Digital Marketing: Way to Boost Real Estate Sales

Real Estate in India has found new & very effective tool for marketing and pushing sales and revenues, called Real Estate Digital Marketing. Today, from high to middle to low end customers’ journey in India starts with online research.

Indian customers are excessively using Internet to search and research before buying high value item especially Real Estate.

In India, when you have more than 200 million users online, which is the creamy layer of India’s marketplace consisting of high-net-worth individuals to middle class and lower-middle class, and then no Real Estate company in India can afford to ignore Internet’s role as a marketplace and marketing funnel.

Now, Real Estate companies in India are exploiting digital marketing to reduce their marketing spends on traditional media, and enhance their outreach, effectiveness, and conversion rate.

As per a survey by ASSOCHAM, Real Estate firms in India spend about Rs. 2,500 Crore per annum on advertisements and marketing, out of which 25 per cent are spent on digital marketing.With such a major chunk of digital marketing proves that Real Estate has excepted its efficacy and relevance.

Just recently, TATA Housing said that online sales could easily reach 30 per cent of the total revenue in coming years.

So, if you are from Real Estate industry in India, digital marketing will be playing crucial role in your sales. Moreover, on Internet you have level playing field, where you can challenge big players with your innovative and creative marketing campaigns and without spending moolah for it.

Now question is – “how do you boost your online sales?” to answer that I have listed seven ways you can boost online sales with Real Estate online marketing.

1. Help Your Customers Through Your Blog– ‘Answer them’

In any high-valued product selling, providing in-depth details helps better and leads to informed purchase decision. Therefore, in Real Estate digital marketing, blog is one of the strongest tools to create interest, engage, convince and eventually convert the incoming traffic.

As we’re dealing with Real Estate, therefore, try to develop blogs on the frequently asked questions, or on the topics that interest majority of your customers.

Research it to find the online customer purchase journey

I’m sure for Real Estate, customer journey is longer, so try to find the questions or brainstorm or maybe survey within your present customer base to understand that what kind of words/keywords they use, and what topics they generally start with.

Thereafter, move to deeper questions and try to develop blogs on each answer.

Moreover, search for the trending topic related to Real Estate market, for example – in January SBI & HDFC reduced their home loans interest rate. Why not use this news to push sales online?

With blog, you get dual benefits first with relevant and high-quality content you get higher ranks in search engines, and again with content you are able to engage your audience and convert them.

2. Develop Your Strategy and Campaign from Conversion Perspective

It is a common thing in an effective digital marketing campaign, creative digital marketers tend to forget or avoid the importance of conversion strategy.

You will find many campaigns that are there for entertainment sake, not conversion. Just tell me, you have created the hype and interest but now what?

If you do not tell your audience, what to do after watching brand video, viewers will not make any effort to continue further. So, it’s important to tell them to ‘subscribe’, to ‘opt-in’, to ‘visit’, to ‘call’ etc.

It is quite simple to do it, just focus on your goal and conversion strategy, and then develop your marketing strategy and campaigns. There are few important components in your conversion strategy – call to actions, designing, pitching, and customer profile.

However, I would still not tell you to compromise on your creativity, because creativity enables engagement, without which customer will not easily believe in you. Make creativity your differential advantage, and try to integrate it with your conversion strategy, in digital media it is quite easy.

3. Engage Your Customers Wherever Possible – Email, Blog, Social Media, Forums etc.

As I told you earlier, your target audience is searching and researching extensively on digital channels. So, it’s important to engage them, start a conversation, make a dialogue, and enable interaction.

On Internet, engagement can be through emails, on social media, blogs, forums, groups, communities etc.

There are endless opportunities available around you. All you need is to explore these. Use medias where you will find people searching for your product online.

Engagement cannot happen just like that. You need strategy on - how you will create interest in customer (through blog, info-graphics, video, contests etc.), what will be the platform and technology (blog, flash media, social media etc.), what kind of conversation you want to start, and lastly, what will you get out of it (identity, brand following/loyalty, customers, sales etc.).

For any brand online, engagement is the quick and effective tool that builds sense of dependability, amiability and loyalty among audience.

In Real Estate market, where purchase decision can take longer time, these engagement tactics, will enable you to be on top-of-the-mind, and simultaneously, it goes long way in word-of-mouth publicity.

4. Market on Vertical Search Engines, Properly and Extensively

Today, in Real Estate digital marketing strategy in India presence on search engines like 99acres, Makkan, IndiaProperty, Housing, Commonfloor etc. have become a necessity. You just can’t ignore them.

Almost all of them are in top searches of Google. Even for generic keywords such as ‘Real Estate India’, ‘Real Estate industry in India’, etc. Moreover, they’ve huge flux of loyal audience.

