Commercial Agents – Tips for Advertising Commercial Property on the Internet

When it comes to advertising your commercial property listing on the Internet, the strategy you adopt is really important given that many other properties will be similarly listed in the same general location or suburb. In other words each listed property has to be individually optimised for the internet advertising process. If you want enquiry from your marketing efforts on the internet, then you have no choice.

The Internet is one of the most convenient and effective ways to advertise commercial and retail property today. It is cost effective and conveniently accessed by the people looking to buy or lease property. Just about every property that is available for sale or lease will be placed on the Internet, so you have some competition to handle and position against.

In any given suburbs and for any property type you are likely to have 50 or more properties competing against you as the salesperson or property owner promoting the property; sometimes (and in the case of CBD or capital city property) this number is even more difficult.

The numbers can be stacked against you as the marketer of property. This is where the expertise and experience of the commercial agent becomes crucial to the marketing and promotion process.

Today you can simply not advertise the property and hope that the results will come in the door or a cross the telephone. You need to think about the Internet Marketing process as it applies to the particular property listing and then you need to apply particular processes and strategies.

Here are some ideas to help you:

• List your property on industry based websites that are well accepted and proven promoters of commercial property. Get some statistics from each of the website portals to understand their positioning and results on the search engines.
• Design the adverts for the property around the relevant features, improvements, and location. To achieve this, you really do need to understand the target market that will be attracted to the property. The advertising needs to be appointed to the target market in a way in which interest can be optimised.
• Use keywords within the property advertisement that are used currently in accessing properties through the search engines. You can do a keyword search with most of the search engines to understand the types of enquiries that are being made currently.
• You can pay for priority placement in some of the search engines and commercial property website portals. This comes at a premium but is very relevant for quality properties.
• Send out emails to your database and prospects, with links to the particular property advert on the internet. There are some good software packages available that do this very well. Track the opens and the hits on the email.
• Break the advert down into simple form and presentation. Dot points that feature the attractive aspects of the property should be used in preference to the long and drawn-out sentences that we have seen in the past.
• They say a picture is worth 1000 words. When it comes to property advertising, the observation is relevant and a real. As part of your marketing campaign, get some professionally prepared photographs of the property taken at the best times of day. One or two photographs should appear at the top of your advertising.
• Develop a caption to place consistently across all the advertising material. The caption should be relevant to the target market and attract interest.
• Make it easy for people to contact you to make further enquiries. It is questionable whether the address of the property should be placed on the advertisement. This can sometimes lead to lost enquiry not reaching the agency. In simple terms you want people to ring you. When they make contact, you can optimise the enquiry and qualify the inspection.
• The method of marketing and advertising on the Internet should be optimised for the first three or four weeks of the advertising campaign. It is a proven fact that most enquiry with most property types come to you during this period. It is also a known fact that most people tend to review properties listed on the Internet between the days of Wednesday and Saturday in each week. If you track your website hits, you will likely see that this is a proven fact.
• Every property listed on the Internet should have the page hits tracked from the start of the campaign. In this way you will know how a particular property is comparing to others that you have listed. If you cannot see reasonable improvement in Internet hits from the start of the campaign, then you should review the advertising for different wordage and placement.

As a permanent and long-term strategy for your personal Internet profile, it is best that you write industry based articles about your property type specialty and location, and then place them on a personal blog. Providing you adopt this strategy regularly, you will find that the personal profile of your name and property specialty will improve. This will have benefits across all the search engines and potentially lift the levels of enquiry you get from the Internet.