5 real estate marketing strategies for 2017
5 real estate marketing strategies for 2017, because it is essential to understand which real estate marketing trends are going to be strong in order to allocate resources accurately and intelligently.
Understanding which marketing trends are going to be strong this coming year is essential to be able to allocate resources in a precise and intelligent way. Times change and, if you don't adapt, you die or lose a huge amount of resources by deploying marketing actions without a previous strategy or by not tuning the actions already deployed with the new market demands.
It is essential to understand which marketing trends are going to be strong this coming year, in order to allocate resources accurately and intelligently.
Recently, Grant Findlay-Shirras (@GrantFSOfficial) has published an article for Inman, 5 Real Estate Marketing Trends to Watch Out For in 2017where he talks about the main trends in real estate marketing for 2017 in the North American market. In this post, I explain them and "land" them to the Spanish market.
Virtual reality and 3-D
Virtual reality and 3D visualisations have gained traction in 2016 and the trend will continue to gain traction throughout 2017. Lhe most important and specific feature of these tools is the sensation of spatiality they offer, as they allow you to visit a flat as if you were there, which saves time and travel for both buyer and agent.The first can access several properties in less time in a more immersive way thanks to the high HD quality of the videos and 360º panoramic views; the second ensures that physical visits to the properties are made by very interested clients at the end of the day. And let's not forget the homeowner, for whom these tools save unnecessary visits to their property and can shorten the time to sale.
These tools can be accessed through easy-to-use mobile applications such as Immoviewer, Matterport o Realisti.co among others. In Spain, suppliers such as Floorfy They make the tool available to agencies, but also the possibility of outsourcing the work to them if they choose to outsource the service. In general in our country, the market has shown good receptivity for virtual reality and 3-D technologies.The cardboard glasses, which are inexpensive and easily customisable with the agency's logo and image, have been chosen by several agencies.
For further information on this issue, I recommend reading this article by César Villasante (@cesvillas) Virtual reality to visit homes published in Inmoblog.
Facebook Ads
Real estate will always have a physical nature, as it is a transaction between people who need to see and trust each other. But it is undeniable that the new forms of consumption brought about by the digital revolution mean that many of the phases of the purchasing process will be increasingly digital. 259 million subscribers on Linkedin, 6,000 tweets per second, 144,000 hours of video uploaded per hour on Youtube, 4,750 million posts per day on Facebook, etc. are numbers of such magnitude that tell us loud and clear: "renew or die".
The real estate business will always have a physical nature, but the new forms of consumption brought about by the digital revolution are leading us towards unstoppable digitalisation.
Among the many possible digital platforms, Facebook remains the gateway to this digital transformation for estate agents.The social network is the social network of mass adoption par excellence, and this familiarity with the platform makes the path much easier. Marketing gurus such as Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee) and Tom Ferry (@tomferry) say that we are living in the golden age of Facebook ads and at this point, many North American real estate agencies are running simultaneous campaigns on Google Adwords and Facebook Ads to get leads. However, an identical campaign on both systems does not necessarily offer the same performance, as the moment of consumption on Google is "search data" and on Facebook it is "conversation". Nothing to do with each other...
According to Grant Findlay-Shirras, Facebook Ads will become increasingly expensive and less profitable in the United States.... Why? These tools must constantly evolve, in a never-ending loop, in order to remain attractive to the companies on which they live. To get as many advertising accounts as possible is precisely to the detriment of the profitability of the campaigns, which forces these platforms to constantly sophisticate their tools, and so back to square one. For this reason, this author recommends that North American agencies continue to invest in Facebook Ads, but be on the lookout for new platforms in which, although in the first phase the profitability may not be rocket-proof, it will be in the second and third phases. In addition to the competitive advantage they will have acquired by having gone through part of the learning curve before the others. In these cases, being among the first to arrive is important...
In Spain, although more and more agencies are investing in this type of advertising, we are far from the penetration rates of the North American market. So, for now, Facebook Ads is still an excellent platform for obtaining leads. That said, it is very important to make a good segmentation, take care of the creativities, target the right landing pages, monitor the effectiveness of the different ads daily, etc. So While it is true that the leads received through Facebook Ads are the most economical, they are also the least qualified..
Marketing automation
In the last edition of AICthe annual real estate event held every year in Calafell and led by Sergi Verge (@carbasses) of Inmoban, the presentation of Neus Arqués (@NeusArques), a personal branding expert, started with this maxim: "The raw material in the real estate sector is not housing, but trust".. Precisely for this reason, technological applications that, for the sake of being more economical, include all the solutions in a single tool, leaving aside the most relevant factor in the real estate business, the personal relationship, have not been successful. That said, technology can help us. Very much so.
"The raw material in the real estate sector is not housing, but trust". Neus Arqués
Among the many solutions, one of the most popular in the coming years will be marketing automation tools. 49% of companies in the United States use them because they help companies assign various automations associated with certain actions of contacts in their databases to attract, engage and satisfy them (known as lead nurturing) with relevant information, enabling step by step, sequentially, the contact's journey through the conversion funnel until it becomes a lead and finally a sale. In short.
According to a study by IBM and eConsultancy for IBM Marketing Cloud, only 35% of consumers receive relevant communications from their favourite brands; and 4 out of 5 consumers believe that brands fail to understand them as individuals.
