Reflections on the Best Marketing Mix in Commercial Property Promotions
When you have a commercial property to lease or sell, the marketing mix and promotional strategy should be well crafted and directed. Don’t approach things generically (unless the property is ordinary, you have no funds, and it is an open listing). Specific promotional strategies will always provide better results for your listing and your creative effort.
Great marketers generally create more enquiry and listing churn; their time on market is shorter in most cases.
Are you up to the promotional challenge?
So the object here in commercial property promotion is that you have vendor paid marketing funds to use, and that the listing is exclusively controlled. From that base of control, you can do the marketing things creatively and directly.
Consider the following issues in your promotional checklist:
- Time of year – Some properties are more suited to sale or lease at particular times of year. When you understand the property segment and the prevailing market conditions, you can usually control this issue quite well. The same rules apply for choosing the best days of the week for promotion. Why not undertake a target market assessment so that you can get this equation correct from the outset?
- Online – You will have a number of promotional strategies online that you can use. Consider the best websites and the grade of listing that you can use (and afford) as part of promotion. Premium quality listings require prime placement on the industry portals and that will cost someone money (hopefully you can convert client paid advertising funds). Given that there are usually many other properties competing in the target market at the same time, your listing has to stand out in both size and prime placement.
- Offline – Traditional newspaper based advertising still has a place in our industry albeit short-lived given the limitations of promotion over just a few days after publication. Understand the best days of the week to advertise commercial property and devote some of your promotional budget to those days and newspapers. Most of your property enquiry is likely to come from online initiatives so bias your budget and advertising choices towards that. Limit your newspaper advertising.
- Advertising copy – Where possible, use a professional copywriter to oversee your advertising before it is sent to the media. They can probably lift the quality of words and phrases used given the factors of attraction in and about the property.
- Professional photographs – Quality images will always pull in the interest of your target market. It is always a good idea to spend some of your marketing budget on good quality images taken professionally.
- Direct marketing – It is wise to target your promotions into the local area and certainly directly to the people that you have already pre-qualified in your database. Letters, brochures and social media strategies can make your direct marketing initiatives all that more effective.
When you look comprehensively into these matters, you can do more with your commercial property advertising. Given that you have taken the time to prospect, present, and negotiate the new listing, it is now the time to have a serious look at your promotional methods.
