Marketing Strategies for Commercial Real Estate

In a previous article that focused on Property Valuation, I told you that, in Commercial Real Estate, you can't sell what you don't know. So, now that you have a keen sense of what your commercial listing might be worth, let's see if we can't figure out how to market it and hopefully get it sold or leased in a timely fashion.

While I'm not in the possession of a Real Estate License (and therefore, news flash, have never personally conducted a transaction), I AM the proud owner of a Marketing degree from the best state school in Oklahoma (go Pokes!) and have been helping professionals market and list their properties for going on a decade now. P.S. Thanks to the generously kind Uber driver who just dropped me off at the aiport for commenting that it doesn't look like I'm old enough to have been doing anything for almost 10 years. You are the Real MVP!

Ah hem... let's get started, shall we?

In order to sell anything, you need to first market it, correct? The first stop on our journey in figuring out the how's and whyfor's of marketing is understanding your media options. A healthy marketing plan will have a well-rounded balance of owned, paid and earned/shared media components.

In this article, I won't be focusing much on Owned Media except to say, I think we can all agree on this side of the new millennium, a company should have a web presence via a sleek, professional, easy-to-navigate website. As a Commercial Real Estate Broker, you should consider a personal website as well - check out my friend Alison's page for an example of how to nail personal branding as a broker.

When it comes to Paid Media, let's talk about the elephant in the room (or the 800 pound gorilla)... Yes, you might have guessed that I would have a slight bias on this topic seeing as how I work for the largest and leading commercial real estate information company in the U.S., which just so happens to own the most trusted CRE Advertising platform... Of course, I'm going to encourage you to start there. It is FREE (emphasis on exactly free) to list your available property on CoStar.com, where it will be seen by the largest audience of CRE professionals in the country - in fact, 83% of all Commercial Real Estate transactions are completed by a CoStar subscriber.

When it comes to paid advertising online, what you are really trying to maximize is the amount of exposure you can get for the dollars spent. Here, it's important to make sure you are tracking your performance and running the metrics on the effectiveness of your advertising - I've seen far too many people pay a ridiculous amount of money for Pay-Per-Click ads on social media sites that are improperly targeted and don't actually reach your most desired audience.

Speaking directly to LoopNet.com, with over 5 million monthly visitors (read: tenants, investors, owners, etc. - your desired target audience), we receive 450% more traffic than the next 50 commercial real estate websites combined. That's what we call that in the industry, a whole lotta bang for your buck. That being said, not every listing is created equally - for some, it just doesn't make financial sense to pay for that kind of exposure, especially if you don't think that the listing will move all that quickly (i.e. "prime" development land just adjacent to some unincorporated town in the middle of nowhere... I know it's a hard pill for the owner to swallow, but they might be sitting on that one for a while...)

Moving on...

I'd like to focus the majority of this article around Shared/Earned Media.

One of my favorite stories about the effectiveness of Earned Media, comes from a lunch meeting with my friend Mark Beffort (CEO of Newmark Levy Strange Beffort in OKC). He began his career in brokerage before the days of internet marketing and told me that it was his strategy early-on to make sure that his name appeared in the newspapers and trade journals at least once a week. Usually he was providing a quote on a story in the real estate section, and as such, positioned himself to gain exposure as a local market expert. I'm here to tell you, that is still some solid advice in terms of a marketing strategy... CRE Branding 101, if you will.

Becoming friends with the CRE journalists and bloggers in your market will prove to be a very valuable use of your time – of course, it goes without saying that if you intend to be featured as a subject-matter expert, you will need to be able to back that up. Study the market - get out there and drive it, this will help you get a good feel for the pulse of the city. Become the master of a CoStar search- set alerts for new listings, sales/lease comps and construction. I can help there, if you were curious what my actual job is...

Now, let’s talk Social/Shared Media – this is organic exposure (ie. the good stuff you don’t have to pay for). For Commercial Real Estate, which social media platforms you utilize will depend entirely on the demographic you are targeting. Speaking in generalities, if you want to reach owners, investors, folks in the C-Suite, etc. you want to make sure you have a solid LinkedIn presence as 50% of people with a college degree or higher use that platform on a regular basis. You will find a younger crowd (tenants, entrepreneurs, etc.) by posting on Instagram or Facebook. It looks like just about everyone and their mother uses YouTube and Facebook.

Use these platforms to inform your audience. Content. Content Content.

If you are looking for a check list of allthethings, your company needs to have:

+ a YouTube channel - where you post video content like property tours, interviews with brokers or other employees of the firm, etc.

+ a Company Facebook Page - share articles, links to listing information, links to blog posts on your website, etc. Engage with your audience by mixing up the content you share, ask questions/take polls, and so on.

+ a Company Instagram Page - post images regularly, use hashtags, interact with other users... if you want an example of someone doing a great job on this platform, check here.

+ a Company Linkedin Page - this page is simply there to point clients to your website, listings, etc. Share posts from individual accounts.

+ a personal Linkedin Page - this gets a little tricky. This is *not really* a personal page, but it should reflect your personality to a certain degree... people want to know who they are doing business with. However, the brand you create for yourself also reflects on your company, so keep that in mind before you go liking an inappropriate image or making an unflattering remark on another person's article

So... You'll notice I didn't cover any CRE marketing basics like signage, flyers, direct mail, etc. and that's because we've all been doing it so long, I feel like we've got those things down. But I'd be more than happy to add my two-cents of commentary to those items in the future in addition to some old-standby rants I have like hiring a professional photographer for your listings and head shots, logo design, and using superlative language in marketing copy, to name a few...

In summary, a strong Marketing Strategy is crucial for success in Commercial Real Estate - in today's day and age, your prospects are being marketed to from the moment they wake until their head hits the pillow at night from hundreds of thousands of sources - you have a very compromised attention span to compete with in order to get people to care about what you're trying to sell. And just as important as implementing an effective Marketing Strategy, is making sure that your client's are kept up-to-date (read: weekly basis) on your marketing efforts. Because if a tree falls in the woods, and you didn't let everyone know on social media, did it really happen?