Not so long ago, marketing for commercial real estate, particularly brokerage, consisted mainly of sending out press releases and quarterly market reports to local newspapers and trade magazines, along with a few print advertising buys. As the internet has emerged as the dominant avenue for distributing information, options for getting your message out and promoting your brand have increased exponentially.
Social media marketing is now vital to any lead generation and branding strategy and typically less expensive than traditional advertising. According to 2022 HubSpot research, 44% of marketers identified social media as their top channel for acquiring new customers. If done right, social media can target a more focused group of potential customers to deliver optimal results. But with so many platforms to choose from, where should brokerages invest their resources?
Sarah Malcolm, founder and managing director of Quiet Valor, which provides branding and digital marketing services for multiple commercial real estate clients, begins by asking her CRE clients who want to develop a social media strategy this: “Why? What are your goals and objectives? What are you trying to achieve? Because it should never be that you’re just checking the box that you’re ‘doing social media.’”
Malcolm says that what the industry often misses when implementing a social media strategy is that the commercial real estate industry is still a relationship business. And because there has been such a profound shift in how people work post-pandemic, coupled with the subsequent decrease in industry networking events, the question becomes, "How do you build those relationships online?"
“And that’s really the purpose of LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram—and I know this sounds crazy—sometimes even TikTok,” says Malcolm. “It really comes down to ‘What are you trying to achieve? Are you trying to build relationships? Get in front of investors? Lease a property? And once you know that, you have to determine your ‘secret sauce.’ What makes you or your company different from your competitors? Some people have never even thought about that, so it’s really about defining that piece (that’s important).”
The next step is determining how to connect with that target audience via their social media channels. And while Malcolm and other social media experts recommend a multi-pronged strategy (she’s also a staunch advocate of Twitter), the feeling among SIORs and marketing professionals in the industry is that LinkedIn is the clear winner for commercial real estate. HubSpot names LinkedIn as the top social media platform for all B2B marketers—85% of marketers use the channel—and SIORs affirm that it is especially effective for lead generation and branding for commercial real estate.
“What works today may be different tomorrow because it changes so rapidly, but as of right now, I think LinkedIn is probably the most powerful tool from a business strategy standpoint,” asserts Grant Pruitt, SIOR, president and managing director of Dallas-based Whitebox Real Estate. “And if you can include video—people love visuals—that is the most impactful as far as social media influence is concerned.”
Whitebox also uses Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to convey its message and bolster its digital presence via search engine optimization (SEO) “because everything you're doing on the social media platforms is designed to drive traffic back to your website,” says Pruitt. Recently the firm produced a humorous, professionally-produced broker recruitment video for YouTube, “Why Work At Whitebox?” that has garnered hundreds of views. Pruitt expanded its impact by breaking it into 45 to 60-second segments and posting them to the various media channels.
Pruitt uses both organic and “semi-organic” (sponsored) content for social media platforms and says both have their value. “The most impactful content that you're going to get is the searchable, organic content, and for a small firm or a startup, that’s really important,” says Pruitt. He defines organic as “content that someone other than you puts out that links back to you or your website (such as a press piece in a local trade publication) because that’s at the top of the SEO list.” He stresses that sponsored content also has value, particularly for smaller firms trying to create a digital presence.
Everything you're doing on the social media platforms is designed to drive traffic back to your website.
Michael Maroon, SIOR, founding partner of New Jersey-based The Acclaim Group, says his firm doesn't use Twitter or Instagram at all, “but we're very big on LinkedIn. I personally post videos on strategy or the market.” Maroon says he occasionally posts videos of projects that are brief overviews of case studies of projects his firm has completed. But instead of reciting statistics on square footage, lease terms, or pricing, he weaves in more in-depth, impactful metrics, such as how the building design resulted in greater space efficiency and helped drive better collaboration and innovation for his corporate clients, or how the real estate strategy helped the company attract and retain talent.
“I talk to a lot of CEOs to see what’s on their minds, and one of the things they’re talking about is talent retention,” says Maroon. “They’re scared to death of losing highly skilled talent,” so his video posts tend to reflect what is happening in the industry today. He also authors and posts original written articles and reposts and comments on articles from local and national trade publications of interest to his 5,000-plus followers.
Maroon also uses social media posts published by companies on LinkedIn as a prospecting tool for new business. “We are big believers in what we call the ‘second connection theory,’” he says, meaning that if a potential client is a “second connection” on LinkedIn, there’s already a common thread that exists between him and the prospect, rather than an impersonal cold call. “Your odds go up 60 or 70 percent if you know someone they know personally, and the easy way to filter that is on LinkedIn.”
Mark Duclos, SIOR, president of Sentry Commercial in Hartford, Conn., and past president of SIOR Global, says LinkedIn and Twitter are his main social media channels (with an Instagram strategy in the planning stages), but each serves a slightly different function. “We view LinkedIn as our real company branding and look at Twitter as our company voice, where we can get away with a few more things and put our voice to the industry in a way that’s more than just our brand,” says Duclos. The branding and social media strategy for Sentry was crafted by Splendor Design, an advertising, marketing, and web design agency based in New Jersey that Duclos discovered, not surprisingly, on LinkedIn. Sentry partnered with Splendor “about four or five years ago” to create a new website and to re-brand the company, and they now create and distribute content for the firm as well as generating content for use on employees’ personal LinkedIn pages.
What the industry often misses when implementing a social media strategy is that the commercial real estate industry is still a relationship business.
“I think the biggest challenge for anybody in our industry is the amount of time it takes to create content as an individual,” says Duclos. “We collaborate with Splendor on content, and by working with them directly, they get our personality. We don’t want to ‘out-corporate’ corporate America; that’s not our brand. Our brand is small-to-medium sized companies, nimbleness and understanding local markets.”
Splendor built a campaign around that personality and, after developing a new logo and website, came up with the tagline “Start with Someone Who Cares.” From there, they created multiple taglines for each business unit, like “more care per square foot” for brokerage and “more oversight per square foot” for property management.
“Social media was the perfect outlet to get this message across and drive it home, so we started primarily with LinkedIn because that's still where the bulk of the business takes place,” says Adam Taylor, founder and CEO of Splendor Design. “I love LinkedIn for real estate because it's this great platform to talk about your company culture.”
The LinkedIn and Twitter pages and the homepage for Sentry are visually consistent, with all prominently featuring the company logo and “Start with Someone Who Cares” tagline. The content is a mix of market information and company culture. Sentry posts a one-minute company update monthly across all platforms featuring birthdays, work anniversaries, CRE events, holiday greetings, and other non-business-related items, such as congratulating the UConn Huskies on their NCAA basketball championship.
The website is also a wealth of local CRE market information, with a “Market” section posting daily sales, leases, and development deals for the Greater Hartford market, whether the deals involve Sentry or not. It’s all part of being part of a community, according to Duclos.
“Everybody wants to know what the return on investment for social media is,” says Duclos. “Listen, we've done deals directly because of social media, but we don't necessarily participate in social media just to do deals. I don't know what our world would look like without social media, but I know what our world looks like today with social media. I think many other people in the country and the world know about us as a company and our individuals, and understand our brand more than anybody could ever dream of.”
This article was sponsored by the SIOR Foundation - Promoting and sponsoring initiatives that educate, enhance, and expand the commercial real estate community. The SIOR Foundation is a 501(c)(3) not-forprofit organization. All contributions are tax deductible to the extent of the law.
CONTRIBUTING MEMBERS
Mark Duclos, SIOR
Michael Maroon, SIOR
Grant Pruitt, SIOR