Over the last couple of years, prospective property buyers have shifted their information gathering source from offline to online. The first thing a buyer does is enter his search query on a search engine to look for the most relevant and recent results. The Indian property market has now matured to a point where property buyers are conducting extensive research online for seeing maximum projects before making the final purchase. Developers and property brokers are now increasing their digital marketing efforts for reaching their prospective customers. Along with search, social media has become a big playground for reaching out to prospective property buyers in the comfort of their timeline and social space.
Digital Marketing has the potential to reach, engage and convert potential property buyers better than any other communication medium. You need to create a high-impact integrated digital marketing plan that gets your message in front of prospective buyers and delivers the qualified leads that you can follow up on and close the deal. Developers and property agents who have not yet embraced digital marketing should be ready to go out of business sooner than later!
The single most important factor that works in favour of digital marketing for the real estate industry is its ability to reach the right audience in the right environment at the right price. Through a sustained targeted campaign across digital media, social media, blogging, SEO and SEM, real estate entities can effectively reach out to their prospective customers. Digital has become the leading medium for delivering high-quality genuine leads from property buyers, as it is convenient for the buyers to obtain information about the project and share his or her contact details in one session.
We offer you some digital marketing pointers for running a successful campaign for engaging buyers and generating leads:
- Make your website mobile friendly
80% of the online property searches happen through mobile handsets. If the buyer lands on your website and is greeted with a traditional website layout which has small text and is almost impossible to read, he or she will be immediately put off and leave your website, never to return. In digital parlance, this is called a bad user experience.
- Create engaging and high-quality website content
Along with making your website mobile-friendly, it is equally important to continuously create engaging high-quality content, both in terms of text content and video content. In addition to talking about your projects and their highlights, the content should also feature things like tips on home buying, home décor ideas, home security measures etc. Video testimonials from your existing customers play an important role in motivating the site visitor to move to the next level and share contact details. Remember, first you should “tell” and then you should “sell”.
- Develop a content-rich blog
A blog is the “live” section of your website, i.e. it updates in content every few days and enables the search engines to recognize your website as a “live” website, as opposed to websites where there is no content updating and are “abandoned” once they go live with the initial content.
- Search Engine Optimization
The gateway to internet is Search and the first step in digital marketing is creating and implementing a robust and evolving Search Engine Optimization strategy using On-Page and Off-Page Optimization.
- Social Media Marketing
Creating a presence on leading social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn and regularly populating it with engaging text and video content is the key to acquiring quality response from prospective property buyers. Social Media Marketing also plays an important role in positively impacting Search Engine Optimization.
To summarize the above, these are 5 things a property developer or real estate agent should do in digital marketing:
- Make your website mobile friendly
- Create engaging and high-quality website content
- Develop a content-rich blog
- Search Engine Optimization
- Social Media Marketing