Getting the listing is only half of the battle when you work in commercial real estate. Selling the building or leasing the space is how the battle is won – and how you make your hard-earned money.
From start to finish, getting a deal closed can take months, sometimes even longer. Putting together a solid marketing plan to advertise a commercial listing online is the #1 key to success. It’s what gets a listing sold or leased for the most amount of money in the least amount of time.
Here are the best ways to promote commercial real estate online.
Five Parts of a Commercial Real Estate Marketing Plan
A good commercial real estate marketing plan should act as a road map for your entire property marketing campaign and include both online and offline activities.
There are five main parts to any commercial real estate marketing plan:
- Objectives – Identify who you are targeting, know what your total budget is, and how to differentiate yourself from the competition
- Organize – Marketing efforts and create a schedule
- Offline Planning and Marketing Materials – Combine your online and offline marketing efforts to get deals done quicker
- Online Marketing Campaigns – Digital tools, tactics, and techniques to stay focused on your main objectives
- Measure and Track – What works and what doesn’t
How to Maximize Your Online Commercial Property Marketing
In today’s digital age, marketing your commercial property online is about much more than just creating a brochure and uploading your listing to the web.
A winning online commercial property marketing plan includes:
- Company website for yourself and your business to help build trust, confidence, and authority.
- Property-specific websites for each individual listing. These go far beyond a basic add-on listing page on your company site and demonstrate that extra effort the clients love, and that the property deserves.
- Website updating with news for tenants, buyers, or new clients that provide topical insights on industry trends and showcase your market expertise.
- Outreach marketing such as guest posts or third-party articles by industry specialists and analysts on authority websites that backlink to your site.
- Online commercial real estate listing websites are inexpensive ways to gain visibility, promote your property listings, and drive traffic to your own website.
- Email campaigns are highly effective, but they work best when they’re highly targeted. Try to avoid email blasts that get marked as spam or deleted before they’re even opened.
- Press releases help to make your property listings newsworthy and create more backlinks to your commercial property listing website.
- Social media outlets such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook for business, and YouTube are widely accepted and a great way to informally promote your commercial real estate listings.
- Videos with interior walkthroughs and outside drone footage and aerial shots make it easy for prospects to visualize your property.
- Paid advertisements in online – and offline – publications with your web link build credibility, drive traffic to your sites, and boost search engine rankings.
- PPC or pay-per-click, performance-based advertising through Google Adwords, Bing, and social media sites is an excellent way to zero-in on your key prospects.
- Digital brochures that can be downloaded from your site after your prospect has entered their contact info make it easy for prospects to learn about your listing 24/7 – and build your email data base for future online commercial real estate marketing campaigns.
Don’t Forget Offline Commercial Property Marketing
Combining offline commercial property marketing with your online activities creates a synergy that reaches as many prospects as possible in the least amount of time.
Key techniques to make yourself more visible offline and compliment your online efforts are:
- Print collateral such as brochures, flyers, and research reports,
- Display and window signage that stands out and grabs attention,
- Broker events to connect with prospective buyers, tenants, and other commercial real estate brokers,
- Print media to build awareness in CRE magazines and major newspapers,
- Direct mail to zero-in on your key target market.
Key Performance Indicators
One of the best things about promoting your commercial real estate listing online is that it’s very easy to measure your success. Knowing what works – and what doesn’t – helps you focus scarce marketing funds to where the payoff potential is the greatest.
Defining key performance indicators, or marketing metrics, for your online commercial real estate marketing allows you to use real-time data to make the most of your digital marketing dollars.
Four KPIs – or key performance indicators – to track the progress of your online commercial property marketing are:
- Impressions and click-throughs from online ad campaigns,
- Website visits, traffic patterns, and page views,
- Clippings from PR and third-party activities that generate mentions on authority websites or in print,
- Lead generation reports that show the conversion ratio of traffic into prospects interested in buying or leasing your listing.
If tracking all of this digital activity sounds difficult and time consuming, it’s really not. Google Analytics is a useful and user-friendly tool for measuring online performance that lets you generate a variety of custom reports using your own online dashboard.
