7 Wise Commercial Real Estate Marketing Tips for Enhancing a Broker’s CRE Marketing Plan

One of the biggest mistakes marketers make is failing to monitor their marketing results. Marketing is not an exact science, and you will need to keep up with how well any ads are performing.

How to Monitor Your Marketing Results

For digital marketing, take advantage of analytics. Google Ads and social media ads all provide detailed analytics to show you how often your ads are viewed and clicked on.

If your call to action is to contact you through a form, analytics will track this also. If your call to action is to call or email, you will need to track this manually.

You can track the number of unique visitors your pages receive on eBay and commercial real estate listing sites.

Some sites may not offer page visit stats, but you can manually track the number of calls you receive simply by asking prospects how they knew about the property.

For offline methods, you will have to use a manual system, like a spreadsheet, to track the calls and the quality of leads you get from the various forms of advertising.

You will also need to track any referrals you receive. Knowing who refers clients to you and who doesn’t will show you which relationships are most worthy of your time to cultivate.

Troubleshooting

When you find advertising methods that are not working well, you may need to do some troubleshooting and testing to determine the problem. Some questions to ask yourself are:

• Are you targeting the right audience?
• Do you have clear and compelling ad copy and images?
• Do you have a clear call to action?
• Is it easy for prospects to find your contact information?

If you are confident about the above characteristics of your campaign, the problem could be something minor.

Try changing just one thing about your ad, like the image or a few of the selling points. Then try one more change. Keep doing this until you notice improvement.

Finally, there is always the possibility that your price is too high. If you know you are doing everything else right, and you are getting no response, try lowering the price.

Price is truly the main reason why any type of real estate fails to sell.

The Bottom Line

A lot of marketing is trial and error. Testing different ads side by side can help you find the most effective ads. This is a common practice called split A/B testing.

Run two ads at the same time in the same medium, such as in the same social media network, and track which one performs better.

While you can increase your odds of a successful campaign, you will need to keep testing, monitoring, and making adjustments to fully optimize your campaigns.

Marketing commercial real estate is expensive, and failure to track your success is a sure way to waste a lot of money.

Marketing commercial real estate online can be time-consuming. The initial marketing setup of a new property can take many hours.

Setting up a new website, composing ads, preparing the listing, getting photos, preparing the marketing package, more.

Then you have the ongoing aspects of tracking your progress, posting in groups, answering inquiries, and renewing ads. This is enough work to provide full-time jobs to a whole crew.

The good news is you can automate many of these processes. This will free up your time to focus on networking and finding new clients.

Outsource

Outsourcing is a must. You are a professional broker, not a webmaster or copywriter. You can find ad agencies to manage your Google ads and your Facebook ads.

Some agencies even offer complete social media management, meaning they will manage groups for you. You will also need an agency to help with email drip campaigns.

Automate Your Appointment-Setting Processes

When a client contacts you through a form, what happens next? Do they have to wait for you to call to schedule an appointment?

The internet offers many apps that can automate this for you, like Calendly.

Apps like Calendly allow you to gather information before your appointment. You can set up a list of questions for clients to answer. You determine what your availability is.

Prospects set appointments through the app, and the app manages your calendar for you.

Appointment apps can connect to your Google calendar, and you can access it through your computer or your mobile device.

Schedule Your Posts

Even if an ad agency manages your social media groups or pages for you, your audience may still wish to hear from you directly.

If you need to post yourself, you can plan all of your posts once every week or month, and schedule them to automatically post at specified times.

Automate Your Email Drip Campaigns

Email campaigns are easy to automate when you use programs like MailChimp, ConstantContact, or GetResponse.

You can set up your campaigns that are automatically triggered by various customer behaviors, such as subscribing to an email newsletter.

Email automation software will also allow you to track how many times your emails are opened, how long they are kept open, and whether any links in the email are clicked on.

Email drip campaigns require a lot of copywriting, so be sure to outsource that part.

Automate PPC Campaigns

Google Ads allows you to set up rules to automatically optimize ads. This does not replace the need to manually check your analytics, but it can allow you to do it less often and is therefore a timesaver.

For example, you can set up dynamic bidding so that Google will automatically raise or lower your bid based on the likelihood of a conversion.

MultifamilyCashin Marketplace (and PropertyCashin Marketplace for non-multifamily real estate) is probably the easiest way to get your real estate in front of investors looking to buy a property like yours.

This platform is relatively new but rapidly growing. It’s different from similar commercial property marketplaces with its meticulously developed set of functionalities.

It enables investors to find properties in their preferred categories very quickly thanks to a highly detailed navigation menu.

The menu offers filters with the widest variety of property types and deal types (off-market, FSBO, broker-assisted, distressed, and more).

