Making a positive first impression on prospective clients and maintaining investor and tenant interest are key objectives for a commercial real estate (CRE) professional. If they were looking for commercial premises, they would only consider your firm. You can guess the compelling reasons for having a digital presence.
To do this, having a strong online presence is crucial, since consumers nowadays expect to be able to get the information they need in an interesting and user-friendly manner. You’re undoubtedly losing out on business if your commercial real estate firm doesn’t have a professionally designed and user-friendly website.
Making the effort to have a strong online presence can boost your reputation and give the impression that your CRE firm is cutting-edge. Having the appropriate websites and emails can help customers find and remember your ads. Additionally, a well-designed, user-friendly online presence increases your credibility with renters and investors. There is much to be said about the return on investment (ROI) that your business can get by focusing on building its brand online.
Importance Of A Digital Presence
1. Increase The Size Of Your Audience
Expanding your audience is one of the compelling reasons for having a digital presence. The epidemic has compelled most people to embrace the virtual world in new ways, even if digital natives have inevitably become older and become the majority in recent years.
Nowadays, most people spend most of their time online, whether it be for social media updates, working from home, purchasing groceries and meals, obtaining a wide variety of essentials, or engaging in video conversations with friends. People who previously would have been reluctant to do certain transactions online are being forced to learn digital technology at a very rapid pace.
In every aspect of life, including commercial real estate, these experiences create a sense of convenience and comfort with a new virtual way of doing things. Now is your chance to take advantage of this new captive audience where they are most likely to be found—in front of their screens.
2. Extend Your Reach
Businesses are also reconsidering their headquarters and workspaces. Workers are dispersed across the world, doing remote work from home offices situated far from their employers’ headquarters. Traditional hotspots for certain sectors are shifting as businesses that used to flock to particular towns or regions discover they have more flexibility in terms of where they might locate themselves.
Because of this, your target audience may come from much further away and have different needs than in the past. As a result, maintaining a strong online presence is essential to drawing in new customers and adapting to shifting market trends.
By broadening your products and adjusting your presentations to appeal to a wider range of prospects, improving your digital presence today will provide you with the freedom and flexibility to take advantage of new possibilities as they present themselves.
3. Having An Excellent First Impression
One of the reasons why you need a digital presence is that prospects will form an instant opinion of your company based on the look and feel of your website, as well as how it stacks up against other sites they’ve previously viewed, in the first few seconds after visiting your commercial real estate website.
A strong but approachable online presence with cutting-edge, superior design will exude credibility and authority. You want each visitor to your website to have an amazing experience that they will carry with them beyond their first visit and even when they visit your rivals’ digital properties. This holds for both your main website and each of your particular property sites, including the way you connect them to provide a smooth user experience.
You need digital materials that bring each property to life, as many prospects will do more virtual tours and fewer in-person ones. Your web products should replicate the in-person property tour experience into a virtual one that draws potential buyers in by capturing the authentic vibe of the area. Your websites should include interactive maps, vivid images, full floor plans, virtual tours, 3D renderings, and movies that let users explore the neighborhood and use the facilities.
4. Builds Credibility Of Business
By building a thorough online presence that includes detailed real estate websites, personalized property searches, social media integration, and other beneficial features, you can further enhance your professional image.
From search engine optimization to mobile-friendly design, every facet of your campaign has to be well thought out, consistently branded, and maintained. It’s important to represent strength and stability, particularly right now.
Prospects will see you as a reliable source of information to consult for all of their commercial real estate requirements when you consistently provide the most up-to-date, precise, and comprehensive information about your services.
Being thorough with your property websites and listings, providing in-depth property descriptions, making interactive maps that are engaging and offer important location insights, and showcasing the entirety of your portfolio while keeping all of your properties easily accessible through a powerful search tool are all additional ways to further establish an impression of expertise.
You may establish your brand as an industry leader, increase trust and confidence, and make sure you’re always visible and current by enhancing and stacking your digital efforts. Using a centralized, integrated technological stack that builds upon one another is the most efficient approach to doing this. It is one of the most compelling reasons for having a digital presence.
5. Enhanced Customer Service
You can communicate with more clients in real time if you have an online presence. Having a website is not enough; it also has to be properly maintained. Offering 24-hour customer care is not an option for the majority of brick-and-mortar companies. On the other hand, visitors to your business’ website need to be able to get any relevant information at any moment.
Users may get in touch with you via live chat or contact forms. Make room for people to ask questions, trade information, and post reviews and comments as well. Creating a welcoming environment for users on your website is one of the finest methods to foster connections, which is one of your responsibilities.
It’s OK to reply right away and provide an apology if anything goes wrong. It might be difficult to communicate with clients who are new to your company or who have issues. Simply be upbeat and inquire if they have any queries.
