Top Real Estate Digital Marketing Strategies to Boost Sales
In today’s world, the Real estate industry is expanding at a rocket rate and this is due to an increase in population as well as the desire for high standards of living. As the industry is growing so is the number of people who are adopting it as a business. Speaking about the era before 2000 the real estate leads were pocketed via traditional means but nowadays with the advent of Digital marketing, the market has changed. The transition is real and hence I have tried to include best practices for real estate. Part of this guide can be implemented in other business categories as well.
The article consists of 5 parts:
PART 1:INTRODUCTION
PART 2:OPPORTUNITY, CHALLENGE REWARD
PART 3:DEVELOPING YOUR DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY
PART 4:SAMPLE CAMPAIGN CHECKLIST
PART 5:CONCLUSION
The World of Digital Estate
Content: Digital Marketing Strategy category: REAL ESTATE
Main Platform: Facebook
STRATEGY DEVELOPED BY: Asim Ali Khan
Introduction
The Changing Buyer Relationship
The ultimate goal of any business strategy is to sell more homes. Property units, shops, apartments, etc. In this Guide, I would show you How to harness New digital marketing technologies in order to drive more traffic to our website and hence forge valuable connections with buyers, build significant, competitive advantage, and ultimately, sell more homes.
What is digital marketing?
“Digital marketing is essentially a set of activities delivered across a wide range of digital channels — such as search, social media, mobile, email and websites — that when carefully planned and aligned with your core business activities, can extend your reach and deepen connections with prospects driving awareness, sales and loyalty”
The 4 Ps of Marketing
The Owned, Earned & Paid Marketing Model
Assuming that you know the 4 ps of the Marketing model that are Product, Price, Place, and Promotion let’s dive into the Owned and paid Marketing Model
The two channels exist in the intersection stage, it’s difficult to comprehend and planning can be a little tough, or shall i use the word confusing at times? There are various channels, devices, and tools available which can easily drag a novice marketing person into a drain hole. This fact is alone the cause of why many marketing plans fail. This is where the Owned, Earned and paid media plays its part in understanding the complex nature of the marketing plan. It helps us to get over the planning hurdles by offering a simple framework for organizing and executing your marketing activities.
OWNED MEDIA
• Website/blog
• Email subscribers
• Social media accounts
• Partners
EARNED MEDIA
• Reviews / testimonials / ratings
• Social media buzz / sharing
• PR/ Media coverage
• Word-of-mouth
PAID MEDIA
• Advertising (offline & online)
• Sponsorships
• Promotions
• Affiliates
I have developed Real estate campaigns for many companies and projects. During my studies and observation, I found out that:
The Developers are now more actively involved in the marketing of the new properties and building long-lasting relationships with potential clients, buyers, and communities using various platforms such as Facebook.
The Middlemen: the Agents are on the hunt for data and customer segmentation with marketing automation systems such as CSR software to deliver personalized and highly efficient marketing communication.
While on the other hand, property marketing agencies are developing new creative and engaging more on digital channels to target the potential marketplace. They are using different tactics to attract the buyers such as content strategy and graphic and video content to establish their brand on stronger footings.
As discussed earlier ‘ The relationship between the key players in buying and selling of property is changing — and will rapidly continue to change in the coming years.
Reaching out to digital platforms such as social media posts regarding the property on sale and buying them online is on the move these days. With the growth of digital Technologies future would witness an upshift in the trend too. it will continue to grow and solidify as technology-savvy buyers and sellers opt to use the free tools and platforms available to take more control over their property transactions — and save money in the process.
Ways Marketers Can Use Digital Rewards To Improve Customer Engagement
OPPORTUNITY CHALLENGE & REWARD
Give up if you are considering distributing your Property ads, Brochures, flyers, etc. The Digital channels are making their way fast in the market and have managed to laid influence homebuyer decisions’. Relying on the proverb ‘even a dead elephant is worth a million rupees agents should be considered as valuable as their service is for the sale of property and as they are still a vital part of the sale of a property chain.
Under such circumstances, the developers cannot afford to ignore the opportunity to develop, alongside the agents, their own digital strategy. Your strategy can in fact run in parallel and in perfect harmony with the agents, with all leads being passed over to allow the agents to do what they do best, which is sold.
Developers should be involved and take control at a strategic level of their marketing to ensure all marketing channels and digital activities are working together effectively.
How Property Developers can benefit from Digital outbreak
Take away — Free advice to the Developers. The developers would benefit and be able to pocket a competitive advantage in the future if they invest in their own platforms and forge connections with the buyers.