It was created based on the deepest possible property type research.

Buyers have a ton of other convenient features helping them not only find a potential property to purchase but also estimate its investment potential and get it financed — all in one place.

This all makes for the rapid growth of the marketplace. Another benefit is that listing is free, unlike on other popular CRE marketplaces.

Your network is essential. Having a list of ready buyers for a variety of property types in multiple industries will raise your appeal as a commercial real estate broker.

If you are new to the industry, you may have to start from scratch. Luckily, there are plenty of ways to build a list of commercial real estate investors.

1. Market your brokerage services to buyers. When you work with investors on the purchase side of transactions, you can learn valuable information about their ideal real estate investment types.
2. Join real estate investing groups in your local area and on social media. Let investors know you are a broker and ask them what types of properties they invest in.
3. Partner up with a broker who is more established than you. Just make sure you have value to bring to the table also, such as marketing dollars or prowess.

Collect information about your connections, especially their emails and phone numbers. This will allow you to build an email list. Email marketing is a powerful tool in real estate. Its main benefit is wide opportunities for campaign automation.

Don’t rely on purchased email lists where contacts may be outdated or irrelevant. Having and maintaining your own list of contacts is a much better way to have a number of potential buyers for your properties.

Establishing yourself as an expert in commercial real estate will help you build trust within your network and help you gain name recognition.

This will lead investors and others in the industry to seek you out. This makes it much easier to grow your own network.

Provide Comments to Reputable Publications

Do you ever wonder who those experts quoted in the articles on Forbes and similar publications are? Those are professionals just like you.

When writing an article a reporter asks subject matter experts for comments. In return, they mention the expert’s name in the article.

What is the benefit for the expert? How can they use these quotes?

The main way to use them for your benefit is showcasing those publications’ logos on your website, notably your homepage, in an “as seen on” section.

This will give you more authority in front of your potential clients.

If you’ve been cited by a number of famous media outlets as an expert, then you surely are a reputable professional.

You know what you are doing and won’t waste the client’s time learning on their case at their expense.

But how can you connect with reporters? There is an easy way that won’t require you to pay PR companies or look reporters up and try to break through tons of emails they receive daily.

Real Estate Bees, a platform for all kinds of real estate professionals, has a free PR program helping experts get cited by reputable media outlets.

In short, they use their existing connections with journalists to help experts provide the reporters with answers.

They send you reporters’ questions matching your area of expertise and, if you send them an answer, they forward it to the reporter.

If it’s used in the article, you get your name mentioned. Learn more about this on the Real Estate Bees website.

Write Content

Another way to become an industry expert is to post quality content in highly visible places.

These can be reputable business publications, social media, your website, and on the websites of vendors, partners, and investors. Places visited by your potential clients and colleagues.

LinkedIn offers the ability to post articles. You can also post information on your LinkedIn company page. Answering questions in groups on both LinkedIn and Facebook also helps.

If you build a Facebook group with a large following, you can easily establish expert status there.

Curate Content

If writing is not your strength, you can still gain expert status by curating content. This is where you share an article or video and post a summary or comment about it.

You would need to do this consistently every day, but if you do choose content that your audience likes, you will quickly gain recognition as an expert. This works best on LinkedIn.

Offline Opportunities

Offline, you can write editorials for your local newspaper or try to write for a trade publication.

You could also talk to your local Chamber of Commerce or real estate investor groups about public speaking opportunities.

Speaking opportunities are easier to find than writing opportunities.

Most vendors that serve the real estate industry rely on their networks to find business. They are often very open to mutually beneficial partnerships.

Most likely, you will find that many of these vendors already have partnerships with other multifamily real estate agents.

It may take some time to build trust to get them to refer business to you. The fastest way to do this is to be the first one to offer value.

Send them referrals first. Whenever you have an opportunity to work with them, make sure the experience is overwhelmingly positive. Make yourself stand out.

There are many different types of vendors in the commercial real estate business. Here are some examples:

• Multifamily mortgage lenders
• Multifamily real estate attorneys
• Commercial builders
• Accountants
• Multifamily property management companies
• Commercial demolition or cleaning services
• Commercial real estate photographers
• Apartment building architects and engineers

Associations offer many benefits to brokers. They help keep you up to date about the latest news, legislation, and trends in commercial real estate.

They offer networking opportunities that can help you expand your network at lightning speed. Some even offer public speaking and paid advertising opportunities.

Try to join organizations that cater to different types of investors. Some investors specialize in one type of property, like apartment complexes or retail spaces.

This will help you stay in the know about opportunities in all the different types of industry and build your investor list at the same time.

Join Local Groups

Your local REI groups are a great starting point. Some of these groups may cater primarily to investors in residential real estate, so you may have to do some research to find the best groups for you.

