How You Can be Tapping the Opportunity in Commercial Property Advertising

In commercial real estate brokerage (sales or leasing), you should track the newspaper listings for all properties advertised in your town or city.

The tracking process allows you to understand the promotional messages used by other brokers and agents, and assess the results with competing listings.

In doing this, you will soon see how successful or otherwise those agents are with their advertising copy and marketing messages; you will know how you can adjust your efforts of promotion.

So what happens here with marketing?

Marketing a property is not just a process that is started after the listing is captured.  It is a deliberate choice of words and messages to pull in property interest; you can optimize both of those things.   Better adverts create more inbound inquiry in most cases.  Why not optimize the process?

Your promotional strategies should be of the highest quality on your exclusively listed properties; show your clients how you spend most of your professional skills on their valuable listings.  Convert the quality properties to exclusivity and then drive the marketing campaign accordingly.

What is your system?

So what can you do here with tracking and optimizing local newspaper advertising for your property segments?   Try some of these for starters:

1. Frequency of advertising – How often are the important properties being promoted? There are differences in frequency between the quality properties in prime locations, versus those that are more ordinary.
2. Duration of promotion – A driven campaign will usually have a time based focus; look at what the others are doing. The primary part of a campaign will be in the first 2 weeks of property release.  During that time, you have to pull in the right segments of your target market, be that local or regional.
3. Days of the week – Some days are better than others with property promotion. Stage the campaign for the best days of the week, and consider the papers used on those days.  Where are people going to see your advertisements?  Where are they going now?  Answer both of those questions as you choose your days of promotion.
4. Size of adverts – ‘Big’ can be good when it comes to advertising size, however the size choice will always cost more in the campaign. So what can you do here. It all depends on just how much money your client has to devote to the promotion of their property; they should pay for the marketing.  The advertising spend should be addressed with the client as you close on the listing process.  Vendor paid marketing is an important part of property promotion.
5. Keywords – What words are being used in the local advertising of property? Whilst you can use the same words, choose the words that people would put in the search engines.  Analyse things on that basis.

Drill down into the newspaper property advertising for your location.  Look for the things that appear to be working, and then refine and improve them.  Most agents are very ordinary with their marketing efforts.  You can do better if you really think about the results you are seeking in your property marketing.