According to Lex Perry, Director of Marketing and Communications for Colliers International, commercial real estate marketing is “…stuck in the doldrums…” of traditional print media. While print media has traditionally been the tried and true approach in the CRE marketing space, he cites the number one reason for the lack of adoption of digital advertising is the limited skill set of marketing professionals in this sector.

That feels like a pretty disappointing assessment of the marketing prowess of the commercial real estate industry.  But, don’t let that get you down or make you think that marketing is not worth the effort. It just means you need to work with your marketing resource and push them to make sure that you’re marketing in a 21st century way.  Adding new tactics can really add energy to your marketing efforts and derive benefits for your business.  Below, we’ve identified three tactics along with their benefits that all commercial real estate businesses should be thinking about incorporating into their marketing plans.

Publish some content
Creating value, relevant content is one of the most important activities undertaken by businesses in marketing themselves today. Good content helps you build an audience, establish thought leadership, and enable you to leverage other marketing tactics.  You may not realize it, but if you’re already creating well-written blog posts or other articles, Youtube videos, infographics, and other educational collateral, you’re already creating content.  The most important thing with content is that it has to be important to your audience.  That may mean going against your instincts to tell everyone just how great your business is but instead, educate readers and viewers about the industry, tactics or other newsworthy items.  Don’t worry about taking the backseat for the moment, once an audience comes to trust you as a source of reliable and relevant information, they’ll want to learn more about your organization.

Build your social network
You’ve probably heard social media referred to as social networking and thought to yourself, “why would I ever need to do that?  I already have a great network.”  If you’ve been marketing commercial real estate for any time at all, you probably do have a great network.  The reality though is that your customers, local, national and international businesses, have all adopted social media like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube in a big way as part of their marketing plan.  In our blog post last week, we spoke about “fishing where the fish are”. Well, social media is a great way to do that by linking, sharing and posting online.  Getting involved in social media means you’re paving a path between your current and prospective customers’ online presence and your own – in a sense, you’re “pulling” those businesses closer to your business and making your marketing a two-way interaction.  Social media is also a great way to showcase the content you’ve created which your audiences will download in exchange for leaving an email address, clicking a link or taking some other action.

Get search engine optimized
You’ve probably got a website.  Now, think about how a potential customer finds your website. They just “Google it” – right?  But what if they’ve never heard of you or your company?  They aren’t just Googling your company, they’re probably typing in some generic search term like “office space orlando”.  With search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo! acting as the single biggest source of traffic for most Web sites, it’s imperative that when someone searches for a term, that your site shows up in the results. This is what search engine optimization (SEO) does.  It is the process by which you increase the chances of your site being found on search engine sites.  If you’re wondering how you do this, you may have already guessed that being relevant to your audience is key.  To be relevant means you have to develop and publish great content that keeps the end user (your audience) in mind.  Read more about SEO strategies for the Commercial Real Estate Industry and consider the importance of content and how it drives so many tactics for marketing commercial real estate businesses.