Introduction
Retail centers are one of the main drivers of a great thriving community. Filling them with high quality tenants not only improves the value of the property but also improves the community as a whole. As commercial real estate professionals if you want to maintain healthy sales and traffic at every retail property, effective marketing is essential.
Especially when your target audience spends increasingly more time online in search of the best deals. The competition for attention is high and convenience is becoming a major factor shaping consumers’ overall mindset and habits.
Commercial property firms require a carefully planned and executed strategy to reach potential tenants and investors. Luckily there are a few best practices which we have outlined below to guide you down the path of both successful marketing and increasing visibility for your retail properties.
Identify Target Tenants (Categories & Brands)
People who lease retail space want to be surrounded by good quality anchor tenants. Think of major brands with good reputations. Anchor tenants help drive big viability into a property while at the same time allowing smaller tenants to gain the benefits of increased foot traffic.
If you want to lease more retail space one of the best ways is to lock down major anchor tenants that will help drive traffic and overall visibility.
Define the Value Proposition
To attract quality tenants you need to define your retail location’s value proposition. Highlight the reasons why people should lease space in your location versus another area. This can be done by first defining the visibility of the center. Tenants want to know if any area is highly trafficked because it will help their business make more sales. If you have access to the traffic data, include it in your marketing materials.
Additionally, you should also define the overall trade area by performing a trade area analysis to study of the different geographic zones a business draws most of its customers from. Expect to look at things such as demographics, spending habits, competitors, and accessibility. This will help you understand overall market potential, support new location site selection and optimize marketing efforts.
Once you have this information you can package it into a strong value proposition designed to help you better advertise the overall retail center and individual spaces available.
Use Professional Photography & Video
People will engage with your retail listings if they include high quality professional images and video. Professional imagery helps in two different ways: first it is engaging and second it helps to build trust with your target audience.
Many people are turned off by poor quality images preferring to look elsewhere if your listings have bad imagery you are turning away tenants before they even walk through your door.
Virtual Walkthroughs & Interactive Site Plan Tours
Different businesses have specific requirements for their desired layout. Your team can only be in one place at a time. Virtual walkthroughs and interactive site plan tours can help solve issues with timing issues with scheduling. They also allow a prospect to view a space before they commit to booking a tour to lease the retail space.
Increase Views With Digital Ads
Digital ads offer a powerful way to reach your ideal target audience by engaging with them near instantly. Advertising your listings has a number of benefits. One of the biggest is the ability to test both your marketing collateral and targeting. They also offer a powerful way to stay in front of your most engaged prospects with retargeting to ensure that you always stay top of mind.
Highlight Key Features
Highlighting key features of the retail center is a great way to attract better visibility to the property. Potential tenants want to know they are going to be placing their business in an area with high traffic, excellent access to parking, great security and be located around the other types of tenants that will attract the foot traffic they are looking for.
Create Hero Collateral
“Hero” Collateral can be used to highlight your value proposition and other unique selling points for your marketing efforts. A unique one pager can be used to leave with someone after they have visited a particular space OR to provide something to a prospect if they are interested in learning more before scheduling a tour with a member of your leasing team.
Make Your Center Easy to Find
Retail space thrives off of local search performance. If you have bad discoverability in the search results you will rely on passing traffic and word of mouth to get discovered. And while this is not a horrible strategy, it is certainly not optimal.
To market your spaces as effectively as possible is essential to create Google Business Profiles for both the overall retail center and request that key tenants do the same. By doing this you will help improve online discoverability as people search for businesses in their local community.
Segmented Email List
Segmented email lists should be broken out into various buckets for effective email marketing efforts. Ideally, you should have a few different email lists for retailers, another for brokers, another for franchises.
Once you have this you will be able to send focused emails to whoever on an as needed basis. Additionally, depending on the size of your list (and how you got the data) a customer contact match retargeting can be implemented to stay top of mind in case a subscriber does not see your email.
Reviews & Social Proof (Center-Level Highlights)
Reviews play a critical role in user trust and perception of a property. Especially when it comes to people visiting a retail center. There are 2 primary ways CRE firms go about collecting reviews.
The first on public consumer platforms where users leave public feedback on Google Maps, Yelp, TripAdvisor and others. In most cases these reviews typically focus on the overall atmosphere, parking accessibility, variety of stores, cleanliness of common areas (like food courts and restrooms), and safety. This is what matters to most average people who visit retail centers. With this information you can make improvements whatever needs to be addressed.
Next, we have professional mystery shoppers who are hired by retail center management or individual stores to provide detailed, objective reports.
Reviews from mystery shoppers help to evaluate specific metrics like staff helpfulness, wait times, and adherence to brand standards. The feedback you get here can help to enhance the success of your individual tenants and property as a whole.
Conclusion
We hope you learned something useful about the different ways to market retail space for lease. You do not need to use every method outlined here to be successful, rather pick a few strategies that work for you and stick with what works best.
Filling a center with quality tenants is a challenge but it does not have to be. Cindtoro is here to help you handle the boring, mundane and often overlooked marketing efforts so you can keep your properties filled.