Finding a commercial real estate firm that has the perfect leasing and marketing team for your project can be challenging. With marketing tactics and strategies constantly evolving and changing, it’s crucial to make sure your leasing firm’s marketing team can provide the marketing services your property needs.
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In this article, we help guide you through the most important questions that you should ask your leasing firm about their marketing team.
Questions to Ask About Your Leasing Firm’s Marketing Team
1. Can you describe who makes up your marketing team and what their background and experience include?
It’s important to know what specific roles are on your leasing firm’s marketing team and what their in-house capabilities are.
If the leasing firm outsources a large number of the marketing processes, there could be delays, difficulties in communication, and sometimes added expenses.
A few in-house capabilities to ask about include:
- Designing and printing flyers
- Photography
- Videography
- Drone photography and videography
- Pre-and-post production capabilities
- Virtual tours
- Advertising campaign management
- Website development and maintenance
- Event planning
- Public Relations
- Brand Development
Roles
It’s also important to know what specific roles they have on their team and how they can contribute to your property marketing. Each company will have a different structure with different titles for various responsibilities. At a minimum, you should make sure they have someone leading strategy and someone leading design with a background in property marketing.
Other roles that can benefit your property’s marketing include a market researcher, digital marketer, copywriter and videographer. These responsibilities will likely vary by title, but it’s the expertise and knowledge that will help build thoughtful and successful marketing programs.
Read Next: How to Market a Commercial Property: 7 Essential Tools Your Leasing Firm Should Provide
Outsourcing
While it can be helpful to have all the marketing expertise you need in-house on your leasing firm’s marketing team, it is unlikely (especially if your property has more robust marketing needs). It’s important to hire a leasing team who knows when certain marketing tasks need to be outsourced. Hiring an agency outside your leasing team focused solely on what you need can be a valuable asset.
For example, if your property needs a custom brand or custom-designed website, your leasing team may have to help you hire a branding agency. Having a leasing team with prior experience working and coordinating with agencies can be a big advantage, especially in instances where local knowledge is critical. They will already have relationships and know what will work well for your specific marketing needs.
2. Can the marketing team advise on all marketing aspects from flyers to full branding projects?
Another important question to ask is about the marketing team’s breadth of experience. Do they have the capabilities to complete both big and small marketing initiatives? Can they design a basic flyer to differentiate your project? Have they worked on branding projects? Have they created logos? Can they advise on websites, branding and advertising?
Sometimes a marketing team may not have the technical experience required to build out a full website or launch a large digital advertising campaign, but they may be able to advise you on these initiatives. Guidance and recommendations for these types of projects can be very valuable in navigating a new project’s marketing needs.
Likewise, your firm may not be able to create a full brand for your project, but they should be able to connect you to a local branding agency, advise you on the best practices, and coordinate project communications.
3. What kind of reporting and data analytics can they provide?
If your leasing firm’s marketing team is performing any sort of digital marketing, they should have data and analytics to go along with it to ultimately advise you on what is a worthwhile investment.
If your property has its own website, the marketing team or agency should use Google Analytics (or a different analytics program) to track visitors to your website.
The marketing team should also be able to provide email marketing analytics for any e-blasts sent about your property. But, be aware that due to Apple’s iOS 15 update, open rates and other data from Apple devices may be inaccurate. Having an experienced marketing team can help protect and guide you when updates like this occur.
If the marketing team runs any digital advertising campaigns for your property, they should provide the results of the advertising initiatives. Although these data points may vary based on the digital advertising platform, you should receive analytics related to clicks, impressions, and click-through rate at a minimum. If there are other specific data points you want, they should be able to provide them if it is tracked by the advertiser’s platform.
4. How familiar are they with local organizations, press contacts, vendors, and the local community in general?
Having a marketing team and a leasing team familiar with the local community is extremely important. This will help promote your property to the businesses in the area and efficiently inform the public about your property.
A local marketing team will have press contacts at local news and business organizations, ensuring your property’s milestones get news coverage.
They will also likely have contacts at local charitable and non-profit organizations. This may help you find opportunities to get involved in the community, sponsor an event, or advertise with a local organization.
It’s also important and helpful to engage a team with local relationships with vendors to help elevate your project. It can be advantageous to partner with local vendors when it comes to branding, renderings and more. People who know the local culture and community well will be able to give your property the edge it needs to compete above other properties and also potentially save time and resources trying to understand a new market’s value differentiators
5. How does your marketing team stay up-to-date on marketing trends?
Marketing trends move fast and staying up to date can be an integral part of any marketing team’s success. Beyond a marketing team’s current capabilities, you need to understand how it invests in keeping up with trends, social media algorithm updates, and educates itself on best practices. Does the team attend conferences?
Can they tell you what type of updates Google Analytics intends to roll out in the next year? Can they advise you on design trends? A lot of marketing tasks go on behind the scenes and it’s important to understand your chosen marketing team invests time and resources into staying relevant and ahead of the curve.
Conclusion
The marketing landscape for commercial real estate has changed drastically in the last decade. More resources are invested each year into property marketing to differentiate and retain current tenants and recruit new ones. Now more than ever, it’s important to understand how a marketing team can contribute to making your marketing efforts a success.
