11 Tips For Commercial Real Estate Firms To Generate Leads
Effective prospecting ensures that you always have a steady flow of listings to promote. So as a brokerage or CRE firm, having a solid strategy for prospecting and lead generation is crucial to your success.
The best commercial real estate agents set aside specific times for prospecting and lead generation activities weekly—if not daily.
To help you grow your database and make the most of your existing relationships, we put together a list of 13 commercial real estate lead generation ideas and strategies on digital marketing, email marketing, social media, and more.
Commercial real estate website strategies
1. Invest in developing a professional website for your brokerage
A well-designed website that is clear and easy to navigate is the most important thing to consider when establishing your reputation as a brokerage online.
Be sure to include things like a staff page that showcases your team, testimonials with client stories, social media icons for easy sharing of your content, the most updated property listings, and lead generation forms to capture visitor information—just to name a few.
2. Understand and implement SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is basically everything you need to do to show up in search results and expand your online reach. It’s all about increasing the quantity and the quality of traffic to your website—the most important marketing asset you have.
A couple of simple things you can do to start optimizing your site include listing all of your contact information, using relevant search engine-ranked keywords in your website copy, creating fresh content about your local markets, and featuring other trending stories about those locations.
3. Blog about topics that will capture website visitors
Blogging can be very easy to push to the back burner when you’re busy and overwhelmed with everything else going on, but blog content is absolutely essential.
You want to use your blog to establish yourself as a thought leader in the industry—so write about topics like commercial real estate trends, news, state and local legislation, and other relevant topics.
4. Create useful resources for prospective clients
Offering useful resources to prospective clients means you are immediately helping your prospective clients, which in turn will make them more likely to do business with you.
Develop tools to share like interactive area maps, zoning maps, traffic count reports, walk score widgets, searchable databases and more.
Commercial real estate email marketing strategies
5. Drive results with email marketing automation
Email marketing automation can be extremely effective and efficient for lead generation. CRE firms can use automation to welcome new contacts with automated welcome emails, create drip campaigns to target specific contacts, and segment contacts to ensure the right prospects are getting the right messages at the right time.
6. Streamline processes with email templates and list segmentation
Email marketing automation helps you drive sales by keeping your audience engaged and building relationships—and two essential components to that strategy are email templates and list segmentation.
Be sure to invest in the developmental work up front so that you can easily customize emails that will stand out on any device. Use powerful CRE software to develop email templates and build lists, track your results, then make improvements to turn leads into loyal customers.
7. Share as many client stories as possible
There’s no better way to prove yourself than to share client testimonials and stories. It’s a way to humanize your brand and inspire and educate potential clients. Find clients that are willing to share their stories and separate them into categories on your website for the best user experience.
8. Promote video content
Video content is a great storytelling tool, which is why CRE professionals devote significant time and resources to creating high-quality videos that show off the properties they’re marketing. If you decide to create videos, be sure you can truly make the investment in the production and promotion of the content.
Commercial real estate social media marketing strategies
9. Promote your CRE firm on social platforms
LinkedIn and Facebook are great platforms to increase your brand awareness and generate quality leads via ads. On Facebook, you can target by demographics, location, interests, pages followed, or audience segment.
With LinkedIn—although more expensive—you can target specific audiences based on location, job title, company, skills, and interests. With both platforms, you can also retarget people who have already visited your website or social pages.
10. Build your brand and reputation on social media
As a commercial real estate brokerage or professional, you have to stay connected and develop a dialog with both your current and potential clients.
When using social media, be sure to post consistently, share industry content to establish yourself as a thought leader, and remain social yet professional in posts and interactions.
11. Leverage LinkedIn for prospecting
While promoting your brokerage via ads is a great way to leverage LinkedIn, you can also find and research potential leads on the platform. Use advanced tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator to research prospects and find information about them including location, titles, current companies, etc.
Start generating more commercial real estate leads
With Buildout’s full suite of connected tools, you can streamline your processes, level up your prospecting, and ultimately—win more listings. If you haven’t seen what Buildout can do for you and your team, get in touch with us and ask for a personalized demo today.
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