How to Put More Marketing Suspense into Your Commercial Real Estate Marketing

In commercial real estate brokerage today every exclusive listing should be part of a staged marketing campaign. In other words, the listing and the advertising should be shaped and released strategically.

(N.B. these ideas are also sent out to regularly to our friends in Commercial Real Estate Online Snapshot to help amplify brokerage results…. Get your access here)

In a staged marketing campaign, you can create significant market suspense and better inquiry. Avoid being ordinary when it comes to commercial real estate marketing and advertising. Stage every exclusive campaign so that you can pull in more inquiry over the duration of the promotion.

Strategy is Everything in Marketing

So there is a strategy here. Every advert builds towards the next promotional message; every advert leads to the next advert releasing more information and enticing the tenant or buyer to make an inquiry. Here are some ideas to help you do that with commercial real estate listings:

1. A typical marketing campaign for an exclusive listing will be structured over a period of two or three months. Over the nominated time the advert should feature alternative copy and a good selection of professional photographs. Every 30 days the advertising copy should change as would the digital images. In that way you are attracting different levels of inquiry, and hopefully better interest. You are making people think about the listing and the advantages of inspecting the property.
2. A timed campaign such as that for an auction or expressions of interest, will have a shorter campaign duration of around 4 to 6 weeks. The same strategic process applies in that the advert should be staged and shaped for different times within the campaign. You have a beginning, a main promotion, and then a summary reminder to the property listing or release. You see this process quite often with project sales and leasing. The same rules apply with investment property promotions or vacant properties for owner occupation.
3. You can consider the different target markets that apply to the particular property listing. When you have identified the different target markets, you can specifically design adverts for special release. Those efforts can be released into the media channels and newspapers serving the chosen target markets.
4. You can mix and match your advertising through different media outlets and types. Consider using preliminary adverts to be followed by the major adverts, and then to be followed up by smaller summary advertising at the end of the campaign.
5. The first two weeks of a property release are quite important to make sure that you have the promotional strategy correctly balance during that time. The first two weeks of every campaign are the real foundation and will be critical to the momentum of promotion from that point onward. The advertising should be carefully crafted to create maximum levels of interest and inbound telephone calls. Use facts and figures together with a good balance of written content and digital images to do just that.
6. Always track your advertising results through levels of inquiry, inbound calls, hits or clicks on the Internet, website referrals, website hits, and property inspections. In that way you can understand where the results are converting through the different elements of your marketing campaign. When you know what works, you can repeat the process.

So the idea here is that you can dedicate more focus into the exclusive listings that you have and the marketing processes that you adopt.

You can create variations in the marketing campaign so that the inquiry rate can be optimized and shaped over time. Soon you will know how to best approach the promotion of a particular property type in your local area.