ads through platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Adwords is an effective way of delivering great publicity through targeted online marketing while generating millions of brand impressions.
One significant advantage of performance-based advertising is the measurable and immediate results it brings besides its ability to get more control over your campaign return on investment (ROI).
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Updates
Besides having a beautiful website with great features to attract prospective clients, you’ll need to maintain those potential customers by posting regular updates about your property or company on the site.
Consider adding a news section or blog to communicate with potential investors, brokers, and tenants on an informal level. That way, your brand presents a human personality to your audience.
Your blog or news section will provide valuable insight on industry trends, offer expert opinion or advice, share property and company updates, highlight lease transactions, and other general updates.
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Videos
Marketing videos made with drone footage and an aerial view of commercial real estate properties are vital to your success as a commercial property broker in today’s market. Your clients will love viewing the property through live images. More so, it’ll also broaden your chances of potential clients seeing as they don’t necessarily need to come to the property’s location to experience it.
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Outreach
It’d help if you network and connect with industry influencers, bloggers, analysts, and third-party journalists to attract investors and tenants to help produce industry-specific articles and maximum press coverage.
You might also want to consider contributing as a guest writer on relevant external websites and real estate blogs. However, ensure to add the links to transfer the reader to specific pages of the site you wish them to visit.
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Media Placements
One way to generate more leads is to buy advertising space in relevant business journals, news publications, and online magazines. That way, it’ll ensure you’re generating impressions to keep you in the face of your target audience, helping your website rank higher in Google search engine results.
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Online Press Release
Press releases offer you the opportunity of writing unique, newsworthy definitive content. Don’t forget to add descriptive anchor links to take your reader to your company’s preferred page and get them to act.
3. Upgrade Your Company Website
Most times, the first impression a potential client will have about your commercial real estate agency is through your website. A well-optimized and eye-catchy website will instill confidence and trust in your past clients and prospective customers.
Your website is a vital marketing outlet enabling you to demonstrate industry expertise through research studies and blog posts, promote your agency through property search engines, and feature company news.
An experienced real estate marketing agency like Ardor SEO helps turn commercial real estate agent ideas into reality; however, ensure the service provider is an expert in their field. In 2022, if your agency doesn’t yet have a strong digital footprint, it simply means you’re leaving money on the table for your competitors.
Interactive real estate websites are great ways to show your prospective clients your commercial properties. Besides serving as your property marketing efforts’ digital hub, it serves as a “wow” factor to convert and engage visitors effectively.
High-performing property websites must include feature-rich content like:
- Interactive maps
- 3D virtual tours
- Floor plan PDFs
- Property Video
- Availabilities Information
- Professional photography
4. Identify Your Target Audience
Marketing a commercial property will depend mainly on the available resources and your target audience. Consider studying how your competitors are advertising their properties and agencies to get some ideas and decide how to stand out and differentiate your brand from the rest.
Defining your value proposition helps set the foundation for future marketing materials and communications.
5. Set a Timeline for Your Organized Marketing Task
It’d help to organize your CRE marketing strategy’s primary component in a timeline to enable you to summarize multiple tasks and communicate the marketing effort from one document. Consider using a simple spreadsheet to organize this.
You might want to use some valuable tools to help you create a to-do list and organize your time, such as Trello.
6. Consider the Tools You’ll Need
For an effective commercial real estate marketing strategy execution, ensure you’re using the best real estate marketing tools. The tools, otherwise called “marketing stacks,” cover various equipment and uses, including listing presentations, email marketing, and contact management.
Ensure you choose the best technology and software to avoid changing platforms, leading to decreased productivity and the inability to operate optimally during the transition.
Commercial real estate companies that streamline and optimize various marketing-related software and processes will likely witness overall success and sustained growth. Some of the tools you’ll find valuable are:
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Trello
This software is a collaboration tool real estate agents use for organizing their projects into boards. Trello helps you stay updated on what’s being worked on and by whom.
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Basecamp
This online collaboration app allows people to work together while maintaining effective communication with other teammates. Basecamp is used to keep track of your tasks, files, deadlines, announcements, and discussions around work.
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Monday
Monday is a customizable work management software commercial real estate agents will find valuable for increasing efficiency by tracking workflows and projects, collaborating as a team, and visualizing data. This simplified task management tool organizes tasks into lists.
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Google Docs and Google Sheets
If you’re looking for a tool with all-around usefulness and general versatility, Google is your best bet. Google Docs and Google Sheets have currently taken the place of Excel and Word due to their ability to allow users to collaborate in real-time.
7. Track and Measure Your Results
The only way to know whether your agency is growing or not is to track and measure your marketing effort. Consider measuring the following:
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Metrics
Determine the key metrics for measuring your marketing campaign success and find ways to track your activities’ progress.
Four main KPIs to consider include:
- Clippings (for PR activities)
- Leads generated
- Website visits
- Brand impressions
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Reporting
Reporting your marketing initiative’s results is the best way to make informed decisions and measure success to improve your campaign performance.
Consider using Google Analytics (the best tool for measuring conversions and online performance). Google Analytics also helps you create dashboards and custom reports.
8. Effectively Utilize Social Media for Content Share
While we’ve talked about social media before, we’ll still reiterate the benefits your commercial real estate agency stands to gain when you effectively utilize social media to share valuable content, including market trends.
As one of the most effective and cheap ways to drive eyeballs to your website and build brand awareness, savvy commercial real estate professionals use social media to facilitate connections and spark conversations with prospects and clients.
LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are three social media networks most commercial real estate agents utilize for effective lead generation. So far, they’ve been serving as effective tactics when properly used. Thus, you might want to be actively involved in those platforms.
Summary
Commercial real estate is a renowned sector in the real estate industry, with many investors jumping in to grab the numerous investment opportunities available. However, without a strong commercial real estate marketing strategy and plan, your competitors might amass a larger chunk of the teeming investors.
Marketing lets you keep your company in relevant people’s faces using SEO, target the right audience, and draft content that will appeal to your target market. That way, you get to engage them in conversations to know them better through your social media platforms.
Suppose you’ve been witnessing a low sale rate and fewer visitors to your website and would want to stay on top of your game in the CRE sector like Homes by Ardor, an established real estate investment company, there’s a solution.
Get prospects to notice your agency, generate leads, and sell more commercial properties this year by allowing a professional online marketing expert to handle all your marketing needs. Website development and design, SEO, social media marketing, amongst others, are some of the services experts offer.