Elevate Commercial Real Estate Marketing with Pylot

Many people talk a good game about the benefits of integrated marketing technology ecosystems. When done right, the approach can improve operating efficiencies, enhance the customer experience, strengthen tenant relationships and potentially raise the value of your properties. But when the rubber meets the road, implementing the right commercial real estate digital marketing strategy and technologies to achieve these goals is no easy task. You need to not only identify the right tools and channels but also ensure that they work together to deliver a seamless customer experience and give you easy-to-access, data-driven insights gathered across all touch points to drive results.

Challenges in CRE Marketing

To implement an effective marketing strategy, we must understand the challenges faced by today’s CRE marketers. Are these hurdles keeping you up at night?

• Increased marketing complexity: Multidirectional customer journeys mean you have to manage more platforms and touchpoints and overwhelming amounts of data to connect the dots for better marketing performance clarity. 
• Decentralized decisionmaking: When individual teams implement their own platforms, tools and tactics the result is inconsistent execution across a management company’s portfolio of properties.
• Resource constraints: Marketing teams are challenged to do more with less, stretching their budgets as far as possible and working with smaller teams to achieve better results.
• Rapidly changing trends and technologies: It’s challenging to stay current with consumer trends, search engine algorithm changes, compliance requirements like privacy and the Americans with Disabilities Act, and more, especially with limited resources.
• Too many agencies and marketing platforms: Each uses different approaches and measures of success and controls its own data, making it hard to gain a holistic understanding of integrated performance.
• Fragmented view of the customer journey: Disparate data sources make it challenging to understand the complete customer journey, which is necessary for delivering a seamless omnichannel experience.

Despite all the big promises from agencies and martech vendors to address these pain points, many bright, shiny new tools don’t integrate well with your existing technologies. The resulting hodgepodge of services often don’t work well together, so you end up spending more time coordinating the inefficient, poorly coordinated pieces instead of generating meaningful outcomes.

CRE marketers need a new approach to strategically consolidate their platforms and approaches to support a consistent, compelling brand presence and to scale this presence across a geographically distributed portfolio of properties.

A Strong Digital Marketing Operation Is Table Stakes

Managing various digital marketing platforms and keeping up with a plethora of shopping center digital marketing tactics to deliver on elevated customer expectations requires considerable time, effort and investment. But not keeping up simply isn’t an option either. If you feel stuck between a rock and a hard place, you’re not alone. It’s time to reevaluate your entire CRE digital marketing strategy and the platforms necessary for efficient and effective execution. Here are the must-have tools CRE marketers can’t afford to ignore:

An easily customizable, highly engaging website: A user-friendly shopping center or property website is the launchpad for your digital marketing efforts. This home base must provide an outstanding user experience and be optimized for search while staying secure and compliant with ever-changing ADA, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and data privacy regulations. It should also be flexible and scalable so your internal teams can keep content fresh and compelling.

Enhanced search engine optimization and paid search: While ongoing organic search is important, your search engine marketing strategy should also include paid search to support your efforts. Paid search can help you get found by consumers with high purchase intent, gain local market share, strengthen online visibility and keep customers informed of your properties’ offerings.

Local listings management: Consumers search on various online channels to find a business, so you must make it easy for shoppers to find your properties by listing them across different sites. An effective listings management plan including up-to-date, consistent information across platforms can help you gain visibility and improve SEO and brand presence.

Digital advertising (in the post-cookie era): With third-party cookies being phased out, all marketers have an unprecedented opportunity to retool tracking and targeting strategies and take control of their own data. Leveraging this information and utilizing new targeting methods will help you deliver the right message to the right people at the right time and place cost-effectively. 

Reputation management: Consumers often research online before visiting a store or shopping center and use reviews to help them decide where to shop. There is a strong correlation between positive reviews and increased traffic for a local business. Regularly monitoring online reviews and social media mentions and responding quickly will result in delivering outstanding customer experiences.

Integrated marketing hub: Omnichannel marketing is the name of the game. Use a centralized hub to manage marketing communications across all touch points, including email, SMS/MMS, mobile apps, social media, chat, messaging, etc., to deliver a seamless user experience that will keep your customers coming back.

Consolidate Your CRE Digital Marketing with Pylot

To orchestrate all the moving parts in your digital marketing strategy, you need an integrated platform to aggregate and manage everything in one place. But should you buy different software from various vendors or build an all-in-one system from scratch? Should you run and manage the platform in-house or hire a digital marketing agency?

Each option has its pros and cons. You can have more control by managing everything in-house. However, building from scratch takes time and money: You have to hire a team, design a framework and go through extensive technology platform evaluation to nail down all the pieces and make sure they all work well together.

On the other hand, it’s faster and cheaper to purchase off-the-shelf applications designed for different purposes. But you’ll need to stitch them together and jump through some hoops to make their data play nice with each other. Not to mention, these look-alike solutions could make your property’s brand experience look like everyone else’s.

How Can You Deliver a Unique Brand Experience Without Reinventing the Wheel or Breaking the Bank?

You can get the best of both worlds with Pylot, a digital marketing platform powered by Imaginuity, an expert in CRE marketing for over 20 years. Pylot is a one-stop marketing hub specifically designed for CRE marketers. With Pylot and Imaginuity you can:

• develop and manage a scalable, beautifully designed, fully featured and secure website cost-effectively
• execute integrated marketing programs and collect data to optimize campaigns in real-time, all in one place
• ensure consistent brand implementation across multiple channels and properties
• realize execution efficiencies that produce better results even with a limited budget
• keep up with rapidly changing trends, technologies, and regulations

Instead of spending hours cobbling together disparate tools and solutions — and hoping the integrations will work — Pylot allows CRE marketers to take a disciplined and holistic approach to build their marketing technology stack while keeping the total cost of ownership low.

Once your website is built, you can then unify cross-channel campaign planning and data to improve your strategy and derive in-depth customer insights to drive accurate decisionmaking. The platform is built on a proven integrated and customizable framework allowing you to deliver a unique, consistent brand experience across all your properties. 

An Integrated Platform to Power and Support a Transformative Digital Marketing Strategy

Pylot helps CRE marketing teams do more with less: increase productivity and effectiveness with fewer resources. Pylot enables you to accelerate marketing execution and improve the customer experience online and on-site. After establishing the initial branding of your shopping centers, you can then easily manage your web and social presence and drive traffic to your properties through targeted emails and location-based campaigns — all in one place.

The Pylot platform combines the latest digital marketing technology with extensive experience and expert insights from Dallas’ top commercial real estate digital marketing agency to streamline your digital marketing strategy improve marketing cost-efficiency and provide better customer experiences. 

Learn more and contact Pylot to find out how its digital marketing platform can take your marketing higher.