Essential Marketing Choices for Your Clients in Commercial Real Estate Brokerage
When it comes to the marketing and promotion of a commercial or retail property, you should give your clients some choices when it comes to promotional activity. Whilst you may know the best marketing tools to use, you can mix and match those tools to suit the clients budget and or priorities. When the client has some choices, they are likely to consider the listing opportunity more favourably.
It should be said that good logic and sound recommendations should be behind every marketing campaign and the choices provided to the client. As the local broker or agent, you will understand the methods of promotion that tend to bring in the best results for the property type.
There will be significant differences in property promotion when it comes to an open listing verses an exclusive listing. As a general rule, always focus your property presentation on an exclusive listing conversion.
So what marketing choices do you have? Let’s assume that you do have an exclusive listing. In most cases you can use the following promotional tools and vary the usage in each case:
- A signboard on the property will always be of great value particularly when the targeted segment of tenants or buyers are quite likely going to come from the local area. The local property investors and business proprietors are very likely to have an interest in any new listing taken into the market today.
- The Internet today is a major marketing tool for any property to be sold or leased. Most buyers or tenants will research the market across the Internet. It directly follows that the promotion of a property on the Internet should be optimised as a priority listing. That will occur on the industry portals to give the listing a better ranking against others in the location. There will be a fee for that process. The client should pay the marketing fee.
- Newspaper advertising still has a use when it comes to property marketing. Newspapers had do however have a limited shelf life when it comes to inquiry generation. Within two or three days of the advertisement being placed, the inbound enquiry rate falls away substantially. Do not waste too much of your precious advertising money on newspaper advertisements.
- Check out the methods of marketing being used by competing properties. You may be able to optimise your property listing around those marketing trends. You may be able to compete more aggressively than those other listings by shifting the priorities of your marketing choices and promotional timing.
- Brochures, cold calling, and direct mail also have a role to play when it comes to promoting an exclusive listing. You can add to that process the e-mail newsletter and the database that you have within your brokerage. All of these extra promotional activities will allow you to reach further people in a specific way.
So there are some choices to be made here when it comes to marketing a listing. Look at the property, understand the client, and review the local property market. Make the correct promotional choices based on all three elements.