Marketing Best Practices
Marketing is not essential only to maintaining healthy sales and traffic at every retail property. In today’s age of ever-expanding digital interconnectivity owners and brokers require a carefully planned and executed strategy to get in front of potential tenants and investors.
So, how do you market a retail property to an audience that is increasingly spending more time online to look for deals and spaces?
Below we outlined 3 best practices to successfully market and increase visibility for your retail properties.
A well-crafted commercial property description for your retail space should be succinct (aim for 100-200 words), highlights key selling points, defines who the property is for, and avoids jargon and cliché. Provide informative copy in a short and clear manner with key supporting statistics, without over explaining.
Commercial real estate photography will do much of the heavy lifting. Photos should be carefully selected from work by a professional to highlight the absolute best aspects of the property. It’s difficult to truly capture what it feels like to be inside of a property. Hire someone who has experience doing so and your marketing efforts will benefit from it.
Beyond photography, videos can be a portal into the property and how it is structured. Video content will highlight key amenities referenced in your description, showcase the best elements of the property and provide a visual reference for the floor plan. Drone videos showcase your property from the air and can beautifully capture the area to better understand the location
It goes without saying that surrounding amenities within a trade area or neighborhood of your target property are critical to highlight. Create an interactive real estate map to display and reinforce as many of these details as you can to help strengthen the value proposition for your property.
Learn more about Why You Need a Real Estate Amenities Map.
Site plans are a great way to visually depict the overall property, including outdoor amenities like parking, storefront space, etc. are important elements to supplement your descriptions with.
Demographics provide useful data about the population in the proximity of the property, such as average household income, population density, traffic counts, etc to help your potential tenants/investors quantify the current market size and extrapolate future growth.
Similar to the impact of location, it matters who else is already at the property. Showcasing the existing tenant base helps create “social proof” for your property, identifies potential competitors or gaps, and provides ideas for possible synergies with existing brands.
Today’s retail buyers/tenants want 1) convenience and 2) speed so why not give it to them?
Once you have crafted all your essential content, it’s time to put into use across different marketing assets that are readily accessible and easy to digest.
Here is a checklist for key marketing materials you will need to help equip you with a streamlined process when you’re ready to start promoting your space:
Once you’ve developed your marketing assets and prepared the supporting content needed to promote your property, it’s time to raise awareness and expand reach for your listings.
To supplement the efforts of your brokers in generating leads there are several channels that offer unique benefits for you to consider, including:
If you invested time and money into creating the above mentioned marketing assets, the most effective way to promote it is through a property listing website. The benefit of posting all your content in one place is to provide users with a streamlined experience where they can simply visit a URL you shared with them, get all the relevant information from the teaser and request more information or arrange a tour directly from the website. A design agency can help building that, or you can look into using an all-in-one commercial real estate marketing software.
Your company’s primary website is the first place you should feature your commercial properties for lease or sale.
One of the most effective resources you can add to your company website is a an interactive property search engine, searchable by location, property type, availabilities, and other factors of importance to prospective tenants. This helps to showcase your full list in a user-friendly interface.
You can link back to the property website or a listing page, provide a download of the brochure behind a form (so you can capture user information and follow up), and quickly generate leads using contact forms.
At this point, you likely have a large database of leads. These are individuals you already know are interested in properties in the geographic location you’re targeting and should be your initial targets.
There are three things to consider when using email to promote a new property:
There are dozens of social media channels, but only three you should consider for your retail marketing and advertising efforts:
Read more about how to use social media effectively in our detailed guide to social media marketing for commercial real estate.
You likely already know about and have your property listings on the major commercial real estate websites like CoStar and LoopNet, but there are dozens more that cater to specific markets and property types. These platforms allow you to rapidly amplify your message and reach your exact market where they start their searches, and not necessarily always with a large cost associated.
Advertising your listings has a number of clear benefits, including the ability to reach a large targeted audience almost instantly, get immediate results to test your marketing collateral and targeting, an investment that can be easily measured to determine ROI.
These are the most important channels through which you can generate visibility:
Whether you’re preparing to put a new property on the market or have been struggling to reach your targets with existing an existing listing, staying proactive with an effective marketing plan can help ensure you maximize success.
Use the above elements in your retail marketing plan to expand your reach to more prospects who might be interested in your property listings.
Company updates
Are you a commercial real estate professional looking to improve your marketing, leasing, and...
Marketing Best Practices
Are you missing out on potential clients and sales by not effectively capturing leads from...
Marketing Best Practices
Ready to elevate your commercial real estate marketing game and propel your business to new...