Digital Marketing for Real Estate in India

Social Beat's Rohit Uttamchandani, Head of Digital Advertising & Real Estate was one of the speakers at the Real Estate Digital Marketing Conference in Bangalore on the 22nd March 2016, where he spoke on how real estate companies can leverage content marketing effectively for branding and lead generation. The conference was attended by key decision makers from some of Bangalore's leading real estate companies and included talks on social media marketing, measuring digital campaign ROI, driving sales through personal branding,  Internet of Things (IoT) and Virtual Reality.

Rohit's talk focussed on how content marketing, done right, can be a powerful tool to help real estate companies build their brand reputation online as well as generate leads in the long-term. To be successful in real estate content marketing in 2016 and beyond, one has to create content that is not only unique but also ten times better than the best content on that topic, anywhere on the internet. “10x Content” has become the new buzzword amongst advanced content marketers and the session talked about the ideation, creation and amplification of content for real estate with a clear focus on delivering business results. You can view the presentation from the talk below:

With Facebook deploying constant tweaks to its news feed algorithm, the reach of organic Facebook Page posts have dramatically dropped over the last 6-8 months and is going to drop further in 2015, as per Facebook’s announcement on the News Feed.

What this means is that Business Pages will need to constantly innovate to provide interesting and engaging content to their users in order to reach their News Feed. That being said, advertising and boosting posts is going to be a more significant aspect of every brand that wants to leverage FB. To aid in battling this scenario, we have compiled a list of lessons learnt that includes certain targeting techniques which can help you make the most of your ad campaigns, reaching more number of potential audiences with relevant messaging.

Building Custom Audience

• If you haven’t tried Custom Audience feature of Facebook yet, then 2015 is the year to leverage yet.
• Your company can create a Custom Audience by uploading your email addresses, phone numbers or Facebook user IDs. This could be a list of your existing customers or prospects you met through your other promotional activities.
• By uploading this database on FB, your Facebook Page can have unique campaigns targeted towards these audiences. Let’s assume you are running an ecommerce site and you have 1000 users who bought t-shirts from you in the last 3 months. By uploading this database onto FB you can feature your new T-Shirt launches to this audience.
• The use cases for Custom Audiences are endless and it also comes handy in filtering down large audiences with a specific set of interests.
• Even if your database is small, Facebook allows you to expand it by creating a "Look-alike audience” which creates an audience similar to that of your uploaded database – they take into account demographic data and interests.

Using a Landing Page to run Website Conversion Ads

• If you’re going to run an ad campaign on Facebook, make sure that the traffic is driven to a dedicated landing page where your visitors can be converted into potential leads/customers. In our experience over the last one year, running page like ads and boosted posts can have limited impact on the end result of your business (i.e. conversions or leads or online orders). Website Conversion Ads or Website Click Ads on Facebook can be far more effective medium to leverage the large and relevant audience that Facebook has in India.
• A landing page is critical to deriving results because the landing page has a single focus and is able to convert a higher percentage of visitors into leads or customers. Please do keep in mind that the Landing Page should ideally be an expansion of what the ad/promotion tries to showcase. Below is a snapshot of a landing page & ad for Saint-Gobain Glass.

Behaviour

• The behaviour section of Facebook Ad targeting is an often underutilized feature, but actually one of the most powerful targeting mediums.
• Using this section, your page can target FB users who have certain mobile/internet behaviour. For example, users who use 2G internet connection vis a vis 3G or 4G internet connection. Or users who run small businesses or manage a FB page of their own. Or users who are regular travellers or regular photo uploaders. Or users who use specific mobile devices (iPhone 6, Nexus 5, Note 3 etc.) or Feature Phones vs. Smartphones.
• Another interesting targeting medium under behaviour is called “Online Spenders”. This has proven to be very effective for e-commerce companies. Facebook through its Website Conversion ads knows which users are spending online. This has immensely helped in making the targeting niche for online shopping sites that we have advertised for.
• They also have an Expat Category if businesses are interested in targeting NRIs outside India or targeting Expats who reside in India.