All offer free listing, but there are paid listing and advertisements available. But before you choose, I would recommend to check with the website, how much your local audience is available on that search engines.

Also, try to do research about your competitors on these vertical search engines. Also you will find a number Property Brokers online.

Let me give you an insider view – suppose, 50 leads are generated on these websites, then what they do is that they offer all these leads to the premium customers first, and thereafter provide these leads to general customers or with lower packages. This very thing often confuses the customer leading to further delay in their purchase decision. Most importantly, eroding the quality of leads generated.

However, you still cannot ignore them for the reasons I just explained you above. Nevertheless, just research it thoroughly; ask for the local analytics because often they give you national data, which is misleading.

When generating advertisements for these search engines, do not forget to use keywords, call-to-actions and try to provide clean and HD photographs, so target audience could get sense of your brand and products.

5. Improve Your Advertising and SEM – Targeting, Budgeting and ROI

If you are not able to push your SEO & reach top searches, not able to generate traffic that you wanted, want highly targeted audience for your product, then advertising and SEM can be best options available.

Today, almost all Real Estate marketing strategies have online advertising and SEM to reach their target audience, when they are not able to reach with their organic methods. However, marketers often make mistakes while targeting, budgeting and developing ad copies, and seldom separate SEM and advertising strategy.

This very thing bloats the budgets out of proportion and leads to abysmally low conversions and ROI.

I suggest you three things to improve your advertising and search engine marketing

a.  Keyword and Targeting

Keywords are for targeting your audience and enabling you to reach them. To effectively target, you can use Ubersuggest and Google Adwords. Google’s Analytics and Webmasters can be your treasure hubs if you are using them for long term. You can find keywords those are performing for you, and avoid not performing ones.

b.  Developing and Writing Ad Copies

   Again highly targeted copies will help you to convert easily. Try to   develop ad copies keeping in mind specific need of your prospect, and     write copies using CTAs.

c.  Testing and Monitoring

   Lastly, A/B test by taking two ad copies and changing their colors    combination, CTAs, content etc. Awesome Tip, try to use one or two    colors only, and talk about prospects’ needs in lesser words and    innovate a little.

In the end, I would recommend you to use advertisement Remarketing/Retargeting. It’s quite important in Real Estate digital marketing to reach again and again to your customer, and follow up.

6. Second Screen Marketing For Real Estate

According to IAMAI mobile Internet users’ population to reach 195 million by June 2014, this is 28 per cent of the total population.

Why this matters to Real Estate marketing?

It matters a lot. Because this population consist of users, who can afford to buy smart-phones and tablets, who are easily accessible on the go. This  makes mobile internet marketing highly exciting for any marketer.

Therefore, I recommend you, to develop separate second screen marketing strategy, and try to invest in responsive website and mobile content.

Try to include instant messaging, Whatsapp, WeChat, Snapchat etc.,  in your strategy, and use new social media platforms such as (Instagram, Vines etc.).Google Maps for Real Estate is a highly important tool.

You can do lots of experiments here, nevertheless ROI is still an issue but overtime as market matures in India, second screen will deliver better results.

7. Real Estate Video Marketing

People researching & searching online for properties often look for tangibility content – web content, blog, image, info graphics, VIDEO etc. As it was found by watching product video more than 80 per cent viewers are more likely to show interest.

In Real Estate marketing in India, when there’s a trust deficit even with well-know developers, it becomes important to create brand identity and loyalty by offering tangibility to prospects in shape of videos of the properties. Video production for online marketing and video marketing is excessively cheaper in comparison to Television commercials. Moreover with video marketing you reach your target audience easily and with higher conversion rate.

There are type of videos you create for your brand. Can be for website, blog, social media and other platforms for varied purposes - branding, awareness, sales etc.

For example : Informational Videos 

A Video Can Also Be Attention Grabbing & Entertaining

My tip for video marketing would be to keep it short and sweet giving view of the properties. There’s lot of room for creativity, and apart from creating videos of properties, also use video to get virality by covering related topics such as home improvements, interior decoration and property trends, etc.

8. Humanize…

Gone are the days, when it was B2C, B2B, C2C etc. but now with digital age, it is H2H (human to human).

In Real Estate industry, in offline channels human to human interaction is strong, but on online it is abysmally low. I recommend you to humanize your Real Estate marketing to make it high performing.

Instead of depending too much on your designs, graphics and technical work try to engage directly with audience on blogs, social media etc. wherever possible. If you listen, and talk back, it builds reliability, repo and brand identity, so, don’t forget to use it in digital marketing channels.

That’s it.

I’m sure there may be more ways to improve digital marketing for Real Estate, and then we would love to hear from you.

Internet influencing Real Estate decisions worth $43billion in India: Google