The 20 keys to real estate marketing: from defining needs to the secrets of a successful marketing campaign

The purpose of this introductory article is to show you why a real estate marketing strategy is essential today. Then teach you the fundamentals of real estate marketing that grabs the attention of prospects and converts them into clients.

In real estate, realizing the need to adapt to customer behavior is even more important than elsewhere, for (at least) three reasons:

It is trust, and that alone, that allows you to convince your clients that they need you.

This conviction process takes time, so turning a contact into a prospect, and then a prospect into a customer, can take months or even years.

Because marketing isn't just about choosing a location and putting an ad there to catch the eye of passers-by. Marketing is not just about promoting (I have a great offer), it is above all about generating leads.

However, we should not be afraid of real estate marketing. The single word "marketing" tends to be hairy and hairy, but it's not that scary - once you've gotten to know it. The bad news is, there's a lot of learning ahead of you to tame the Marketing Beast. The good news is that this notion gets easier and easier as you understand how things work.

Marketing is like riding a bicycle: you have a hard time getting started for fear of falling. Then, once you feel comfortable, you have the exhilarating impression that you can go to the end of the world.

Once you have started to develop your skills in marketing, it is not impossible that it will become your favorite aspect of the job ... Particularly because it is less about making money than building quality relationships. with clients who are, above all, residents of the neighborhood.

It's all well and good, but how do you do it? And where to start?

This is the whole point of this article, which aims to give you the keys to real estate marketing. I invite you to explore this area like visiting a house: room by room, step by step, It will be a bit long (that's true), it will sometimes be a bit demanding (it must be admitted), but you will come out of it full of ideas.

Let's go?

Why real estate marketing?

“I don't need any marketing. I have a brand that has been established for decades. I have well-established clients who trust me. Every day, my agents do two or three hours of prospecting and report contacts. Why would I need a real estate marketing strategy? "

You may have heard this explanation from a colleague. Maybe it even translates precisely what you are thinking. The resulting question is, what is real estate marketing for?

it seems important to us to answer this essential question.

The success of any business depends in large part on the quality of the marketing strategy deployed. No one conquers a market without a minimum of preparation. Even the best of goods will not be able to find a buyer if it is not sold properly. Apple's success remains a prime example: it was not the quality of the products that founded the brand's success, but the way in which these products were presented to the public. At the end of the nineties, the ad said "Think different": it invited consumers to move from the status of buyers to that of market players. Their decision to buy became the culmination of a thought process.

Steve Jobs was neither a technician nor a salesperson. He was a marketing genius. He worked with people who could design great products and knew exactly how to convince the public that these products were made for them.

Marketing, in its broadest sense, refers to all the methods, actions and levers that a company (or a person) can use to create links with a clientele in a given sector, with the aim of discovering their needs and how to meet them as accurately as possible.

Creating a bond: To understand what your prospects want, you need to get to know them better and know where they are looking for their information. One of the marketer's missions will, for example, be to adapt his methods to the new digital habits of sellers and buyers: since 90% of them start their real estate project on the Internet, actions must therefore be taken online.

Let’s go back to the grumpy real estate agent who says he doesn’t need the help of marketing:

“I have a brand that has been established for decades. “Certainly, and it is important to perpetuate this good reputation acquired, then developed over the years. However, nothing is set in stone: new competitors are entering the market, consumers are changing their habits, the level of quality of your services may decline. The "Kodak effect" must be avoided at all costs: the inability of a business to adapt to the demands of its customers. (After being the number one in photography, Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012 because it failed to take the digital turn, a technology ... from its own laboratories!) Real estate marketing allows you to read in the thoughts of your prospects to know what they want, better meet their expectations, and thus maintain an excellent reputation in your sector.

"I have well-established clients who trust me. Again, nothing lasts forever. Your customers of tomorrow will not be those of today. And trust is unfortunately a very volatile notion. While maintaining good relationships with your existing customers is crucial, they aren't going to be buying and selling real estate every day. You will need to seek new prospects, wherever they are, and convince them to trust you (in you rather than any other real estate company in the same sector). If you don't have a marketing strategy, how are you going to get this message across?

