The world of real estate is a competitive place for a marketer to be!
And if you’re in commercial real estate, you definitely know how true that statement is. So, in an environment as competitive as real estate advertising, how are you supposed to attract high-profile tenants, score investments, and sell your commercial properties at top dollars?
By having the right marketing strategies, that’s how.
And if you’re looking for a guide to building the kind of marketing strategies that make your properties stand out and drive results, you’re in the right place, friend.
Whether you’re making the jump from residential to commercial real estate or looking for tools to boost your existing commercial real estate marketing strategies, today’s blog is giving you the tools you need to create a winning strategy, achieve your business goals, and rise above the competition!
Let’s dive in!
What’s the Difference Between Commercial and Residential Real Estate Marketing?
You probably already know that commercial marketing is aimed at properties for business and residential marketing is focused on properties for personal use, but it’s good to get some other aspects of each type of real estate straight before developing your first campaign.
This will keep your marketing efforts messaged correctly and tailored to the right kind of audience. Below are some key differences in marketing for either type:
- Target Audience — Commercial real estate marketing targets businesses, investors, and corporations. Residential marketing targets individual homebuyers or renters. The decision-making process and needs of these audiences are quite different.
- Sales Cycle — The sales cycle in commercial real estate is typically longer and more complex compared to residential real estate. Commercial transactions involve more detailed negotiations, due diligence, and financing considerations.
- Property Valuation — In commercial real estate, property value is usually based on its potential to generate income, like rental income or return on investment. Residential property values are usually based on market conditions, location, curb appeal, and comparable sales in the same neighborhood or for similar areas.
- Marketing Channels — Commercial real estate marketing often uses specialized channels like commercial real estate listing sites (e.g., LoopNet, CoStar), industry publications, and business networks. Residential real estate marketing commonly uses general listing sites (e.g., Zillow, Realtor.com), social media, and local advertising.
- Marketing Materials — Commercial marketing materials typically include detailed financial analysis, market studies, and floor plans designed to show off the business benefits of the property. Residential marketing materials focus more on lifestyle and show off the looks and emotional appeal of the property through photos, video, and property descriptions.
- Regulatory Environment — Commercial real estate transactions are subject to different regulations and zoning laws compared to residential real estate.
- Client Relationships — Building long-term relationships is crucial in commercial real estate since clients often make repeat investments and leases. Residential real estate involves more one-time transactions, with a focus on providing excellent service for referrals and testimonials to get additional clients.
- Content Focus — Content in commercial real estate marketing includes things like market trends, investment opportunities, and economic forecasts. Residential marketing content focuses on home features, neighborhood amenities, schools, and personal testimonials.
A Step-by-Step Guide to a Winning Commercial Real Estate Marketing Strategy
And now that you know what kind of audience and strategies you’ll need for a winning commercial real estate marketing strategy, it’s time to build your own.
Below are 9 steps to get you started!
1. Understand Your Audience
Before you can create an effective marketing strategy, you’ll first need to know who it is that you’re trying to speak to.
To do this, determine what different characteristics your target audience has. What type of businesses or investors would be interested in the type of commercial real estate you’re trying to sell?
Here are some tips for understanding your audience so that you can nail your messaging in your marketing materials:
- Market Research — Thoroughly research the market to gather up data on potential buyers or tenants. This includes studying market trends, competitive properties, and any economic factors that could be influencing your target audience.
- Detailed User Personas — Create detailed user personas that represent your ideal clients. Include demographic information (age, gender, location), interests, uses, and behavior insights like buying patterns, and preferred communication channels. If you need some assistance building detailed user persons, click that link for a walk-through.
- Analyze Past Transactions — Review your property’s past sales or lease transactions to see if you can identify any common traits among previous buyers or tenants. This can provide you with helpful insight into who is most likely to be interested in your properties.
- Engage with Prospects — Engage your potential clients through surveys, interviews, or focus groups to help gain a deeper understanding of their needs, preferences, and pain points. This information is invaluable in getting your messaging to resonate with your audience.
- Analytics Tools — Use analytics tools to track website visits, social media interactions, and email campaign performance. Analyze this data to see what works and what doesn’t, and which types of content and messaging resonate best with your audience.
2. Set Your Goals
In order to know if your marketing efforts are succeeding and to keep you focused, it’s good to set some goals.
While, yes, your primary goal is to sell your commercial properties, there are important objectives that can support this primary goal and boost your overall marketing strategy and brand presence. So, whether you want to increase property inquiries, boost your listing visibility, build up brand awareness, or improve client engagement, setting specific and measurable goals will help you get it done.
