If you’re involved in property development, marketing is everything. We don’t need to tell you that a lot of thought goes into every aspect of the lifestyle, amenities, community and various other important aspects needed to sell your development to the desired audience, which will almost always be decided very early on in the process. This means that communication with that target audience is hugely important and a primary focus for the developers right off the bat.
And while traditional marketing methods such as print, television, radio, and billboards are absolutely still important and should contain a message that is cohesive across all platforms, online marketing now offers you the chance to communicate with that audience in real time with up to date message. It also means that you can get feedback and data on the mood and receptiveness of that audience much faster and in much more detail than traditional methods were ever able to offer.
Now if you’d like an in-depth look at how property development marketing works, we do have a 4 part series on it that we did around this time last year, which you can find the first part of by clicking here. But if you’re in a rush, need a refresher, or you’re after a broad stroke idea of how digital marketing can help, then let’s run through a few basics.
More than most other industries, your platforms work together.
One thing we’ve found repeatedly having worked on multiple property development marketing projects over quite a few years, is that your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), Paid Advertising (Google Ads, Media Buying and other pay per click), Social Media and Content Marketing all feed into each other. What do we mean by that? Well basically, when it comes to buying a property, your customers aren’t likely to make a decision the first time around with regards to interactions with you. So with this in mind, it’s very valuable to ensure that you are appearing in multiple places rather than putting all of your eggs in one basket.
It’s quite common for a client to find you via a billboard and then Google you later, during which time they probably still won’t convert or come in to see the display village, so it’s important that while the billboard drew their attention to you and SEO might have ensured that they found you when they looked for you afterward, re-marketing to them via Google Ads, Facebook Marketing and various other methods ensures that you stay front of mind for them while they continue to consider. This is also where content marketing (blogging, etc) can come into play as you’re regularly putting out new content and giving them new reasons to want to buy in your development.
You can track both online and offline efforts with digital tools.
Tracking these days is getting pretty amazing. Google Analytics and Tag Manager, in particular, can track a customer’s path across the multiple platforms we just mentioned right through until the point of conversion. Obviously, with property, you’re not going to have an online sale, but a “conversion” for the sake of tracking, in this case, could be getting an appointment to meet in person set and you can then keep track offline of how many of those appointments convert into a sale. You’ll also know when attending those appointments which of them was generated via online activity as you can mark them as such.
But the endpoint isn’t the only valuable thing you can track. Buyer behaviour is a hugely important factor in making decisions in property development marketing and all digital marketing platforms offer a raft of options in this regard. Via testing with Google Ads, you can test the sorts of language that they best respond to in detail. With Facebook Advertising you can track the types of content they react to and also monitor what the community is saying in real time via any groups you or the community themselves might set up as well as their interactions with your advertising.
You can also track the sorts of information that both potential buyers and existing residents most value from you via your content marketing/blogging. This both maximises the impact of this information on new buyers and feeds into community satisfaction, which in turn can lead to referral sales as the local residents recommend your development to their friends and family.
Accountability and transparency are high.
Given the ability to track so effectively, it’s easy for you to understand (provided you take the time to educate yourself on how it all really works) whether or not your efforts are effective. What this means is that it’s easy to know when you need to change tactics, or when things are working. From making minor tweaks through to major about turns, or building on what you now know to be working so that you can increase the effectiveness over time, your ability to pivot, address issues and run faster in the right the direction, where required, is second to none thanks to the technology at your disposal in 2019, which will only get better as time goes on.
But that’s all from us today. If you’d like us to elaborate or you just want to explore your property marketing options then please feel free to get in touch!