In commercial real estate brokerage the principles of push and pull marketing are quite special and deliberate. As the broker or the agent working on specialist listings, you need to know exactly how you are pushing people towards your listings and pulling in their interest. Special strategies apply to sales, leasing, and property management. Understand the outcomes that you are trying to achieve to attract sellers, buyers, tenants, and landlords. The marketing coverage is quite special and unique in each case.
Given these facts, you are working with a particular listing and the target audience relative to that listing. On that basis every property and client situation should be carefully considered to attract the results at you seek from a promotional aspect.
You should also consider your own marketing strategies as a professional in the industry. There are many alternatives of promotion today both online and off-line that relate to both individual and listing marketing. Soon you need a promotional plan to address both of these issues.
Here is an audio recording by John Highman explaining the important facts of push and pull marketing as it relates to commercial real estate brokerage today.
Don’t complicate the marketing process in commercial brokerage today. Keep things simple and get out and about locally among the people that matter. Our industry is based on personal contact and professional relevance. If either of those things are lacking in your property business, then you have issues and you will struggle to stand out as a top agent.
Resolve the property challenge comprehensively by and through a process of direct marketing. That’s how things happen in our industry; everything else is just luck and luck doesn’t do much for market share.
Here is a simple and yet effective process of direct marketing for brokers and agents. See how you can modify your business skills using some of these contact ideas:
Find new people each day – the best way to get this started is by using the business telephone book (the online and offline versions). There are thousands of businesses in that list for your town or city that you can call direct. Ideally you just want to know if they have a property challenge or issue where you can help them. Make the calls and talk to the business owners. It’s a simple way of connecting with new people. Some of those business owners will lease the property they are located in, whilst others will own the property. Either way you get to connect with property interested people.
Create discussions – the people that we class as ‘clients’ or ‘prospects’ are typically business savvy, and they are very experienced with direct business conversations. Master the art of the business conversation using local property information as leverage. Facts about sales, leasing, listings, developments, and marketing will always create some form of a discussion. Practice your meeting and call conversations.
Take notes of meetings and conversations – given that you will be contacting lots of people in a location, you will never remember everything that is said to you. Your database has to track conversations and contact processes. Put your marketing processes into and around your database; you cannot delegate that process. Take ownership of your database so your prospect list is up to date and growing each day. Build momentum in direct contact.
Send follow-up material – every quality conversation, be it across the telephone or in a meeting will give you a chance to send out material in follow-up. Choose the right material for the location, and not some generic ‘fluff’ that no one wants. Be specific and be real in the information that you send out.
Use a database pipeline – a contact today is potentially a listing or transaction in the future. Everything depends on what you do with that contact and how you open up the pipeline of information; your database should be at the centre of that contact. Relevant local property information will always help you open doors on business contact so create a regular informational marketing process around email, telephone calls, meetings, and referrals. Consistency and regularity will help you with that.
The promotional marketing process in commercial property doesn’t have to be complex, but it does need to happen. Keep your direct marketing activities local in focus and frequent in momentum. That’s what the top marketers do all the time. Are you up to the promotional challenge?
Time and strengthen your commercial real estate marketing with strategy.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
