Do you know that saying, all roads lead to Rome?  It’s based off of the ancient Roman road system where roads radiated from the capital of Rome. True story.  Well, the same is true about your commercial real estate website.  It serves as your virtual hub for generating commercial real estate leads.  Without your website, it would really be difficult, if not impossible, to generate leads online.

But, before we go any further into generating leads through commercial real estate websites, let’s take a moment to explore what we mean by a lead.  Simply put, a lead is any person representing another business who is contacting you because they are interested in the services you provide. These leads are different than mere “suspects” because some person took to the time to visit your commercial real estate website and fill out a form or call you (finding your number on your website).  They took an action, invested time, however small, and signaled that they were interested in your company – that’s great stuff.

How do you make that happen over and over again?  Here a few tips to get you started in generating leads with commercial real estate websites.

Be attractive to search engines – When designing or maintaining your site, be sure to put your best foot forward by making your sure your attractive to search engines.  The best way to do this is by developing valuable content, coding your pages properly and using responsive design techniques. Your commercial real estate website design firm should be able to help you with all of this as well as more technical things like 301 redirects, optimizing meta descriptions and page titles, and fixing canonicalization errors, so don’t worry if some of this sounds a little overwhelming.

Capture contact detail – Visitors to your commercial real estate website are nice – if you know who they are.  Generating commercial real estate leads starts with capturing name, email and phone number of site visitors.  Offering some of that valuable content mentioned above is great for this.   Go beyond offering a consultation or broker opinion of value, offer a piece of rich content that visitors are going to really want such as a newsletter, market report, comp sheet or any other information that would be valuable to your ideal client.

Make it easy to reach you with contact forms – Ideally, there should be a contact form with a unique tracking code on every page of your website.  To maximize conversions, try to make sure the lead form falls “above the fold” on your pages. Entice contacts to get in touch by using a call to action that shows you understand their needs and which offers the promise of helping your visitors succeed. Leaving contact forms off your site can be a huge mistake.  Not only do you miss the opportunity for lead generation, but you miss out on the chance to build your email marketing list.  By now, you’re probably starting to see how central your commercial real estate website is to your overall marketing plan.

Share your success stories – Nothing sells like past experience. Show off your expertise and the powerhouse companies you’ve worked for.  If your website visitors can see how other businesses have trusted you, they are going to be more likely to do business with you. It adds to your credibility and helps establish you as a thought leader. Be sure to include testimonials from customers, partners and professional organizations. If you’ve earned awards, certifications or industry recognition of any kind, include those points as well in your success stories.  Whatever you do, be sure to be genuine or risk alienating a prospective customer, or worse, possibly casting a shadow on your brand.
Be Social – Social media doesn’t have to be a time suck – be strategic and be social by sharing site updates, content offerings and recent transactions through your social media platforms.  Let people know how you’ve solved problems for other companies and be sure to weigh-in on important industry topics. Again, this is a way to show your an industry leader.

Work your funnel with email marketing – Don’t simply send a message – direct traffic to your website to learn more. It all starts with a visit – make sure your website has what it takes to create interest and ultimately generate a highly qualified lead.  Email marketing is another great way to create value for your audiences. Send emails that contain relevant commercial real industry information.  Make sure the focus of your emails is on the reader, meaning how can you help them to be more successful.