How to do a Creative Marketing Brief in Commercial Real Estate Agency
In advertising and marketing commercial real estate today, some properties will be quite unique and special. For that reason they need a creative brief and the involvement of advertising specialists. It is the job of the commercial real estate agent to structure a comprehensive creative brief to supply to the advertising specialists.
The advantage of this creative strategy is that appropriate marketing specialists can produce unique and special promotional ideas that a normal commercial real estate agent may not understand or perhaps even overlook. The process costs money, but it is very worthwhile with those special properties to be sold or leased.
Exclusive listings
This creative strategy would occur with properties that are exclusively listed, and that have an extended marketing requirement in time or area. In other words the message about the property promotion has to be specially spread to the right people in the right way. A special or unique property that is expected to create a lot of interest would be ideal for a creative brief.
The intention of a brief is to build a promotional campaign based on special marketing materials and strategies. This approach would be adopted with new projects, special properties, and those with numerous units or properties to be sold or leased. Such could be the case with retail shopping centers, industrial parks, or large office buildings. Project leasing and project sales are a good example.
Here are some ideas to help you structure the requirements for the creative brief and to issue those instructions to the advertising people that can help you.
- Inspect the property beforehand so that the strengths and weaknesses can be fully understood. The weaknesses of the property may need to be addressed prior to any campaign being structured. The strengths of the property should feature in the advertising and marketing material. If appropriate, take the advertising people to the property so they can understand the listing and the surrounding area; this will help them with promotional ideas.
- Determine the target audience that should be attracted to the campaign. Will the target audience be active at a particular time of year? Should the timing be considered in the creative brief? Seasonal selling and marketing can be a real issue with some listings.
- What are the main benefits that the property provides to the market? Are those benefits better than those that are offered by the competing properties currently available? Review all competing properties as part of this process. Determine the differences.
- Establish the response methods that will capture the enquiry. They will impact the design of the advertising material and may involve a special property website and domain name constructed for the campaign. A special telephone number may also be set aside for the enquiries coming from the campaign. A special e-mail address may be structured as part of the promotion.
- Select the correct media channels to be used in the campaign. Those channels should suit the target audience and attract the enquiry. With larger and special properties, it is not unusual to include promotional activity on radio, television, newspaper editorial, social media, and dedicated websites. A basic property promotion would normally not utilize all of these special media alternatives given the expense.
- Select some supporting activities that will be active in parallel to the main campaign. They could be telemarketing, direct mail, direct canvassing, and an e-mail blast from the database.
When these requirements have been set, the creative brief can be issued to your advertising agency. As you can see, this process is quite unique and a step above normal advertising and marketing.
This process applies to those special and unique properties that deserve more agency attention and promotion. That being said, a campaign of this type requires significant vendor paid marketing funds.
