Marketing Secrets in Commercial Real Estate Brokerage

In commercial real estate brokerage it is wise to change your sales efforts and strategies a number of times for a promotional campaign for a property.  Essentially and in doing that, you can capture more enquiries and leverage further inspections with key people.

A quality listing should not be marketed in a standard single way; that’s the rule.  If you have gone through all the hard work of capturing the client’s interest and the property as a listing, the next stage is to focus your promotions to attract the right levels of enquiry.  So I guess you would agree so far, however I bet you have not done the following.

A quality exclusive listing deserves a few alternative advertisements and strategies running simultaneously to attract the target market you need.  That means different words and content in a number of advertisements for the same property, all being done at the same time.  Don’t repeat the same ‘hashed words’ across all media choices in your campaigns.  We want people to call us, and the same advertisement across all choices of media will waste a lot of time.  Results come from creativity, and advertising alternatives will be part of that.

Whilst the facts and ideas of this seem obvious, the practice used by most agents is to repeat the one single property advert across all places of promotion.  If we truly regard ourselves as ‘marketing experts’ then every exclusive listing should get special promotional treatment in a variety of ways.  That means different words, different photographs, different layouts, and different messages (all at the same time).  You will soon know what advertisement layout and message is attracting the right feedback and inbound enquiry.

Think about this:

• You will be using various website portals to promote the one property.  Given that the search engines thrive on ‘keywords’, why would you repeat the same advertising layout and copy on every portal?  You can take the one property listing and then change the words to describe the selling points and factors of attraction for the property in different ways.  It stands to reason that a different advertisement will be seen by more people or the same person in different ways.
• They say that photographs will tell a great story, and I would agree.  On that basis we should use professionally taken photographs for all of our exclusive listings; that will be a very powerful tool in attracting the ‘eyes’ of the reader.  In saying that we should use a variety of quality photographs across the listing promotion for any single property.  For example, take photos of the front of the property from different angles (internal and external) and at different times of day.  Split the good photos to use across the different media choices.  Remember to create variety in your promotions with different photographs in different advertisements.
• Make sure that you choose the right keywords as ‘alt tags’ for your property photographs. For those that don’t know what I am referring to here, the search engines look for ‘alt tags’ to describe a photograph.  When you use ‘alt tags’ correctly it helps the search engines ‘see’ the property listing.  You can change the ‘alt tags’ for your photos placed on many web portals, so on that basis the photos you use can have a different set of ‘tags’ for the one property.  So what does this do?  It helps the search engine ‘hit’ on your listing when people type in their search criteria.

These are just a few ideas on marketing commercial real estate that will help your promotional efforts.  Different aren’t they?  I go back to the point here that ‘winning’ the listing is just the start of the marketing process; make your property marketing efforts stronger, diverse, and unique for any quality exclusive listing.  Do that through a few different photo angles, changes to advertising copy, and unique stories all at the same time.