Insights

July 2026 · 8 min read

A commercial real estate marketing plan that actually gets used.

Most marketing plans are decks that get presented once and opened never. A plan that gets used fits on a page: what you're selling, to whom, with what assets, through which channels, on what calendar. Here's that page, for a firm or a single property.

Part 1 — Positioning (three sentences, not a workshop)

Write three sentences you can defend: who you serve (asset type, deal size, geography), what they get from you that the next option doesn't, and why anyone should believe it (track record, tenure, specialization). Every asset and channel below inherits from these sentences. If your three sentences would work for the firm across the street, they're not done — specificity is the entire game. We've written more on this in the field guide.

Part 2 — The asset stack, in build order

1. The website. Everything else points here, so it comes first. For a firm: positioning, listings, case studies, market pages. For a property: a dedicated site with availability, plan, and demographics. If the destination is weak, every channel dollar downstream underperforms.
2. Photography. The one asset every channel consumes — portal, site, flyer, email. Shoot once, properly: ground, aerial, twilight. (What that costs and includes.)
3. The collateral. Leasing flyer or brochure that matches the website's quality. One design system across all of it — mismatched materials read as a disorganized operation.
4. The list. Your database of tenant reps, owners, and prospects, cleaned and segmented. Unglamorous, decisive.

Part 3 — Channels, in order of leverage

Spend attention where CRE demand actually moves, in this order:

• Portals, done completely. Every field, every photo, response discipline. Table stakes, not strategy.
• Direct email to the right list. Broker-to-broker announcements with a link worth clicking. Highest ROI channel in the industry when the list is good. (The email playbook.)
• Search. Your name, your properties' addresses, your submarket. Low volume, high intent, nearly uncontested — the practical guide.
• Signs. Still the top local channel. Legible at 40 mph, pointing at a URL worth visiting.
• LinkedIn, sparingly. Launches and closed deals with real photography. Presence, not content-calendar theater.

Part 4 — Budget logic

Skip percentage-of-revenue formulas; think in terms of the vacancy math. A vacant suite costs its full rent every month; a disposition mispriced by presentation costs points of the sale price. Budget the asset stack (site, photography, collateral) as a one-time capital item per property or per firm refresh, and channels as small monthly spend. For most independent firms, the entire stack costs less than one month of carrying a mid-size vacancy — which is the comparison that matters.

Part 5 — The 90-day calendar

• Weeks 1–2: positioning sentences; audit existing site, photos, list.
• Weeks 3–6: build or fix the website; shoot the photography; rebuild the flyer on the new system.
• Weeks 7–8: relaunch portal listings with new assets; announce to the list.
• Weeks 9–12: claim the Google Business Profile, fix the search basics, set the monthly rhythm — one list email, one market note, response-time discipline.

The plan isn't the deck. It's the order you build things in — destination first, channels second.