In commercial real estate (CRE), measuring success is critical to determine the effectiveness of marketing and leasing efforts. However, the industry has been misguided by one metric in particular. Clicks. Using clicks or click rate as a key performance indicator (KPI) is not always the most effective way to evaluate the success of your marketing strategies. The click metric lacks a genuine impact on the leasing process due to a lack of qualified information, cost-per-click, and relevance.
Instead of focusing on clicks, CRE professionals should shift their attention to modernized metrics that can better measure the impact of their efforts. Exposure, reach, and revenue participation are the metrics that CRE professionals should prioritize.
Exposure measures how successful the property is at getting its message in front of the right target audience, including prospective tenants currently in the market to lease space and their representation.
Reach measures the success of the property in reaching tenants and their influences at every stage of the sales cycle, staying relevant throughout the entire buying decision process. This also includes reaching prospects more successfully than ever before in CRE, including every stage post-tour.
Lastly, Revenue Participation measures how successful the marketing team is at educating specific tenants that leasing teams are focused on transacting with. Marketing and leasing should be aligned when it comes to understanding their critical audiences, and success should be measured based on how qualified the tenants are based on the amount of exposure they’ve had.
Success in leasing space involves various factors outside the marketing team’s sole control, including asset economics, location, and the leasing team’s negotiating skills. So, why would CRE teams prioritize clicks, a metric that only focuses on the ability to influence a contact to ‘learn more’ with no other helpful information about that contact?
Property teams must track the relationships the marketing team helps cultivate with tenants and brokers (exposure) and how often they touch those relationships (reach) to keep the asset relevant throughout the entire transaction. Then measure how many of those relationships have also been in contact with leasing to better qualify the potential tenant (revenue participation). When you focus on these metrics, your marketing strategy will produce more ROI than ever before.
Measuring the success of a marketing program in the CRE industry requires a shift in KPIs. By focusing on exposure, reach, and revenue participation, CRE leasing and marketing teams can better measure the impact of marketing strategies, cultivate relationships with tenants and brokers, and stay relevant through the entire transaction. Learn more about these modern metrics and why clicks are inefficient here.