When committing to a new digital marketing strategy, commercial real estate marketers should be wary of a few things. With the overcrowded markets and constant construction in major metropolitan areas, it’s difficult to know how to distinguish your property.
When the strategies being adopted are nontraditional, it’s hard for marketing veterans to understand how they add value.
What most in the commercial real estate industry fail to realize is that digital marketing actually offers more measurable value than traditional methods. Traditional methods bring prospects and residents at largely unknown rates, whereas inbound marketing offers measurable results.
In fact, inbound marketing offers three times more leads per dollar than traditional methods, and inbound leads cost 61 percent less on average. This form of data intelligence is one of the many values that a digital marketing method like inbound offers CRE marketers.
An Integrated and Informed Solution
Perhaps the biggest benefit of digital marketing is the ability to track everything. Traditional marketing material printed and displayed cannot always track how many people saw your billboard or looked at your mailer. However, digital marketing tactics can provide this information with the ability to set goals that produce measurable insights.
Tools like Google Analytics and HubSpot offer data on website visits or what pages they looked at. Email marketing platforms can tell you who opened your email and which links were clicked on most. And social media can give you the reach of both organic posts and paid advertisements. The world of analytics in the realm of inbound marketing is deep. It is just a matter of keeping up with that data.
Maximizing the Educational Experience
Consider a commercial office space marketer trying to lease up a workspace in a renovated building. Looking at digital efforts independently, they could know the percentage of traffic on the leasing page that came from social media versus referral sites versus organic searches. However, an inbound approach further emphasizes the integration of a variety of marketing methods to maximize the educational experience of a prospect.
For example, a well-planned social media post might lead to a blog that has a call-to-action, that then leads to an offer describing the benefits of working downtown. By emailing the prospect after they download the offer, they’re given information on what to look for in an office space. Continued follow-ups via email might ultimately lead to a lease.
Using Data and Analytics to Optimize Results
Digital marketing can also pull data and analytics to understand the interactions at each point. An inbound marketer can figure out how many people who saw that social media post chose to click on the link. On average, they can tell how long people spent reading that blog and how many people on that blog clicked on the call-to-action feature. Insights like these allow marketers to make changes where necessary.
This is an underappreciated value of inbound marketing. The ability to regularly track and offer such insights in the conversion funnel allows marketers to better optimize their efforts. Businesses can save large amounts of time and money by ensuring their marketing strategy is always on track and that goals are within reach. Per HubSpot, the less a business knows their key performance indicators, the less likely they will be to meet revenue goals. Therefore, with this “track, test, and re-test” approach, properties using inbound are certain to know and meet their vital goals.
Supporting the Numbers
While marketers in their daily life may care more about achieving goals efficiently, most executives care about the numbers. This is another area where inbound marketing offers strong value to commercial real estate marketers. Calculating ROI, cost per lead, and customer acquisition cost is simple when using inbound methods, as the data can be tracked easily.
Consider cost per lead: It’s as simple as knowing your marketing spend and dividing it by total leads.
Cost per lead (CPL) = Total Marketing Spend / Total Leads
If you want to understand your cost down the pipeline, you dive deeper, calculating the cost per qualified lead. To do so, you would just need to divide your spend by the number of leads classified at each point. Remember how we mentioned earlier that inbound leads cost 61 percent less on average? This is how marketers can prove that number.
For marketers looking for more comprehensive numbers, cost per customer acquisition can show the value of each customer brought in. For this, you simply divide spend by amount of customers. The value of customer acquisition cost is its use in calculating overall ROI. This, along with lifetime value (Annual Spend on Product or Service by the Customer * Expected life of customer), can help you come up with the ROI number your CFO desires.
ROI=( Lifetime Value – Cost Per Customer Acquisition)/ Lifetime Value
This number is key to gaining support for your efforts.
An All-Encompassing Solution
It can be tempting for marketers to rely on the world of traditional advertising. For so long, our lives have been surrounded by intriguing commercials, radio ads, and billboards, making the world of digital seem unfamiliar.
However, digital marketing efforts like inbound offer a true measurable ROI that is often absent from more traditional methods. With this, commercial real estate marketers can ensure that their efforts are consistent and effective.
