SharpLaunch is excited to join CCIM Institute’s affinity program.
The SharpLaunch platform was designed to help busy commercial real estate teams better manage the marketing phase of their listings and deals, and expand the digital footprint of their properties.
The CCIM Institute affinity program offers members access to a global network of industry-leading tools, tuition discounts, and a global network of commercial real estate professionals giving CCIM Institute members a professional edge.
CCIM Institute is commercial real estate’s most influential professional organization, with members closing $200 billion annually in commercial real estate deals. For 50 years, the Institute has been building opportunities through its respected education program, led by established practitioners.
The addition of SharpLaunch to CCIM’s affinity program enables CCIM members to leverage best-in-class commercial real estate marketing tools to differentiate their property listings, improve asset visibility, and greatly reduce production time to stay organized and move faster.
Are you a CCIM member? Access the member area to access the exclusive SharpLaunch discount.
Thinking about hiring a commercial real estate marketing specialist?
Or maybe you’re ready to expand your marketing team to help support your busy commercial real estate business.
With the constant evolution in commercial real estate marketing and a growing list of available commercial real estate marketing tools, having your own in-house marketing specialist can be an important driver to help you move faster and provide momentum to help grow your company.
An experienced commercial real estate marketing specialist typically works alongside busy brokerage teams and executives to support property marketing efforts and the overall marketing success of an organization.
Below is a list of 25 key activities you can ask your marketing specialist to help you with to accelerate your commercial real estate business.
Company Marketing
Manage and update all written and visual material produced by the company
Brainstorm and produce branded content including case studies, articles and research reports
Manage and update the company website
Provide technology support for company applications and platforms
Manage and create email marketing campaigns
Own and manage company mailing lists
Help create and prepare meeting materials
Manage social media accounts
Manage paid marketing campaigns
Pitch news and articles to press for media exposure
Ensuring branding is consistent across all touch points
Property Marketing
Prepare offline marketing material including flyers, offering memoranda, direct mail, tour books
Create and send email marketing blasts and follow-up campaigns
Commission photographers for high quality property photos
Write press releases about new deals and opportunities
Prepare ownership/marketing reports
Sales Support
Prepare client pitches, proposals, RFP responses and presentations
Manage deal flow and transaction data
Help maintain and update prospect lists
Assist with property tours
Perform market research
Schedule and plan broker and industry events including coordinating logistics, scheduling, managing invitation lists, designing invitations, and day-of execution
Conclusion
Whether you’re a small and growing commercial real estate firm or an established organization, you have a lot to gain by hiring and delegating marketing activities to a dedicated specialist.
Off-loading your day-to-day marketing is a small move that starts a cascade of great benefits.
You will find yourself with more time to focus on high-level strategy and more attention to new opportunities for growth and expansion.
Commercial real estate and financial industries are buzzing about blockchain and its potential impact on how data is shared. While the buzzword seems to be all around us and continues to make headlines, many people don’t understand the implications and how it may affect the way we do business in the future.
We’ve selected a list of 8 articles on blockchain and commercial real estate to help you better understand potential use cases and implications.
CRE Opinion: The Impact of Blockchain Technology on Real Estate
Blockchain has the potential to disrupt many processes within real estate. From accounting to title business and contracts, the blockchain will be omnipresent. Take, for example, the chain of custody and ownership of real property. Today we use a title company to research the records and give us assurances that the documentation available indicates ownership. With the introduction of a public open ledger system, the blockchain, custody of property, and the need for a secondary central repository (be it a title company or city and state public records) would not be needed. This would reduce transaction costs, state and city costs for hosting this information, and legal work associated with the research needed to transact on property.
In its most simple sense, the blockchain is a series of computers (thousands to potentially millions of them) that each keep the same record of an event or transaction in a ledger that is open to the public. Each record is encrypted, and the ledger is virtually hack-proof. Since all these computers see the same thing, they offer consensus that the recorded event or transaction is valid. The most important value of the blockchain is that it allows two or more parties to interact with, say, a financial transaction, with no middleman.
Blockchain and CRE: The Only Article You Will Ever Need to Read
So this blockchain thing it’s all over the place, and there is so much hype and hyperbole.
Once you get past all of that BS, you get the nerds who want to sit and talk about forks being forks and other forks that won’t be forks. Don’t understand that? That’s ok; you don’t need to.
How Blockchain-based Smart Contracts Could Revolutionize Commercial Real Estate
Blockchain technology has recently been adopted and adapted for use by the commercial real estate (CRE) industry. CRE executives are finding that blockchain-based smart contracts can play a much larger role in their industry. Blockchain technology can potentially transform core CRE operations such as property transactions like purchase, sale, financing, leasing, and management transactions.
How Blockchain is Reshaping The Real Estate Industry
The infiltration of blockchain, the technology that supports cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, into industries around the world is only a matter of time.
The historically traditional commercial real estate industry won’t easily escape.