You can find these groups through your local Chamber of Commerce or by searching online using Google. You may also find some leads by searching for commercial real estate groups at Meetup.

Join National Organizations

You may want to consider joining national organizations. There are organizations for almost every industry.
This will provide you many more networking opportunities and build many positive relationships. Here is a list of some of the largest organizations for commercial real estate investors:

• NAIOP – the Commercial Real Estate Development Association, boasts 20,000+ members and are the leading organization for developers, owners, and investors of office, industrial, retail, and mixed-use real estate.
• ICSC – formerly the International Council of Shopping Centers, and now Innovating Commerce Serving Communities. They support large and small businesses in the retail industry.
• BOMA – Building Owners and Managers Association. They support investors and professionals for all building types.

Before you jump into marketing your commercial property, you will need to take the time to develop a plan.

The plan should outline the smallest details of how to market your commercial real estate.

While developing your commercial property marketing plan, you will need to consider the following factors:

• Your marketing budget
• Your likely buyers
• Your property type
• Your property size
• Your property price
• Your marketing experience

Your Budget

Your budget may be the most important determinant of how you market your commercial property for sale, but to get the best possible return on ad spend, you must target the correct audience.

You need to know who your most likely buyers are, where they hang out, what they read, and what interests them.

Try not to skimp on your marketing budget. While there are a few low-cost and even free marketing options, these options are limited and may not reach your target audience.

Targeting Your Likely Buyers

As a rule, the more specifically you target your audience, the more expensive the advertising will be.

Sites like eBay and Craigslist are inexpensive, but they may not specifically target your ideal buyers. They target everyone.

Your likely buyers do not visit these sites and thus do not shop there.

Although you will spend more to target your most likely buyers, you will usually sell your commercial property faster and for a higher price.

For example, if you list your property on a site like MultifamilyCashin, you target commercial real estate investors.

Trade publications offer a great opportunity to be super-specific with your targeting, but they can cost thousands for a single ad.

This may still be an important venue. Remember, your return should be a more important consideration than the upfront investment.

Social media advertising is another opportunity that offers the ability to target your audience, with LinkedIn being the most specific and the most expensive upfront.

However, don’t assume your audience hangs out on LinkedIn. Research your market and use the social media platforms where your likely buyers hang out.

While you may be tempted to save money by advertising on less expensive venues, your return on ad spend (RoAS) may be higher by paying more for the targeted campaigns.

Knowing who your buyers are, what they read, businesses they frequent, and what their interests are can help you target correctly and spend strategically.

Your Property Type

Single-property websites are effective for a variety of property types. Knowing your audience will help you determine the most cost-effective way to draw traffic to your website.

You can use Google, social media, or a combination of both. Again, the key is to know your audience.

Larger, more expensive properties are more expensive to market because they present the largest risk to investors.

Smaller, less expensive properties may sell better through networking efforts or through Facebook or Instagram ads.

However, there is no hard and fast rule, and it really is a matter of understanding the industry and knowing who your most likely buyers are.

Network, Network, and Network

No matter which marketing venues you choose, you should always be working to expand your network.

Networking costs a little of your time, but it is worthwhile because it will increase your odds of finding a buyer through the people you already know.

You can increase your network by posting regularly on LinkedIn and by joining groups on LinkedIn and Facebook.

Balancing Your Marketing Plan

Remember that time and money tend to compete, and this is especially true in real estate sales.

If you want a faster sale, you will have to sacrifice money, either in the form of a higher marketing budget or selling your multifamily property or another type of real estate for a lower price (read about apartment building appraisal methods).

If you wish to maximize your profits, you will have to sacrifice time, in the form of waiting longer for a sale or spending time networking through social media or other means.

This will also cost more upfront, as you will need to spend more on marketing.

While you may be tempted to save money by advertising on less expensive venues, your return on ad spend (RoAS) may be higher by paying more for the targeted campaigns.

Knowing who your buyers are, what they read, businesses they frequent, and what their interests are can help you target correctly and spend strategically.

While you certainly do not have to use all the commercial property marketing strategies available to you, a healthy marketing plan will include a good balance of the different types of advertising.

A combination of listing directories, targeted advertising through social media or google ads, and offline advertising methods will expose your ads to the largest number of most likely buyers.

Alternative to Marketing

If you are not a broker, and you do not have experience in marketing, you can hire ad agencies experienced in commercial real estate to handle all or part of your advertising.

This will involve hefty upfront expenses.
Alternatively, you may wish to consider hiring a broker. You will not have to pay upfront, and the broker will do all the marketing, follow-up, and negotiations for you.

You can bypass the marketing process altogether by requesting a cash offer from MultifamilyCashin. Our process is hassle-free, and helps you sell your property fast.