Commercial Real Estate Marketing – How to Use a Blog Effectively in Online Marketing
Ask anyone about ‘online strategy’ that really understands the marketing world, and they will tell you that a blog is a very important tool to consider and implement. In commercial real estate brokerage a blog is a critical tool to integrate into a brokerage or personal marketing approach.
Why is a blog so important?
Well the facts will tell the story:
- Your Website: Just about every brokerage has a website. Most of those website are full of listings and not much else except for some marketing ‘blurb’.
- The Industry Portals: All brokerages and agents use the ‘industry portals’ in addition to their websites to promote listings on a location basis. On those portals there are lots of properties fighting for ‘front page’ or prominent placement.
- Competing Properties: In some towns or cities there are hundreds of properties being advertised in a single suburb, so spreading the word about a particular property of high quality is a problem unless you pay a premium price for the listing and placement.
- Advertising is restrictive: There is just so much you can put into a property advertisement before it looks overloaded with content; invariably it becomes unreadable.
- Factors of Attraction: Property listings talk about single properties. Over time those listings become stale and lack the ‘attraction factors’ to pull in the enquiry.
So there has to be another way of spreading the word about a property type, the activities of an agent, and the local factors of property change in a town or city. There is a real opportunity here for a commercial real estate broker or agent to write things about property trends, property types, locational changes, and rates of enquiry.
Understand this; search engines are always on the lookout for quality property information to support and enhance the satisfaction of enquiries coming from the internet. If you can match your information to a location, it stands to reason that you will be seen by the search engines for ranking and listing purposes.
The more blogs that you load to the internet, the better things can get. Quality articles and editorials or case studies will help greatly.
So you can write a blog about your area. You can place that blog on your website (that’s the best place), or if that is too difficult then start a separate blog where you can add information easily and directly and then link back that information to your website and particular listings. There are two very good portals for that blog strategy including http://blogger.com and http://wordpress.com . At little or no cost and with just a little amount of time you can set up a commercial real estate blog to integrate into your brokerage and agency marketing plan. From a personal marketing perspective it is very powerful.
