Sometimes there is a fine line between marketing success and failure, and commercial real estate marketing mistakes might result in a loss of leads and income prospects.

Selling or leasing commercial real estate can be difficult, but there are a number of commercial property marketing mistakes that should be avoided in the marketing process. We’ve compiled a list of the 13 worst blunders commercial real estate firms can make, so you don’t have to.

Mistake 1: Try to imitate competitors

It is one of the most harmful mistakes you may make if you simply follow the crowd. Of course, it’s alluring to do this because of the belief that everyone else is doing it right.

It’s not enough to advertise your property on a portal and send a few basic emails out.

Every marketing plan should be tailored to the specific needs of each target group. You’re wasting valuable time and resources by advertising your business in the same ways that everyone else is. You’re not reaching your target audience where they really spend their time.

In commercial real estate, what matters most?

• The kinds of properties that you tend to market
• Those who may be interested in what you have to promote
• Your properties’ location
• The available space and the need it fulfils

It’s a waste of time and effort to send a one-size-fits-all email to all of your customers, hoping something will catch on and pique interest.

Consider where you should concentrate your time and efforts, what kinds of content and marketing collateral are necessary, and you’ll have a more effective approach in place.

Mistake 2: Using too many marketing tools

A patchwork system is often the result of combining the many marketing tools and CRE technologies that are now available. This not only makes your life more difficult and time consuming, but it also generates a number of separate and disconnected data links.

In order to avoid this, you can buy a property marketing software system that has all of your digital marketing in one place.

A full-featured marketing platform has the advantage of having a lot of different tools in one place, which makes the process easier and increases productivity.

Mistake 3: Using an inept promotion strategy

No matter how many commercial real estate listing sites you use or how much money you spend on aesthetically pleasing presentation materials, your efforts will amount to nothing if no one knows about your property and no one knows how to find it.

If you want your property listing to get seen and generate quality leads, you’ll have to put in the requisite time and effort. Continuous, multi-channel advertising is required.

Let’s take a closer look to see what this means.

• Continuous: One-time only campaigns are far less effective compared to ones that are consistently promoted. During the early stages of your marketing campaign, keep the regularity of your promotional actions going and don’t taper off. Potentially interested buyers are more likely to recall and take action on properties that keep popping up in their searches.
• Multi-channel: Successful campaigns employ a variety of distribution channels and methods to spread their message. Email, social media, search engine optimisation, paid advertising, and human contact all fall under this category. To get the attention of as many potential customers as possible, cast your net as wide as possible.

Mistake 4: Your content lacks strength and quality

Quality content and an engaging property description follow closely behind professional photography as the foundation for a successful commercial real estate listing. Potential buyers might be turned off by a boring description of the home’s features and amenities.

In addition to beautiful photographs that capture a property’s best features, there are several reasons why written content can have a significant influence on conversion rates. Even a little description of your home may communicate a lot:

• Closeness to local attractions is a factor in the location
• An accurate depiction of the availability and space
• Certain advantages are offered by the property’s features
• A good review of a property’s price and value of the space

Landing pages and property descriptions are critical to attracting and retaining visitors’ attention and conveying the value of the property they’re considering. A muddled message can drive potential clients away from poorly written content.

Mistake 5: Failure to delegate work to team members

Promoting a property is a team effort, and delegating work is an important part of marketing a commercial property.

Companies that delegate marketing responsibilities to a single individual never have the same level of success as groups that work together to promote the listing. As they say, several heads are better than one.

Marketing and sales people must work together and read from the same hymn book, and rules must be set up to make it easier for everyone to work together.

Many marketing operations, such as posting on social media, sending emails, and conducting outreach, do not involve a substantial financial commitment but do require consideration of time and effort to carry out. If you have one member whose strong point is articulate writing, get them to write the blog posts. If one is good at conversation and answering questions, get them to respond to social media posts etc.

Mistake 6: There are no clear goals to strive for

A good metaphor to explain this oversight: an archer who pulls back the string of his bow will do so with much more strength and purpose, knowing he has a target to aim for.

You need a strategy that precisely reflects your organisation’s goals, what you want to do, why you intend to do it, and the metrics you intend to measure the success or failure of your campaigns. In other words, you need a plan with clear objectives.

Include the following aspects in your plan for a better chance of success:

• A thorough knowledge of your intended audience and market
• Checklist of strategic objectives that you want to pursue
• Your strategy’s rationale and anticipated return on investment
• The precise figures you’ll need to gauge your success.

Your marketing efforts may be doomed from the start if you are lacking any one of these important components. To make matters worse, after putting in a lot of time and money, you won’t understand how bad they are until it’s too late.

Mistake 7: You don’t have a process to guide the way

Identifying your goal is only the first step in figuring out how you’re going to get there. After that, it’s necessary to map out how you will achieve it.

To this end, how will you map out and implement an effective marketing strategy? Is there anything more you’ll need to do before you begin? What strategies will you use to achieve your goals?

Too many CRE professionals start investing time and money without a game plan in place. This can too easily lead to disaster, because having a roadmap for your potential success is vital.