Demographics

• Apart from the regular targeting of Age, Gender & Location, there are interesting targeting filters under Life Events. They have categories like Friends of users who have recently engaged or recently moved homes – these categories can be interesting for a company into gifting. Another category is “Anniversary within 30 days” so it can be interesting for restaurants, hotels, travel companies and gifting companies who can target users whose anniversary is coming up. Another interesting category is called “Parents” where Pages can target expectant mothers as well as parents who have children of specific age groups – this can be very effective for a business like a kids store, play school, entertainment centre etc. Many such categories exist so check them out to see if its fits your business needs.

• Job Role/Company – It can be useful for a B2B company to form a strong inbound marketing strategy by targeting users in a specific industry or job position.
• Demographics, in general, will help you increase your ad’s performance and reduce the effective cost per click and cost per action, narrowing your audience to a greater extent.

Interests

• Helps target those audiences who have expressed interest in subject matters or brands that are connected with the ads. This helps the brand/business tap the most responsive set of population who might be interested in the product.
• For example, a business which is selling musical instruments, it can target users who have interest in Guitars, Keyboards, Yamaha & Casio. These interests span not just broad topics but even specific brands (i.e. Yamaha & Casio in the above example). This can also be used to target users of competitor brands or websites.

Creative / Images used in the Facebook Ad / Post

• The right images & text used connects with the audiences and creates an appeal for the product being advertised.
• While creating an ad, one must ensure that the text used must contain a brief (preferably 3-4 words) description of the product/service being advertised in the form of popular adjectives. This description along with a clear call to action can help in getting a higher click through rate.
• Mentioning the price is also important since it gives the audience an idea of whether they can afford the product or not.
• Images that are used for the creative should not be cluttered with too much text or design. The neater and confusion-free they are, the better the ads work. Facebook of course has the 20% text rule so Facebook ads cannot have more than 20% text.

Indians seem to have become increasingly comfortable making high-value purchases such as apartments and plots of land online – if the stats of the recently concluded Great Online Shopping Festival are anything to go by. The GOSF turned out to be a big hit amongst real estate developers, as can be seen in this story on the NDTV Property Show which has Social Beat’s Rohit Uttamchandani featured in it:

Real Estate at GOSF 2014:
Here are some of the key stats from the shopping festival which indicate that real estate seems to be well on its way to becoming a mainstream ecommerce commodity:

• 36 real estate companies including Tata Value Homes, Brigade Group, Purvankara Developers, Artha Property and Provident Housing were part of the event. This is as compared to just two developers being part of the previous edition in 2013 and none in the festival’s maiden edition in 2012.
• Real-estate company Brigade Group recorded its first sale at 1am, an hour after the GOSF was opened.
• Real estate developer Puravankara sold over 125 homes within the first 12 hours of the shopping event and had 507 online bookings over the 3- day period.
• Tata Value Homes secured over 10,000 registrations for their homes across five projects in Bangalore, Chennai, Pune, Ahmedabad and Boisar near Mumbai.

For more information on the changing landscape of real estate, read our complete guide for digital marketing for real estate.

Stats Source: The Times of India

Marketing real estate online is known to have shown a phenomenal increase in the number of leads(by~ 300%*) that property sellers have opportunities to convert as current buyers or as potential buyers for future projects. Since, buyers want a more personal buying experience on high monetary value purchases, B2B businesses or even businesses selling higher value products achieve greater impact on branding and lead generation from marketing than directly on sales.  This is true to real estate selling, where all the marketing is directed towards generating leads, than on direct conversion

The following are a few reasons why going digital marketing for real estate has had a greater impact for sellers

Lifestyle patterns of Key Demographic segments: Property buyers are now relying more on online, than on newspapers and other mediums to gather any information that can help make their purchase decision.  This a definitely a true phenomenon when it comes to the metro cities where the target buyers are all hooked on to their smart phones, laptops and tablets. It’s more the “Pull marketing” than the push that seems to be working for this new generation of home buyers.

