Digital marketing for residential real estate business: strategies that work
According to research from researchandmarkets.com, by 2024, the real estate business should swell to a $41.4 billion ad category, with digital media marketing accounting for nearly 77% of all spending. But finding the needed client is still not easy. And the developer's marketing must always meet the current market challenges — especially digital marketing.
The customer journey in residential real estate is usually taken a long time. With cheaper properties, this process is usually faster than with premium ones.
The customer makes 5-8 touches with the developer's business during this time. Nowadays, primarily in digital. This is, first of all, such platforms as the developer's website or specifically of the residential complex, big boards, different digital marketing advertising, and other platforms.?
But TRUST — that is what is always essential for every business, and especially for real estate. There are practically no sales without trust in real estate marketing; if potential buyers trust a developer's business, they can buy from him again.?
The video case study below shows how we rebuilt trust in Ukraine's largest residential real estate developer.
Therefore, strategies for warming the audience by promoting the developer's brand are always good.
So what should a real estate developer's digital marketing look like today?? Let's take a look at a few aspects.
1. Digital availability of information
Yes, time is money. No one wants to spend even tens of minutes in waste. Sometimes real estate developers choose to present a minimum of information about the residential complex on the website for a person to call the sales department. Those strategies look strange, while the openness of information greatly simplifies the life of the marketing department — having relevant information about the lead, you can analyze a huge amount of info and then build Google's bidding strategies and scale just such a target.
This allows real estate digital marketing agency to work with optimization and warm leads, as a bonus: no more endless info queries for the sales department.?
2. Why you shouldn't cut marketing budgets during a crisis
During crises, as a rule, everyone immediately starts erroneously reducing marketing budgets. And not only for digital. Prices fall by 10%, and marketing budgets are cut by 70%. And now, simply mathematics: there were 100% of the leads (potential buyers), and only 30% remained.?
Therefore, the remaining leads are redistributed to those who have not cut their marketing budgets.?
My observation over the years: if a real estate company spends the cost of its 1 square meter to attract one buyer, then the marketing in this company works correctly.
3. What is a high-quality marketing mix of sales channels?
The Internet has been and will remain the absolute champion in this question. To maximize the return on digital marketings channels, their goals should be divided into:
Variations of this digital mix mainly depend on the size and, therefore, on the budgets of the developer's company and directly affect how cheap traffic it can afford to attract.?
The top 3 channels for attracting customers in real estate internet marketing are:
In addition, there are email marketing, native advertising, and other tools that warm the marketing funnel.
A high-quality mix of channels gives high-quality leads.?
4. Why does a residential real estate developer need Call tracking?
Before deciding on a real estate purchase, a potential buyer makes at least 11 search digital queries on different platforms and visits 3 sites. Therefore, it is crucial to understand where the lead came from and how much it costs. Without call tracking and Google Analytics, understanding it is challenging.
The role of incoming calls in real estate digital marketing can hardly be overestimated. Because any potential buyer will look for the possibility of personal contact with the business to which he will entrust money.
In Ukraine, the callback widget on the developer's website and call tracking are standard. It is convenient and free for potential buyers and allows the sales department to process up to 92% of missed calls and generate about 20% of additional ones.?
This increases the likelihood of a deal, thanks to contact with the user at the time of his peak interest, making it possible to analyze controversial issues, objections, a portrait of the customer, and other helpful marketing options.
According to surveys, 50% of Ukrainian developers analyze the cost of targeted calls monthly, 16% - weekly, and 9% - daily.?
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5. Orientation to CPA - model
Marketing of European developers long ago switched to the CPA (Cost per Action) model. They pay only for the action. This work well for small companies with small budgets, allowing them to get even less traffic but better quality than if they bought it somewhere and converted it through their sites.
Let's move on to the most interesting, what can the CEO of a digital marketing agency share: how much can a lead cost??
The cost of a quality lead depends on many factors, ranging from the residential complex's location to the country's situation and season. But there are four main ones:
— brand recognition,
— state of construction
— the number of finished projects in the developer's portfolio
— ambition and marketing funnel width.
An extensive marketing funnel is always more expensive because, along with the number of leads, the cost of processing them will also grow (you may need more people in the sales department, at least).?
Watch one of our video case studies for even more helpful information.
And now, I want to leave some tips about websites for residential real estate:?
1.In the sales cycle, the website plays a critical role, but still not the final one, such as a visit to the sales department.
The marketing idea of complex solutions on the residential real estate developer's website does not justify itself. All possible "show-offs" in the form of parallaxes, scrolls, image things, and automatically playing videos lead to users getting annoyed and closing the tab faster. By the 10th second of loading the website, you lose 80% of potential buyers: the website has not yet loaded that superb chip you put there, and the user has already clicked on the cross and moved on. Google also lowers a heavy-to-load site in the rankings.
Today marketing, and not only digital, have faced a huge fight for attention, so each user's question must be predicted, and each answer must be clear, concise, and specific. Therefore, the three whales on which the website should “stand” are fast loading, a straightforward interface, and a convenient menu. That is all.
How to avoid punctures? Avoid the desire to give the user a luxurious experience and focus on practicality.?
Legacy is not websites or big boards. The legacy is the houses and living in these houses. Building well is better than creating a marketing bias toward unacceptable indicators.
2. Another tip concerns the display of the apartment on the developer's website. A person is offered to transfer his hard-earned hundreds of thousands for some indistinct plan scheme. That's not how it works. The apartment is similar to a product card in an online store. Show it to future buyers from all sides, with furniture, without furniture, etc.?
One more working marketing tip from online shops' platforms is displaying similar products next to the position the potential buyer is currently viewing. Thus, doubts are removed: if you don’t like the apartment size, you see another size; if you don’t like the layout, you have a different layout, and so on.
And a few words about SEO's importance in real estate marketing:?
Depending on the country, region, and season, the share of the organic search traffic for real estate websites is typically 30-40%. And always exist companies that capture a significant part of the search results for all real estate queries.
For example, for the USA, it is Zillow. In Germany — Immobilienscout24, and so on. And therefore, not only big aggregator websites but also news sites (if we are talking about the brand of an already well-known developer) "borrow" the most important USP of residential complexes.
But this does not mean you can not try to win back this traffic. In doing so, you should be guided by the basic principles:
— the highest quality collection of the semantic core
— prioritization of requests. Occurs based on the strategy and budget for SEO.
— work with low-frequency requests. One of the best strategies for a small budget.
— a constant search for growth points
— quality content.
In one of our cases, we managed to increase organic traffic to the website thrice in 5 months only thanks to rewriting existing texts and competent specs.?
And the last one: Don't blame low sales on the financial crisis. It has a negligible effect on the plans of those who decide to buy real estate. For example, in the coronavirus year 2020, the sales departments of our clients (that year, we accompanied with marketing the projects of 24 East Europe developers) received almost 264,970 requests. In dynamics, this figure is 15% more than a year earlier, in 2019.
George Kurbanov, CEO Svitsoft