The technology has the potential to transform the property business. The potential shake-up would significantly speed up transactions and increase transparency.
The inevitable convergence of blockchain and real estate may be viewed as a modern-day example of the classic confrontation staged when an immovable object meets an unstoppable force. On the one hand, real estate — an industry as old as mankind — is notoriously resistant to change, and seemingly allergic to adopting new technology. On the other hand is blockchain — touted in headline after headline as the greatest innovation since the Internet, and promising no less than to revolutionize the way the world conducts business. As is typically the case, the truth most likely lies somewhere in the middle.
How Blockchain Technology Is Allowing For A Reinvention Of The Real Estate Ecosystem
Over the last five millennia, little has changed in the way we transact real estate. From listing a property to closing the deal, multiple stakeholders, data sources, service providers, regulators and government agencies take their place between sellers and buyers, contributing friction, paper, redundancies, errors, waste delays and costs.
Blockchain and Smart Contracts Could Transform Property Transactions
Adoption of blockchain is on the rise in commercial real estate (CRE) as industry players see how it can be used to develop smart contracts that can drive significant transparency, efficiency and cost savings in core CRE operations. “In particular, property transactions processes involving leasing, purchasing and sales are well-suited to benefit from blockchain,” observes Bob O’Brien, Global Real Estate & Construction leader, Deloitte & Touche LLP, citing the Deloitte Center for Financial Services report, Blockchain in Commercial Real Estate.
Technology is a vital tool to support on-demand communication in the sales and marketing process for commercial real estate professionals. A client document portal offers the opportunity to organize and consolidate resources into a single online repository that can easily be shared with clients and partners alike.
An effective document portal allows you to securely share documents with clients, including property presentations, offering memorandums, and tenant manuals. Some may also include online confidentiality agreements to streamline your sales process.
The secure and time saving resource can also provide actionable insights and analytics into who accesses these documents, where they access them, and when. You can measure interest among your prospects and client, manage the deal process more efficiently and use the data available to improve your sales activities and win more deals.
Here’s a list of reasons why CRE professionals should use a document portal to save time when sharing information with their prospects and clients.
1. Maximize Mobility
Document portals are cloud-based, meaning they can be accessed from any device with an Internet connection. Being able to share marketing or investor materials to your clients that are “on the go” is immensely beneficial to quickly capture their interest and help facilitate a better sales process.
2. Improve Efficiency
Not only can you get documents to people faster, a document portal offers a central online repository so you can ensure everyone is working from the same library. Instead of sending emails back and forth and losing valuable time, you can share and send mass updates to clients who already have access to the portal instead of doing it manually one-by-one.
3. Better Security
Document portals are fully encrypted and require a login. Commonly, they provide different levels of privacy settings and permissions which make it easy to give control and access only to those who need it for any given document.
4. Track User Activity
With a cloud based service you will be able to gather information about who accesses your documents and how often they do it, providing key insights into the activity levels of your documents. This insight is extremely valuable to improve your tactical sales and follow-up.
5. Reporting and Analytics
Reporting and analytics give you comprehensive view of the overall performance of your marketing materials and what changes you can make to improve those engagement levels. Also, automated reporting is very useful and can help save a lot of time when you create Ownership reports for your clients.
Need a solution for sharing your documents?Click here to learn more about our document portal.
Common Uses of a Commercial Real Estate Document Portal
There are several situations in which a document portal can benefit commercial real estate owners, brokers or property managers. Some of the most common use cases include:
Leasing Portal – leasing brokers can add easily accessible documents related to a leasing transaction such as marketing materials, site plans, flyers and brochures.
Investment Sales – investment sales brokers can use an “investor portal” to securely share offering memorandums, rent rolls, financial statements, tax returns, licenses and permits and property plans while enabling an extra layer of security with online confidentiality agreements.
Tenant Communication – property managers can use it as a “tenant portal” to upload tenant handbooks, emergency procedures, request forms, property events, holiday photos and other documents to improve engagement.
Choosing the Right Document Portal
As a commercial real estate professional, you need a secure document portal that will fit your specific needs while integrating seamlessly with your existing property management software. Spend time evaluating how these features are met and choose a cloud-based solution that will help streamline your operations and improve communication with clients accordingly.
Learn how to streamline your CRE marketing operations and amplify your digital presence with an all-in-one solution built for busy commercial real estate teams.
While there are hundreds of creative agencies specializing in branding, design, web development, and marketing, there are only a few specialized commercial real estate marketing agencies that produce the quality of work necessary for this industry’s standard of professionalism.
Here’s our list of the best real estate marketing companies that have the depth of industry experience and expertise suited specifically for CRE firms.
inMotion Real Estate Media is a commercial real estate marketing company that provides a wide array of marketing and creative solutions to some of the world’s largest real estate companies.
Founded: 2006
Solutions: custom website development, graphic design, online marketing and video production.