Building a sustainable competitive advantage
Fast-forward 5 years, and think about your nearest competitor. Imagine they have spent the past 5 years building their own marketing channels (email database, social media, search engine rankings) — capturing buyer information, and engaging with buyers on a range of platforms.
Imagine they now reach a highly targeted network of several thousand, or even tens of thousands of people, and have geographic, purchase & demographic information on them to use to inform future marketing and business decision making.
Now imagine! Your only marketing channels are still the
traditional channels of agents and advertising.
5 stages of the Home Buyer Process
In the first stage, he considers buying a home, apartment or shop etc that could full fill his needs. In the next step, he studies the online guides and best platforms to buy the property. Once he has made up his mind regarding his location and ideal home qualities, he would engage in an active search accordingly to his budget leading ultimately to transactions in stages 3 and 4. Closing the deal is the most crucial step for any real estate sales process agent. Although, it’s the last stage but holds the most significant part of the process. Many important tasks are associated with step 5 which includes documentation, the final examination of the house, the agreement process, turning keys, and much more.
The implications are clear. Developers and agents must adapt their marketing strategies to match where the customer is, at each stage of the buyer journey.
A Framework for Success
DEVELOPING YOUR DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY
Although the primary focus of this guide is up on Facebook, I would take the opportunity to cast some light on the need for Website and Website strategy. They are closely related as the Facebook pixel is implemented on the website to extract the data and then utilize it to target Facebook ads.
Website Strategy
Your website is the most critical component of your digital marketing strategy. It should be thought of as your shop front, or web store
— where customers come to browse and do not leave without completing a transaction. They need to convert, and your website needs to work hard to get that conversion.
After ensuring that the website is fully optimized and all SEO-related errors have been removed. It's now time to jump to content.
When posting about a particular property on a website or on social media such as Facebook make sure as a seller you have included at least 70% of the answers to the following questions
Why are you selling the property?
Time on Market Length?
Which elements are included in the sale?
About the Neighborhood?
Natural Hazards and lead paint?
Previous or Existing Issues with Property Conditions?
Components Ages?
Renovations or Major/Minor Repairs?
Best Part of the Property?
Financial Expectations?
Records such as taxes, insurance, licenses, unpaid taxes… and so on.
At this stage, all we are trying to do is make contact with the buyer, help them out by providing some useful information that matches their current stage, and try to connect with them as they progress along the path to purchase.
Content drives leads
By focusing on creating the content that people are looking for when they are at the Consideration & Active search stages of the buyer journey, you are positioning yourself to capture those visitors and have them on your website, and not your competitors or 3rd party sites — and thus convert them to leads.
What information do buyers look for when doing active research?
Floor plans / site plans
Location maps
Computer Generated Imagery (CGI)
Pictures / concepts
Virtual tours & 3D walkthroughs
Area information
Property price guides/data
New home buyers place emphasis on virtual tours and videos showcasing properties and communities. Some of the content you will create will be and some will be campaign evergreen, specific (i.e. only relevant to your latest property development project). Here’s how that maps to your site structure:
FACEBOOK CAMPAIGN
TO BE IMPLEMENTED WHENEVER DATA IS AVAILABLE. THIS
COULD EXTEND TO MANY MONTHS AND EVEN YEARS.
Evergreen Content
General area/region information
Property price guides/data
Environmental ratings guides
Buying Guides
Selling Guides
Finance & Legal information
Project Specific Content
Floor plans/site plans
Location maps
Internal / External Imagery (CGI)
Building Features
Video, animations, 3D walkthroughs
Area-specific information
Schools and transport information
The most important task with any inbound or content marketing activity is
to define your customer. Are they first-time buyers, young professionals, families, or retirees?
The content you develop should match your project and be anchored by crystal clear buyer personas. Write them down, and share them with your marketing and channel partners to ensure everything aligns. A mistake that is often made is assuming your target market is open to everyone… Whilst you wouldn’t turn down any sale your marketing should always be focused on a particular demographic. Targeting everyone dilutes your marketing effort.
Images and Video
video is known to make a marketing campaign more effective by generating an increase in brand recall (+33%) and message recall (+45%).
At all stages of the buyer journey, rich media is an essential piece of content to get right. Buyers are often jumping around, bookmarking and emailing links to themselves in order to build their list of potentials for viewing — so long-winded pages of text can be off-putting. Better to quickly deliver the key information, in a visual and engaging way. And always think mobile.
