By BTS Brands
Commercial real estate, unlike some businesses today, is still driven through relationship building. Sometimes, those relationships are built by marketing your successes, but most of the time it’s done by meeting new people and by maintaining the connections with the people you know. As the face of your business, you’ve worked hard to make it great, but you’re also just one person and reaching out to and staying in touch with so many people is not easy. That’s why LinkedIn is a marketing must for commercial real estate professionals.
No matter your goals, LinkedIn can help in lead generation, brand building, or establishing your prominence as a thought leader. By design, the platform is made to connect you and your brand with professionals around the globe and, more importantly, right in your community.
Once you’ve created an effective LinkedIn company page, you’ll want to start making your page even more compelling by publishing engaging content. The goal with publishing content is to be interesting to your target audience. There are lots of options for doing this like writing articles, sharing videos or commenting on posts written by others. You’ll know that you’re doing a good job when you start to see the number of clicks, shares and comments rise. The lift in these key performance indicators will signal that you are creating engaging content.
Publishing “interesting” content more-than-likely runs counter to the instincts of your internal salesperson that wants to sell your audience on the unique value proposition of your commercial real estate services, or shout about your new listing. Remember though, “salesy” content does not usually show results on LinkedIn. Business people on LinkedIn want to be engaged and they want to learn about your industry, gain insights on performing their jobs better, get questions answered, and have their pain points addressed. The overwhelming majority of people on LinkedIn are involved in the purchase decision process for their respective companies and according to information published by LinkedIn, the average executive reads 10 pieces of content before finalizing their purchase decision. It would be great if one of those pieces of content came from your company.
Of course there will be times when you want to promote your own business, but those should be the exception. A formula for success on LinkedIn might follow one that has been generally accepted for social media. Create and share content that promotes your industry knowledge and expertise 70% of the time, share content from other sources about 20% and self-promote the remaining 10%. Sticking to this pace means you should self-promote only about five times each year.
According to Laura Ramos of Forrester, “Business buyers don’t buy your product; they buy into your approach to solving their problems.”Readers of content on LinkedIn are looking for ways to make themselves and their business better. If your perspective, presents a new or fresh angle to solving a problem, you’ll have captured their attention. Maybe you have a unique view on stemming millennial sprawl using mixed income housing. Or, perhaps your experiences can enable you to demonstrate how renovated industrial properties are the hot new office spaces. By demonstrating knowledge and expertise, you’ll become a commercial real estate thought leader.
When you’re in search of ideas for establishing yourself as a thought leader, look for opportunities to show your relevancy by developing content that:
You’ll use your LinkedIn company profile page to showcase your perspectives and help build strong relationships that that you’ll establish with the content you’re creating. You can make your company page stand out by using interesting graphics, including your logo and optimizing the page so it is SEO-friendly. Stay diligent to keeping content fresh and don’t forget to use LinkedIn’s built-in analytical tools to track your progress.
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