“Every day, my agents do two or three hours of prospecting and report contacts. And once those contacts are in your database, what happens? What do you do with it? If you don't know how to deal with them, if you leave them in a corner, or if you are not able to maintain their interest throughout the customer journey, they will certainly be lost. Real estate prospecting and marketing are not opposed: they are two complementary concepts. You need the former to collect contacts and the latter to market yourself, gain attention, track your leads, convert them into customers, etc. Marketing makes prospecting more efficient and vice versa. In short, it is the articulation between the two approaches that ensures the success and sustainability of your real estate business.

This is why you must be able to count on a concrete and viable real estate marketing strategy.

1. Analyze your marketing needs

Your marketing strategy is necessarily born out of a need, and this need defines your positioning. As such, there are two essential questions to ask yourself:

In which market are you positioned? Knowing the market in your sector is essential. Typology of properties, price trends, but also the number of transactions and the owner / tenant ratio are all data from which you can define your real estate marketing strategy.

Equally important: take the number of the inhabitants of the area in order to draw a composite portrait of the local population. This is the sine qua non for positioning yourself (residential properties? Offices and professional premises? Rental? Prestigious real estate?) And preparing your future speech for prospects.

What competition are you up against? You were not the first to establish yourself in your industry and you will not be the last. the market is changing. Who are your direct and indirect competitors? What is their success rate? How are they evolving? The idea is to draw the competitive landscape to better position yourself and explore your differentiation levers (like: "if they do this, I will rather do that").

From a real estate marketing perspective, your competitors are not your enemies, only adversaries to be faced in regular combat. You can learn a lot from their methods and actions, don't forget!

2. Analyze the needs of your customers

It is not enough to paint a composite picture of the local population: you must also get to know the inhabitants of the area who may become your customers, and analyze their needs precisely. Imagine that you are the doctor and that your clients are the patients: before offering analyzes or treatment, you must make a diagnosis, so listen to what your interlocutors have to tell you. Otherwise, your actions will be tantamount to putting a cautery on a wooden leg.

Real estate marketing is precisely that: diagnosing the problem better.

To do this, there are two steps to follow:

Define personas. Understand: descriptions of your typical customers, taking the form of fictitious identities. For example, Ali and Sara, 29 and 28, who want to sell their apartment to buy a house because they are expecting a happy event. This type of portrait helps you better target individuals by understanding who they are, what they expect and where they are going. It is easier to talk to Ali and Sara than to "prospect n ° 1" and "prospect n ° 2".

Segment targets. Real estate marketing is characterized by a concern for personalization: it is about designing modes of communication that make it possible to forge close ties with prospects. However, it is not possible to address each contact personally: you would have to write your one thousand emails per week one by one, so hire someone who would do just that! To simplify things, we “segment” the targets into several sub-families which become as many profiles to which we can send relevant messages. It's up to you to define these sub-families: by positioning in the customer journey (“thinking sellers”, “mature sellers”, “motivated buyers”), by socio-professional category (“CSP +”, “affluent households "), Etc. Anything is possible, as long as it helps your marketing strategy.

Analyze the needs of your prospects. What they envision (for their real estate project) and what they expect (from a professional who will take charge of the project). Here, it is crucial to distinguish between sellers and buyers, whose paths are necessarily distinct. And to assess the level of need as accurately as possible: a seller who has already taken steps to put his property on the market will not be considered the equal of an owner who has no intention of selling for the moment. You must put in place real estate marketing actions adapted to each course.

3. Define your marketing objectives

What goal do you want to achieve?

This, again, is an essential question for the deployment of an effective real estate marketing strategy. Your marketing goals flow directly from your business goals: it is by having a clear destination in mind that you can think about the best way to achieve it.

You can work on two types of business goals:

Qualitative objectives. These are the goals that cannot be quantified, but which are nonetheless essential for your business. For example: gain visibility, improve your local notoriety, optimize the positioning of your digital media (especially on search engines), target contacts already pre-qualified to boost your conversion rate, retain more customers, etc.

The quantitative objectives. These are the quantified, clearly defined objectives. They serve as thresholds to be reached for the purposes of measuring results (to assess the effectiveness of a real estate marketing campaign, you must first know what the goal is) and motivation (your teams know they must organize so many meetings or take so many mandates to achieve their objectives).

These objectives, you must define them in coherence with the typical courses of your sellers and your buyers. If you know that 75% of sellers in your sector sign a contract with the agency that gave them an estimate, you can focus your efforts on a given number of estimates to be made (this is of course only an example. ).