Sample clients: CBRE, Cushman & Wakefield, JLL, Rockwood Capital, Lincoln Property Company, Marcus & Millichap, NKGF, The Dilweg Companies, Fischer, Lewis Retail
Neoscape is a creative studio with offices in Boston, New York and San Fransisco that has been crafting branded experiences of built environments for discerning clients around the world.
Founded: 1995
Solutions: branding, strategy, design, visual Identity, web & mobile app development, 3D visualization, film & video, animation, photography, VR/AR/MR and interactive experiences
Sample clients: Brookfield Properties, Robert A. M. Stern Architects, Elkus Manfredi Architects, Gensler, Tishman Speyer, Related
The Seventh Art is a digital communications agency specializing in the branding of upscale lifestyle offerings, including real estate, hospitality, design, culture, travel and bespoke products.
Founded: 2003
Solutions: market research, brand strategy, brochures, e-mail blasts, web design, renderings, floor plans, film and social media
Sample clients: Christie’s, Colliers, Corcoran, The Durst Organization, Goldman Sachs, Halstead Properties, Hines, The JGB Companies, Tishman Speyer, Vornado
REA is a brand and marketing agency based in Washington and New York.
Solutions: real estate marketing, corporate branding, property branding, interactive and web development, rendering and animation, leasing and sales environments, video and short films, and media strategy
Sample clients: Hines, Madison Realty Capital, Thor Equities, Equity Office, East End Capital, JBG Smith Properties, Normandy Real Estate Partners, RXR
DBOX is a creative communications agency based out of London, Miami and New York, operating in residential, commercial, hospitality, destination, and cultural sectors.
Founded: 1996
Solutions: market intelligence, positioning and brand identity, communications strategy, graphic and environmental design, print and digital advertising, computer generated imagery and animation, virtual reality applications, photography & film production, mobile and social media marketing, web and interactive design, branded sales and leasing experiences
Sample clients: Hines, HFZ, Ivanhoe Cambridge, Macklowe Properties, Oxford Properties, The Peebles Corporation, Phoenix Property, Swire Properties, Witkoff, Woodridge Capital
Visualhouse is a creative agency focused on creating compelling brand stories for architecture, design and the built environment with offices in New York, Los Angeles, London, Miami and San Francisco.
Founded: 2008
Solutions: strategy, 3D visualization, still imagery, film, animation, branding, graphic design, photography, web development, immersive imagery
Sample clients: Related Companies, The Howard Hughes Corporation, Extell Development, Townscape Partners, Two Trees Management, L & L Holdings, Gale International, Magellan Development Group, Brookfield Properties
Creating a property marketing report can be painful. But at SharpLaunch we believe that it doesn’t have to be. That’s why we are thrilled to announce a new feature to our marketing analytics dashboard: Branded Property Marketing Reports
You can now download a professional “white label” commercial real estate marketing report that includes all of the key metrics from your marketing dashboard with a clear and easy to read PDF layout.
Set your date range, select the metrics you want to include, and simply hit “download report”.
Why is client reporting important?
1. Build Relationships w/ Ownership and Stakeholders
Reports allow you to have ongoing, scheduled meetings and get in front of your clients on a consistent basis.
2. Convey Professionalism
Share your knowledge with your clients and educate them on what you do in the context of measurable performance metrics.
3. Gives You Credit
Provides concrete proof of your hard work and marketing and sales efforts.
Interested in learning more about our property marketing reports? Learn more and get a demo or contact us directly.
2017 was another exciting year for the CRE tech ecosystem with the continued rise of technology adoption, shifts in the digital landscape and creation of new opportunities. Here’s a look back at the most popular stories that made headlines in the past year.
Did we miss anything? Please share in the comments.
Why the Retail Store is Not Dead
February 2017
The magnitude of disruption over the last decade is indisputable — as evidenced by ongoing rounds of store closures including several new rounds in 2017. Does the future of shopping belong to e-commerce? Actually, no. In fact, many retailers are heralding a new retail ecosystem.
How Data and Sustainability Will Shape Supermarkets of the Future
February 2017
From vertical farming to motion-sensitive displays, supermarkets across Europe are embracing new technology that caters to food-savvy, eco-aware consumers. “Providing a large amount of information easily and accessibly is a way to improve efficiency – for customers who are increasingly concerned about where their food comes from, and for retailers who want to meet this need,”
Whether retail is ready for it or not, consumers have become hooked on the real-time, personalized world of the modern digital landscape, and they expect their retail providers to follow suit. Today’s digital consumer is a demanding beast. They want what they want, and they want it now. (And that’s just today’s shoppers; don’t even get me started on Generation Z, which is actually expected to become the next big retail disruptor.)