In the national ecosystem of small and medium-sized real estate companies, the penetration of this type of tool is practically non-existent.Why? Out of ignorance, or because they cannot afford the comprehensive solutions offered on the market. Hubspotfor example, one of the best known, offers a basic plan 185 per month for the management of databases of 100 contacts, a pro plan 740 per month for 1,000 contacts, or a enterprise plan 2,200 per month for databases of 10,000 contacts. But marketing automation saves companies time and moneyLet's take an example: Let's say the agency receives an email from an interested party asking for information about a property. The agent in charge enters this information in the CRM for possible cross-referencing with the available portfolio and then enters the interested party's email address in the email marketing software so that they receive the newsletters. Or... He does nothing because all this is done automatically. This, and hundreds of other possible combinations. Keller Williams in his manual The Millionaire Real Estate Agentstates that an agent should have an average of 33 interactions per year with each of his or her contacts in the database. Sounds like science fiction...
In the end, it all boils down to the following: It is important that our contacts keep us in mind, because every day someone decides to sell or rent out their house (or knows someone who will), but with the saturation of advertising in which we live, the proliferation of devices, new channels and emerging markets, it is increasingly difficult to get their attention and to be considered. Being there is a hygiene factor, out of sight out of mindbut it is not enough. According to a study by IBM and eConsultancy for IBM Marketing CloudIn the UK, only 35% of consumers receive relevant communications from their favourite brands; and 4 out of 5 consumers believe that brands fail to understand them as individuals. Marketing automation allows companies to design a sophisticated web of processes specific to each stage of the buying process to mature the relationship with their contacts, building loyalty and driving them from awareness through consideration, acquisition and interaction to recommendation.
Relevant retargeting to improve conversion
The retargeting is a digital marketing tactic consisting of impacting with advertising to users who have previously interacted with us, either because they have visited our website, opened an email or simply clicked on one of our links on the Internet (a forum, a blog...). Thanks to Google Analytics, for example, when a user visits our website, even if they do not take action and do not leave us their contact information, we can track their visit and know: where they have entered our website and where they have left, what information they have consulted, what properties have interested them... But there is more: we can know where they are from, what browsing system they use, gender, age, other websites consulted... All this information is very valuable, as it allows us to accurately define the profile of our users and know what is relevant to them and what is not. The retargeting is the automatism that allows us to reinforce our brand and keep us in the minds of our users, "chasing" them during the following days with online ads that appear on other Google content pages and that show them, for example, properties related to the searches they have made or the listings of the properties they have consulted.. These ads will encourage these users to return to our website and, now they will take action by requesting information and leaving their contact information. This is true if it is done well, of course.
But it is a common mistake of some real estate agencies that have retargeting campaigns for visitors to their website, to resort to ads with generic and irrelevant messages that redirect them to the main page of the website. Wrong... This causes precisely the opposite effect: rejection. If you want to get results, you need to be relevant to your audience.. Otherwise, your ads will be invisible. It's not just a matter of improving creativity, but also of segmenting your target: are they buyers, sellers, investors? And if they are buyers: are they buyers of first homes, second homes, coastal towns? Once the target has been identified, find out what worries them (pain points) and you will know what information is relevant to them and will attract their attention, thus facilitating the conversion of this type of advertisement.
If you want to get results, you need to be relevant to your audience.
Content marketing for hyper-segments
We have been hearing for years now that "content is king". Here's one more... But it's no longer enough. Content is one of the main sources of organic traffic to our website, but it is not enough anymore. with a department in every company dedicated to publishing content on the networks, users no longer swallow, and not just any content, on any channel and to any audience.There is not enough time to read everything! And with such saturation, organic search engine optimisation (SEO) also becomes more complicated. So... what to do?
Never before have real estate agencies created as much content as they do today.. The home is a very viral and rich topic: decorating tips, cooking recipes, guides to shops in the agency's area of operation, interviews with interior designers, monographs on a piece of designer furniture, etc. Attractive content that combines text, photos and video and takes several hours to produce. And then, these contents only get a few tens of likes... How is it possible with how beautiful the post was!
In the changes that are expected in Google's algorithm for 2017, those websites with useful content for their users for certain keywords will be promoted and better positioned, that is to say, the positioning of local and hyper-segmented content will be favoured. Therefore, attention to those real estate agencies with websites based on CRM software templates, as they will inevitably be left behind in the search engines. And as far as keywords are concerned (keywords) if the pages of real estate portals are already full of generic terms such as "housing", "real estate", "sell house"... So, as small real estate agencies, what keywords should we cultivate in order to be positioned in Google?
Let's start with an idea: quality over quantity and to the right audience. As real estate agencies, we do not need to receive thousands of visits to our website from users from all over the world, but we need to receive visits from our target audience. It is for our target audience that we write, and our entire content strategy must revolve around them.What worries him? What interests him? What makes him laugh? Where does he move? What does he eat? How does he dress? We must put ourselves in our customer's shoes and understand his consumption routines, because only by knowing him very well will we be able to attract his attention and, more importantly, retain it.
In short, if we continue to write for "all those who want to buy or sell their home in Barcelona" we will be covering too much and we will not be deploying an optimised content strategy. We should therefore focus on creating highly geolocalised content (neighbourhoods, districts, postcodes...), aimed at specific groups of consumers (hyper-segments) (first-time buyers, large families, singles, expats, etc.), different according to type of property (lofts, duplexes, villas...) and by time of consumption (newlyweds looking for a flat, new space needs as the family grows, etc.).
Advertising and lead generation are investments for the short / medium term. But the deployment of a good content strategy for the right target is a long-distance race that feeds and strengthens brand positioning.
In a nutshell:
●Real estate marketing is evolving rapidly, with more and more agencies deploying online advertising and content marketing strategies.
Virtual reality and 3D visualisations will become more popular in 2017.
A growing number of agencies will invest in Facebook Ads.
● Attention to marketing automation tools for their time and cost savings.
● Content marketing should be highly targeted (hyper-segmented) to favour the organic positioning of small and medium-sized agencies, as generalist content and keywords are the breeding ground of portals and large agencies. players sector.
