Goals are set, budgets are approved and now all that is left is to close deals. But what do you do if your conversion rate is lower than expected? We put together 7 proven ways to increase your close rate using brand awareness specifically for the commercial real estate industry.
Who should read this guide? Anyone doing business within the commercial real estate industry. Not only CRE brokers and agents, developers and contractors but also service providers, property managers, and technology firms.
Evaluate Your Branding
Before constructing a plan to bolster and improve your branding, your business first needs to evaluate its current branding. This means looking at the customer-facing elements of your business and assessing a number of factors. So, what are elements of your brand that your customers see? In the book, Rework, the authors say it best: “Marketing is not a department. Marketing is something everyone in your company is doing 24/7/365.”1 Your brand is everywhere, from the people who answer the phone, to the goods and services you produce.
Evaluate your branding for consistency across all channels, including:
Website & website content
Social media
Advertisements
Print collateral
Promotional emails
Staff email signatures
Physical locations
These essential elements are used by almost every business, regardless of size, and may be already used by your brand. But this is the content that makes up your branding that you need to analyze when evaluating your brand. Some of the factors to consider with branding are:
Brand tone, personality or voice: What sort of language does your brand use in your messaging? What branding is more formal and what is more casual? How does the tone or voice of a piece of branding reflect the goals of your brand? Some traits to consider (and you can pair up traits however you want; it’s about identifying the persona that your brand presents to prospective clients and partners):
Informative vs authoritative
Playful vs sarcastic
Clever vs serious
Blunt vs motivational
Straightforward vs upbeat
Intellectual vs inspiring
Factual vs cheeky
Traditional vs dreamy
Mature vs startup
Conversational vs polished
Conservative vs edgy
… and so on, and so on
Images and graphic design: Are elements of your brand instantly recognizable through familiar images or graphics? Do you consistently use the same colors across all of your branding? For your marketing and sales teams, provide guidelines for dos and don’ts with images and graphics. For even more consistency across your brand, consider hiring a graphic designer who specializes in brand development. Whether they’re full-time or in a contracted position, they can serve as the gatekeeper of your images, logos and graphics to ensure consistency.
Logo: The instantly recognizable element of your brand should just be that. As the first thing any potential customer is likely to see about your brand, your logo should push forward a message and always be present across all of your branding.
Taglines and slogans: Create short, memorable snippets that represent your brand and communicate who you are. This could be a great exercise for an AI content creation tool. Provide the prompt similar to this: “I need 20 suggestions for taglines for a commercial building painter who specializes in warehouses and light industrial facilities. The company is family owned. The company's name is Central Commercial Painters and Pressure Washing.”
Here’s what we got when we ran it through ChatGPT:
"Bringing Warehouses to Life with Color"
"Transforming Warehouses, One Brushstroke at a Time"
"Quality Painting for Your Industrial Space"
"Where Precision Meets Paint"
"Your Warehouse, Our Canvas"
"Adding Value, One Warehouse at a Time"
"Coating Warehouses with Excellence"
"Family-Owned, Industry-Approved"
"Your Business, Our Brushwork"
"Elevate Your Workspace with Central Commercial"
"Warehouses Reimagined, Crafted with Care"
"Bringing Colorful Solutions to Industrial Spaces"
"The Artistry of Warehouse Painting"
"Your Trusted Partner in Industrial Painting"
"We Paint Warehouses, You Create Success"
"Crafting the Perfect Industrial Aesthetics"
"Precision Paintwork for Industrial Excellence"
"Unlock the True Potential of Your Warehouse"
"Industrial Painting, Family-Style"
"Elevating Warehouses, One Coat at a Time"
With some of these elements in mind, you can start to understand where your branding may be deficient. If you’re lacking an essential element of branding, or your branding isn’t consistent across all of your current channels, any future changes you make will be held back by these foundational problems. Before you improve your branding, you need to make sure that you have a brand.
Promote Your Brand Through Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most effective strategies for getting your CRE brand in front of another business. On average, email drives an ROI of $36 for every dollar spent.2 But, of course, an increase in conversion rates is never guaranteed. A lot of factors go into crafting and optimizing a marketing email. Here are some quick tips for promoting your brand through email marketing:
Stay mobile-friendly: Many emails are read on smartphones and other mobile devices. If an email is illegible or not formatted to work with mobile devices, it will likely be ignored or deleted.
Compelling subject line: First impressions are incredibly important, and the subject line of an email is usually just that. Your subject line should be relevant to your brand, attention grabbing, and encouraging a lead to open the email and get more information. Again, this is a potential use for your favorite AI tool, whether it’s ChatGPT, Bard or another one of the many emerging technologies.
Effective CTA: A CTA, or call to action, is what your email is encouraging a prospect to do. It may seem obvious, as you just want them to make a purchase, complete a form or sign up for a demo. But that might be too big of an ask for an email message. Instead, gently nudge them to your website to get more information about your brand and properties.
Personalized to customer needs: What data do you have about the customers you’re sending emails to? What are their industries or locations? Receiving emails relevant to a business’ needs can be incredibly valuable for making a sale. This is where Biscred can provide you the competitive edge you need. But, we’re jumping ahead of ourselves. Turn to the last section in this guide to learn more about how Biscred can help you contact the right CRE prospects at the right time.
Promote Brand Through Newsletter Ads
Newsletters are an effective method for commercial real estate brands in particular for generating new leads. A newsletter is a source of news that people subscribe to for relevant to their industry or interest. A newsletter may send a weekly email to its subscribers that also contains advertisements from brands. Commercial real estate newsletters, such as Bisnow exist for news, events, solutions, and services related to CRE. Marketing your brand through such newsletters can tap into new audiences and generate completely new leads for your business. Additionally, CRE newsletters have an audience that’s already interested in CRE opportunities and your ad will be more relevant to their interests.