The Power Disruptors: The Players Who are Upsetting Real Estate’s Status Quo
April 2017
In today’s economy, change is inevitable. New ideas and innovations constantly transform the way people do business. As the technology sector has grown—permeating nearly all aspects of the global economy – every entrepreneur is seeking the next big, disruptive product or platform. Traditional industries, especially, have appeared ripe for disruption by tech-focused companies.
Real estate has been no exception to this. The industry is perpetually evolving, with companies ranging from established internet giants to plucky tech startups bringing fresh approaches to the table.
What New Technologies Mean for the Future of Office Space
May 2017
Changes in the workplace have come fast and furious over the past few years, with new technologies advancing digital mobility and giving rise to worker demands for a flexible work environment. Office users have responded by creating open, collaborative office environments with a variety of workspaces and amenities to attract and retain talent.
Early-Stage Real Estate Tech: 120+ Companies Building the Industry’s Future
June 2017
Real estate is a massive asset class representing trillions of dollars in value. To date, the industry has not been thoroughly affected by technology and software, but investment from venture capital investors into technology startups operating in the space has picked up in the last year. Through 2017 year-to-date (6/6/17), investors have already invested $1.46B across 107 deals. At the current run-rate, total dollars invested are expected to exceed 2016 by 25% to $3.4B.
A New Venture Firm Focused on Real Estate has Raised $212 Million from Real Estate Industry Giants
July 2017
It isn’t easy to find white space in the world of venture capital, where every venture firm must have a specific vision to sell to the universities, pension funds and family offices that tend to fund them. But Brendan Wallace and business partner Brad Greiwe have a fresh pitch, as well as nontraditional investors. Their L.A.-based venture firm, Fifth Wall Ventures, invests in startups that are benefiting from changes in the real estate market, and they turned to the country’s largest real estate companies to fund it.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Real Estate
July 2017
Long tipped as a revolutionary technology of the future, Artificial Intelligence has already begun to reshape the way work is carried out in commercial real estate: chat bots are changing the way real estate services are delivered; recommendation engines are revolutionising the way we find property and automated – and more efficient – ways of tracking and analysing mountains of unstructured data are unlocking new opportunities for value.
Find out more about how AI is reshaping the way work is carried out today – and will be carried out in the future.
The Future is Now: Five Smart Building Features Transforming Today’s Workplace
August 2017
To say that building owners are getting creative with the workplace would be an understatement. In the quest to create the coolest or most unique office buildings, we’ve seen a host of ostentatious building amenities: golf simulators, rooftop pool lounges, spas, dog spas, even rock climbing walls. These can certainly be attractive for a company looking for some extra perks in its office environment, and it makes for great fodder for social media — but the savviest building owners are making strategic investments in upgrades that more broadly and consistently benefit both the owner and the tenant.
Transitioning Building Design to a Future of Compact, Driverless Cars
August 2017
Compact driverless electric cars, once they become mainstream, will usher in many changes in U.S. urban centers from how cities are designed to how real estate is developed, he said. Curbside parking may disappear. Parking spaces will be narrower. Office buildings may need a large “queuing” area at the front where autonomous cars drop their passengers. Parking garages and parking lots will be converted to other uses.
Amazon’s HQ2 Deadline: Now the Real Competition Begins
October 2017
Amazon’s preferences for HQ2, which will cost more than $5 billion and create 50,000 jobs over the next two decades, include a metropolitan area with a population of more than 1 million, access to mass transit and the potential to attract and retain technical talent. The company has said it won’t make a decision until next year, but speculation is sure to reach new heights now that the bids are in. Here are 10 cities that may have the best shot at the prize.
Blockchain Will Revolutionize the Commercial Real Estate Industry
November 2017
In 2009, a mysterious person (or persons) named Satoshi Nakamoto published a white paper that introduced the world to bitcoin—a digital payment system that eliminated the need for financial institutions. For the cryptocurrency to work, transactions would need to be recorded in a database known as the blockchain.
This presents an opportunity in the commercial real estate space. Historically known to resist change, a new generation of startups are building applications on top of the blockchain that will disrupt the industry and force us to rethink the concept of value.
Xceligent Shuts Down Operations, Files for Chapter 7 Liquidation
December 2017
Xceligent is closing, effective immediately. The decision comes one year to the day after Xceligent’s legal battle with commercial real estate data giant CoStar began.
Compass Nabs $450 Million in Largest Real Estate Tech Investment in U.S. History
December 2017
Humongous breaking news for Compass, the white-hot real estate tech company: it just received a $450 million investment from SoftBank Vision Fund, the collaborative tech investment vehicle started by Japanese company SoftBank and a host of big international players.
The $450 million investment in Compass marks the largest private real estate tech investment in U.S. history, according to Compass, and follows on the heels of a $100 million investment from other funders last month, which valued the company at $1.8 billion.
Though property prices came back down to earth in 2017, real estate tech valuations shot into the stratosphere.
Big valuations tend to make it easier to raise money, and so 2017 was also the year of blockbuster funding rounds. Underlying it all is a growing belief that the multi-trillion-dollar real estate market is overdue for innovation and that startups can profit tremendously.