Make every stage of the journey visual Using 3D visualization, property developers and real estate marketer’s can create accurate imagery for their marketing campaigns from the outset, building assets that speak to buyers at each stage of the buying process.
With a carefully planned suite of visual marketing aids, your imagery can be used on a wide variety of materials, from brochures, websites, apps, and social media.
Social media advertising channels to consider:
Advertising on social media should be considered for residential developments. Facebook particularly could be a great channel for residential property marketing due to the wealth of ‘interest, location and demographic’ data they hold on their users. For example, you could target your ads to users in specific areas who have indicated on their profiles that they are interested in the property.
FACEBOOK CAMPAIGN
— STARTUP
AS DISCUSSED BEFORE, PRIOR TO DEFINING FACEBOOK CAMPAIGN, ITS ALWAYS HELP FULL TO DO KEYWORD RESEARCH, CAMPAIGN PLANNING that is TO DECIDE ON TOPICS OTHER THAN THE PRODUCT-ORIENTED SUCH AS QUOTES, REAL ESTATE LAW, AND NEWS ETC
Social media is a complex world and can be extremely time-consuming to master and reap the rewards from. However, it can be effective over time to support your campaigns and lead-generation strategy. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media channels are where buyers converse and share tips and experiences.
Tactics to grow your reach on Facebook:
>>Set up an account to curate property news for your area
>>Focus your updates on one key thing, e.g. Helping people
>>Post “concept” visuals of your work-in-progress development
>>Spend 10–15 mins per day engaging with fans and followers
>>Share your own blog posts, and re-schedule to go out 3–4 times over two weeks
How an Efficient Real Estate Marketing Looks Like
SAMPLE CAMPAIGN CHECKLIST
Quick to-do list on Social Media (Facebook ID plus page)
>>Follow and engage journalists and property influencers
>>Post images/video teasers
>>Curate news stories on relevant market trends & insights
>>Curate news stories related to finance and mortgage help
>>Post useful information on your site and link to it
>>Use #hashtags wherever possible to extend your reach
>>Next: Read the post where I have shared the link to the keypoints of the Business plan
.
After Developing the General Business plan, perform the SMO for the Facebook page. Since Instagram is the product of FaceBook, it’s recommended to take it along.
Let's assume that your goal is to reach 1000–2000 Facebook followers in a time span of 30 days.
You should not set your eyes directly on the 2000 figure rather divide it into 4 phases of 500 followers per week and Develop strategies scaling to lower cost per lead and higher the quality of the lead.
Work with the business owner first to identify opportunities, market needs, and possible strategies and then use that information to set realistic budgets, milestones, and objectives for a digital marketing campaign ( business plan).
Further, divide the Followers/leads generation into two categories.
Organic: (it would help in creating and maintaining the potential client’s trust )
It a long-term and would benefit the owner even after the contract is completed
Paid: The main no of followers would be generated through Facebook ads.
How to Create An Effective Facebook Ad Strategy
The most common type of online advertising in the real estate industry is on Facebook. Real estate Facebook ads are cost-effective, with an average cost per lead of Rs9.18, and you only pay when someone interacts with your ad. Plus, it offers a ton of audience targeting options, so you can hone in on your ideal client by area, interests, other sites they‘ve recently visited, income level, and more.
Targets such as
People who match: Interests: Real estate investment trust, Investment, Real estate development, Return on investment, Private property or Real estate investment club
In a nutshell, to Reach a Targeted Audience With Social Media Facebook platform (ads) you must post 4 ads per month and for the first two weeks run an A/B test on two ads by changing the parameters and with a minimum budget( if desired results do not reach within a week via campaign A)
In the next two weeks set a high budget and go the best results either in campaign A or Campaign B
Leave the Digital Marketing to the Pros & Grow Your Business …
CONCLUSION
What will separate the winners and losers is a clear strategy, customer-centricity, connecting and engaging through useful content, and capturing and using data to deliver exceptionally relevant information to
buyers at the right moment.
Digital Marketing Services I Grow Your Business Online
My Name is Asim Ali Khan, I am a digital marketing expert since 2009 and have performed digital tasks for various companies and clients across the globe. I helped the business grow by providing SEO services as well as other digital marketing services such as Web Development (mainly WordPress), Social Media campaigns, Content writing, Graphic Designing, and 2d Animation.
The Topic is the nutshell of my experience which I managed to achieve during the past ten years. I have mainly focused on the social media platform and on the micro level I took on Facebook organic as well as paid marketing techniques.
The brand name since 2009
DIP:Digital Identity Phrase = (Google search): asimali1511
