Every commercial real estate brokerage’s success hinges on its pipeline. So long as you can maintain a healthy flow of high-quality leads (and have talented brokers to work them), you’ll generate enough revenue to thrive.
But, as every CRE marketer knows, it’s not as easy as it sounds. To keep your pipeline full, you have to deploy effective and scalable CRE marketing strategies. And as consumer habits have evolved and the majority of the buyer’s journey has shifted online, it’s become even more challenging to attract and nurture the right leads.
Over the past two decades, there’s been an explosion and fragmentation of media platforms. With so many things vying for peoples’ attention online—thanks to the insatiable demand and never-ending supply of fresh content—it’s easy for your message to get lost in the noise.
It’s no wonder so many marketing professionals are feeling overwhelmed. How can you possibly keep up?
This is where commercial real estate marketing automation shines, but many marketers are worried these technologies will leave them without a job.
Are these fears valid? And what, exactly, can CRE marketing automation accomplish? In this post, we’re addressing all of the above.
CRE marketing automation is a type of software that helps marketing departments work more efficiently and effectively by taking over tedious, repetitive tasks. For example, it enables CRE brokers and marketers to maximize listings’ exposure via a broad array of channels without increasing their workload and overhead. Instead of manually entering listing data to several different websites and platforms, the software can instantly publish it to dozens of places.
By eliminating the manual work required to scale marketing efforts, automation streamlines workflows and frees up marketers’ time for more strategic, high-level tasks. In other words, it handles the busy work while you focus on the creative and human elements of marketing.
To be effective in today’s market, your brokerage must excel in a wide range of digital and traditional marketing efforts.
This encompasses everything from building and maintaining websites and email programs to managing social media accounts and creating and launching digital ad campaigns. Plus, you have to produce and publish videos, blog posts, and high-resolution imagery, handle direct mail efforts, coordinate showings, prepare physical brochures and documents, and more.
And every year, the list of marketing duties seems to grow.
This is a colossal amount of work, even for a large team of marketing professionals. But, according to our 2022 DNA of CRE report, nearly half of CRE marketers work alone or with only one other marketer. And a whopping 50% of brokers are solely responsible for marketing their own listings.
And you can’t simply opt out of a marketing channel without significantly limiting your potential and losing leads to competitors that are dominating those spaces. Failing to cover all your bases could negatively impact offers or occupancy for clients’ properties.
Today, the demand placed on marketers significantly exceeds reasonable expectations. And there’s no way brokers can find time to manage even a fraction of the necessary marketing duties without losing vital time with existing clients. But CRE marketing software helps overcome these hurdles and helps brokerages increase their marketing success.
With a solution like Buildout Marketing, you can offload manual tasks and save countless hours of work. For example, you can enter listing data once and instantly update it across your website, emails, proposals, third-party listings, and marketing materials. You can also automatically generate professional-looking property websites with lead capture forms and create multi or single-property promotional emails in seconds.
While learning about sophisticated CRE marketing tech can be exciting, it can also be nerve-wracking. After all, can this software do marketing tasks so well that it’ll leave marketers out of work?
The answer is: absolutely not.
If you consider other industries that are further ahead in adopting automation tech, you’ll see this type of software helps marketers work smarter, not harder, and allows them to focus on more meaningful work. Leveraging automation frees up your time to focus on creating innovative campaigns, growing your skill set, and enjoying a healthier work-life balance.
Despite automation, the demand for marketers is growing, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a 10% annual growth in marketing jobs through 2030. As marketing becomes more critical to achieving revenue goals, business leaders invest more in scaling marketing teams.
The bottom line is, by avoiding commercial real estate marketing software out of fear, you jeopardize your long-term results and risk being left in the dust by your competition. But choosing to adopt automation today will help you spend your time more wisely and ensure you have a healthy pipeline well into the future.
Learn more about how Buildout marketing can help you save time, close more deals, and boost your bottom line. Schedule a demo today!
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