Guide to Boost Real Estate Sales through Digital Marketing!

Real estate in India has found new tactic for marketing and pushing sales and revenues, called real estate digital marketing. Today, high to middle-low end customers’ journey in India start with online research.

1 June, 2020 / Cleardeals

Indian customers are excessively using the Internet to search and research before buying high-value item especially real estate.

In India, when you have more than 220 million users online, which is the creamy layer of India’s marketplace consisting of high-net-worth individuals to the 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.

In 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 percent are directly spent on digital marketing.

With such a major chunk of digital marketing proves that real estate has approved its efficacy and relevance.

Just recently, Tata Housing announced that online sales could easily reach 30 percent of the total revenue in the coming years.

There you are, if you belong to the real estate industry in India, digital marketing is currently playing a crucial role in your sales.

Moreover, on the Internet, you have a level playing field, where you can challenge big players with your innovative and creative marketing campaigns and without spending much money for it.

Now question is – “how do you boost your online sales?” to answer that I have listed some 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 informed purchase decision. Therefore, in real estate digital marketing, the blog is at the core 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 most to them.

Research it through 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. With the 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 commonplace in digital marketing, creative digital marketers tend to forget or avoid the importance of conversion strategy.

Therefore, you will easily 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 the branded 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, still, I would not tell you to compromise on your creativity, because creativity enables engagement, and without which customer will not easily believe in you. Make creativity your differential advantage, and try to marry 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 the 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 join these, 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 the customer (through blog, infographics, 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 a quick and effective tool that builds a sense of dependability, amiability, and loyalty among the audience.

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

4. Real Estate Video Marketing

People researching online for real estate properties often look for tangibility in the shape of content – web content, blog, image, infographics, VIDEO etc.

As Kissmetrics found that by watching the product video more than 80 percent of viewers are more likely to buy.

In real estate marketing in India, when there’s a trust deficit even in well-known developers, it becomes important to brand identity and loyalty by offering tangibility to prospects in the shape of videos of the properties.

Video production for online marketing and video marketing is excessively cheaper in comparison to other Television commercials, moreover, with video marketing, you reach your target audience easily and with a higher conversion rate.

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

5. Humanize…

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

In the 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 marketing for real estate in India to make it high performing.

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

Disclaimer: The article contains data collected from various sources & the use of same is at readers discretion.