The SMART model is a great way to create clear, actionable goals to guide your company. If you’ve never heard of it before, here’s a quick breakdown.
- Specific — Clearly define what you want to accomplish.
- Measurable — Make sure you can track and measure your progress.
- Achievable — Set goals that are realistic and attainable.
- Relevant — Align your goals with your overall business objectives.
- Time-bound — Establish a timeline for achieving your goals.
So, for example, if your goal is to boost your properties’ visibility, your SMART goals might look like this:
- Specific — Improve the visibility of the property in the market.
- Measurable — Increase online listing views by 40%.
- Achievable — This can be done by using your marketing teams’ expertise to optimize your listings with high-quality photos, virtual tours, and SEO, and by setting aside a percentage of the budget for targeted online ads.
- Relevant — This goal is relevant because higher visibility attracts more potential clients and increases the likelihood of a sale.
- Time-bound — Achieve this goal within the next 2 months.
3. Create a Strong Brand Identity
A strong brand identity can set you apart in the market and increase your credibility and recognition among any potential clients.
So, start by identifying what makes your brand unique. Is it the types of property you have? Your amazing customer service? What’s your value proposition?
Once you’ve nailed that down, you’ll need to decide on the visuals that can best represent that.
We find that the best way to unify your brand identity, your mission, and your values is to hire a graphic designer to create a brand guide for your company. A brand guideline is a comprehensive document that outlines your brand’s visual elements, everything from the size and spacing around your logo to your color palette, typography, tone of voice, and imagery style. It also has instructions on how all of the elements of your brand should be used for different marketing channels to keep your visuals consistent no matter who is creating content for your brand.
Having a strong and appealing brand identity can make all the difference in how your brand is perceived by potential buyers.
If you need assistance creating a strong brand identity, check out our branding and logo services, so we can get you the support you need!
4. Optimize Your Digital Marketing Channels
We’re going to go out on a limb here and say that a big part of your real estate marketing plan is going to involve digital channels.
Because digital channels like your website, social media, and ad campaigns are so crucial for your success, you’re going to need to make sure they’re firing on all cylinders and helping you get the results you’re looking for.
Here are some tips to optimizing your digital channels:
- Optimize for SEO — Make sure that your website and content are optimized for search engines by using relevant keywords, creating meta tags, and giving your site a clear structure and layout. High search engine rankings will make your properties more visible to potential buyers and tenants.
- Set Up Targeted PPC Campaigns — Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns can drive targeted traffic to your site quickly. Use platforms like Google Ads to create ads that target specific demographics, locations, and interests of your target audience. This will help you reach the right audience at the right time and generate high-quality leads.
- Website Optimization — Your website should be user-friendly, responsive, mobile-friendly, and contain all of your contact information. Make sure it loads quickly, is easy to navigate, and provides a positive experience no matter what device your potential buyer is visiting from. High-quality, relevant content should be easily accessible, including detailed property listings, virtual tours, and clear calls to action to encourage conversions.
- Produce High-Quality Content — Content is king in digital marketing. So, your brand should be regularly producing high-quality content like blogs, videos, testimonials, and case studies. This type of content will help establish your authority in the real estate market and provide valuable information to your audience. Written content is particularly useful since it gives you a place for more relevant keywords to help your content and website perform better in search results.
- Social Media — You should be on social media to promote your properties and engage with potential clients. Share your high-quality content, including blogs and videos, on platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. You can also use various social media advertising campaigns to reach a broader audience and interact with followers through comments and messages. (More on this in a bit!)
- Email Marketing — Build and maintain an email list to keep potential clients informed about new properties, market trends, and company updates. Send regular newsletters and personalized emails to nurture leads and stay top-of-mind with your audience (More on this in a bit!).
- Analytics and Adjustments — Use analytics tools to track the performance of your digital marketing efforts. Monitor key metrics such as website traffic, click-through rates, conversion rates, and engagement levels. Use this data to adjust your strategies and improve results continuously.
5. Set Up a Social Media Presence
If you created detailed user personas as the first step of your strategy, it should be a much easier task to find out what social media platforms your audience is most active on.
Which is good, because a strong social media presence is crucial these days for engaging with your audience, building brand awareness, and showcasing your properties.
So, set up social media profiles on all the biggest players, including LinkedIn, Facebook, X, Instagram, and YouTube, and regularly post valuable content that both resonates with your audience and matches the vibe of the platform you’re using.
Here are some content ideas for each platform:
- LinkedIn — Share industry insights, market trends, professional achievements, and property listings tailored to a professional audience.