4. Differentiate your real estate business

Differentiation should be one of your main goals. In addition to all the others (quantitative and qualitative).

Differentiation, This is the idea of distinguishing your real estate brand from all the others on the market. In a very competitive sector, every brand dreams of standing out from the crowd and sailing above the clouds. The higher you are, the easier it will be for prospects to see you and come to you.

Differentiation is pure marketing. This time, it is no longer a question of defining personas or adapting your services to the expectations of prospects, but of presenting your brand in such a way that it is more attractive than the others. Several levers can be used to achieve this: enhancing the quality of the services offered, the originality of the approach, the demonstration of your expertise in your field, and the ability to step into territories that your competitors are abandoning.

This is where the information collected previously (benchmark and analysis of prospect needs) will come in handy. This information will allow you to position yourself in a way that sets yourself apart from your rivals, and real estate marketing will help you sell that difference to your future clients.

5. Prepare your real estate marketing strategy

What real estate marketing strategy are you going to adopt?

The question is important because there is no "one" real estate marketing, but "different" ways of marketing.

Today, sellers and buyers alike expect you to make them a real value proposition. They do not have to use your services (or go through a professional at all) and do not feel committed. The best way to reach them is to show them you've got the right solution for them. This is the essence of inbound marketing: a way to (re) put the customer at the heart of the concerns.

It is only once you have chosen your real estate marketing strategy that you can prepare the necessary resources to deploy it.

6. Set up the right acquisition channels

Different acquisition channels serve different purposes, but all of them have their advantages as part of your real estate marketing strategy ... As long as they are well suited to your business, your services and your prospects / customers.

The notion of "acquisition channel" covers both methods, tools and levers. In terms of marketing, prospecting is itself an acquisition channel, just like SEO for a website. The term refers, taken as a whole, to anything that enables you to acquire contacts and generate leads, whether through physical or digital actions. Thus, we will consider as possible acquisition channels:

Prospecting in the field and by telephone;

The use of print media;

The use of digital media;

The setting up of events related to the brand;

The use of software making the link between prospecting actions and marketing actions (in a double articulation of acquisition and follow-up of prospects);

The various acquisition strategies intended to strengthen the effectiveness of these levers (natural referencing, sponsored links, emailing, cross-channel approach to link the different channels, etc.).

Of course, it is not enough just to set up different channels. It's also about focusing your efforts on the right channels - those that match your goals and the habits of your prospects. This is a (real) real estate marketing approach: adapting tools to targets. If your prospects massively use digital media to find you, you will be keen to focus your actions on web marketing, without neglecting the physical media that will come as reinforcement.

7. Combine prospecting and real estate marketing

It is understood that prospecting and marketing are two distinct approaches. But that doesn't mean they shouln't be used together for the best results.

Prospecting aims to forge links, to make yourself known to prospects, to give a face and a voice to your brand. It mainly materializes in the form of person-to-person (one-to-one) relationships: your prospect and yourself, without intermediaries. It allows you to build privileged relationships and remains ideal for going from making contact to meeting.

Real estate marketing focuses on communication and brand awareness. It aims to install your brand in the landscape, to develop communication actions, to create a brand identity, to create and use supports and resources allowing to impose your expertise, and to follow the evolution of your prospects throughout the customer journey. Real estate marketing does not come before or after prospecting: it is present all the time and everywhere. It's the bait that draws audiences to your brand, and it's the set of actions that will turn prospects into customers. Very powerful, marketing makes it possible to build relationships with several people at the same time (one-to-many) before moving towards more personalization (one-to-one). This funnel operation is what makes its strength.

Prospecting and marketing are all the more powerful when they are used together, to reach the right people and to do it at the right time.

8. Set up the follow-up of your prospects

Acquiring leads is good. But what to do once they are integrated into your database?

Few of the salespeople sign a contract after the first contact. The decision phase (the last step in the customer journey) can be long, even very long. During this time, you absolutely need to keep the line of communication open so that your prospects don't forget about you.

As part of an Inbound strategy, the follow-up of the prospects passes through the establishment of several levers:

The conversion tunnel (the path borrowed by prospects from the first contact until conversion).

