Richard knows the importance of marketing. In fact, his degree from a well-known southern college includes a concentration in marketing. He understands the marketing mix; product, price, place, and promotion and believes in tenets like reach, frequency and the customer value chain. However, this is commercial real estate, and focusing on those things feels like time stolen from direct revenue producing activities like meeting with customers, calling prospects and negotiating the next deal. Richard’s situation is not unique and traditional marketing and real estate advertising activities are easy to sidestep when faced with a mounting to-do list, urgent customer needs or some other fire drill.

Skipping marketing activities, or worse – cutting marketing budgets, feels easy because the impact of not doing marketing is not instantly realized. Even when you ignore your marketing, your brand equity (the result of years building your business), lives on. As one author puts it though, “marketing is food, not medicine” and businesses fail when being busy is construed as being more important than continually marketing the company.

Balancing Busy With Marketing
Marketing your commercial real estate business is not only about creating flyers and brochures, using good website design or showing up at a networking event. It also includes many strategic and tactical activities aimed at engaging customers and managing profitable customer relationships. In thinking about this, you undoubtedly realize that all of this takes time, resources and expertise. You may also be thinking that you need help. A real estate virtual assistant, or outsourced marketing support, could be just the nourishment your commercial real estate marketing needs.

Get Efficient With Time & Resources
Even if in-house marketing staff members have special skills, they often have other responsibilities, which make it hard for them to give their marketing work the attention it demands. Compounding this problem is the issue of productivity. In a frequently-cited Microsoft global study, U.S. respondents indicated that they work an average of 45 hours per week, but consider 16 of those hours to be unproductive. That means that 36% of the time your employees are NOT helping to create an overall positive impact for your company.

By that rationale, it seems as if you should question having any employees at all. Well, not really. But, you should consider whether hiring a real estate virtual assistant can maximize your marketing dollars.

Expertise on Demand
Any marketing manager worth their weight needs the ability to spot opportunities and adjust strategies quickly. That’s easily said, but not so easily executed when faced with other mounting pressures. The ultimate benefit of entrusting your marketing to an outsourced marketing team is that you get to spend all your time and effort on your core business activities while your outsourced partner does what they do best – marketing. A well-qualified virtual marketing team will bring all the depth of experience you need in a complete range of marketing disciplines.

Outsourcing means you’re still involved
Outsourcing is an arrangement in which one company provides services for another company that could also be provided in-house. However, that doesn’t mean you’ve given up control. You’ve merely hired a partner that’s an expert in helping you to build and maintain all those important customer relationships. Think about your commercial real estate business. Businesses turn to you for help with renting and selling properties, because you’re the expert in that industry. Those businesses haven’t given up control, in fact they’ve probably gained some control of their situation. They rest comfortably knowing the real estate “stuff” is taken care. Outsourcing your marketing can give you the same kind of control now and for whatever the future holds.