So you have a winning commercial real estate business strategy, but you are failing to market your business to your target audience? You need to get ahead of the competition and build your brand awareness with the perfect CRE marketing strategy which is unique, promotes your business objectives, and engages your potential clients for the long term.
In the post-COVID world, where technology has disrupted the entire industry, digital marketing has become a leading factor for business growth. According to eMarketer, the amount of money spent by firms on digital marketing surpassed traditional offline marketing. Moreover, in 2020 NAR found that 88% of clients purchase property through a real estate agent. Out of which 73% preferred to stick to one agent. Therefore, to stand out from your competitors and increase visibility, you need to have a good digital strategy.
Lilypads provides you with the best digital real estate marketing strategies and tools to promote your business and engage your clients. Remember it is crucial to have an apt Real Estate Marketing Plan”. When it comes to marketing in commercial real estate, your business growth is as good as the strategies you implement.
What is commercial real estate marketing?
To showcase your product, you need to spread the word around to create awareness, increase sales, and increase your audience. A commercial real estate marketing strategy aims to gain interest, trust, and confidence from clients for your real estate venture. Using CRE marketing, you can emphasize various services, such as property deals, property management, leasing, etc.
However, all this was previously carried out by real estate agents. While they are still relevant today, the rush of digital technology has forced realtors to adapt to digital commercial real estate marketing trends. Digital marketing in commercial real estate aims to promote real estate services through digital channels and online platforms.
Why is digital marketing for commercial real estate important?
With the pace at which the world is adapting to keep up with the latest technology. The real estate industry is bound to adhere to digital marketing strategies. With its wider audience reach, simpler customer interaction, and new client attraction, realtors are realizing the importance of digital marketing.
The following reasons are why digital marketing is important for commercial real estate.
- By utilizing automation and sharing information across the organization, digital marketing can boost agent productivity.
- In addition to connecting with potential buyers, digital marketing can be used to sell digital assets on the open market and provide property information to those interested in the property.
- A digital marketing program will allow an organization to communicate with its customers.
Digital real estate marketing’s ability to generate leads has got real estate developers utilizing digital platforms. Not only does it help in help in creating brand awareness but also keeps us ahead of the competition. Moreover, it is easier for small companies to establish their brand presence online and enhance sales by targeting potential clients.
Digital Marketing for Commercial Real Estate: Major Shifts Happening Right Now
According to the marketing manager of Brandywine Realty Trust, the commercial real estate industry is full of innovative technologies. From using artificial intelligence in automating building maintenances, to implementing AR in construction. There are endless digital ways to optimize traditional operations which resulted in major CRE marketing shifts.
1. Adoption of Account-Based Marketing in Commercial Real Estate
Account-based marketing(ABM) is a strategic marketing approach based on account awareness. In account-based marketing, an organization communicates with and considers individual customer or prospective accounts as a single market. This strategy is a complete reversal of the traditional ways of customer acquisition by making marketing and leasing teams work together.
Ways to adopt this methodology in ascending order :
- Tailoring message directly to the end-user or the final decision maker instead of tenant reps.
- Creating customized messages to target ideal clients to stand out among other top deals in the market.
- Grabbing the attention of targetted market by allocating budget lines for ad placements and analyzing the trend lines.
- Having a Customer Relationship Management(CRM) tool provides a more clear understanding of the customer acquisition lifecycle. Using CRM, you can have real-time insight into how your prospects are doing in the acquisition lifecycle.
2. A change in marketing from Print to Digital
Up until now most of the marketing in the industry was carried out on static materials like magazines, and brochures. Although, these did have a good first impression but also manage to quickly lose their value since there was no data to be collected that would prove to be insightful for the sales team.
Here is where digital marketing comes into play. Implementing a digital marketing strategy simplifies the hunt for clients. Moreover, it does more than create a strong impression, by allowing custom tailor messages to potential target clients. Digital marketing provides clients with an immersive environment compared to static environment marketing.
3. Enhanced Expectations for Real Estate Marketing Reporting
Traditional marketing had set low expectations from marketing reports, however, digital marketing is completely different. Since it relates to ROI, marketing reports have higher expectations than before.