Tracking tools (software solutions that allow you to organize your tracking, such as CRM, emailing tools or marketing automation tools).

Performance indicators (the tags that record your results and that you consult to find out exactly what's going on, with which prospects and when, in order to calculate the return on investment of your actions).

Tracking prospects is at the heart of any successful real estate marketing strategy. Without regular and well-organized follow-up, you will never know what your prospects become, neither what pushes them to turn into customers or, on the contrary, to turn away from your brand to see what the competitors propose.

9. Create a website and make it a full-fledged media

The website is one of the main tools in your real estate marketing, and THE main part of an inbound marketing strategy.

Indeed: in a web marketing approach, everything revolves around your website. This is not just a virtual storefront, a kind of enhanced business card intended to make you known and encourage your contacts to push through the door of your agency or offices. No: your website must occupy a central place in your real estate marketing strategy, and for that to become a media in its own right. Or, if you prefer this image: a "hub" to which all your acquisition channels, all your communication levers and all your essential tools are connected.

Your site has a role to play at all stages of the customer journey:

Initially, to attract visitors and convert them into prospects (virtual showcase, publication of advertisements for your property in a catalog, service and contact pages, blog articles on real estate themes, etc.);

During, to ensure the follow-up of prospects and communication (link between your site and your monitoring tools, publication of content in line with the stage of the customer journey, collection of user data to integrate them into the CRM, etc.);

At the end of the process, to transform prospects into customers (downloading premium content, emailing, etc.);

Beyond the customer journey, to retain and engage prospects who have become customers (emailing, communication actions, follow-up, connections between the site and accounts on social networks, etc.).

In short, your website is used for everything, it is at the heart of your real estate marketing.

10. Work on the SEO of your website

Digital real estate marketing has a particularity: it is subject to strong competition. Much stronger than traditional marketing.

If you buy an ad insert on a municipal billboard or in a local newspaper, competition is limited. You hit localized targets with localized communication. Things are simple.

But if you launch your website or post a blog post, you are competing with the entire UAE real estate industry. Under these conditions, positioning your media so that they are visible to Internet users becomes a real challenge. In particular your website. Knowing that there are tens of thousands of sites dedicated to real estate, whether they are agency pages or information platforms, how do you get people to come across your content and discover your brand?

This is the whole point of digital marketing: pulling the right levers to make you see internet users.

And, in this game, the best solution is to work on the referencing of your media.

There are two main types:

Natural referencing, which consists of positioning your pages on the "organic" (natural) results of search engines. These are the most popular results for internet users looking for information. This strategy is not profitable in the sense that you do not have to pay anything to boost the positioning of your site (other than the consultant who helps you define your SEO strategy, but the effects of this one will continue to be felt long after that you will have stopped paying him).

Paid referencing, which takes the form of sponsored links (AdWords on Google, Facebook Ads on Facebook, etc.). You pay a certain amount according to the competitiveness of the chosen keyword, so as to broadcast an advertisement immediately visible to Internet users, with a high click-through rate in prospect (but high marketing expenses).

Although paid search is akin to a more "classic" form of advertising, with interesting and quick results, it is nonetheless more relevant to invest in its "natural" equivalent. Because it is more sustainable and it helps to establish your brand over the long term, by working on your digital reputation.

11. Practice local SEO

In addition natural referencing also exists in a "local" version.

By working with localized keywords (in particular by using the names of the city, district, streets, places of interest that surround your sign) and by favoring the long tail in the choice of expressions, it is possible to position the agency or network website in local search results. Handy, when you know that the inhabitants of a given area can more easily come across your web pages through this, especially if they are searching from a mobile device with geolocation connected.

Local SEO is therefore a very powerful real estate marketing lever. It responds precisely to the challenges of the sector: addressing prospects established in a given sector, or prospects outside the sector but who are interested in your catchment area (for example: buyers from elsewhere who plan to 'acquire a property in this neighborhood).

12. Produce and distribute your content

At all stages of real estate marketing, especially from an inbound perspective, you need to create and distribute content.

The notion of "content" is broad. It also designates:

Print media such as business cards, brochures, catalogs, letterhead;

Physical mail;

Content to publish on your website (blog articles, premium content, infographics, etc.);

Promotional offers or informative content to be sent by email;

SMS;

Social media publications; Etc.

