You may not recognize my name, but I have had interactions with a lot of you through Laverty Chacon’s blog posts, Twitter and Facebook. My name is Jeff Snyder and I have been interning at Laverty Chacon since April, performing various marketing duties while working closely with Tanner to improve the online presence of the firm. Essentially, I’ve been trying to increase exposure for the website, which in turn increases the exposure of your vacancies.  Tanner has asked me to reach out to you and give you some information on what I’ve been doing for the last 7 months.

To introduce myself, I am a senior at Santa Clara University in the South Bay, studying marketing with an emphasis on online marketing. I am originally from Sacramento, CA, so I know both geographic areas in which Laverty Chacon does the majority of its business. I found Laverty Chacon through the career center at my school and connected immediately with Tanner through our hometown ties (our childhood houses were less than a ½ mile away from each other).

Since April, I have learned an enormous amount about professional conduct, commercial real estate, investing, marketing, and organization in business. Considering just the aspects of online marketing, I would like to share with you what I think are the five keys to success for a commercial real estate firm as the users and tenants of commercial real estate gravitate to the online universe.  You may find this very boring if you are not interested in online marketing, but if you are interested in the changes that have been taking over the world the last few years, please read on.

My Five Keys To Online Exposure:

• CONSISTENCY: With any business, consistency is king. Your online presence needs to be congruent with your personal presence. For example, all of our social media icons need to be the same as each other and we use the same iconic landscape photo of the Sacramento skyline for our cover photo and any background on our social media outlets. Consistency drives home our brand image, conveying the intended message to our target audience.  Consistency also applies to regular posting of interesting information whether or not this information is created by us or if we share information we have come across.

• RESPONSIVENESS: Many of my marketing classes have emphasized the importance of responding to the clients’ concerns; this has always seemed to be a obvious idea to me. Since I have been working at Laverty Chacon, I have seen responsiveness in action and in this economy, there are always concerns. This interaction is essential to building a brand presence on Twitter as well. Twitter is unlike any other social media outlet for commercial real estate, connecting you to not only other CRE professionals but ultimately connecting you to your prospects, clients, tenants, businesses, etc.

• CONTACTS: Building contact lists have been one of the most challenging tasks for me as an intern with limited experience in the CRE industry. Besides the obvious benefits of adding potential clients, a contact list helps to build a brand presence and, through blogging and regular posting of relevant information, ultimately propels traffic to your website.

• BLOGGING: Blogging as a marketing function moves traffic from your contact list to your website. I have found that it is important to be consistent with blogging, whether once a day or once a week and not to barrage your contacts with too-frequent postings.   Creating a system that you can maintain in the long term will help increase exposure. We recently added a RSS feed to our blog page that allows you to subscribe to the blogs without having to visit the website directly to read them as well as “opting out” of our emails if you prefer that instead. We have tried our best to provide our clients with information that is relevant to the industry and is beneficial to them regarding the health of the economy and therefore, their properties.

• SEO (Search Engine Optimization): Recently, we have moved towards focusing on search engine optimization to increase our page rank on Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and various search engines. Besides revising our custom document titles, page descriptions, and keywords to make them more relevant, we have also been working on building a preferred vendor listing page within our website that should be live in the coming months. If anyone says that they know exactly what goes into Google’s algorithm to increase your page rank, they are lying, but all the previous keys to marketing success (1-4) will help to provide that frequency and reach that the crawlers are looking for when determining your page rank.

At the end of the day, everything we’ve done is an attempt to increase the exposure of our website and therefore your properties.  Because the Tenants are gravitating online to look for spaces, we need to be online as well. In fact, we’re ahead of the game and not many of our competitors are trying this yet.  The great news is that we’ve seen results and we’re positioned well for a recovery.

If you would like more information about our online marketing plan, please feel free to shoot me an email at jsnyder@lavertychacon.com or give me a ring at 916.300.4406.  You can also contact me if you’d like a list of online resources we are currently active on.  If you are members of any of the following, you can follow us via Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn as well as this Blog and the RSS feed.  You can also find all of the links at the bottom of this page in the yellow footer bar.

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