How to Use Market Suspense in Commercial Real Estate Marketing

When you have a high quality commercial property to sell or lease, the marketing campaign that you create can be carefully crafted for maximum suspense and impact. Don’t just advertise something in an ordinary way and wait for things to happen.

(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)

Take the time to think about how you can build on the promotional campaign momentum and implement the campaign strategically. A good quality property always deserves maximum promotional effort.

Exclusive Please!

Before I go too far into this topic I will say that these rules apply to exclusive listings only. You would not spend the time or effort on any openly listed property. Too many open listings in your group of properties can be and usually will be a distraction to what you are doing in growing your real estate business.

Marketing Message

So what is this ‘suspense’ idea all about? You can time your entire campaign for the best results, and you can put into it a number of special ideas and concepts. The effort and creativity that you apply to the process will have direct results in the outcomes you achieve (inbound inquiry and inspections). Here are some things to help with your marketing of property listings:

• Best time of year – some properties are suited to a marketing campaign at a particular time of year. Understand exactly who or what your target market may be, and then look at how and when they would choose property activity and movement.
• Best days of the week – there are many different advertising methods that you can use with most marketing processes. Stagger the campaigns across a period of weeks both online and offline.
• Call your short list of qualified people – check out the people in your database and give them the chance to see the property at the earliest opportunity after the campaign start. Call the people that you know and get them to the property early.
• Mix online and offline promotions – we all know the massive advantages of the internet in promoting commercial property today. That being said, the traditional newspapers and mail out processes still apply as part of property marketing. So mix and match your online and offline promotional methods.
• Priority placement on the commercial portals – this is a vendor or client paid cost. Priority placement on the online property portals is a valuable strategy to adopt with the right properties. Pitch the idea in your listing presentation; show the client why the idea is so important.
• Blog some editorial – every top agent should have a blog that they load material into. When a top quality listing comes onto the market, the blog is a great place to talk about the listing. Use photos and good quality promotional copy on your blog, then feed the link to the article through your social media channels.
• Social media – from the previous point, you can see how the blog process and social media interaction go well. Most agents have a ‘bland and ordinary’ approach to social media, offering nothing (or very little) of value or interest. Create your blog and fill it with great material; then circulate that material online and through your social media contacts.
• Pre-release and a staged campaign – spread things out when it comes to promoting a property. Set up a few small adverts for the pre-release and then build the story about the listing in a series of different adverts.
• Using different advertising layouts – in any exclusive listing property promotion, the advertising layout should have 3 alternatives and be used in that way so that the property tells a new and fresh story across the media channels that you are using online and offline.
• Target market focus – know exactly who you are connecting into as part of the property promotion. That awareness will help you with your campaign structure and timing.
• Keywords – some if not most properties should be described in the ways that the search engines are being used by inquiring tenants or buyers (as the case may be). A list of keywords can be fed into your property marketing so that the adverts online are attracting more hits and interest via the search portals.
• Photos professionally taken – great photos always attract readership. Get professional photos taken as part of your marketing budget.
• Dot points of features – the strengths of the property should be clear and precisely laid out in the advert so you can pull in the target market. The dot points should not be the generic ‘fluff’ used by every other agent or broker in your city. Make the dot points special and specific to the listing. Short precise points of focus about the property should be used.
• Brief narrative – don’t say too much in your listing advertising. Say enough to get people to call you and use white space simplicity in the layout. Adults don’t read long promotional statements about property; they want the simple facts, and then they will consider if there is a need to go further with a telephone call and or an inspection.

From all of these things, you can see how suspense and creativity have a role to play in property marketing today. Build your commercial real estate marketing accordingly.

(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)