Cost Effective: Most of the push marketing strategies such as “full- page” advertisements in newspapers, previews in TV and advertising in movie halls cost a lot of advertising rupees. Although they do capture some mindshare and help in brand awareness, they completely fail in executing an immediate “call-to-action”.  Also, there are no clear measurable outcomes of the advertising money spent, to keep the ROI to the optimum. Online marketing strategies on the other hand,  are more cost effective-  they are both targeted and measurable. Both social media outreach and online paid adds reach the right category of target audience- age group, tastes, geography etc. with a dual intent of creating brand awareness and driving prospective buyers to make inquiries

Branding Online is Personal:  Reaching out to the target buyers and building an emotional connect on a one to one basis, especially when it involves high value purchases such as homes is imperative. social media serves as a potent channel where the prospective buyers can be educated about the brand, as well as guided through the process of purchasing a home. The emotional connect develops by having a mix of both formal and informal conversations with buyers, thereby creating a brand image that understands the sentiments of its buyers, rather than just hard selling the property

Burgeoning Third Party Platforms in Real Estate Domain: There are various third party platforms today that cater to helping the property buyers and sellers to make prudent purchase decisions by facilitating comparisons or serving as one-stop shop for educating the buyers and sellers about the various trends, pricing and newer developments in the domain. To name a few of them- Magic bricks, 99 acres, India Property, housing.com, etc.  Integrating existing robust digital presence (website & landing pages), including an active social media presence with third party platforms, is making conversions much faster and easier.

Measurable conversions:  Digital marketing allows to measure the value derived from each peny spent on the advertisements and on digital assets such as websites and landing pages. The key / basic three measures are

• Registrations/ inquires on Websites and Landing pages
• Traffic on Website
• Path of Traffic

An uplift in the first two measures is indicative of the success of the digital campaign and the last measure “Path of traffic” allows to understand where the targets are arriving coming from. This measure allows modifying and enhancing marketing plans to achieve maximum ROI.

* Results from Digital Marketing Activities of Social Beat Client

In a recent report by Assocham, it was reported that Real estate firms throughout India spend about Rs 2,500 crore annually on publicity across different media and digital marketing apparently accounts for about 25 per cent with a share of about Rs 625 crore. In our experience, this percentage is much lower and is in single digit percentages. That being said, it is on the rise. For instance, Tata Housing expects online home sales to make up for 30% of total revenue over the next 3-5 years.

I recently spoke at ET conference on Digital Marketing for Real Estate Companies and below are they key takeaways from the day long conference that was held in Delhi.

The Indian home buyer has changed over the year’s - younger, tech-savvy but still carry out extensive research

Jogy Thomas, the CEO of real estate firm ATS Greens was on the panel with me and he had interesting insights on how the consumer has changed over the years. 25 years back when they started, the average buyer’s age was over 50. Of course, the financial markets and availability of loans was not easy then and hence the buyers needed a lifetime of savings to buy a house. Fast forwarding to today, the fastest growing segment of buyers is between the age of 30 to 45 and some even in their mid twenty’s. Easy availability of loans and with the ability to pay over a course of 15 or 20 years has driven consumption.

One thing that has still not changed is the fact that home buying is a family decision and not an individual’s impulse decision. Most buyers carry out a lot of research and consult family and friends before taking the big decision of buying a house. This means, it’s a very social process and real estate companies need to take into the mind of the lifetime value of their previous customers and how their social circle can be impacted by the experience they had.

Digital is being used by more than 50% of home buyers

Guneet Singh, Head of Consumer Marketing for Google India pointed out a recent study by Google and Zinnov which showed that more than half of home buyers are influenced by their online research, so it’s not a segment that can be ignored. Another interesting insight from Jogy from ATS Greens was about their affordable housing projects which range between 7 to 12 lakhs. He pointed that more than 50% of the buyers for this project interact with them over email. So, the question real estate companies need to ask themselves is which medium – digital, OOH, TV or print gives them better ROI .

Manish Vij from SVG Group who was also on the panel with me has had experience in ecommerce and media selling. He pointed that the biggest benefit of going digital is the ability to target the right audience and measure the impact. So, depending on the project, one can identify the right digital channels and target the right demographics to get results. So if it’s a premium project maybe Linkedin and display ads across business news sites (Money control, Economic Times) might be more relevant.

