Location Based Marketing Campaigns for Commercial Real Estate Agents

Every marketing campaign today in commercial real estate should be carefully considered to help attract the right level of qualified enquiry for each property listed for sale or lease.  With limited enquiry from some property types and in some locations, the enquiry that comes in off any advertising or marketing effort is really special and should be optimised into your database and ongoing contact system.

Paid Marketing

As a general rule, marketing campaigns in commercial real estate should be vendor funded.  All exclusive property listings should feature a vendor funded marketing campaign of reasonable flexibility.  In this way you will collect better enquiry from all quality properties that are taken to the market.

The simple fact of the property market today is that you cannot easily build your profile as an ‘expert’ off the back of low profile property marketing; think ‘big’ and promote ‘big’ (that is why you need vendor funds for the campaigns).

The top agents of the property market make sure that the local prospects and business leaders know that they are out there and available to help.  Every quality property is to be promoted heavily into the local area; that is the zone or precinct that will produce further listings for you at some stage in the future.  Quality marketing campaigns are noted by others and will help you build your relevance as the property expert that you are (or want to be).   There is no glory in being the ‘secret agent’ of your city or town.  Get your profile out at every opportunity on every quality listing marketing campaign.

Enquiry base and database

Top agents work their enquiry base extensively into the future.  Any buyers or tenants that missed out on a listing, or that inspected a listing that was not suitable, should be contacted regularly into the future to ensure that any other similar property that arises can be communicated to them.

Keep the ‘doors open’ when it comes to prospects and business leaders in the local area.  Systematic prospecting will help you there.

Here are some rules that can be applied with any property that is taken to the market for sale or lease:

1. The campaign should be set for a period of time, and that can be 6 to 8 weeks in most cases. During that time you can reach the target audience and track the results that you get.  If enquiry is slow or not reaching the targets that you expect, it pays to adjust the campaign quickly; the process of ‘test and measure’ is really important when it comes to property marketing today.  Track your enquiry results.
2. Look for the methods of marketing that appear to be working more than others today in your area.  That says that all enquiries that come in to your office should be sourced back to the place where the person saw the property advertised or the details of such.  When you ask the right questions you will get facts that can help you with other properties.
3. Every property should be marketed extensively at a local level. When it comes to businesses and property investors, they tend to buy and rent the property that they understand and that is usually a property that is located in the local area.
4. Competing properties will always be a factor to consider in any marketing campaign.  Get details of all properties in the same location or of the same property type that could compete with your listing.  It may be that your campaign has to be adjusted to suit the pressures applied by these other properties.
5. Every person that you talk to and every property inspection that you take across a listed property will help you understand just what people are looking for and when they want it.  These factors or requirements can change seasonally so be aware of the property enquiry situation today and how it is adjusting throughout the year.  Most ‘commercial real estate marketing years’ are just 10 months in duration; the rest of the year is downtime with holidays and seasonal changes.  You have 10 months each year to make your listing and commission quota; all the more reason to focus all of your efforts when the business is ‘on’.

What level of enquiry is coming in at the moment for leasing and for sales situations with your listings? What are those people looking for?  How much time does it take to convert the average quality listing to an inspection and a successful transaction?  Key questions like this will help you with the tuning of the advertising campaign.

Top agents are usually great marketers of commercial and retail property.  They get the message out.  You can do that as well; make the effort to be the best in marketing of all property listings.  Take the steps to improve all of your market campaigns today.  In the long run that will help you improve market share and commissions.  Your quality listings will give you real profile as a top agent with a dominant market share.