Introduction
If you want to take your commercial real estate firm to the next level you need to know how to reach the right audience at the right time. You also need to know how to avoid the top real commercial estate marketing mistakes most marketers make of which there are many.
Luckily for you, the cindtoro team is going to guide you down the path so you can avoid these mistakes and hopefully save time, energy and money.
Key Takeaways
- Bad marketing can cost you heavily
- Lack of planning is a key pitfall
- Lack of a process will cost you time and money later on
- Ignoring data can lead to loss of trend understanding
- Poor property visuals can harm your brand image
- If you do not use AI you will fall behind
What Poor Marketing Can Cost You
Bad marketing can cost your firm more than you think. What are some of the drawbacks? The biggest is the loss of quality leads, which costs you time and money. Bad marketing can also cause a loss of critical data to make informed decisions and If continued for an extended period of time your firm can eventually fail or significantly get beat out of the marketplace until you turn things around.
Lack of Planning
As the age old saying goes If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Lack of planning will make it significantly harder to spot opportunities and take advantage of them as they come about. Sure you can have ideas of a plan but until they are written down on paper none of it matters. Planning is where you will figure out answers to some of the most important questions as a CRE firm.
Lack of Process
Lack of a process is right up there with failed planning. The process stage is your guiding light on how to run new market plays. Without a process you will not be able to develop a system for how you are going to run each task as effectively as possible.
Gaining and losing team members is a natural part of running a company. If you are reliant on one person’s marketing skills or ideas what would you do if and when they leave? With no process in place you will need to train a new marketing manager how to operate at your firm.
Ignoring Data
In digital marketing data is your best friend. It can uncover things that you did not even know existed. Ignoring data means missed opportunities. These opportunities could allow you to expand into new markets or overtake competitors. This mistake will cost you greatly
No Tracking
Of course having the data you need to make better marketing decisions comes down to tracking. If you are not tracking your efforts how can you tell if you are doing better or worse than when you started? Data tracking is a heavy lift which includes digital metrics, traditional marketing metrics etc etc. At a later date we will expand on data and tracking in a separate focused post.
Weak Property Visuals
Another terrible commercial real estate marketing mistake you can make is having weak property visuals. What does it mean to have “weak” property visuals? Well, we are referring to items such as: blurry images, little to no video, poor lighting, etc etc. As more CRE professionals invest in the digital realm. You cannot afford to harm your brand image with weak visuals. Your prospects may never come back.
No Defined Audience Targeting
It may seem like a chore but having a well defined target audience is critical to inform all of your efforts. You should know exactly who your marketing is expected to influence. A defined audience helps you define every area that you need to influence to gain max exposure.
It will help inform your commercial real estate firms overall messaging, brand positioning and content strategy to influence the right people at the right time. Without clear audience targeting how do you expect to market to any audience?
Missing CTAs
A call to action (CTA) is one of your best friends in marketing. Potential clients will read different sections of your website depending on how engaged they are. The best way to think about how to lay out CTAs is to break your website out into 25% sections until you reach 100%. This equates to about 3 to 4 CTAs per page.
An overwhelming majority of people will reach the 25th percentile and 50th percentile, however less people will reach the 75th and 100th percentile ranges. If your only call to action is located at the bottom of the page you are missing out on 75% of potentially qualified users.
Little to no lead capture forms
How can you collect leads if you do not have the ability to do so?. This is where your lead capture forms come into play. Most commercial real estate companies only have 1 form which is typically located on the contact us page.
It is important to make providing information as easy as you possibly can. The more steps you place between you and your prospect the less likely they are to reach out to your firm.
Poor Listings Descriptions
The quality of your listing description will affect your overall visibility. Listing descriptions are areas where many brokers and firms skimp out where they should be using much needed effort. Some do it better than others but for the most part many CRE firms are way behind the eightball.
If you want potential clients to pick up the phone and call your firm they need information to make an informed decision. Without taking steps to improve your descriptions a prospect will lack what they need.
No Social Media Use
There used to be a time where you could get away with not being active on social media and it would not cost any new business. Now, you almost have no choice but to adapt into using social media to promote your commercial real estate firm.
Using social media is a trust signal that allows potential clients to verify you are a legitimate business. The lack of its use in the eyes of your prospect screams “untrustworthy.” You do not need to post on every platform if your ideal clientele is not active on said platform. Failure to use social also leads to the lack of building an online community within your industry which will lead to less business in the future. If you are not using social you are falling behind others that do.
No Digital Strategy
Do you invest in digital? if that answer is no your firm is making a big mistake. Social media is just one part of that overall strategy. There are other elements such as improving your performance in search, using online ads or other techniques.
Prior to working with Cindtoro many of our clients tell us that they know digital is an important part of an overall client acquisition strategy but have not pulled the trigger because they don’t know where to start or they don’t have time to do it internally. That is where we come in…
Third Party Listings Platforms
Third party listing platforms can make listing management a breeze but they can also pose some serious complications. The main issue they pose is the use of iframes (a code that does not get read by a search engine) this means your listings don’t show up on your website. We wrote an entire article explaining their effects we’d recommend you read up on.
Inconsistent Followups
Commercial real estate is all about developing relationships. A “followup” is a marketing tactic whether you think of it as one or not. Every time you fail to put yourself in front of your client you are missing an opportunity to remain top of mind.
You do not need to follow up every day but you should remain diligent about conversation details and have a schedule planned around the next outreach.
Lack of a CRM
If you struggle with follow-ups this is where a CRM or client relationship management come into play. They can help you keep track of the follow-up process ensuring you always know who you talked to, when you spoke to them and what it was talked about. If you do not one you are falling behind. You are likely disorganized or at the very least not operating as efficiently as you could. Check out this article on CRMs to understand which one you should consider
Not leveraging AI and influencing LLMs models
Did you know that 62% of American adults interact with AI several times per week? Times have changed and commercial real estate is embracing AI. Regardless of if you use GPT, Perplexity, Grok or others if you are not leveraging tactics to influence LLMs so they mention your brand consistently you are missing out on “new era” traffic sources. Additionally, you are wasting time on simple repetitive task that can be easily taken care of with the help of AI.
The Cindtoro team always promotes human capital before AI however there are ways to adapt these models to fit your firms needs while maintaining ethics.
We should however mention that artificial intelligence is NOT a silver bullet. What you put into it you will get out. You should NEVER use it to shortcut your work process to attempt to game the system. Doing this is looked down upon by Google, as well as other platforms.
Conclusion
If you have made any of these mistakes now is the time to take charge and change them. The worst thing you can do after reading this article is to do absolutely nothing. Let the cindtoro help enhance the success of your firm.