If you deal in commercial properties, you already know how challenging it can be to find the right buyers/tenants for your properties. Today’s message is for Realtors or realty companies that want to achieve a higher profile among the right buyers. If that describes you or your company, keep reading. Good stuff lies ahead.
Today, I want to briefly share 10 things that you should be doing right now to ensure that you start moving more properties or, at a very minimum, stop attracting the wrong prospects with your content and start showing those properties to the right people? Are you ready? Great! Let’s have at it then…
#1: Develop a Good Marketing Plan
This one may seem like a no-brainer, but that is exactly how too many marketing pros and even large, well-established businesses approach getting a new marketing plan off the ground. They do it with far less thought than necessary. That, right there, is where problems start.
Ask yourself the following questions:
• Do I know precisely who I should be engaging when trying to move commercial properties?
• Do I know how to produce the right content?
• Do I have a firm plan in place to produce and publish good content?
• Am I currently doing everything I can to engage my audience, particularly on social media?
• Am I happy with the results I’ve been getting lately from my own ideas and efforts?
Now, be honest: How many times did you answer, “No…” just then? Even if the answer is “Only once,” you have work to do. I obviously can’t press to find out which one(s) had you responding in the negative, but I do know that all those things work together to form a good strategy. The following points springboard off this one, so pay close attention going forward.
#2: Audit Your Website
If you haven’t had your website audited lately (within the past 18 months at most), it’s time to reach out to an agency or company that offers that service in real-time. Do not rely solely on online tools to get this done. Algorithms simply don’t take the same things into account that human beings do.
If your SEO game is weak, nothing else really matters. Don’t spend one more penny on content until you get your online house in order. Again, if a significant amount of time has passed since you made a few updates, it’s time. Do that before anything else on this list.
#3: Create Pages for Specific Properties
Treat these pages like landing pages. Optimize them so they can be found by an ideal buyer or tenant. I have numerous blogs on how to do the SEO thing right, so feel free to have a look around when you’re done here. You will also want to target ads and social media posts to ensure that the right people see them. I’ll have more on that in a few minutes.
#4: Create Targeted Segments for Email Campaigns
Keep email addresses captured in specific funnels segregated for targeted email campaigns. Keep your brand in front of your entire list with helpful emails or alerts to new content, new properties, etc., but also create targeted content for specific properties and property types. Push messages to the people who are most likely to want to move in and save your energy crunching numbers for list segments who you already know aren’t going to respond.
#5: Create the Best Content Possible
That likely means that you will need help unless you have your own content marketing team in place. Even then, you might find the need to outsource. Shameless plug time: At Beez Content, we have on-staff writers as well as a vast store of talented freelancers who know commercial real estate content creation. We can help you build a content marketing campaign from the ground up or just fill in gaps when you need just a little more great content.
#6: Be Active and Visible on Social Media
This means that you don’t simply automate your posts and walk away. Encourage engagement on your posts. Start conversations. Respond when people engage you. You would be amazed at how often that last bit is neglected, and it can be one of the things (if not the thing) that makes or breaks your entire content strategy.
#7: Send Press Releases When New Properties Get Listed
This is a powerful and effective way to attract potential buyers or tenants. Send your press releases to the local news outlets and also distribute online through newswire sites, like PRWeb. When writing press releases, keep in mind that the who, what, where, and when are the foundational details and none of them should be neglected. This is especially true for online distribution. If you want your message to propagate well, it has to be complete, informative, and free of baseless opinion.
#8: Write Good Listings and Post Them on Commercial Listing Sites
There’s not much to add here except to emphasize, once again, the importance of quality. I’ve written an important piece on this particular subject for our blog, so I won’t dwell on it here.
#9: Consider Using Paid Ads
These are most effective on social media and most platforms make it very easy to send highly targeted messaging to the right prospects. If you decide to venture outside social media, you need to properly vet any ad placement site that deals with real estate. Be sure they deliver the number of impressions for which you are paying. Most of the time, you can track that by using the ad site’s native metrics, but I also recommend using third-party services as a means of checks and balances.
#10: Measure Your Success
Track the aforementioned metrics and pay attention to who is responding both via email and social media. See what ads or messaging garners the most click-throughs. Analyze the types of prospects that respond. If there is an incongruity between those stats and what you hope to accomplish, it’s time to try something else.
Final Takeaway
Marketing commercial properties is like marketing anything else: You need to have a plan in place and the right action(s) to make that plan a success. It starts by knowing who your ideal prospect is and designing content that will attract him or her to your company. The above strategies are a good place to start, as is contacting us at Beez to get some professional aid in making your next real estate content marketing strategy a success.