6. Create Awareness
Standard business hours are a thing of the past. These days, individuals operate remotely from multiple places while managing various demands and stretching schedules throughout the day and night. Having a solid online presence enables you to always be prepared to make an engaging presentation to a prospective renter, buyer, or investor.
Your websites can work for you offline if you put in the effort to make them effective. They will continuously draw in visitors, hold their attention through engagement and targeted remarketing, and open up new chances for prospects to become customers.
Ensuring you are reaching prospective renters, investors, and purchasers on any screen they could be using is also essential. To do this, you must optimize your digital products for smooth delivery across all platforms and device types. This is one of the compelling reasons for having a digital presence.
7. Draw In More Guests
Approximately 80% of real estate investors, renters, and purchasers begin their search online; this percentage was undoubtedly greater during the epidemic and is probably going to stay that way going forward. Increasing the size of your digital footprint will increase the number of prospects who see your properties.
Selecting commercial real estate marketing software can assist you in creating branded domain names, facilitating word-of-mouth referrals, social shares, and increased brand exposure. It can also help you easily integrate social media into your websites and improve search engine optimization (SEO) across your digital assets to boost your visibility for key search terms.
8. Edge Over Competition
Having an advantage in competition is one of the reasons why you need a digital presence. You may be certain that your rivals are frantically trying to future-proof their companies and ramp up their digital strategy. This is true notwithstanding the economic uncertainty brought on by the epidemic and applies to all sectors.
You may fuel a sophisticated digital marketing plan to meet your short- and long-term objectives by wisely reallocating cash that you had allocated for events like in-person tradeshows and conferences that are on hold for the time being.
However, you will want agile solutions that enable speed, efficiency, adaptability, and scalability if you want to remain one step ahead of your rivals. The adage “the only constant will be continual change” seems more accurate than ever these days; therefore, having a proactive digital strategy can help you stay alert. It is one of the very compelling reasons for having a digital presence.
9. Focus On Both Domestic And International Markets
Expand your company’s local market reach by cultivating more one-on-one connections with clients. However, it depends on whether your goal is to reach a worldwide audience or more individuals in your local community. In actuality, striking the correct balance between the local and the global is one of the problems with a localization-centric approach.
The local reach expands with the growth of your firm. Therefore, there may eventually be restrictions on how far you may reach locally. When your local reach is limited, you can often find yourself attempting to draw in more prospective clients.
Extending your strategy’s reach is the way to address this problem. The first stage in this process is to create an internet presence. You may tap into a variety of marketplaces and draw in new clients with a higher conversion rate if you have a website or an app.
How To Establish A Strong Online Presence
Now that we are aware of the compelling reasons for having a digital presence for conventional brick-and-mortar businesses in the modern business world, let’s examine some strategies for optimizing your online presence and using the resources at your disposal:
Create and construct a basic website or application: As we’ve just said, less is more. A complicated website is not necessary for your offline firm. Make it simple to use and visually appealing. You’ll therefore stand a higher chance of drawing in and holding the interest of a visitor.
Sign up for a free Google My Business profile: Create a fantastic profile of your company that will allow it to show up in search results with all the information potential customers could need to know about you, such as your address, phone number, hours of operation, and even Google reviews.
Engage your audience on social media: Social media is an excellent platform for informing your audience about available updates. Make better connections and establish trust with your audience by using your social media platforms. But keep in mind that you have the power to use your brand voice to enhance or detract from your social media presence.
Purchase your goods online: Retailers with conventional brick-and-mortar locations must also facilitate customers’ online product orders. Create a website or an application that makes it easier to place and fulfill online orders.
Advertise online: Online advertising is a useful tool for promoting your company since it can help you create a strong brand image, increase website traffic, and get more devoted clients. Microsoft advertising, Facebook advertising, and Google ads may serve as the cornerstones of your Internet marketing strategy. However, you may think about integrating your physical and internet marketing activities for greater outcomes.
FAQ
Q: What is the online presence’s power?
A: Having a digital presence enables you to motivate prospective consumers to take the necessary action in addition to reaching a larger audience and promoting your brand.
Q: Which four aspects make up a person’s digital presence?
A: Content, strategy, design, and technology are the four distinct but connected elements that must be addressed to create a solid foundation. To ensure a balanced approach to your digital presence, you must devote equal and measured amounts of attention to each of them.
Q: How can one maximize their online presence?
A: Investigate search phrases (or keywords) associated with your company, goods, or services, adding keywords to the pages of your website, and establishing connections with publishers, journalists, and bloggers in the field, routinely creating fresh material, like blog entries, and optimizing it for search engines.