ROI can be in the form of lead generation or brand building

Since real estate companies have always spent on mass media, they have never had a ROI approach to their marketing. On the other hand, digital marketing is driven by ROI. As Sachin Kapur, CMO of Groupon pointed out during another panel discussion, culturally Indians have a trust deficiency compared to the West. This means, that ROI cannot be just about lead generation. While digital can give 2.5x to 3x better ROI (read our previous blog post on this), brand building needs to be an important goal for the digital marketing efforts.

Companies need to build a community on social media to create the trust. For example, project updates to showcase that the timelines are being met can be a great way to build trust with existing customers. A 360 degree walk through of the project on the other hand can be a good way to build trust in prospective customers. While consumers research online, they do see reviews of previous customers and this is when online reputation management becomes important. Another insight from the Google & Zinnov study was that many consumers pointed at the lack of accurate, in depth and updated information on the developers and aggregators. Companies need to use their website and social media to communicate the right information on a regular basis to tackle this.

Analytics can make or break the sales funnel

While digital is more measurable than any other medium, it is important for real estate companies to use the analytics for key actionables. For example, using sales and marketing automation systems, the real estate companies can identify what the top leads that the Pre Sales team can follow up with. Analytics tracked over a few weeks (or months) can throw up data on which source of digital marketing is working better for which projects. This can be then be used to take decisions on marketing spends for future projects. In the absence of analytics and data points, it’s difficult to optimise campaigns. Real time tracking now helps in taking quick decisions which can impact the sales funnel.

Messaging needs to vary depending on purpose of home buying

While there are no readily available stats, but home buyers in India can be split into buyers who want to move into the house after buying and buyers who are using in an investment. The kind of messaging and digital channels required for these two would be very different. While a home buyer might need a more emotional messaging of buying a dream house, an investor mindset requires messaging which showcases that it makes business sense to buy the house.

If you are interested in knowing more about how and social media marketing can help your real estate business, please contact us.

Read our comprehensive guide for digital marketing for real estate for a more in-depth analysis.

The Economic Times - Real Estate & Digital Conference in New Delhi, is still a month away (27^th June), but the interest has started building among the digital agencies, real estate companies and marketing professionals. And why not, considering how digital media has revolutionised marketing for real estate developers. It is true that real estate is something which you purchase after physical verification, but the first step in the purchase funnel starts with a Google search or a click on a social media ad. In fact, the next step of narrowing down on choices is made online. Digital Marketing has a very important role to play in terms of lead generation. Actually, the ROI for digital media is better when compared to print media for real estate marketing. It has opened up huge opportunities in terms of an efficient leads-oriented ROI-based marketing but the path is not easy in this highly competitive industry. Several challenges lie ahead as the real estate industry goes through a paradigm shift in their marketing strategies.

With this as the backdrop, the Real Estate & Digital Conference – Future Perspective - New Delhi, will be a real eye-opener for everyone associated with the industry. When you want to discuss the digital media and real estate, you don’t get a better mix of industry experts than Marketing Gurus, Digital Marketers to Developers. The speakers’ list comprises the likes of Shailesh Rao (VP-Twitter), Brotin Banerjee (MD, Tata Housing) and Vikas Chawla (Co-founder at Social Beat).

Some of the key program highlights of the conference are:

• Re-inventing digital marketing strategies to bring the buyer back
• Content – the game changer
• Benefits of leveraging social media content in the real estate industry
• Why buyers are going digital: Crowd-source feedback and buy intelligently
• Digital in real-estate: future perspective 2013-14
• Real estate digitally yours: best practices and success stories

Apart from the above discussed highlights, you would not want to miss out on the informative discussions around the real estate industry best practices for digital marketing, Real Estate case studies and in-depth panel discussions. If you are in New Delhi for the Digital Marketing for Real Estate India Conference, we would be glad to meet you. Please drop us an email at team@socialbeat.in.

