Prospects are coming to your commercial real estate website looking for property to buy or lease. You don’t have to cold call them. You don’t have to chase them down for a meeting. And you don’t have to play telephone tag. By seeking you out, they’ve already qualified themselves as potential prospects. But potential doesn’t pay the bills. If you’re not converting as many prospects into clients as you think you should be, you might be making lead generation errors without even realizing it. Here are the five worst and most common lead generation mistakes in commercial real estate – and what you can do to avoid them.
#1 Not Following Up On Leads
Believe it or not, not following up on leads is at the top of lead generation mistakes in commercial real estate. When the real estate market is strong, letting leads go from hot to warm to cold is easy to do.
Clearly, that’s a bad way to do business. But it’s also a great way to help your competition and lose money. If a prospect doesn’t hear back from you in a reasonable period of time, they’ll simply go to another CRE firm that acts like they want their business.
#2 Clogging Your Real Estate Lead Pipeline
Maybe you’re following up on leads but don’t have a system to follow after the initial contact.
A real estate lead pipeline is the path your leads take from the first inquiry to signing the contract to purchase or lease. By creating a pipeline for your CRE leads, you know where each prospect stands, how to prioritize them, and what your next step should be.
A basic real estate lead pipeline has four stages:
- Lead – all responses to your lead generation programs enter your pipeline as someone who has contacted you for more information.
- Prospect – when the lead shows interest in one of your listings or your services they become a prospect that may do business with you at some point.
- Client – prospects become clients when they agree to let you represent them in the sale, purchase, or lease of the commercial property they’re looking for.
- Sold Client – a good real estate pipeline helps you maintain your relationship with the client after the transaction is completed because satisfied clients are great for repeat business and referral business.
#3 Not Using Video Marketing
People love to watch. According to HubSpot, over 50% of consumers want to watch a marketing video instead of reading text or looking at photos. The longer a visitor stays on your site watching a virtual tour of your office space or panoramic drone video footage of your latest listing, the greater the odds are that they’ll contact you for more info.
Using video marketing to generate commercial real estate leads is quick and easy. In fact, there are more than a dozen different types of CRE marketing videos you can create right away.
#4 Forgetting To Nurture Your Leads
There is always a certain percentage of leads that are “trash” or “dead” because people provide inaccurate contact information. It’s simply the nature of the lead generation game.
But one big lead generation mistake that commercial real estate agents make is to label a lead as dead just because the prospect doesn’t respond right away. Using this 4-step plan can help nurture your leads and turn more prospects into money-making clients:
- Develop a lead management plan,
- Route your leads to ensure a fast response to inquiries,
- Create a lead database and keep it updated and organized,
- Automate your marketing.
#5 Only Using One Lead Generation Strategy
If you’re using only one commercial real estate lead generation strategy, the odds are that hundreds of other brokers are using the same technique too. Which means your marketing efforts get diluted and your share of the pie gets smaller and smaller and smaller.
The commercial real estate agents with the most successful lead generation campaigns use multiple strategies, all at the same time:
- Social media: LinkedIn, Facebook for business, YouTube,
- Digital marketing: emails to opt-in prospects, Twitter,
- Online marketing: broker websites, individual property sites, and online listing sites like CommercialCafe,
- Direct mail: post card marketing and one-page flyers can be very effective,
- Door knocking: can also work very well, simply because many agents don’t take the time to do it anymore.
Lead Generation In Commercial Real Estate Takes Both Time And Money
Lead generation is a financial investment. To get the most from the time and money you spend generating CRE leads, don’t make these five common lead generation mistakes:
- Not following up on leads,
- Clogging your real estate lead pipeline,
- Not using video marketing,
- Forgetting to nurture your leads,
- Only use one lead-generation strategy.