Wow! What a year in CRE tech. Many amazing things happened. Challenges remain for many. Opportunities for all. That’s kinda how I see things, always. Great upside but with the realization that it takes hard work, lessons learned, discoveries and then, ultimately, there is progress. It’s never a straight line. Nor should it be.
LinkedIn is the most powerful and active business social network on the planet and we already wrote about how it should form an integral part of a commercial real estate social media marketing strategy.
For this reason alone, every commercial real estate company and professional should be using it actively to engage with prospects and clients alike whether it is for building their personal brand, commercial real estate prospecting or promoting their listings.
Not only does LinkedIn offer a direct line to the people you most want to talk with, it allows you to showcase your property listings (whether leasing or investment sales) in a forum targeted to your audience.
To get the most out of your LinkedIn efforts, however, there are some best practices you should be following – tips that will allow you to better attract attention, engage prospects, and drive visits to your property listings.
Let’s review some of the most important areas of an effective LinkedIn strategy and the things you can do right now to improve your performance on the platform.
How to Use LinkedIn as a Content Platform
There are three types of LinkedIn posts, and each of them can be supplemental to your broader marketing goals. They include:
Company Posts – Posted to your Company or Organization Page, these posts are branded by your CRE business, and therefore can be as promotional as you want them to be. They are also the only posts eligible for paid campaigns so offer a number of benefits over the other two options.
Personal LinkedIn Posts – Posted directly to your personal profile, these are the bulk of the posts you see in the news feed when you login each day. They are the most likely to get engagement, but also the hardest to make directly promotional for your CRE listings.
LinkedIn Articles – LinkedIn has a communal publishing platform. Once called Pulse, the article function allows you to share content with anyone who follows your profile as a thought leader, your direct connections, and a much larger potential audience if it gets picked up by editorial. This can be a potentially powerful resource if used properly.
Each of these options has different benefits, so it’s important to build a strategy that draws from them as needed. Let’s look closer at how to create, promote, and engage with people using this content.
General Guidelines for Posting on LinkedIn
Regardless of which type of post you are publishing, it’s important to build something that speaks to your target audience directly. Here are some things to keep in mind when crafting content:
Is It Professional? – LinkedIn is a professional network. It’s designed for sharing career and industry related tips and advice, not for politics, general complaining, or YouTube videos. As a social network, there is bound to be some crossover, and your content should still be entertaining and engaging whenever possible, but keep it professional.
Does It Answer a Question or Provide a Tip? – Content should be actionable as well – it should speak to the core needs of your target audience. Other people may see the posts, but make sure you’re offering real advice they can use in their lives.
Is It Consumable on Mobile Devices? – Make sure your content is accessible and mobile friendly. Don’t write long, paragraph heavy content that is hard to read on a phone (more than half of all content on LinkedIn is accessed via phone).
If you do all three of these things, you’re already several steps ahead of everyone else.
Anatomy of a Good LinkedIn Post
Some other things to keep in mind when structuring your LinkedIn Post include:
Image Selection – While not required, if you plan on linking back to your website, publishing long form content as an article, or posting to your company page, strong visuals that represent your subject are important.
Visible Text in the Feed – Your post, especially if long, will only show the first hundred or so characters in the feed. Those 100 characters should define the purpose of the post, outline the solution you’ll offer, and engage with your target audience.
Link to a landing page – The space available in a LinkedIn post is limited and before your users will get in touch they will want to know more about what you’re offering. Linking to a property website from your LinkedIn post enables your prospects to learn more about the location, amenities and availabilities and further entice them to contact you.
Adding Keywords and Hashtags – Keyword integration is important for all digital content, especially on a social platform heavily on reliant on algorithms to showcase your posts. Target local, relevant terms and supplement with hashtags that highlight specific topics you’re discussing.
Call to Action – If you want someone to click a link, download a document, give you a call, or leave a comment, ask them to do it. Include a call to action, the same as you would on your website or in an email.
Supporting Content on Your Feeds – Make sure your content is surrounded by other strong content that discusses similar topics. If you post an article to your company page, for example, that offers tips about selecting a certain type of property in your area, other posts could be for some of those listings in the area.
Actively Engage in Comments – Keep an eye on the comments – if someone asks a question or offers a compliment, respond to it as soon as you see it. That kind of engagement not only encourages more responses, but it keeps your post higher in the feed for longer.
Do these seven things and your LinkedIn posts will be targeted, engaging, and most importantly, perfectly situated to take advantage of people who use LinkedIn as a research platform.
Tips to Generate Organic Visibility on LinkedIn
It’s all fine and good to write a killer post and optimize it using the above tips, but what if no one sees it?
Social media has a finite window during which a post can “catch” and spread to an ample audience. So you need to optimize and promote effectively to get it in front of the right people.
