Creating a Diversified Digital Advertising Plan

Email campaigns are a successful strategy for marketing commercial property for sale or rent. But with both tenant reps and prospective tenants facing inundated inboxes, this channel’s effectiveness is at risk of communication saturation. Savvy marketers should also find complementary distribution channels to drive interest in properties.

Here, we'll discuss how you can introduce a truly diversified marketing channel mix to support your lead generation and increase deal velocity.

Portals
You’re probably already advertising on property portals, like LoopNet. With their ready-made audience, portals give you access to hundreds of thousands of potential tenants. Using portals to generate inquiries and guarantee exposure for your listing is a logical first step. Be strategic about your choice of portals. The best practice is to start broad and then narrow down based on the results of your first few campaigns. If you’re just getting started with portal advertising, allocate an equal budget to 3-5 main portals you want to test. After a few weeks of tracking results, you should have a clear idea which portals are winners when it comes to inquiry delivery and quality. After you’ve established which 2-3 portals are the best performers, redirect your entire portal budget to these.

When evaluating the performance of portals, you might want to analyze the following:

• Cost per inquiry [how much does it cost you to generate one inquiry]

• Cost per conversion (closed deal) [how much does it cost in advertising to convert one inquiry into a signed deal]

• Percentage of qualified inquiries [what is the percentage of inquires that lead to viewings]

Adwords Search Advertising
You want your pages to rank high in Google searches. SEO (search engine optimization) is a discipline that deals with organic rankings on Google and other browsers. However, if you want to guarantee that you list at the top of the page for specific keywords, you should try Google Adwords. First, you might want to start by determining the keywords you want to bid on. Usually, you will have quite a good idea what sort of keywords your potential prospects will use when searching for the commercial property you’re marketing. However, if you need some practical advice to help you start with your first Adwords Search campaign, you can use this simple key phrase generation formula to create a list of keywords to bid on: [type of property] + [for rent/for sale] + [specific location].

Before you switch on your campaign, you might want to estimate potential results for your keywords. Keywords Planner is a very good tool for forecasting numbers of impressions and clicks. Plus, it will help you plan your spend.

Display advertising
Display, alongside Search, is another type of advertising offered by Google. Display advertising allows you to use online banners to promote your business or service/product to a target audience. There are a few types of targeting available for display advertising including:

• Remarketing - this type of targeting allows you to serve banner advertising on websites to people who visited your website

• Interest-based - you can target a group of potential prospects based on the interest. For instance, you could choose a group interested in real estate or commercial real estate.

• Demographic-based - this is a standard type of targeting based on gender and age group.

• Specific website placements - you can also choose specific website where your banner advertising will be placed (that website must be enrolled with Adsense - you can check by searching placement website within your Google Adwords account).

Social Media
Facebook and Twitter, although very different platforms have a rather similar advertising model. Both rely on revenue from the ads shown in a user feed. Hence, a similar approach can work across both social media networks. For instance, you could start with the following objectives for both channels:

• Content distribution - the fact that content marketing is one of the most effective marketing tactics for B2B businesses is not a secret. Now you can utilize social media as distribution channels for your reports and whitepapers. You could allocate some ad spend money to promote pieces of content that are likely to be popular among your targeted audience. Most platforms provide comprehensive analytic software to allow you to evaluate the results and establish what types of content attracts most visitors. LinkedIn is particularly attractive as it allows you to target individuals who are currently or previously working at a specific organization. You can take it a step further and target people with a specific job title in specific organizations.

• Remarketing - using a custom audience (built from your previous visitors or buyers), you can create a campaign targeted at users that have previously shown interest in your listing(s). The campaign will reinforce the message and marketing qualify your inquiries (marketing qualified inquiries are those from users with sufficient level of engagement e.g. users who inquired about a property or users who read your site). Getting your prospects re-engaged with your brand is crucial for nurturing your prospects and pushing them down the sales pipeline. The more familiar your prospects are with what you offer and your expertise, the more likely they are to convert into paying customers.

As a professional social media platform, LinkedIn is naturally suited to promoting your services to a business community. For a B2B business, LinkedIn can be a great way to build your reputation online and showcase your expertise through articles published on LinkedIn. Sales Navigator is a paid tool offered by LinkedIn that allows you to reach out to LinkedIn users. It’s a prospecting tool used for researching new prospects, contacting them and following their LinkedIn activities (knowing what they like and are up to helps to start a conversation on social media).

Events promotion
Events are an important channel for the commercial property professional. They’re often used to launch a new building coming to market. You could target local tenants with a LinkedIn Inmail campaign, including an invite to one of the events you will be hosting to promote the building. The effectiveness of such a campaign could be measured by the number of prospects attending your event and eventually book a viewing.