Whatever your way of working, whatever the acquisition channels you favor, you must produce a lot of content/media and ensure their proper distribution everywhere. This is one of the keys to the success of your real estate marketing strategy: if you want people to contact you, they must first get to know you.

13. Do emailing

Despite the development of social networks and other instant messaging, emailing has not lost any of its luster. As part of a real estate marketing strategy, it is even an absolutely essential communication lever.

First, because Internet users continue to ask for email. The rise of mobile uses has a lot to do with it: with a smartphone or tablet, it is easy to check your email from anywhere, at any time. 98% of Internet users are email users.

Secondly, because emailing is used for everything. It is a real estate marketing lever, a prospecting channel, a means of communication, a way of keeping in touch with existing clients, etc. You can send promotional emails, newsletters, exclusive and exceptional offers. You can use it to obtain the consent of contacts made during a prospecting session or through your digital media (by asking them to click on a link to validate their registration in your database.

Finally, because emails are an additional opportunity to convert contacts into prospects and prospects into customers. By placing a CTA there, you encourage recipients to visit your web pages and fill out a form or download premium content.

14. Make events

Organizing events related to your real estate marketing strategy is an approach that has many advantages.

On the one hand, events are an acquisition channel in their own right. They allow you to attract attention and make yourself known. Instead of going out to meet the residents of the neighborhood (prospecting), you invite them to join you for a specific occasion (event).

On the other hand, the event channel is particularly well suited to new technologies. Today, an event can be easily "augmented", in the sense of "augmented reality": you just need to relay it on digital media, and in particular on social networks, to bring it to life well beyond its base target. If you are having an open house in a property that you have just returned, for example, it is very easy to make a video of it (or several very short clips in the form of "Stories") and broadcast it on Facebook or Instagram so the whole community is in the know. The border between physical and digital being porous, this is an opportunity to do viral real estate marketing.

You have many possibilities for events, depending on the calendar (holidays, end-of-year celebrations, back to school, etc.), special occasions (agency anniversary, legislative changes affecting individuals, etc.) or events which concern the general public (locally or nationally). An example ? Launch a special football flyer during a World Cup, organize a real estate workshop for sellers to celebrate the arrival of spring as a favorable season for successful transactions, etc.

15. Use social networks as acquisition levers

After the notions of SEO, communication, dissemination and events, it is almost natural to come to the question of social media.

It must be said that it still divides the real estate community. Is social media, or isn't it, an integral part of real estate marketing? The answer is "yes", and even a big "yes": a transaction professional wishing to develop his notoriety, build relationships with prospects and create a base of trust has every interest in leaning on the power of social platforms. to propel its brand.

There are a thousand reasons why you can integrate social media into your real estate agency, network or developer marketing strategy. We will choose just one, the most obvious: Social media is popular and widely used. In UAE alone, Facebook has 7.77 million users and YouTube 8.65 million users.

Of course, by themselves, these numbers don't mean much. There are more than 10 million inhabitants in UAE and no real estate agent sees 10 million or more potential clients. Even on a small scale, it doesn't work: if you're in a city of 500,000 people, you don't have 300,000 sellers and 200,000 buyers to convince. In short, the number does not make the clientele.

But these networks are like territories in which evolve those who could well become your customers tomorrow. You know where they are. You know their habits (check Facebook every day, tweet regularly, watch videos on YouTube at least once a week, etc.). And, knowing this, you can develop methods of communicating with them - methods that prove particularly effective and pay off in the long run. Especially since social platforms provide professionals with a number of very valuable features and indicators from a real estate marketing perspective.

16. Animate your social accounts

So, of course, that means using these social networks in the right way. We talk about "animating" professional social accounts, so that they do not remain "frozen".

You have certainly heard the term "community management" before. The term refers to the activity of managing a brand's presence on social media, posting posts regularly, responding to user comments and posts, sharing information, etc. It is about "bringing life" to your social accounts so that there is constant activity on them, in the same way as you have to repeat advertising actions so as not to disappear from the field of vision of prospects.

Community management is also marketing. Applied to the needs of your agency / network / promotion business, this is real estate marketing.

17. Convert your contacts to leads

Beyond real estate communication marketing, there is a whole lot of follow-up and conversion marketing. Understand: Developing your brand awareness and getting the public's attention is great, but then you have to get down to business. After all, what you want is to get contracts and increase your turnover, right?

