SiteStuff.com, Austin, TX, an e-marketplace for the commercial real estate industry, launched a marketing campaign this week in time for what it calls one of the hot real estate seasons.
The campaign is designed to reach two target audiences, according to Tracy Ott Wallingford, vice president of marketing at SiteStuff.com.
“The first group we need to contact is the senior-level executives at the corporate headquarters of these real estate agencies,” she said. “Then we need to reach out to the people who run these real estate properties, like the property managers and the maintenance managers.”
The 1-year-old company is looking to do this with a major print campaign designed to drive people to the Web site at www.sitestuff.com, where the firm will look to turn them into registered users of the site. A major direct mail campaign is in development that Wallingford said is expected to get underway in October.
“We have just started to discuss what the design of the piece might look like,” she said.
The only details provided regarding the campaign are that the company is looking to contact about 50,000 people. That number includes senior-level executives as well as property and maintenance managers.
The print campaign, which began this week in The Wall Street Journal, will run through year's end in national as well as trade publications, including Building Operation Management, Maintenance Solutions, Commercial Property News, Urban Land, Journal of Property Management and BOMA.
SiteStuff.com will use one print ad and will change it slightly based on the publication. The ad in The Journal will target the executive-level audience, while the other publications will target management.
The ad is made up of 12 boxes, 10 of which contain images of people and things such as hammers. One of the remaining boxes will contain the Web address, while the other will have a short paragraph of text summarizing what the site offers.
The part of the ad that will change is the image of the person in the upper left corner. For the piece in The Journal, it will be the face of an executive. The other publications will have an image of someone who appears to be a landlord or maintenance manager.
“The goal is to show people [who] are reading these publications that we are talking to them, [while] at the same time letting them know that they can get everything from light bulbs to paper clips at our site,” she said.
Wallingford said people do not have to register to use the site's features, but they must if they want to make purchases. She said there are more than 3,000 members.
There are currently no plans to include any TV or radio advertising.
