Introduction
Regardless if you are a commercial broker, agent or agency If you want to achieve success in commercial real estate regardless You will need to approach your marketing efforts with a solid well developed plan. But, commercial real estate professionals are not professional marketers for a living. Building a solid CRE marketing plan can be tough.
Luckily for you the Cindtoro marketing team is here to help! This article will guide you or your firm down the path of creating a customizable commercial real estate marketing plan step by step!
This marketing plan will lay out some of the following: ways to gain new potential clients, which marketing channels to use, the importance of lead generation as well as a general understanding of setting marketing budgets.
What Questions Should You Be Asking?
What is your unique value proposition (UVP)?
What do you do differently than similar companies in your industry?
What is the current market landscape?
Who are the market leaders in your area, who are the national leaders?
What are your key marketing objectives?
Do you want to grow online? Or do you want to expand brand awareness for in person events?
What is your budget?
It is great to say we have a marketing budget of 100,000 but where do you plan to put that budget? Should the advertising budget be directed to digital marketing, traditional media or both?
What marketing channels and tactics will you use?
Do you have a list or an idea of how you are looking to promote your real estate services? Or will you need to perform more research
How will you measure success?
What KPIs will you track, how do you measure success of marketing?
Who is responsible for executing the plan?
Do you need an internal or external team to carry out your marketing plan? How often will you meet with them?
What is your communication plan?
How often should there be updates on the progress of your marketing efforts?
Asking questions like these will help you with the next parts of helping to define goals and objectives.
Define Objectives and Goals
Once you have your questions answered from above, you will need to define the objectives and goals associated with that plan/strategy. Defining goals and objectives will help to lay out all the sections that are required to make your commercial real estate marketing efforts a success, which should yield you increased amounts of traffic, leads, and ultimately sales.
In order to properly define objectives, you will need to understand what you are trying to accomplish and when you are trying to accomplish it by.
Let’s take for example that your firm has identified. The need to market your listings more effectively to people who are searching for them. By having this objective/goal you can identify the way needed to hit the target in the most efficient way possible.
During the objective and goal-setting stage of your marketing plan you will likely discover other elements that you may or may not have been thinking about.
This this can be best done using a bulleted list or a document made specifically for company goals.
Developing an in-person / brand awareness on the ground strategy!
Real estate marketing requires two different approaches, first, an in-person on the ground strategy. As well as digital marketing strategy. Both are needed to achieve a successful result. Before we dive into digital marketing we are going to touch on everything that is involved in “boots on the ground” marketing efforts.
Some of these efforts will be things that you have already likely thought of and others could be completely new to you! We encourage you to look at these things with an open mind and think about how you can custom tailor these methods to your situation.
Broker Events –
After you gain a valuable property listing network with other commercial real estate brokers or potential clients by creating a memorable networking event that is located at the commercial property that you’re trying to sell!
If people are able to: see, feel, and touch the commercial real estate you have to offer, that means they can envision themselves living, working and thriving in that environment. This may give you the competitive advantage you were searching for and could help you sell the property to the right prospective buyer faster!
Direct Mail
Direct mailers of any type are effective if you know how to utilize them properly.
With digital marketing becoming primarily dominant today, receiving a well thought out piece of direct mail can be a refreshing experience. Direct mail allows you: to stay top of mind and in a highly thoughtful way while continuing to foster a positive relationship with your potential prospects.
Networking Events
Both the commercial and residential real estate industry is all about shaking hands and making deals! Planning out various different types of real estate networking events that your firm can attend is highly important.
Go to these events with the intention of meeting new people / a goal of finding a new deal. This will help guide your actions in a positive direction leading you to where you want to go. At an event you never know who you are going to meet. Make sure you bring lots of business cards and be ready to exchange contact information!
Traditional media like billboards/ window signage
How well-known are you or your firm in your local market? Because if you’re not the go to person / agency in the specific area you service, then you should definitely consider investing in traditional media like billboards, and window signage.
These sorts of advertising methods will not only increase your companies’ brand awareness but if done correctly can also generate you new high quality real estate leads!
Potential clients will begin to associate your commercial real estate brand with a premium luxury product in their area. You won’t be just any real estate company who does the same boring stuff. You will become THE company in your local market!
When people need to buy and sell commercial real estate, they need to think of you or your agency! Saturating the market for maximum brand awareness is the best way to do that.
Printed media – flyers
Market saturation doesn’t just have to come from utilizing billboards or window signage. It could also happen by using printed media like flyers.
Flyers are easy to create. They give you a way to easily list your company’s services, current property listings, a short bio about you or other brokers and ways to get in touch with your firm.
Planning For Digital Marketing
There’s a lot to the world of online real estate marketing. The Cindtoro team is about to take you down the path of the most effective digital marketing channels you need to be using and the reasons why.
Commercial Real Estate SEO
You may or may not have heard of SEO. It stands for search engine optimization, it is the practice of getting a company found for keywords they are important to the business.
In commercial real estate, SEO can be a game changer for you or your firm. Do you want to get found as people are searching for real estate keywords that are related to your firm? Then you need to invest targeted real estate search engine optimization. This strategy will help your website show up for the keywords that matter to your company.
You should know that SEO takes 6 to 12 months to start working. This is because an SEO company is working to influence a search engine’s algorithm on your behalf.
Becoming a trusted authority within the real estate industry utilizing SEO will take many articles, backlinks, custom content, and much more. But, by doing all of this and investing the time and energy into this marketing tool, your firm’s real estate website will gain an increased amount of brand exposure and organic traffic from search engines.