Here are some of the things you should be doing:
Tag Colleagues and Team Members – Draw in the people most likely to engage with your posts, including coworkers, colleagues, and team members at your CRE business.
Mention Your Tenants – You can also use the tagging functionality to mention any tenants that you want to feature in your post.
Connect Personal and Company Pages – Make sure your Company Page is linked from your Personal Profile as your place of employment. Everyone else in the office should do the same to increase the reach of that Page.
Engage with Other People’s Posts – Spend time every day commenting on, liking, and reading other people’s posts. Not only does this familiarize you with what works and what doesn’t, it gets your name out there.
Tag Influencers in Your Posts – Tag people with much larger audiences than you in your posts. Do this in context and with the right content and, if they respond, you can greatly increase your reach in a single post.
Use relevant hashtags – Hashtags on LinkedIn help users discover and participate in the topics and interests you’re mentioning
Combined with the formatting best practices, these steps will ensure your LinkedIn post is not only intriguing to potential prospects; it will provide ample content for search engines and LinkedIn’s own algorithm for showing it to people who are most likely to be interested in your property listings and marketing content.
Lease Announcement Example
Article Promotion Example
Perspective and Opinions Example
Team Member Profile Example
Paid Campaigns
We could write an entire, separate post about paid campaigns on LinkedIn – they offer a powerful tool to hyper-target your ideal audience – but for the purposes of this blog post, we’ll keep it to the basics.
When properly executed, a paid campaign allows you to select key demographics and employment data that can be used for targeting.
This includes things like:
Job Title
Company Size
Industry
Education
Interests and Location
Years of Experience
Size of Audience on LinkedIn
In short, every detail you could possibly think of to narrow down the exact people you want to see your ads. If you are targeting Brokers with 10+ years of experience and 25+ employees within 25 miles of your location, you can do that. And it gets more detailed from there.
The key to successful LinkedIn Paid Campaigns is not the targeting, but the content you pair with it.
Unlike Google AdWords, which are based on specific search queries or Facebook which is based on Interests and a handful of other less specific personal demographics, LinkedIn ads can get quite pricey – costing as much as $10-$20 per click.
The cost is worth it when you consider the hyper targeting you get, but if you don’t spend ample time building strong ad copy that approaches those individuals just right, the cost will add up fast.
To get the most from your Ad campaigns, consider the following:
Format and Placement of Your Ads – Ads can be run as thumbnails in the sidebar or as in-feed news items. The latter will perform much better (but cost more as a result). The combination of good content that you boost and share via advertising can be extremely effective though when done right.
Pay Per Click or Pay Per Impression – The default is to pay for every click you get on an ad, but don’t be afraid to experiment with impression-based payment as well. If your content is attractive enough, this can be less expensive.
Property Listings or Content Shares – For direct sales, you can share property listings and links back to your real estate website, but keep these super targeted. Content shares can be more general, and will have a lower ROI, but much higher click rates.
What is the Value Per Lead – Know your targets. How much should you spend per click to make it worth your while to spend money on ads?
LinkedIn’s platform can be a hugely powerful, hyper targeted tool in your arsenal, but if you don’t use it properly, it can also be a money sink, so be careful to build ads that you know can work based on your target audience.
Leveraging LinkedIn Groups
The last thing to touch on is LinkedIn Groups. At first glance, these look like a professional take on Facebook Pages or Forums, and while you wouldn’t be wrong, the value of these groups for smart marketers is immense – even greater than either of those.
Why?
Because you’re looking at incredibly targeted, often high selective groups that contain a very specific subset of professional in a given field. Looking for real estate investors in the tri-state area? There’s a group for that. Landlords in Miami? Yup.
That kind of targeting and the sheer volume of potential groups in which you can reach out to target prospects makes Groups a must in your marketing strategy.
It also makes it a tricky minefield to navigate, because a LOT of people try to spam these groups. To get started, consider the following:
Most Groups Require Approval – If your profile is a sales-heavy brochure attempting to promote your business, some groups will decline your invite request because it’s likely you’ll spam them. Be careful of what your public profile says and how it conveys your value add.
Group Admins Will Ban Fast – While not as trigger happy as mods on Reddit or in some large Facebook Groups, LinkedIn Groups don’t put up with a lot of spam. Your posts will need to add value and provide useful information to users, not drive traffic to your sales pages.
Groups Require Personal Profiles and Are Limited – You can only join groups as an individual and you can only join a certain number of groups at a time. So, you’ll need to select one or more people in your CRE business to join target groups, and you’ll need to be somewhat selective of which ones you join.
You Can’t Automate Posting – LinkedIn recently removed API access to groups, meaning all posts must be manually created from personal accounts. This limits the ability to automate or scale your posting to multiple groups at once.
