Starting Your CRE Marketing Plan

Starting Your CRE Marketing Plan


When it comes to marketing commercial properties, you may find yourself wondering: what are the most effective marketing strategies in such a competitive digital age? With so many options available, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed when setting up your marketing plan and in some cases, you may not even know where to start. If you have already made the decision to create a marketing plan specifically for your commercial property, you are headed in the right direction. Now we can look at how to establish a concrete marketing plan that will be both focused and effective.

The planning stage of your commercial real estate marketing plan is just as important as the implementation stage because it gives you direction. CRE marketing plans need a solid base to truly be effective and the best place to start when planning anything is to define what your goals and objectives are. 

Objectives and Goals

Knowing what you want to accomplish will make choosing your marketing strategies that much easier. CRE marketing plans often include goals like finding ways to attract new tenants, generate leases, improve resident retention and highlight property features. Once you know your goals, you can begin to set specific objectives for your CRE marketing plan. While goals give your marketing efforts direction, objectives will set specific benchmarks for your marketing plan. Objectives for your CRE marketing plan should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-based. Setting SMART CRE marketing objectives will help you stay motivated and allow you to gauge if you successfully executed your marketing plan.

Budgeting

Once you have determined what the focus of your marketing plan will be, you should begin deciding how much money you want to put toward marketing efforts. Deciding on your CRE marketing budget may require some research if you don’t already have an idea of what specific marketing strategies you want to use. Researching the going rates of real estate marketing services will allow you to make a realistic budget and will help you better understand which marketing strategies will be the most cost-effective for your property.

Choose Your Tools

Now that you know what you want to accomplish and generally how much you want to spend, you can decide which marketing tools will help you to best promote your property.  When it comes to CRE marketing, you have a lot of options for marketing strategies. You can run a print campaign, market via social media or add a variety of virtual content to your listing page. The strategies you choose should align with your goals and objectives and stay within the confines of your budget. For example, if one of your goals is to highlight your commercial property’s features, high-quality amenity photos would be a great marketing tool to get you started on achieving that. Check out our post on CRE Marketing Tools for a more in-depth look at marketing strategies that will help you execute your CRE marketing plan.

If you’ve been following along, your CRE marketing plan now has set goals, objectives, a budget and specific marketing strategies that align with them all. With the strong foundation you have created for your marketing plan, you can now put your focus toward implementing your CRE marketing ideas and later measuring their success.

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