The thing is, that won't happen if you leave your contacts at the door. Once the first contact has been made, it is essential to launch the marketing machine so that this seed planted in the soil of your business gives a plant, and so that this plant bears fruit. The first step in converting your contacts to leads is to make sure you grow the plant.

We are talking here about the second stage of the Inbound marketing conversion funnel: the one that consists of converting leads (the first being dedicated to acquisition, the joint work of marketing and prospecting).

With this in mind, you need very specific tools. Real estate agency, network or real estate promotion marketing is a subtle art that requires being able to rely on quality instruments. Otherwise, you might as well entrust a Stradivarius to a violinist who is doing his first scales. The idea is to gently push your contacts to leave information about them, so that you can convert them into leads.

18. Convert your prospects into customers

Logical continuation of the previous point: the final conversion of prospects into customers. This is the third step of the Inbound Tunnel, and the one that will require your attention the most. Because, as you know, there is a world between the seller who listens to your pitch, who reads your content, who asks for an estimate, and the seller who sits down at the table to sign an exclusive mandate.

Nothing could be more normal: this is not a decision to be taken lightly. You don't leave the project of a lifetime to the first comer. The choice of your agency or your network is the culmination of a long reflection coupled with a precise analysis of the services offered by the professionals, without even mentioning the fact that your main competitor is none other than the seller himself. (who can choose to fend for themselves, from person to person). Don't be bold enough to think that you are the only possible choice for a salesperson; have the humility to recognize that the competition has valid arguments; and focus your efforts on convincing the other person that you are the best possible choice for them.

The whole point of real estate marketing is to help your seller make the decision that will move them from prospect (why not sign?) to client (I'm signing!). Converting your prospects into customers is about coaxing your plant into yielding tasty fruit.

Your prospect needs to see the obvious: they need to work with you, and no one else. If it works, you can thank your real estate marketing!

19. Retain and engage your customers

The strength of real estate marketing is its funnel operation: you communicate with a large number of people at a time to select only the most interested, in order to qualify them and turn them into clients.

But the power of your marketing doesn't stop with conversion. No, sir (or madam). Marketing goes much further, since it goes beyond the simple act of selling or buying: it generates ambassadors.

To fully understand, it should be known that the term "ambassador", in the field of marketing, does not designate this charming character who deploys treasures of diplomacy in third countries on behalf of his government. A marketing ambassador is someone who promotes a company, brand or product spontaneously, with no obligation, no remuneration, and no return on investment.

In other words, an ambassador is someone who liked a product/service and talks about it around him. This is the co-worker talking about the new running shoes he bought. This is the neighbor who brings up his recently purchased dream car, with stars in his eyes. This is the one that makes you too want to get the same product or use the same service provider.

Successful real estate marketing not only gets you clients, but you can count on ambassadors who will advertise you. Isn't that the most effective promotion?

20. Measure your real estate marketing performance

We come to the last point, and it is just as important as those before it, if not perhaps even more important.

Because the secret of successful real estate marketing is that there is no performance without indicators or measurements.

A performance is always judged against a benchmark. With your real estate agency, network, or development business marketing: your performance should be measured, evaluated against your own goals and against the market.

You therefore need to select the right indicators, those that make sense in the context of your activity, and carry out regular checks to know if your communication, marketing and prospecting actions are bearing fruit.

Otherwise, how will you know if your strategy is working? If your acquisition channels are the right ones? If your sales pitch is working? What if you convert as many leads into customers as possible?

In conclusion

Only you can decide if you want to invest time, means and resources (financial, human) in methods, levers and actions likely to bring you customers.

It is up to you, and to you alone, to determine what is best for your agency.

But you know what we say: whoever rests on his laurel crown does not move. Be satisfied with a punctual and ephemeral success, it is not sustainable. If you want your real estate business to be doing well, if you want to continue listing properties and running your business, or even developing your business (expansion, recruitment, expansion), you need to inject prospects into it. with regularity.

Otherwise, it would be like opening a restaurant on Monday, advertising on Tuesday, being very successful on Wednesday… and stopping everything on Thursday because you feel you've had enough customers!

-Mustafa Tahseen Al Droubi