Sponsored Content
The aforementioned newsletters will sometimes have opportunities for sponsored content, but there are many other examples of sponsored content to consider:
Sponsored social media posts, such as LinkedIn native advertising. These go beyond display ads and include helpful, entertaining or informative content, like this readable guide from Mailchimp.
Guest posts on business-to-business sites, such as this one from Goodman-Gable-Gold on Bisnow:
Infographics are popular ways to share sponsored but incredibly informative content. They can be large poster-size infographics packed with relevant data, or they can be micro-infographics, containing a single point of data.
Other formats to consider for sponsored content include:
Videos
Podcasts
Reels and shorts
Listicles (think “best” lists, for example)
With sponsored content, the publisher (LinkedIn, Bisnow, NYTimes, and industry blogs) works with a brand to create a piece of content that’s informative, useful, and beneficial to both companies. Brands will generally pay to have their business mentioned in an article or other piece of content. Typically there is a SPONSORED disclosure somewhere near the headline. Sponsored content differs from traditional advertising, because its intent is more to help rather than to sell. It’s less obtrusive than an advertisement demanding that someone makes a purchase.
Leverage Social Media to Position Your Brand’s Expertise
As a more organic form of brand awareness, social media can be easy to pick up but difficult to master. Social media has a very wide reach and can be an excellent way to cheaply advertise a business. However, without an effective strategy and use of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques, any content that you create on social media will struggle to get off the ground.
By effective SEO techniques, we mean using the correct keywords, images, and informative content that’s compelling to your audience. This also means optimizing these key elements for the audience that you’re targeting with your CRE brand. For B2B commercial real estate companies, the leading social media channel has been and will continue to be LinkedIn.
To this end, Biscred’s online platform can assist with identifying a businesses and individuals who work in your target industries. You’ll have contact information for more than 443,000 decision makers and influencers at over 192,000 (and growing) companies in CRE within the United States.
Master Retargeting, Especially on LinkedIn
Remarketing is the strategy of pushing targeted advertisements at leads that have already interacted with a brand in some way. This means that if a lead searches for a product or service similar to your business, or at some point visited your brand’s website, they’ll later receive a targeted advertisement to your brand.
LinkedIn, in particular, is a powerful avenue for retargeting advertisements in the LinkedIn Ads platform. LinkedIn Ads has a lot of excellent capabilities, such as allowing you to create a target audience profile that’s accurate to your customer profiles. Additionally, you can utilize LinkedIn’s Insight Tag to learn more about the potential leads that visit your website. LinkedIn Ads also lets your brand retarget advertisements by a number of different factors besides just website visitors. If you want to retarget an advertisement based on their engagement with a specific event, company page they visited, or video they watched, you can easily make an audience profile based on these factors.
Create Value Beyond Your Brand
Who are your current customers? What is your audience? What are their needs and goals? The lead generation content that you craft should be connected to the key information that you have about your audience. In other words, what are your customer profiles? Aligning your content with who your customers actually are will create value beyond lead generation.
Intangible value may seem just that, intangible. However, it can have relevant effects on how customers perceive and understand your brand. This can be thought of as your brand’s positioning. Remember that when a customer makes a sale with your brand, they consider far more than just the transactional, monetary value. They also perceive the value of your brand as a whole. This perception may include:
Your customer communication channels
Fluidity of the purchasing process
How your brand responds to customer feedback
Customer service
Past marketing campaigns
Your brand’s background and story
Content that you’ve created
Social media presence
With so much to consider with your brand’s value, consider some of these companies that focus on creating value beyond the brand.
Uber - Uber positions their brand as focused on safety, accessibility, and diversity on a global scale. Uber’s services go beyond the driving services they’re focused on. They act as a mass employer, food service provider (Uber Eats), and private driver service (UberX). Uber identified these key areas that are valuable to their customers and expanded their business to meet these needs. Additionally, Uber positioned their brand to focus on the key concerns that customers may have with a driving service.
Slack - Workspace software slack is focused on improving workplace productivity across any industry. Slack positions itself as working with just about any application or tool that a company may use while still being extremely easy to pick up and use. For inspiration on how Slack positions itself to be so widely accessible, look towards their customer stories page.
Zillow - As a one-stop website for home buying, renting, and selling, Zillow navigates the difficult challenge of simplifying a notoriously complicated process. One method that they utilize is Zillow Learn, a learning center for everything their customers need to know about home ownership. Targeting organic searches, these learning articles also address current events and tips for navigating the current real estate climate
About Biscred
Biscred is not just another CRE software tool. It's a prospecting platform that makes CRE-specific data accessible for sales and marketing teams in industries such as proptech, insurance, architecture, design, engineering, services and material providers, and all industries looking to work with CRE. The platform merges people-level data with industry-specific information, such as industry classification, asset class and job function.
A user looking for CRE contacts and information can log into Biscred to search for industry professionals and information on companies both large and small to find new prospects and create lists with key contact information.
Beyond searching for people and company names, users can filter to search for someone with a specific level of seniority, experience in a certain asset class or located in a certain state or region of the county. For example, select “vice presidents within acquisition departments with multifamily experience in the Northeast” and see a comprehensive list of contacts.
At the heart of Biscred is a combination of targeted research and machine intelligence. The team leveraged Bisnow’s vast network of CRE professionals and its extensive database, encompassing 14 years' worth of categorized, validated and organized information on one platform. Biscred is currently home to millions of data points, with approximately 10K contacts added and validated every week. The database focuses all of this information into seven key data points that go to market teams need to sell their products to CRE professionals: name, contact info, title, industry, asset class, and geography.
If you're ready to ditch lead generation platforms and find out how data research and machine learning can up your business development, schedule a demo here.