How Email Marketing Builds Brand Awareness in the CRE Niche

Email marketing can serve many purposes, including promoting products or services, generating leads, building relationships and more. It can also be used as a tool to build your brand awareness and grow your network within the commercial real estate space. 

When we talk about brand awareness in marketing, we tend to think about consumer brands — think Apple, Microsoft, Home Depot, Ikea, Lego, Disney — those brands that are household names. For B2B marketing, it’s less about becoming a household name and more about associating your brand with what you do and how you can serve other CRE businesses.

Benefits of Email Marketing & Brand Identity

Five advantages of using this approach in commercial real estate include:

1. Communicating what you do 

2. Standing out among competitors 

3. Demonstrating thought leadership and expertise

4. Building trust and credibility

5. Improving sales conversion rates

For this article, we are going to use a fictitious nationwide commercial cleaning business that we’ve dubbed SparklePro Commercial Cleaning Services. But the principles that we present could be applied to any business within the CRE space: architects, designers and engineers; builders and developers; brokers; owners and investors; property managers; professional service providers; and suppliers.

6 Ways to Align Email Marketing With Your Brand

We’ve numbered these “steps,” but they aren’t sequential steps. In fact, the first point — brand consistency across all channels — is something you, as a marketing professional, do as a regular part of your job. This of this more as a checklist for best practices when building your email marketing strategy with a focus on brand awareness.

1. Make sure your brand is consistent across all channels

   Consistent omnichannel brand messaging means you present your brand tone, image, and voice across all channels, platforms, and promotional materials. For example, a fictitious nationwide cleaning company called SparklePro Commercial Cleaning Services, would make sure all of their messaging is consistently supported across its website, social media accounts, advertising campaigns, and, of course, email marketing. 

   • Graphics/images: For example, before and after images highlighting the transformation of the space, eco-focused logo that includes water droplets

   • Tagline: “Where Cleanliness Meets Perfection”

   • Mission statement: To provide exceptional, eco-friendly cleaning services that ensure a spotless and healthy environment for every client.

   • Core values: Quality, Trust, Sustainability, Customer Satisfaction
     

2. Build your CRE lead list

   This is where we shamelessly promote Biscred as a way to enhance your existing list of contacts and lead lists, as well as find new prospects in the markets where you want to grow. We’ve written extensively about how Biscred works, and we’ll include links to those articles below. In short, it enhances your existing company and people data, and it connects you with over 331,000 companies and 1.3 million professionals in commercial real estate. 

   We’ve built in several ways to filter our database, including geography, company size, level of experience, asset experience (retail, industrial, etc.), and company industries (developer, property manager, REIT, etc.).  

   • How Biscred got started (14 years of data)

   • How Biscred approaches data

   • How Biscred helps you find CRE leads (using the example of commercial construction leads)

   • Biscred product
     

3. Segment your CRE contact list 

   Segment your contacts into two (if not more) categories: base tier and top tier. The base tier contains contacts with whom you’ve had minimal to no contact with. They’re prospects you gleaned through Biscred’s prospecting platform or through other means. With these base-tier contacts, you’ll use automated workflows, with the goal to convert prospects into leads. 

   For your top-tier leads, personalized your brand experience in your email workflows. Tailor emails to create a personalized connection with recipients. We’ve crafted three lead-generation email templates for CRE businesses.

   To learn more about the tiered approach to CRE outreach, read our CRE case study with John Gitman from BridgeInvest. He explains how his firm dedicates more resources to top-tier or high-touch leads. 
   

4. Automate email workflows for lower tier CRE prospects

   Consistent communication with your audience and regular email touchpoints will reinforce your brand messages and values. If you are new to email marketing, you may be interested in our post on how to avoid email going to spam. 

   Your email workflows should be a mix of helpful, non-selling content and promotional content. There is no best-practice rule for how much, but to start, try following an 80/20 rule where 80% of your email marketing is helpful content and 20% is promotional.

   Using our national commercial cleaning example, SparklePro, their 80% helpful content might include information about sustainability trends in cleaning products, a cleaning checklist for medical offices, why professional office cleaning is safer, and best practices for tile and grout maintenance. Their 20% promotional content might include a post about the company’s values, a new client offer, referral incentives, and targeted messages to various properties highlighting areas of specialty (medical, construction, life sciences, financial, etc.).  
   

5. Craft a more hands-on outreach strategy for higher tier leads

   Your high-tier leads are those with whom you’ve had regular contact or personal interaction, such as people you had conversations with at a CRE event like a conference, expo or local networking event. High-tier leads would also include companies or individuals who were personally referred to you by existing clients or customers. 

   Personalize post-event emails by referring to topics you discussed or sharing what you’ve learned about them or their company.

   Take a more personal approach to outreach to high-tier leads, to show sincerity and to reaffirm your brand, as well as how a business relationship could be mutually beneficial. Always close with an invitation to meet — when is a good time to jump on a call or, if you’re in the same area, to meet in person for lunch or coffee. 
   

6. Measure brand awareness 

   The following are metrics commonly used in brand marketing to measure (directly and indirectly) brand awareness:

   • Social engagement: These include metrics such as likes, shares, follows, and mentions (good or bad). 

   • Impressions: This is a Google Search metric that estimates if your web pages show up in search results and in what position.

   • Monthly search volume: Several tools will estimate branded keywords that include branded search mentions; among the tools are SEMRush, Keywords Everywhere, and The Hoth (those are just a few examples). 

   • Mentions: A number of tools exist that track online brand mentions, and some of the more sophisticated ones use algorithms to measure sentiment as well. Google Alerts is a free tool that emails you when your brand (or your competitor’s) is mentioned. To explore more tools, search for “brand monitoring tools.” 

   • Website traffic: Get to know how to use Google’s analytics tools to track your website traffic, especially organic search results. Google breaks traffic sources into type, including organic, email, paid, social media, and direct. The steps are too extensive to explain here, but a good place to start is Grow With Google. 

   • Backlinks: When another site links to your site, that’s a signal of brand awareness. It indicates that someone found your content worthy of being shared. The best backlinks to your site are any that search engines, especially Google, value. Those would include sites that are relevant to your business, well-established industry trade publications, and government and educational sites. 

Learn more about Biscred

To learn more about how Biscred can help you find commercial real estate and CRE-adjacent companies to build out your lead list, schedule a demo. We aren’t into high-pressure sales, but we love to show off our product and “talk shop.” 

ID 82808432 | Brand Awareness | Suthisa Kaewkajang | Dreamstime.com