This might seem like a lot of restrictions, but keep in mind that the more restrictions you see, the fewer people will attempt to do this. If you follow the rules and do everything right, you’ll be situated to reap the benefits of your efforts. Here’s what you should be doing:
Post Regularly – Don’t post only when you want to promote content on your site. Post on a regular basis to engage with the group and build a reputation.
Answer Questions and Provide Value – Answer common questions, provide value through links you share, and call out other people’s content as valuable.
Focus on a Handful of Quality Groups – You can join 30+ groups, but it will be difficult to maintain a relationship and any kind of authority in all 30 of those. Choose a small number with a good following to target first.
Share Marketing Content, Not Sales Materials – Always share content that can provide value to people, not just to you. Brochures, sales links, and other sales-first content will get flagged or ignored.
Do it right and your LinkedIn Group efforts will drive results in the form of clicks, inquiries, and new connections on the platform.
Real Estate Listing Examples for LinkedIn
Need inspiration for your next post? Check out the below examples for the next time you want to post real estate listings on LinkedIn and generate visibility for your properties.
The Portfolio and Property Dashboards have undergone a big refresh. Along with an updated look and feel, you can now export all property data to help give you a global view of all your properties and streamline reporting processes to deliver reliable data, faster.
Data Export
Automating your data collection and reporting saves time and eliminates manual errors that compromise your property data’s consistency and quality. The brand new data export feature will provide you with a comprehensive Excel download that includes:
All property level data
All space availability data
New Dashboards
The biggest update you’ll notice is the introduction of sleek new Portfolio and Property dashboards. The Portfolio dashboard will give you access to key information on a global view of all properties including:
Total property SF
Total available SF
Vacancy rate
On the property level, you will have a comprehensive view of property marketing activity along with key metrics including:
1. Website Visits & Pageviews
View the number of unique visitors and total pageviews for each of your properties across a specific time range.
2. Email Campaigns Stats
Get a snapshot of your email campaign activity that includes total number of email recipients, opens and clicks.
3. Document Portal Stats
See the total document views (downloads) in your document portal and executed confidentiality agreements.
4. Leads Trend
Track lead generation activity as your contact list grows and do a deep dive into your prospect’s behavior and engagement.
5. Traffic Sources
Find out where your visitors are coming from and track all relevant traffic sources, whether it’s organic, direct, referral, etc.
6. Top Referrals Sources
See the exact referral sources (google, loopnet, your website, etc.) that’s driving visits to your website.
7. Desktop vs Mobile
How savvy mobile are your users? See what device your visitors are using to access your property website.
8. Client Activity Report
Get a breakdown of your clients who visited your property site, accessed the document portal, and which documents they downloaded.
Getting Started
The Marketing Analytics dashboard is now available to all SharpLaunch clients and can be accessed once they login. If you want to learn more, get a demo.
One of the biggest challenges for commercial real estate marketing is lead generation. Getting people to your website and into your sales funnel is a huge challenge.
The more you can convert, the better your business will perform, right?
Not always.
Once a lead enters your funnel, they may not be ready for the critical sales conversations you want to have. They may be researching your business, downloading educational information, or preparing for a decision they’ll make in a few weeks or even months.
That’s why nurturing is so important.
Staying top of mind and continuing to provide value to your prospects will ensure they remain engaged with your CRE business long enough to move from lead to real opportunity.
This is a vital part of your overall marketing strategy, and can have a huge impact on the performance rates of every one of your campaigns. Let’s look closer at what kind of content you can use for these nurturing activities and how to ensure they work as intended to keep your business top of mind with prospects.
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Thank you email
The first and easiest thing you can do to nurture your new leads is to setup thank you emails for any conversion point on your website.
If someone fills out a form on your website, subscribes to a newsletter, submits a question, or downloads a piece of content, they should receive an email immediately that includes the following:
A link to the information they requested
Confirmation of their outreach and an expected response time
Subscription confirmation and expected email frequency
Next steps to learn more about your company, either through social media, a blog, or on property-specific websites.
Use this opportunity to build that new relationship and ensure they have everything you want them to know at this stage of the marketing funnel.
Here’s a thank you for subscribing to Real Views email by JLL:
Leasing opportunities
Once a prospect has entered your marketing funnel, you have ample opportunity to follow up with them and provide additional information about your business. Don’t abuse this power, but at the same time, make sure you showcase leasing opportunities whenever possible.
To stay top of mind and ensure your prospects keep your business in mind as they near their leasing decision, you need to send out promotional emails that showcase available properties.
Aim for every prospect on your email list to receive at least one email every 3-4 weeks that showcases these offerings, even when they aren’t in the active sales funnel.
Here’s an example of a office leasing opportunity email created by SharpLaunch:
Company news
There is a fine line every commercial real estate company must walk to ensure they provide optimal value to their prospects.
Information they can use to make a research decision or learn more about your properties is incredibly important, but so too is information about your company that will help them get to know and trust your operation.
This comes in the form of recent sales you’ve made, acquisitions added to your portfolio, partnerships you’ve made, and charity work you perform in the community.