- Facebook — Post property showcases, client testimonials, community events, and engaging videos that highlight your properties and services.
- X — Share quick updates, industry news, and market statistics, and engage in conversations with industry leaders, real estate professionals, and potential clients.
- Instagram — Post high-quality images and videos of your properties, behind-the-scenes content, virtual tours, and client stories.
- YouTube — Create and share property walkthroughs, client testimonials, educational content on real estate topics, and company updates.
You can also take advantage of social media marketing campaigns and use each platform’s PPC options to further your reach and target the right potential clients and investors.
Just remember that no matter what you’re posting or where, be sure to engage with your followers by responding to comments, answering questions, and participating in any relevant industry discussions to keep your followers interested and your channels active.
6. Email Marketing Strategies
Email marketing is a powerful tool for maintaining a connection with potential clients and investors, as well as keeping your brand and your properties top of mind.
If you’re just getting started, you’ll want to first build up a quality list of clients through whatever lead generation tactics work best for you, like offering valuable content downloads, hosting webinars, providing market reports, or inviting subscribers to your company newsletter.
Once you’ve built up a list of email addresses, segment it according to criteria like demographics, interest, previous interactions, stage in the buying process, or source of your lead. This segmenting will allow you to create different emails, all tailored to the specific needs and interests (i.e., new property listings for investors looking to buy, market analysis reports to industry professionals, success stories for clients who’ve shown interest in properties) to boost engagement and conversions.
It helps to create your content and then automate email sequences to make sure that your follow-ups are timely and your leads are properly informed and properly nurtured.
Track your email marketing campaign’s performance too! This will help you fine-tune your campaign, determine what’s working and what’s not, and find the email frequency that works best for your clients and you!
7. Invest in Quality Visuals
Visuals are everything in the world of real estate.
Having high-quality visuals makes your properties stand out, attracts more clients, and conveys the professionalism that your brand needs to convey to make more sales.
So, start with professional photography and videography. Hire a pro to snapshot your listings and provide you with high-resolution, well-composed photos that showcase your properties in the best possible light to make a strong first impression.
Videos take this one step further, providing any curious potential buyers with a more dynamic view of your properties that photos just can’t. Videos are also excellent engagement tools, providing you with a way to keep your viewers on social media or email interested with things like promotional videos, virtual tours, property walkthroughs, client testimonials, and more.
And your brand itself needs to look just as good (if not, better!) than your properties!
Stunning graphic design is another key component of your visuals. If your marketing material, email campaigns, social media posts, and ads look great and appeal to clients, you’ll drive much more interest and, ultimately, successful sales for your brand.
8. Fine-Tune as Needed
Once your campaigns are up and running, it’s just as important to monitor their performance to make sure that they’re as effective as possible and helping you reach your marketing goals.
Monitor key performance indicators (KPIs), like website traffic, conversion rates, click-through rates, social media engagement, and lead generation to measure how effective your marketing efforts really are, and which areas need improvement.
Staying on top of your KPIs and implementing any customer feedback you get keeps your campaigns fresh, your customers happy, and your brand ahead of the competition.
If you need some assistance on which crucial KPIs you should be tracking, then check out that link for one of our recent blogs with all the info you need!
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Need Some Help with Your Next Commercial Real Estate Campaign?
So, if your brand is pumped and ready to put all of your real estate marketing ideas into action and create the perfect marketing strategy, then we’re pumped for you too!
And if you’re ready to create the perfect marketing strategy, only you lack the creative talent, the manpower, the resources, and the time to get it all done and keep it managed effectively, then we have a solution you’ll like.
Why not partner with Designity?
Designity is an innovative Creative as a Service platform that connects you with the best of the best in creative and marketing experts, including graphic designers, video production experts, copywriters, social media strategists, digital marketers, web designers, web developers, and more — anyone you could need to provide you with all of the assets your marketing campaign needs to be a success.
And with a dedicated Creative Director, a real estate marketing and design expert, leading your account, sourcing and managing your creative team, and making sure that you have the assets you need when you need them, you can get it all done without neglecting your other duties, obliterating your marketing budget, or spreading yourself too thin.
Take a peek at our real estate marketing page and portfolio to see how Designity’s model has made all the difference for real estate brands like yours. And if our style vibes with you (and we have a good feeling it will) then go ahead and book your demo call.
We’ll get you started with a two-week, no-obligation trial so you can test-drive our services and see for yourself why Designity is the only real estate marketing partner your brand will ever need.
Are you ready to boost your real estate marketing strategy?
