Accessing Your Audience Everywhere, All at Once

Connections and timing are common denominators in driving commercial real estate deals. Accessing your network with the right message at the right time is a balancing act in generating interest in a property.

For leasing and marketing teams, pinpointing that perfect moment to engage is sometimes challenging. There’s no formula to follow because every prospect is different. Every tenant’s leasing journey, from discovering a space to signing on the dotted line, is entirely unique.

In the digital age of communication, that perfect moment is fleeting. Attention spans are shorter, and research for space is more comprehensive. By understanding how tenant prospects are introduced to space and identifying which aspects will be most important to them and their employees, you build a compelling case to lease your asset. In this article, CBRE Calibre Creative Group explores engagement strategies that will enable you to reach an audience consistently once that case is made.

Put yourself in the prospect’s (and their broker’s) shoes.

Say you’re looking for office space. How do you find it? More importantly, where do you spend most of your time researching online? Those are the million-dollar questions property marketing teams must answer before developing a marketing strategy and budget.

How your future tenants discover commercial space varies. Relying on one channel and traditional marketing tactics won’t move the needle in 2025. You must put yourself in the prospect’s shoes and understand their current interests and behaviors before deciding where to invest your budget. Additionally, Tenant Representatives will curate a “shortlist” of options to help expedite the search process. The more dialed in you are about what differentiates your asset and the diversity of channels a prospect uses throughout their journey, the greater the chances your asset makes the list.

Building demand starts with data.

In commercial real estate, data is leveraged to educate tenant prospects on a location’s viability and potential to the end user. CBRE connects and transforms this real estate data at scale, embedding analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) into the very core of a client’s real estate strategy and related business processes, so they can realize trusted insight and augmented intelligence across their businesses. Data has also become currency in the arms race to differentiate in property marketing.

Google and Apple are currently phasing out third-party cookies, pushing companies to focus on their zero- and first-party data for actionable insights. When a digital ad or email campaign drives traffic to a property website, it creates a wealth of first-party data about your target audience. After the transaction, zero-party data reveals valuable information about the end customer. Like a "Trophy" distinction within Class-A properties, zero-party data is now viewed as a class above the rest.

Securely collecting, analyzing, and interpreting all property marketing data will uncover what prospects are interested in and what they might do next. According to an April 2024 study by Forrester Research and Acoustic, 75 percent of global marketing decision-makers said collecting real-time experience data is “important or critical to their business,” but less than 50 percent said they are collecting it. Fully leveraging data is how brokerage teams can differentiate in a competitive marketplace.

Personalize your property promotions.

Consumers have been shown to prefer personalized experiences, and property marketers can adopt this approach to stay ahead of the curve. Personalization in property marketing might mean using data to understand your target audience on a deeper level, curating promotions with the end user in mind, crafting messaging that speaks like a company’s brand voice, and helping them visualize what it looks and feels like to be in that space.

Apply that approach to any marketing channel, and greater outcomes will be achieved. According to a McKinsey & Company research study, companies that “excelled” at personalization realized 40 percent more revenue than those with “average” capabilities. The same survey showed that 76 percent of consumers said personalized promotions were a primary factor in their consideration of a brand. Not all brands and marketing platforms are made equal, though. Knowing how your target audience engages on these channels and, more importantly, their intent when they get there is crucial to success.

LinkedIn is a high-intent channel for the commercial real estate audience and B2B businesses. Brokers can grow their professional profiles, expand their networks, and activate a property page to generate high-quality leads. Seeing a property ad feels more natural because users are there to consume and share news about their industries and companies. Conversely, Facebook is a place to share personal updates and connect with friends and family. Consider it a low-intent platform better for B2C businesses as users are more inclined to purchase items impulsively. An office building in Manhattan is not an impulse decision. Your ad dollars are better spent on channels where decision-makers in the leasing process spend the most time searching for space and growing their businesses.

Adopt an “always-on” approach to advertising.

Awareness in the marketplace can’t be achieved overnight. Leasing a property requires a significant decision-making process, and any level of online virality is unlikely to lead to a signed deal. Therefore, property marketers should consider nurturing their prospects longer, on multiple channels, to effectively inform them of a space’s key differentiators.

Digital advertising streamlines this process and lets you target and educate an audience on a property’s best qualities. Simply put, it improves a property’s chances of being noticed at that perfect moment. You don’t want to miss a prospect when they decide to log on and research space. By investing in long-term, "always-on" digital campaigns driven by data, property marketers can consistently reach prospects throughout their search for space.