In the past marketing was viewed as more of a cost center rather than a revenue generator. Whereas today, the whole situation is different as a comprehensive reporting framework gives us the ability to monitor tactics, formulate strategies, and measure ROI.
Awareness, Engagement, and Lead Generation are the three key performance indicators for CRE marketing.
Commercial real estate marketing trends to watch out for in 2022
1. Integration Of CRE Marketing Tools
Technology is rapidly changing the CRE Industry as well as propelling the integration of the latest tech solutions in a CRE firm. The CRE industry is witnessing an increased use of commercial real estate marketing tools integrated with tech tools in an API-drive tech stack. An API-driven stack helps in optimizing marketing processes and streamlines listing data flow from CRM to content management systems. But before integrating such tools make sure they are compatible and open to integration with other technology.
2. Digital marketing: A Key Factor Driving Growth In CRE
We have already established that flyers, magazines, brochures, and all static marketing materials are slowly being surpassed by digital marketing means. Digital assets are easier and faster to create and share as compared to static materials.
With digital marketing, you can create a trail of data that can be analyzed with every single interaction. As a result, the collective data can help you gain insights that are valuable to your business growth.
3. Virtual Reality: A Game-Changing Technology
The pandemic almost wiped away any kind of physical interactions, conferences, or any kind of face-to-face meetings. During this period virtual reality tech grew out of proportion as it replaced the need for physical interaction. According to TrustRadius, the growth of VR tech was over 500% in usage during the pandemic.
virtual tools like virtual meetings, virtual tours, and video conferences provided a greater sense of convenience. It helps save time and money for clients. For example, Virtual tours provide great detail and understanding of the property without having to be physically present there. Thereby changing the way commercial real estate presents itself.
4. Interactive Content Marketing
With the advent of digital content production and dissemination, there has also been an increase in the development of interactive marketing content. As clients are unable to visit or interact with projects physically, the CRE market has offered them a range of tech-inspired interactive elements.
For example, downloadable floor plans or interactive maps for CRE allow clients to interact with the firm. Replacing flyers, and brochures with interactive property sites, allowing track and maintain a record of visitors that can be shared on digital channels to generate visibility. Moreover, virtual tours let clients interact with properties directly through a digital platform. Furthermore, AI using data analysis makes it possible to fetch any data or documents instantly.
5. Adaptable Marketing Strategy
The pandemic showed the CRE market that it needs to be fast on its feet and adapt to the rapidly changing new world. With that, the commercial real estate marketing team must be also ready to adapt to the new trends.
Right now the world is still coming up with new trends in the post-COVID world. and CRE firms must be able to adapt to these changes quickly, update their brand on a digital level and ensure a strong online presence.
15 Commercial real estate marketing ideas
As the market is continuously evolving, it is important to have the right set of tools to maximize visibility, create a marketing strategy and grow your business. Lilypads’ provides you with 15 winning commercial real estate marketing strategies and ideas that will help you stand out in 2022.
1. Manage an active blog
Blogs are a great way to get started with your digital marketing of real estate. Blogs are a great marketing tool that has a strong impact on search engines and social media visibility. They are also a great source to gain market insights, and reports and educate potential clients with tips and strategies. By using tools like Google Analytics, you can identify the right keywords that will increase the visibility of your content on Google.
Lilypads provide you with the best in class content covering a wide range of blog topics.
2. Social Media Marketing
People have a huge misconception about social media when it comes to marketing or building a business. Social media like Linkedin and Instagram are great platforms for targeting reliable clients. Running ads on social media can help you reach out to potential buyers even if they aren’t actively looking for a property. For example, running ads on Instagram will help you connect with followers by attracting additional clients by commenting and answering their questions. Some popular social media platforms for CRE marketing are Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, and Facebook.
Follow Lilypads on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook for tips and tricks of Commercial real estate investing and the latest CRE market trends.