The following are some of the requisite things that your map must include:

• What will you do in order to accomplish the goals you’ve set for yourself?
• How you plan to create your marketing campaigns and the tools you’ll employ
• You’ll need to incorporate certain technologies into your website, content delivery, and follow-up marketing operations.
• Vendors you’ll need to work with in order to fulfil important parts of your strategy
• How much money will you need to spend and how long will it take to complete each of the aforementioned components?

The foundation of any successful marketing campaign is a well-thought-out strategy and how you will achieve it. You need a clear target, or you won’t know if you have achieved success or not. You’ll be flying blind if you don’t have it.

Mistake 8: Poor photo quality

Visual appeal is critical in virtually every form of organisation nowadays, especially since the advent of the internet. So, in fact, for commercial real estate firms, photography is one the most important parts of their marketing efforts. This is why.

A well-taken photo may accomplish a wide range of objectives. With the help of a well-executed marketing plan and high-quality photos, your audience is captivated and the property’s story is shown visually as you show off the most important features.

No matter if it’s in a local listing directory or on your own website, poor photography might cause consumers to skim right over your most significant properties since they’ll have a negative first impression. You only have a second or two to pique someone’s interest with professionally taken photos before they move onto a different listing.

Mistake 9: Failure to use calls-to-action in your marketing efforts

At first appearance, a new marketing effort appears to be a big success, and you get all excited about it. Several hundred page views from a variety of different sources of traffic. A lot of time and a lot of clicks on the site have been recorded. A steady stream of high-quality visitor traffic to your site.

In spite of this, there is no paperwork or phone calls to follow.

When it comes to your website, you’re better off constructing billboards in the middle of the jungle than not having any calls-to-action at all on your main website or landing pages.

In order for people to take advantage of what you have on offer, they must know exactly what to do next. This signifies two things:

Firstly, every page of your website should have contact information for you and your company displayed in a prominent place. Not everyone likes making phone calls, so you should provide a variety of ways to get in touch with them.

Secondly, every page should provide links and buttons for appropriate conversions both above and below the page’s banner. Visitors to your website should be able to find a button that allows them to get in touch with a member of your staff, download a document, or engage in some other way at any time.

If these things aren’t done, you’ll get half or a third of the potential customers from the same traffic. If site visitors have to work too hard to figure out how to contact you to find out more, then they are unlikely to do so. It’s harsh, but a reality.

Mistake 10: Failure to focus your communications

How many pieces of irrelevant promotional material do you receive daily by email? Probably quite a bit.

The average person is bombarded with over two hundred marketing messages a day, half of which are delivered by email. With that many possible spam messages, you’re wasting your time and maybe doing more harm than good if your message isn’t clear.

It’s possible that some people on your list will respond if you send an untargeted email to a thousand people on your list. However, you can significantly increase the response rate by segmenting your audience and only sending relevant emails to relevant groups of people.

Have you recently listed a new property? Send it to those who have expressed interest in your properties without details of the deals available attached. What’s going on in the workplace? Send it to long-term customers rather than freshly converted prospects who haven’t had a chance to get to know your business. Your emails should be segmented to get greater results from them.

Mistake 11: Failure to measure how you are progressing

We have already cautioned about the blunder with a lack of a defined goal and metrics for measuring progress along the way. However, setting metrics is one thing, but monitoring and reporting them to make sure things are going as planned is quite another matter.

If you want to assess the value and success of your marketing efforts, you must have some fundamental KPIs in place. In the end, it helps you to improve your efforts in future marketing campaigns.

The following are some important metrics to monitor:

• Total number of visits
• The total number of leads
• Ratio of converting new customers into paying customers
• The sum of all sales
• The ratio of sales conversion
• The total cost of marketing
• Marketing Return on Investment (ROI)

Depending on your marketing goals, your specific KPIs may differ, but if you’re not keeping an eye on and making adjustments based on at least some of these eight KPIs, you’ll be less effective in achieving your marketing goals.

Mistake 12: Not using social media

Commercial real estate social media marketing broadens your audience significantly, is simple to implement and track, and is free or affordable to employ. It’s startling to see how many CRE agents aren’t taking full advantage of social media given the potential this marketing channel holds.

Tweeting is a terrific way to get specific messages out to your audience. If you want to upload digital flyers and quality images on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, you may do so. The YouTube marketing channel is ideal for showcasing your cutting-edge drone filming techniques.

Mistake 13: Making the process too difficult

Your job is to make the lives of property owners, investors, and potential renters as simple as possible. It is easier to offer a property for sale, to discover a good bargain in a hot office market, or to identify the right co-working space for a couple who are convinced their start-up will be the next big thing. Often, making something easier means removing barriers.

In the digital age we now live in, information regarding your business property listing is expected to be available online these days. It’s important to make it simple for visitors to your website to download brochures, records, papers, and contact information. In the end, it’s all about human psychology: if your procedure is smooth, you’ll minimise any concerns investors or tenants could have about how hard or time-consuming doing business with you might be.