Marketing for Real Estate Companies: Time to Shift From Print to Digital Media?

In this age of new media marketing, digital marketing has proved to be a game-changer. While any proponent of an effective marketing mix model would suggest a healthy mix of conventional as well as unconventional modes, digital media certainly leads by a margin when you bring the ROI perspective into play for real estate industry. The advent of digital media has paved way for a marketing approach that now wants to track penny-to-penny spend on each marketing effort and the returns derived from it.

Digital marketing is predominantly being used by every firm out there and is proving to be an extremely successful means of spreading awareness and creating a brand value. The same is true for the real estate businesses.

The challenge is stiff competition in the real estate industry

The biggest challenge for the real estate companies is that in this highly competitive space, the brands are looking forward to boosting their digital presence and generating leads. In order to enable the real estate companies to establish a digital identity and leverage upon it, they need foolproof innovative digital marketing strategies with lead generation at the center-stage.

Website should be user-friendly & mobile responsive

There are a couple of things to be kept in mind while designing a website and implementing digital marketing strategies for real estate companies. First and foremost, it is the website that needs attention. The purpose of the website could vary from capturing leads to brand-building. A website must be user-friendly and must ensure “call-to-action”. Great content always helps in increasing visibility on the digital media.

Creative usage of social media to build brand & generate leads

On social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google plus, what matters is how creative your contents or posts are. The frequency is not an issue as long as your posts are able to garner enough audience engagement. Real estate companies need to project their unique strengths in the most creative manner possible on the digital space. A lot of online tools and applications are available nowadays that help in automated updates on the social media sites.

SEO to rank higher in search results

Social media follows SEO (Search engine optimization). Earlier, the pre-conceived notion was that just having a website is enough. But actually just having a website takes us nowhere. Search engine optimization and search engine marketing plays a key role in the integrated approach towards getting traffic on the website and generating leads. SEO results give an imperative method of ranking on the digital space and the higher the company is ranked, the better chances of gaining leads from their websites.

Print media v/s Digital media: Digital gives a better ROI

Traditionally, the real estate companies invest highly in print ads, but the returns they get on their investments, is comparatively lower when compared to the Google ads. Our research in the space throws up a couple of interesting facts. The research results clearly show that on investing the same amount of money in digital marketing and the print media, the real estate companies are able to realize results which are at approximately 2.5 times better. The detailed statistics are as shown below in the table:

*ROI comparison for Print v/s Digital media

A 1/4thpage advertisement in a newspaper costs about Rs. 7 lakhs, which is bound to target one million or more audience. However, the conversion rate is surprisingly low. One print ad worth Rs. 7 lakhs results in about 400 website visits, out of which about 130 leads are generated. In the end, the company gets only 3 to 4 buyers for the properties at an average. In comparison, Google ads, with the similar investment of Rs. 7 lakhs results in about 400 leads which convert into more than 10 buyers.

The way forward for real estate companies: It’s never too late

Most of the real estate companies currently, do not have a commendable social media presence but it’s never too late. There is immense potential in the digital media to leverage for the real estate companies. The efficiency & optimization control should be at the forefront of any decision by an organization. And when that decision has the potential to catapult the number of leads by 250%, then there is no reason why the real estate companies should not go digital.