I love my new digital weapon. It’s the Microsoft Surface Pro, and it’s a fantastic tool for strategic planning and digital marketing. I’m sitting in Nevis, listening to cadences (this word is close to my heart) of a West-Indian sun-shower and thinking about how to take my competitor’s employees, clients and lucrative relationships and figure… Hmmm… Why not draw a map?

I then remember a discussion I was having with a few colleagues on how technology has leveled the CRE marketing strategy playing field in under 15 years.

2005 touches

The large commercial real estate firms have an inherent advantage on the slimmer boutique firms when I start my CRE career in 2005. They dwarf our marketing budgets and litter industry literature with their logos. They subscribe to the best mapping technology and the equivalent of Google Earth or ESRI back then would cost millions. Many firms land accounts just because of their mapping technology, not the people. Larger firms dominate tradeshow marketing with gargantuan booths and lavish company parties. The executives take influencers golfing/fishing and demolish their monthly corporate accounts. In 2005 social media is in its infancy in the B2B cosmos. Facebook isn’t open to the public until 2006, Twitter also launches in 2006, Instagram launched in 2010 and LinkedIn (started 2002) is nowhere near the colossus of business interconnectivity that it is today.

Fast forward to 2019

The large firms still undertake the aforementioned CRE marketing strategies, but the playing field is leveled in how everyone can touch influencers. If you (personal digital brand) or your firm (company digital brand) isn’t strategically putting together a LinkedIn/social media strategy, I can assure you your competitors are. The large parties and trade show literature definitely have an effect and impact people’s decision making. What a digital social media marketing strategy allows for is a direct message, where the author controls the narrative and the results are very measurable. It’s exciting and the first time that this level of interconnectivity has ever occurred in business.

This diagram shows how digital touches flow and illustrate how if you aren’t actively engaging your clients in 2019 with a CRE marketing strategy, a company like mine is.