The most effective approaches to commercial real estate marketing can change quickly as technology evolves and business owners adapt to consumer needs. Keeping up with the latest trends can feel challenging. But you can’t let a few barriers prevent you from growing your agency.
Follow these commercial real estate marketing tips for 2021 to reach buyers and sellers. Staying ahead of your competitors will help ensure that your agency keeps growing and tapping into new revenue opportunities.
Build Authority With Content Marketing
If you have years of experience working in commercial real estate, you can use your knowledge to write content that shows off your expertise. Set aside a couple of hours each week to think of ideas, create outlines, and write blog posts that will build your authority in the industry.
The simplest content marketing involves publishing about one blog post per week. You can add a blog section to your agency’s website, use a publishing platform like Medium, or post your content on a service like LinkedIn.
The best content marketing does more than display your knowledge. You can attract more readers to your content by:
- Using keywords that will help search engine crawlers find and index your posts
- Including meta descriptions that summarize articles on search engine result pages
- Adding images that make your posts look more appealing
- Tracking your website traffic and post engagement to determine which pieces of content get the best results
You want to establish your authority, but you also want to collect leads and find clients. Include a call-to-action at the end of your posts. Some people need a little nudge before they will reach out to a professional for help with buying or selling commercial real estate.
Use Social Media to Reach More Buyers and Sellers
Social media has changed the way people connect. Make social media a central part of your commercial real estate marketing for 2021 so you can build an audience that helps you reach more buyers and sellers.
Take Advantage of a Social Media Platform’s Best Features
Each social media platform has at least one feature that makes it popular. Take advantage of each platform’s best features to broaden your influence. Some important things to remember include:
- Facebook has the largest number of active users, excels at short-form content publishing, and lets you promote posts without spending a lot of money.
- Instagram’s focus on images makes it a great place to share pictures of real estate.
- Twitter works well for keeping up with other professionals in your industry.
- LinkedIn has a relatively small audience, but the people who use it are more likely to have professional backgrounds and an interest in commercial real estate.
Experiment with different types of posts on these platforms to see which ones gain traction. You may decide that some of the services work better for you than others.
Use Social Media Tools to Improve Your Campaigns
You can’t determine how well your social media posts work until you start tracking data. While you use each platform’s built-in tools, they often take a lot of time and rarely provide in-depth insights. You can make your social media commercial real estate marketing more effective by adopting third-party tools.
Some of the tools that professional marketers use include:
- Buzzsumo – Analyze your posts and compare them to those from your competitors.
- Hootsuite – Bring data from all of your social media accounts to one dashboard.
- Sprout Social – Features for analyzing post engagement and collaborating with other members of your agency.
These tools have affordable pricing for small teams. If you don’t want to spend money, you can find free tools that offer similar features. They don’t work quite as well, but they’re good enough for most small agencies that want to improve their social media outreach without changing their marketing budgets.
Respond to People Who Engage With Your Posts
Responding to people who engage with your posts is one of the fastest ways to grow your online community. You don’t have to spend a lot of time writing back. Often, a simple “like” will do the trick. People just want to know that you care enough to interact with them and show appreciation for their feedback.
Create Virtual Tours to Save Time and Attract Buyers
This year a lot of real estate agencies started investing more in online virtual tours so they could promote properties without coming into contact with a lot of potential buyers. The threat of COVID-19 forced everyone to rethink how they did business. Hopefully, the coronavirus will become a much smaller concern in 2021. That doesn’t mean you should stop using virtual tours as part of your commercial real estate marketing.
Virtual tours can save you a lot of time. For the best results, make 3D tours that show off the properties you represent. Instead of meeting buyers in person, you can let your website do the hard work for you. When you have virtual tours on your website (or you use a third-party website that hosts virtual real estate tours), you only have to talk to buyers who have a genuine interest in the properties. Instead of wasting time driving across town to meet with someone who walks away from a retail or restaurant property within a few minutes, you get to focus on people who know what they want.
Virtual tours can also help attract buyers from out of town. Let’s say someone who owns several multi-family buildings in California wants to take advantage of low real estate prices in a different state. That person might spend hours researching potential properties before deciding which ones to visit in person. With virtual tours, they can weed out the opportunities that don’t interest them. If they spend the time and money to visit the real estate with you, they probably have serious intentions.
Grow Your Brand by Sponsoring Events
The lockdowns of 2020 have created a primal urge for people to get out of their homes and interact with each other. You can use that to your benefit—and have a little fun—by sponsoring events.
As people start feeling more comfortable congregating in public, non-profits, college groups, sports teams, venues, and other organizations will need help setting up events. This gives you an excellent opportunity to get your agency’s name in front of people.
Sponsoring an event probably sounds like a huge expense. It doesn’t have to be. You can always co-sponsor with other businesses in your area to share the cost. You could even become a sponsor by using your industry connections to book an amazing location for an event. Depending on your relationship with the owner, you might not have to spend anything at all. Just provide a place for people to enjoy music, food, and the company of other humans.
Join ProspectNow to Make Your Marketing More Effective
No matter what commercial real estate marketing strategies you use during 2021, ProspectNow can help you reach your goals. ProspectNow’s commercial real estate database includes:
- The contact information of property owners in your area.
- Details about businesses and properties for sale.
- Predictive analytics that will help you identify real estate likely to go on the market soon.
Don’t waste time and money pursuing leads that will never contribute to your revenue. Get started with ProspectNow so you can access the data that you need to fine-tune your commercial real estate marketing and get better-than-ever results for 2021.