Baking a pie takes precision and strategy, a careful measure of all the ingredients creating the perfect formula. The pie crust needs to be the right consistency and bake to support the filling. Timing becomes the catalyst to perfection. Thankfully, today’s modern technology has supplied digital scales, timers, and thermometers that have taken away most of the guess work, providing many with the tools needed to achieve culinary success.
Marketing for commercial real estate has also experienced similar advances in technology that measure campaign metrics and provide the data to help perfect one’s marketing methodology.
Our team has learned to lean on much of this technology to build our marketing process and ensure both precision and efficiency.
Digitize all Materials
Most of our materials are now digital. Although we do make printed collateral for our team marketing, we always accompany each piece with a digital version.
Digital Materials not only help track open rates and additional metrics, it also allows for incorporating interactive elements that are not traditionally utilized in the industry. As a marketer for Lagos Shopping Center Advisers, I push our team to breathe new technological innovations into our campaigns. No longer are the days of printed collateral, mailers, and faxing. Everything needs to be instant and easy to access.
Our team utilizes a few platforms to ensure investors can access the property marketing materials immediately – our go-to being Real Capital Markets (RCM). Their user friendly interface not only allows for immediate access, its aesthetics are sharp and the platform is easy to use. RCM also provides our team with real time alerts letting us know when someone has accessed the marketing materials.
Drone Videos have also been a great way to bridge the gap between antiquated marketing campaigns and innovation. Our team creates a video for every property we market and we make sure to utilize the newest trends in video editing and animation.
Tracking Metrics
Tracking the effectiveness of marketing campaigns is one of the most distinct benefits of leveraging technology for commercial real estate marketing campaigns. Metrics are essential to any marketing campaign because they show whether your marketing efforts resonate with your target audiences. This not only helps us make adjustments to current campaigns, it also helps us streamline future campaigns.
With every new campaign innovation there is a huge curve for learning. A wonderful example of this was our team figuring out the appropriate length for a property video. Metrics helped us find that most videos should be no longer than one minute and ten seconds. We learned an important behavioral pattern, specifically how much time our audience wants to spend watching a property video.
Not only are metrics important to us, they are important to our clients. And, technology allows us to accurately provide that information. Our clients want to know that we are correctly positioning their properties by showing them how many people watched the property video, how many people opened up an email from our marketing campaign, as well as how many people downloaded marketing materials throughout the campaign. These metrics provide valuable benchmarks and also help us re-assess a marketing campaign if the numbers just aren’t reaching our expectations.
Timing Is Everything
Timing really is everything with commercial real estate marketing campaigns and technology is a wonderful tool in helping our team find a campaign’s rhythm.
Because most of the platforms we use give us detailed metrics, we are able to see what time of the day works best for sending email campaigns, and even if a campaign is losing steam.
Technology goes hand in hand with all of our marketing campaigns and we are always looking for new ways to provide our clients with the highest quality possible and the most effective marketing campaigns.