Bisnow’s 5 Tips For More Effective CRE Marketing

In the last 10 years, Bisnow has grown from a single e-newsletter sent to one person's personal email address book to the largest CRE media outlet in North America, Canada and the U.K. To build its subscriber base, Bisnow adopted a philosophy: curate events, craft newsletters and create emails that people want to attend, open and click. 

Part art, part science, the ability to effectively engage an audience has become essential for marketers. It is no longer enough to build a broad campaign and rely on anecdotal feedback to determine if it generates any ROI. Marketers are under more pressure than ever before to leverage targeted outreach and tangible lead generation to justify their budget allocations. 

As Bisnow’s creative director and head of growth and development, Miles Bloom has worked to perfect effective audience engagement. In his own words, Bloom shared five tips for marketers looking to generate a higher return on investment for clients.

1. Know Your Objective

When I sit down with clients, one of the first things I discuss with them is finding a real business objective. I ask clients what they want to accomplish, and some common responses include wanting to increase brand awareness or generate traffic to their website. These are not the real goals people are shooting for with their marketing efforts. When I push people to hone in on what they are really trying to accomplish, they realize that they are marketing to bring in more business or to win market share. Those are goals.

You have to start with the end result and work backward from there. Once you know what you are trying to accomplish, whether that is to lease available space in a new office building or promote your commercial loan product, you can hone in on what you want your marketing to do — which is generate leads — and then build out a plan accordingly.

Marketing without a purpose or a defined set of business objectives is almost always a waste of money.

2. Identify Your Audience

In the days of print advertising, marketers would cast a wide net, hoping that a few key people would see an ad. Now, successful campaigns spend money on content that reaches the key people interested in the advertised goods or services.

If a commercial real estate company wants to lease a new property, target brokers and tenants. If a lender wants to promote a new loan product, target borrowers and mortgage brokers.

The more broad, the less effective the content tends to be. This is true even when choosing event sponsorship. Smart marketers do not care as much as they used to about the sheer number of people in the room and the subject matter covered. They want to know the number of event attendees within their target audience. They do not waste a cent on anything that fails to accomplish reaching the right demographic.

Targeted outreach can be as simple as addressing the audience directly in the headline of a branded content article, the advertising copy or the subject line of an email. Marketers can also go as far as to custom-build audience lists around an interest specific to that demographic.

3. Find Your Message

Once a marketer knows their goal and their audience, they need to find their voice. I recommend brainstorming with the top sales producers at the company. The conversation will reveal the information the sales team prioritizes when making a sale, and the tricks they already have for connecting with their audience. 

Successful marketers take advertising plans and put them in the context of what their customer thinks about daily, from legislative changes to rising property values to strategies about increasing net operating income. 

Marketing teams can often be out of sync with what sales reps are saying. Some might focus on a charitable component, for instance. While that is a nice thing for brand appeal, owners and managers, for whom everything has a cost, are not going to buy goods or services based on a company’s charitable actions.

Do not speak in platitudes. What marketers need to find is the differentiator, the value proposition that will make the target audience sit up and pay attention. 

They need to do it quickly, too. If a marketer has someone’s attention for two seconds, then they have to get across their most important message in two seconds.

4. Choose The Best Platform

Finding the most appropriate media outlet starts with an understanding of what a target consumer watches, reads, listens and pays attention to. More than knowing the total subscriber base of a platform, marketers should focus on how many subscribers fall within their target audience. A good media partner generates content that is in line with the customer’s message and reaches a sizable portion of the advertiser’s demographic. 

Brevity plays a role in identifying the best platform for a campaign. People only have so much time, and lengthy white papers and research pieces inundate audiences with information. By breaking up lengthy copy into individual pieces, topics and themes, marketers are able to more effectively reach their target audiences.

I also recommend paying close attention to how the competition spends marketing dollars. 

You do not want to be one of five people offering the same thing at the same event. Pay attention to what your competition is doing and focus on things your competitive landscape is not embracing. 

5. Measure Success  

When digital advertising first entered the conversation, marketers sold clients on the ability to track views and impressions. Marketers have since realized that those measurements are not the most effective way to measure the success of a campaign.  

I often ask people: How do you measure success? They respond, "Oh, that’s the million-dollar question." The truth is, stats and metrics are just one part of the equation.

B2C (business-to-consumer distribution) companies have experimented with selling clients information on not only who is clicking but also what their buying behaviors look like. While the B2B (business-to-business) world is not there yet, every dollar should still be spent on platforms that use data to get advertisers selling as many of their goods and services as possible. Bisnow’s ability to generate leads meets that goal. 

What advertising customers need is a list of leads and the capability to convert those clicks and views into tangible sales activity. If that is not possible, it might be time to rethink that events or media partnership. 

Have questions about how to crack the CRE marketing code? Email Miles Bloom at miles.bloom@bisnow.com to learn more about Bisnow’s approach.