Paid Ads
CRE search engine optimization can be an expensive endeavor, so instead you could use paid advertising as apart of your plan. These ads also get your website found for keywords important to your firm similar to the way SEO does. But, the only difference is you are buying the keywords you want to be found for instead of showing up organically.
When it comes to keyword based advertising, you will need to plan out a fairly hefty marketing budget. If you are a smaller firm or you just want to get started testing the waters with CRE digital ads then $2500 per month is a good starting number rising upward from there.
Video
Do you want to set your real estate company apart from other firms in the area? Utilizing high-quality forms of video marketing can also help you do that. The videos could be things such as drone flyovers, virtual tours, interviews with brokers of your company or promotions about your commercial real estate services.
Social Media Marketing
Looking for another underutilized tool in the commercial real estate industry? Social media marketing. This is likely because most professionals do not know how to do it in a highly effective way. The goal of marketing on social media is to not only generate increased followers, but also more importantly increased lead and new business.
Planning to use social media to gain potential customers requires a significant time investment. You will likely need to hire somebody to manage your social media account because of the daily tasks that are required to perform successful marketing strategies.
Social Media Tasks
- Creation of post: A high quality post that shows you know what you are talking about
- Finding the best hashtags to use: helps the algorithm understand your content
- Liking sharing and commenting other peoples post: sends social signals that your content is worth promoting
- Engaging with your current followers: helps users feel valued when you interact with them
If you decide to undertake your real estate company’s social media marketing on your own, then you will likely find out that it is not a cut and dry process. Which is why we would encourage you to find a marketing agency to manage all the platforms.
Sending highly targeted real estate email blasts is the key to making email marketing work. You want to avoid sending generic pieces of information that are not customized to your target audience. Email marketing can be highly effective when done properly.
Did you know that a well tailored email strategy and plan can return $36 for every $1 that is spent according to Constant Contact? Think about it this way: most people hate giving their email out to anybody because they don’t want to be spammed with information that they don’t really care about.
As a savvy real estate professional armed with this knowledge you will be able to avoid the spam box while delivering your message in a clear and concise way using a well thought out approach.
If your real estate company does not have an email list then you should highly consider investing into creating one.
This means offering things to potential clients in exchange for their email. These could be: templates, market reports, property listings or updates about current brokers or general things about your firm people should know before they do business with you!
Essentially the main takeaway here is to provide anything of value in exchange for the information you are looking for.
Real Estate Website Development
You cannot generate new leads as a business if you don’t have a place to send marketing traffic to.
Your main real estate website is that place to send the marketing traffic to!
Not only does your website need to contain all of the most important pieces of content that your firm has, but it also needs to: show your available listings, show featured listings, and entice people to utilize your company after they read your website’s content.
A high-quality commercial real estate website will allow you to increase your brand awareness, website traffic, and ultimately serve as a place for people to get connected with you.
Explore the best commercial real estate web designs
Off- shoot landing pages
Offshoot landing pages are a fantastic way to promote singular commercial property listings that you would like to direct large amounts of marketing efforts and web traffic to. These landing pages are excellent for a combination of digital and traditional marketing efforts and could be used for your most important commercial property listings if you choose to do so.
Tracking and measuring the real estate marketing plans effectiveness for on the ground and digital
If you have a real estate marketing strategy, are you tracking and measuring the effectiveness of its ROI?
For most companies the answer is No!
If you do not track the marketing efforts you are undertaking then how are you supposed to make the proper performance improvements to see better results?
There are numerous types of digital marketing tools that can be used to track the performance of marketing campaigns.
Here are a few of them that you should know about:
- Google Search Console (GSC) : A quality marketing tool that can be used to track SEO performance and keyword ranking positions.
- Google Data Studio : Visually tie all types of data ranging from social media platforms, email marketing and even web traffic into a master report that you can use to view all your marketing data top level.
- Google Analytics : measure website traffic and engagement
- Email Marketing Tools : track performance of the email marketing efforts for each email sent.
Organization, setting marketing task and timelines
The final piece to a well planned commercial real estate marketing strategy. Needs to have organization, timelines and a process. Laid out so all team members can understand what needs to be done and by when to achieve said marketing goals.
By this point we are sure you are thinking about some tools that you can utilize to track the progress of your plan / strategy?
- Monday.com
- Asagana
- Clickup
- Hubspot
- G-mail chat and Google Workspaces
- Microsoft teams
All of the project management tools we laid out above will help you with your overall organization, internal task setting and timelines. Once you identify these things you will be able to start executing against the things that can be done in the short term, and long-term.
Work With A Commercial Real Estate Marketing Agency
If at the end of the day you still cannot figure out how you would like your commercial real estate marketing strategy to go and you would like a company to create it for you then we would recommend you look towards hiring an agency who specializes in the real estate industry. Cindtoro is the agency you have been searching for!
We have been doing commercial real estate marketing since our founding in 2019 and have helped companies create numerous real estate marketing strategies that they either utilize themselves or we perform on their behalf to grow their company.
Generating increased amounts of inbound leads, overall brand exposure and awareness within their desired target market. While Cindtoro is an Orlando, Florida based advertising firm it does not matter where you are in the United States or the world we can work with your company to service all your needs!
As Of 09/11/2024 we have recently been ranked as a Top real estate marketing agency by DesignRush