As per the Indian Brand Equity Foundation report on the Indian Real Estate industry, Real Estate is India’s second largest employment generation sector after agriculture and contributes about 6.3 per cent to India’s gross domestic product (GDP). Foreign direct investment (FDI) in Indian Real Estate is expected to touch US$ 25 billion in the next 10 years from its current US$ 4 billion while the sector’s projected annual revenues is expected to be US$ 180 billion by 2020. This enormous growth potential seems to have lured a good number of startups to the industry.

Web Design and User Experience Perspective:

Most of the startups in the space seem to have invested a lot of time and attention in Web Design and User Experience to differentiate themselves from the bigger and more established players.

Housing.com, for instance, has an excellent interface with the property-search button in the centre. The interface is map-based and all property-search results turn out as places on a map. It also has a Shortlist button enabling the user to shortlist options and come back to them later to take a final call. While they have scored well with their interface, what sets them back is the fact they have yet to garner a large number of listings, leaving the user with very few options to choose from.

PropTiger differentiates itself by providing a portfolio tracking tool which enables the end user to know the status of their property investment in terms of pricing, construction progress, project and locality updates, price trends and market talk, which is intended to help them decide the right time to sell their property.

HomeShikari, a TTK services company started in 2011 and currently operating only for properties in Bangalore, is trying to crack the real estate problem by shunning the brokerage model and embracing complete transparency. HomeShikari too allows the user to search for properties via a map-based interface and has worked on a neat ad-free website with a good user Experience.

RealtyCompass claims to be a consumer centric property portal focused on providing the consumer with the information of every new project in the city. Started in July this year and based out of Chennai with a presence in 4 cities in South India, they are looking to expand rapidly to 10 cities pan-India.

Metroplots, also started out of Chennai in 2009, has witnessed good success in 3 major markets of Chennai, Bangalore and NCR where it currently operates and is on an ambitious expansion spree to 20 more cities. They have a strong online interface which offers investors an array of options to choose from while looking for deals and have also created a proprietary SAAS tool called Sales Desk to enable builders & agents grow their business.

Social Media Strategy Perspective:

All startups in the space have been actively using social media platforms to build their brands and engage and acquire customers in an attempt to revamp the industry.

Facebook seems to be the favorite tool with all startups to interact with their customers and promote their services. Housing.co.in, now Housing.com has over 236,000 likes, Commonfloor over 115,000 while HomeShikari, RealtyCompass and PropTiger have about 25,000, 22,600 and 10,000 each.

Amongst the other platforms, Twitter seems to be used more than the rest with Commonfloor being the most active of this pack with over 6500 Tweets and 3500 followers. Metroplots with over 3000 tweets and Proptiger with over 2800 seem to be catching up.

The use of Google+ and LinkedIn as social media platforms is just beginning to catch up while YouTube as a marketing platform has not been used much by either of these startups, with PropTiger being the lone exception. PropTiger has begun uploading videos of the projects listed with them on YouTube and currently has over 40 videos.

With big players such as Magicbricks and 99acres already established in the space, these startups are taking their Web Design, User Experience and social marketing strategy seriously and working on capturing a big chunk of this growing market.

Are you taking your Web Design, User Experience and Social marketing strategy seriously? Call us for a discussion. in the meantime, read our comprehensive guide for digital marketing for real estate.

Buying a home and talking about real estate prices is a popular topic over coffee. The Real Estate Industry in India, and Chennai in particular, is growing rapidly with new developments in the heart of the city and many suburbs becoming a part of the city. Developers and Aggregators provide a lot of information online to increase awareness of their new projects and help us make the right purchase decision. The above infographic provides information on the digital and social media activities of Indian Real Estate Developers, with a special focus on Chennai.

As the infographic points out, almost 49% of the companies are not leveraging the digital media to boost their business and hence loosing out a huge opportunity to leverage their offline business.

Some of the developers covered include Prestige Developers, Vijay Shanthi, BBCL, Ceebros and Akshaya. Watch out for the next infographic in the Real Estate Space, which will cover best practices in online media by Global Real Estate companies. You can also read our complete guide for digital marketing for real estate for more information.