3. Implement SEO Marketing
Implementing an effective SEO strategy will rank your website in the top search engine result. SEO can be a great tool for your digital marketing, provided you focus on having the keywords. Keywords researching is an integral part of SEO marketing, as people use them to search for information online. Even during building a website, it is necessary to identify the right keywords to direct organic traffic to your website. Besides keywords, other elements that help in the ranking are backlinks, online directories, titles, meta descriptions, snippets, social media pages, etc.
4. Automated property marketing
Automated marketing platforms help streamline real estate marketing activities and reduce time by reducing iterative tasks. You can create a process-oriented marketing strategy and save time with automated marketing strategies. For example, sending out mass e-mails to clients.
5. Sponsored Advertising
Sponsored ads or promotional ads are advertisements that use target specific keywords to reach the targeted audience and generate leads. Sponsored advertising is categorized into two types: Sponsored Content and Sponsored Messaging.
With Lilypads’ Sponsored content you can maximize visibility by posting in the Lilypads feed, attract investors, and gain insight into your ad campaigns. With Lilypads’ sponsored messaging marketing strategy, you can target specific clients with customized and interactive messages.
Moreover, with pay-per-click, you can avoid third-party databases for getting traffic to your site. You can bring people directly to your website using PPC ads which are easy to set up.
6. Conversation Ads
By using Conversation Ads, you can target specific clients with predetermined messages. Lilypads Conversation Ads help in increasing audience engagement by redirecting recipients to various landing pages with multiple call-to-action features. Improve user experience with automated questions and Lead gen forms turning ads into quality conversions.
7. Message Ads
Similar to conversation ads message also uses a call-to-action feature to send direct messages to recipients. With message ads, you can custom tailor messages suitable for individual clients based on their profiles.
8. Video Ads
Videos can be a more powerful tool than texts and emails. Creating an impactful video is likely to draw more attention, therefore, gaining a larger audience right on the Lilypads feed. They also help in establishing a long-lasting relationship with professionals.
9. Text Ads
Having a simple yet powerful text ad campaign can greatly increase lead generation with powerful catchphrases and headlines. Text ads can attract genuine audiences.
10. Carousel Ads
Carousel ads are a series of swipeable posts that inform you about the real estate business objectives in a narrative manner. These are visually interesting ads that engage audiences with an integrated storyline. It is used for efficiently delivering your objective.
11. Dynamic Ads
Dynamic ads are banners that automatically change and adapt their content to show personalized promotions to each user. Dynamic ads are data-driven i.e the longer you run these ads the better are your chances of finding results.
Hence, each user is shown whatever is most relevant to them, thereby ensuring maximum engagement and user satisfaction. Through dynamic ads, you can deliver utmost relevance, boost your conversion rates, and campaign ROI even at a budget.
12. Contact Targeting Ads
Lilypads CRM platform allows you to import your list of contacts and email addresses for ad targeting. As a result, you can build a personalized audience. As an investor with a vast network of contacts, you can convert prospects and keep partners within their network.
To set up contact targeting with Lilypads, firstly upload the contact list and choose a match based on contact IDs by clicking on Create an Audience. Second, integrate your contact management platform with partners supported by your platform.
13. Retargeting Ads
Retargeting lets you convert previously engaged audiences who didn’t connect with you on the first interaction. By showcasing your best projects and deals in your ads, you can retarget and re-engage audiences on the Lilypads platform.
14. Lead Generation forms
A lead generation campaign consists of finding prospects, nurturing their interest, then converting them to a customer. You can gather data about potential clients who click on your ads and leverage their data and information to curate Lead Ads. Normally these are people who show interest in your projects or deals.
15. Company Newsletter
To maintain the top position, in your client’s minds, you must keep consistently in touch with them. And the best way to achieve that is through emails. Email is considered the most effective and basic form of communication in any organization. By subscribing to Lilypads newsletter you can receive frequent updates on the commercial real estate market, listings, etc. Thus keeping your name at the top of their mind.
The Lilypads Bottomline
The commercial real estate market is frequently undergoing new changes or trends. And along with that, your digital real estate marketing strategies must keep updating as well. Thus there is no guarantee that a particular marketing strategy will give results. However, the above-mentioned Lilypads’ marketing strategies and tools are devised in a way to deliver the maximum result when utilized properly.