The 5 Essential Fundamentals of Commercial Real Estate Marketing

When you have listed a commercial property for sale or for lease, the marketing process will be critical to the outcomes that you achieve. When you have a good property to sell or to lease, the message has to reach the target market effectively and directly; that’s your job. The tools that you use in property promotion today should be carefully considered and utilized.  The commissions that you convert will be in the main, from the effectiveness of your marketing.

(N.B. these ideas are also sent out to regularly to our friends in Commercial Real Estate Online Snapshot to help amplify brokerage results…. Get your access here)

So what is the message here?

Avoid the generic marketing process with your exclusive listings. Take every exclusive listing directly and effectively into well timed and strategically structured promotional campaigns. Given that you have spent considerable time in converting the client and the property to a listing process, you are then entering the importance zone of property promotion and inquiry conversion.

The time that you spend at the front end of the marketing campaign will help you achieve better outcomes with enquiry and inspections. I go back to the point that you should avoid the generic marketing process with all of your exclusive listings. Devote more time to those very special listings so that you can attract better levels of enquiry and inspection opportunities. Communicate with your client regularly each week or every few days, updating them with the results of all advertising strategies both online and off-line.

Avoid open listing stock

If you happen to have any open listings on your books today, then avoid spending too much time with them and on them. The marketing process with those openly listed properties will and should be of a low level and of a low priority; you will be spending very little time with those listings given that the client has not trusted you with their asset exclusively, and they have not given you their fullest attention and commitment in the listing process. Exclusivity really matters in our industry, and you should be converting most of your listed properties in that way.  If that is not happening for you currently, then look at your relevance as an agent or broker to the clients that you present services to.

The 5 Facts of Marketing

So here are five fundamental facts and strategies to help you improve your marketing approach and promotional campaign for your exclusive listings:

1. Target market – before the property goes to market, determine the target market that you should be chasing and attracting as part of the campaign. That focus will allow you to choose particular marketing strategies and approaches. When you define the target market to the client, they can also see the importance of an advertising budget and a staged campaign.
2. Timing – given the property type, the local area precinct, and the time of year, there will be certain timing choices to take the property to the market. You may have to resolve a few weaknesses in the property before the promotions and the inspections start. Do a full and detailed swot analysis of the property before the promotional campaign commences.
3. Story to tell – look into the history of the property to understand if there are some stories of interest to be shared as part of the marketing campaign. A property of history and relevance to the location and the community will always be a prime target for an editorial; that editorial can be circulated both online and off-line. If the property has a story relating to usage, occupancy, or change over time, then you have something to write about and use in the editorial strategy.
4. Exclusivity – in every property presentation and listing process you should be targeting exclusivity. Control your listings in this way so that you can best serve the clients that you work for. Exclusivity allows you to optimize inquiry and convert more inspections. Show the client how you devote more time to the exclusive listing process and the promotional campaign associated with that. As part of exclusivity, they should receive your total focus and dedicated approach to attracting tenants or buyers as the case may be.
5. Refresh your messages – assuming you have converted the listing exclusively, it is wise to review the property campaign results every three or four weeks. In reviewing the results of inspections and inquiries, you can reshape the advertising message and the promotional story. The property advertising approach will be targeted to a group of buyers or tenants and a segment of the market. You can always revamp your advertising to pull in more, better, or fresh levels of enquiry and opportunity. Don’t let the property advertising gets stale or redundant.

In commercial real estate today the property market is always under change and flux. Every listing that you have should be shaped into the target market and the current market conditions. That is exactly why you should work with these five specific fundamentals of property marketing.