Marketing Checklist to Boost Property Inquiries in Commercial Real Estate Brokerage

When you list a commercial or retail property for sale or lease, you want to attract inspection requests and improve your enquiry numbers.  Marketing is everything in brokerage today. Create a checklist and here is how.

You want plenty of enquiry coming your way.  How do you achieve that?  Create a plan for your marketing and property message.  Spend time on your property promotion planning.

A Clear Marketing Message About Your Property

When you improve your marketing message and media coverage, you should improve enquiry; it directly follows that exclusive listings should get more of your promotional attention and strategy.  So, you have some choices to make here.

Let’s get started with a focus on attracting plenty of property enquiry.  These ideas are valuable places to start that:

1. Headline attraction – simple words can be selected for the property promotion. Use local media examples and magazine headlines to see how the ‘professionals’ of marketing do that.  Certainly, you cannot be misleading in your marketing headline, but you should be creative.  Think about the headline that reflects the special elements of the property and the location.  Don’t use the ‘generic’ headlines that other agents use.  What can you say of a positive nature about the property and its release to the market? If you want to attract the buyers or tenants of your location to your property listing, then your headline message must be good and unique.
2. Feature factors – go to the property and walk around. As you do so, take plenty of photographs to review the way people may look at your listing.  Understand what they may see.  Look at the property from the target market perspective; that will help you set some ‘feature factors’ to your marketing message.  Features to look for could be the property size, location, improvements, tenancy mix, or investment potential.  Put some priorities on your selected features.  Choose the top five features that should be placed in your advertising as dot points.  When you know what those things are, you can also use some phrases of importance and ‘words that sell’ to convey the core message about the feature in your marketing.
3. Professional photos – the use of professional images in your listings online and offline will always attract the eye of the reader. Even the most ‘average’ property, can be boosted significantly in the marketplace by good quality photos.  Ensure that your photos are of high quality and professionally taken at the right time of day (usually first thing in the morning at sunrise, or just before sunset when the building façade is in full natural sun).  You can usually tell the difference between the professional photos of property listings and those taken by agents.  A few extra dollars applied in the marketing campaign will help you with that visual marketing strategy; it should be easy to sell the idea, and the cost to your clients before the listing is signed off and promotional funds are agreed.
4. Media placement – some media channels and strategies will be better than others. Every exclusive property listing should be carefully considered for the online and offline media channels that will convey the right property message.  Stagger the marketing spend over a set period and vary the property message.  There is no point in repeating the same property message and description in all media channels.  Be creative and variable in putting together your marketing message about the property.
5. Stories about the property – if the property has a ‘history’ or story from the past that you can use in your promotions, then do so. Stories from the local area about the land, the property, the occupants, the history, or the ownership will attract readers to the listing.

Local area coverage will be important when you have done all these things correctly.  It is a proven fact that most property enquiries come from the local area or those people that invest in the local area.  Use that fact to boost your enquiry and the campaign momentum. 

The first few weeks of any property marketing campaign will be the most important.  Keep the promotional campaign running with targeted strategies set to the audience of tenants or buyers.  The choice of marketing is yours, so spend more time in setting the right plan in place.