ClickCease
Resource

Buildout transforms Front Street Commercial Real Estate Group’s marketing from reactive to proactive

When Virginia MacKoul, Director of Marketing at Front Street Commercial Real Estate Group, began to explore her brokerage’s commercial real estate marketing processes, she found the need for optimization. The firm’s marketing department was operating reactively rather than proactively, and though MacKoul was producing high-quality, sophisticated materials, they took far more time to create than she’d have liked. She saw an opportunity to innovate and maximize the efficiency of her brokerage’s marketing work as well as the impact of the firm’s branding.

Buildout was her answer.

The opportunity

In the typical “old brokerage” model, brokers are siloed. Each broker has their own clients, associates and often, marketing support staff. Brokers keep their information close to the chest and clients only have access to their own broker’s knowledge. With no standardization across siloed teams, every broker approaches their work and services their clients differently, which hinders brand consistency and affects their firm’s overall reputation.

Front Street saw this model as ineffective and decided to take the opportunity to shake it up. They chose to build a different type of brokerage culture and structure with a stronger emphasis on collaboration and sharing. They implemented a shared CRM that gave every broker access to the same centralized information and decided to implement a single marketing department to serve all brokers.

But even with this new brokerage model in place, as the sole marketer at the firm, MacKoul still felt bogged down by busywork. Every time a new listing came in, she needed to meet with the broker, draft a brochure and other marketing materials from scratch, go through a revision process and present the materials to the client, who often had even more revisions. And her work didn't end there. After the client approved the brochure and other marketing materials, MacKoul had to build a website for each listing. This was a very time-consuming process that took up at least 40 hours of MacKoul’s week, every week.

She wanted to have the bandwidth to do more content creation and lead generation, but she was still stuck spending all her time on brochure and website creation. Finally, she realized that in order to see the full benefits of the changes Front Street had made to their marketing function, she needed to hire a marketing associate and further streamline processes with a marketing automation tool.

Buildout streamlines marketing collateral creation

Buildout was the perfect fit for Front Street’s needs.

MacKoul devoted a lot of time to developing a professional look and feel for Front Street’s brand, and felt it was important to find a tool that would replicate the quality of materials she created from scratch. She researched a variety of commercial real estate marketing platforms, but was dissatisfied with the basic, templated nature of the materials they produced. Buildout was the only tool that fit her needs.

The marketing materials MacKoul develops in Buildout look just as hand-crafted and high-end as her custom materials, but thanks to automation, she can finalize them in a fraction of the time she once spent. MacKoul was also excited about the option to easily add aerial maps to her materials to highlight nearby retailers and other points of interest.

Now, MacKoul and her marketing team can enter property information just once, in one form, and Buildout creates the brochures and websites they need automatically.

And through syndication, the Front Street marketing team can automatically list properties in multiple locations. Plus, thanks to searchable listings and easy-to-use property websites that live under the Front Street web URL, the firm’s SEO has improved and investors can easily find available properties that best fit their needs.

Front Street Commercial Real Estate Group branding

Marketing’s evolving impact at Front Street

Now that Buildout has helped streamline material development and other routine marketing tasks, MacKoul has been able to focus her time on more strategic work that impacts Front Street’s bottom line, such as:

  • Ramping up Front Street’s social media presence and reviving their Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram and YouTube pages after they had fallen to the backburner
  • Segmenting contacts so she can target the right people with email campaigns and get a better return on her firm’s email marketing investment
  • Creating listing activity reports for clients so they can better understand the great work Front Street is doing

Is it time for you to rethink how your marketing department should function? Stop wasting time on tedious tasks.

Contact us to learn more about maximizing your firm’s marketing efficiency and effectiveness with Buildout.

The secret weapon top brokers use to win more deals

Over 22,000 CRE brokers use Buildout to find, win, and sell or lease more listings faster. Stand out as a broker with record-breaking commissions to take your win rate to the next level. Request a personalized, no-obligation demo today.