Did you know there are over 86,000 brokerages in the United States?  (source)  That’s a lot of competition.  Marketing your commercial real estate business is more important than ever, especially since these numbers are rising rapidly.  Here are 8 best marketing tools for commercial real estate agents that you should definitely look into.

1. Reonomy – Buying a list of leads has never been easier! Reonomy allows you to search property owners in your area and filter by property type, and size. Pull lead info, including phone number, contact name, address and sometimes an email is included.  Great resource for lead lists!

2. Direct to Voicemail – Have a broker that screams at you to cold-call? Cold calling used to suck, but now it’s automated. With services like Voicecasting, you can broadcast a prerecorded message to thousands of phone numbers in a few minutes.  Next time your broker asks how many people you cold call in a week, say over a thousand!

3. Mass Text – Want all your contacts to know about an open house? Need to broadcast an investment opportunity to a call list? You’ll be shocked at how inexpensive Mass Texting services like CallFire are.  Send 1,000 texts for $50.

4. Cold emailing – Cold emailing is different than follow-up emails. You’ll need to write personal messages like, “Hi <Name>, I saw your company, <Company Name>, while working with a similar company named <Competitor>. I wanted to see if you were also interested in lease renewal representation.  We were able to save <Competitor> 15% on their monthly rates.”  Instead of doing this individually, services like Woodpecker will fill in those blanks with an excel spreadsheet and automate the entire process.

Send hundreds of emails a day and get an immediate notification when someone replies.   Learn more about cold emails.

5. Follow up emails – I, personally, love MailChimp and use them for all my follow-up emails. Their easy-to-design email templates make it simple to create beautiful emails. Mailchimp can be integrated into your website’s contact forms, so entries are automatically added to your database.  Use follow-up emails such as Newsletters, Announcements, and Events to keep in-touch with potential clients.

6. Social Media linking. Hootsuite is an amazing way to keep up with your social media accounts without spending hours on social media. Post once and it will automatically update all your accounts – LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc..

7. Google Analytics. If it can’t be tracked, don’t do it! Your website is the same way.  Track your visitors, what pages are most compelling, your conversions and more with Google Analytics.  It’s a bit intimidating, but if you only spend time on viewing where your traffic originates, you’re doing better than 90% of other CRE firms.

8. SEO plugins. I use Yoast SEO for all my websites, but there are plenty of great SEO tools out there. Some features to look for are the ability to create and update an XML Sitemap and Customize Meta Tags.