Communicate these pieces through email newsletter updates, in blog posts, and via press release when large enough to warrant it.
Here’s a news article by MMG Equity Partners about their recent acquisition:
Blog Content
Your blog is the most important piece of real estate on your website for establishing expertise. Every article you publish can and should showcase your knowledge about the local commercial real estate market, the industry as a whole, and the benefits of specific properties or property types.
By publishing new articles on a regular basis, writing longform white papers and producing visual content that can be easily shared, you can establish yourself as an expert in the field.
To get the most out of your blogging efforts, find a specific niche on which to focus – something like real estate best practices. Your posts should be beneficial to the reader as well – not just focused on highlighting your properties and making sales, but providing useful information to potential tenants and investors. Get creative and the traffic you can generate will help to grow your business.
Here’s an example of a CBRE newsletter showcasing their expertise about the local market:
Surveys
One of the most effective ways to drive engagement from someone in your marketing funnel and to build a relationship is to ask them a question.
Posing questions on blogs and social media can get people engaged and encourage them to share with your brand.
A survey takes this concept to the next level, incorporating input from both clients and prospects into the decisions you make about your business. By inviting them to provide this feedback you build a relationship that goes well beyond simple information transactions. They become part of how your brand is perceived, and will feel ownership in that.
Surveys should be run periodically – at intervals corresponding to major changes or decisions for your business. They should also be narrow in scope to ensure as many people as possible complete them.
Your blog is a powerful resource to showcase your expertise in the field, but you can take this one step further. It’s easy to write about your own properties, but to provide key insights into the market as a whole, you really need your finger on the pulse.
Sending market reports for your area and certain property types, summarizing market trends, and providing context for important statistics can establish you as an expert in the market. If your prospects start to see you as the commercial real estate expert that knows what’s hot, what’s not, and what they should be keeping an eye on, they’ll come to you with questions and buying interest alike.
If you implement the kind of active, highly educational marketing funnel outlined in this article, you’ll be publishing a lot of content.
That kind of content volume can have a hugely positive impact on your business, but it needs to be presented in the right format. Most people won’t visit your blog every week or even see your social media content on a regular basis.
A weekly digest email that compiles everything you’ve been publishing, highlighting the most important and useful content, and showing them that you are very active in the space, continues to build that authority and keep your business top of mind.
CP Executive‘s weekly digest rounds up the latest posts by the news site:
Case studies and testimonials
A recent study in the Washington Post showed that positive social proof is more effective at driving conversions than the opportunity to save money, and over 70% of Americans say they look for a testimonial or product review before they make any type of purchase or buying inquiry.
People are inherently social, and the lack of social proof is innately seen as a detractor. To combat negative impressions and take advantage of the need for social support, add case studies and testimonials to your website that highlight what you have done for other clients.
The more specific, including names, company names, and photographs, the better the social proof will perform at building trust and encouraging new prospects to contact you.
Here’s a case study on how Colliers helped Nike with their real estate needs:
Social Media
Nurturing is all about the relationship you build with your leads. Raw information is useful, but if it doesn’t encourage them to engage with your brand, it may not have the intended effect.
The easiest way to nurture prospects via social media is to share content you’ve been publishing as it goes out. New videos of your properties, recent articles or white papers, or case studies of recent developments can all be highly effective at re-engaging inactive leads.
Another way to maintain that relationship is to take questions from followers. Whether it’s a general customer service question about your website or more specific questions about properties, this can showcase your listings to even more people in a public forum.
Here’s an example of how SVN Inc use their social media to showcase their properties and position themselves as thought leaders in the industry with useful information from commercial real estate experts.
Event participation
Almost everything we’ve discussed in this article has been digital. There are dozens of ways to engage with people online and the tools at our disposal make it easier than ever before.
But there is something inherently trustworthy about meeting and interacting with someone in person. Let your clients and partners know when they can meet you at an upcoming event, share events you’ll be attending with your prospects and subscribers, and be available.
You can do a lot online, but it will never quite replace the impact of an in-person meeting.
Here’s an example by Hendon Properties of how you can let your contacts know where they can find you an an upcoming event:
Conference recap
At the same time, you shouldn’t limit the impact of event attendance to the people you can meet there. Leverage the time you spend in seminars and breakout sessions to share what you’ve learned with your subscribers.
Write a blog post or a weekly update that includes a summary of what you experienced at a recent event. You can amplify the impact of even a single event attended, showcase how active you are in the community, and provide key thought leadership this way.
Nurturing for your prospects, leads, and existing clients and partners is invaluable. It allows you to provide important resources that keep your business top of mind, establishes you as a thought leader in the commercial real estate space, and encourages them to come to you with questions or concerns in the future.
Even a couple of new marketing efforts that provide regular updates to the people on your email lists will have a hugely positive impact in growing your audience and that relationship.
