Advertising Strategies for Agents in Commercial Real Estate Today
When it comes to the marketing and advertising of commercial real estate today, it is critical to identify the correct target market and tap into it as part of the property promotion process.
The days of generic marketing are well gone and we now have limited enquiry for any given property listing. To some degree, we have to do more with less.
To create the right level of property enquiry, an exclusive listing should be your priority. Any property that is openly listed across a number of agencies will be both harder to control and harder to market.
Marketing Facts and Realities
Many of us can relate to the desperation when you see one property with five signboards across its frontage. That being said, some property owners still think an open listing is better for them in getting market coverage. Nothing could be further from the truth. You need to prove that to them.
Top Agent Marketing Decisions
Top agents will not generally take open listings for the confusion and time-wasting factors that they present. It is up to you if you will work with open listings; however, always give priority to exclusively listed properties within your agency and territory.
If you have successfully presented and sold yourself as an expert and top agent in the local area, converting the listing to an exclusive appointment is normally easy.
Most clients that we work with do not want to be an experiment in marketing and advertising. They want the best agents with the right ideas. That is why top agents are so successful.
So here are some tips that can apply to the Marketing Advertising process in commercial and retail real estate today:
- Inspect the property comprehensively before you design the advertising. Look at the property from a tenant or buyer perspective as the case may be. Create a list of features and improvements that will be attractive to the potential target market. You will need approximately six features to build consistency into your editorials and online advertising process.
- When it comes to the marketing of the property, minimal display works more than complexity. In other words, keep the advertising simple and direct. A few sentences with supporting dot points are highly effective strategies for capturing the reader’s attention.
- Get some professionally taken digital photographs for the property. These photographs should feature at the top of your advertising and marketing material. The cost of this process should be built into the vendor paid marketing funds. Professional photographers know how to take the right photographs at the right time of day. Most commercial salespeople do not have the photographic skill as is quite evident with most ordinary marketing.
- Some words that sell more effectively than others. Regarding advertising formats and layouts, your chosen words will be critical to the enquiry rate. You can get some very good books from the Internet that lists the words and phrases that sell more effectively than others. You can select words and phrases from those books that suit your property type and location. You can feed those words into the advertising copy. That will help the listing enquiry conversions from each advert.
- Research the Internet search engines regarding current keywords that apply to your industry and location. This is quite easy to do and will help your advertisements regarding search engine exposure and ‘hits’. Google is the largest search engine of great relevance on the Internet. They have a keyword search tool that is freely available for this purpose.
- The advertisements that you create should be designed with the target audience market in mind. There should be a simple consistent message across all of the advertisements for the particular property; that message should be relevant to the target audience. The key message can be built into the advertisement headline above any photographs you use. Attracting enquiry is really important, and this process can help in a major way.
We all know that the property market has changed over the last few years. This then says that every marketing effort should be specifically designed to attract the greatest enquiry.
Correcting this equation will create more enquiries, which will help you with both listings and commissions. A successfully marketed property will attract other property owners and local business proprietors to you as a top agent in your local area. That is exactly what you want.
