How I run an effective marketing campaign as as Real Estate Marketer
Email is dead. No one pays attention to pesky SMSs. As a Marketer for a Real Estate company, I live in a constant dilemma – how can I maximize the effectiveness and efficiency of my Marketing efforts? How can I maximize the ROI?
Let's look at this from first principles. When running a marketing campaign, the questions that I as a marketer need to answer are:
1. Who – who is my target audience?
2. What – what is the message I am sending? What is the perception I need to create in the mind of the audience?
3. Why – why am I sending the message – what is the objective?
4. How – what is the medium/channel of sending the message?
5. When – when is the best time to send a message?
6. Where – where am I sending this message to? Am I aware of cultural nuances?
In order of priority, we probably care more about the top 4 and aim to get them as close to answered as possible.
But, we are looking at real estate here and we need to look at these questions from the lens of real estate.
1. Who – does my lead list include potential house buyers? My project is on the East coast - do I really need to target the West Coast population? Am I looking at the right demographics? As an anecdote, typically, home buying decisions in a family are made when the couple are in their 30s with the wife leading the decision making.
2. What – as a real estate developer, I am trying to sell dreams which would last a lifetime. Is the message that I am sending hopeful, bright, optimistic or is it dull, boring and wordy? Am I including the right visuals?
3. Why – what is it that I look to achieve out of the marketing campaign? I am running the campaign to attract the right footfalls to get to visit my project - maximize my MQL to SQL ratio. Does my marketing campaign have the right hooks in place to make this a seamless experience in that case?
4. How – is my mode of communication for the campaign a widely used medium. Email read rates are typically less than 2-3%, click through rates even lower. I use SMSs only for OTPs. WhatsApp, on the other hand has read rates between 60-80% with commensurate increases in click through rates.
What my research told me:
Wants, needs and concepts aside, I want to get a practical solution to get to my goals. So I go about researching the statistics what is possible in the current state of the art
1. WhatsApp is indeed THE channel to include as a part of my communication and outreach efforts. I can use the channel to initiate a conversation, build automation to intelligently reply to queries, capture lead information, insert a human into a conversation, analyze results etc. Yet, there is a gap, a solution needed to bring it all together.
2. Personalization is key. I want to do this activity in bulk yet I need personalization in my messaging rather than generic content.
3. While using digital means to reach out to my prospects is great, given the high value of the property, a human touch will ultimately help connect, build relationships and close the sale.
Some other things to consider:
1. Average starting home prices in Urban areas are in the range of $200K. I am willing to pay a higher price for the right lead to be able to minimize time to sell.
2. I am willing to spend from $10 to $30 for the right lead for my real estate project. If I can get the lead to physically visit the site, then the price increases 4x to 10x – so from $40 to $300.
3. I already run a digital marketing campaign with Google and Facebook ads. I would love any clicks on these ads to be tracked and the conversation to be handled automatically.
As you can see, running a marketing campaign for a real estate project is expensive – the economics are not cheap. But then, so is the value of the dream we are trying to sell.
Now, where does Engati fit in all this?
Well, first and foremost, Engati helps automate conversations and act as a steroid to my marketing efforts. Engati helps me qualify the ‘Who’, finesse the ‘What’, while enabling me with ‘How’. Engati is the one platform where I found practical ways to fulfill my requirements - one solution which brought everything together.
1. While WhatsApp is the channel of choice for marketing communications in real estate, Engati supports an additional 15 channels besides WhatsApp if I wish to have an omni-channel presence. All with the same level of automation and standardization.
2. Engati helps me to leverage the flexibility of WhatsApp template messages to build the right hooks to attract eyeballs to your marketing campaign. Not only that, Engati provides me with a library of templates to help get started.
3. Engati helps me track each click and response, collect information, qualify my lead, schedule site visits, send floor plans and brochures – all as a part of the automation. This automation is available out of the box as a template. LiveChat support for human sales managers to pick up conversation threads is also available. All this with a deep level of tracking and analytics to help you see what is working and what is not - helping me maximize my ROI.
4. I can also embed links to conversational journeys in my overarching digital marketing campaign - prospects who click on my Google and FB ads can directly get serviced instantaneously by Engati’s bot.
So there you have it. As a Real Estate Marketer, I constantly live between a rock and a hard place - between being effective and being efficient. But, with Engati in the toolkit, I don't have to choose. I can maximize the productivity and outcomes from my Marketing Campaign and not just meet but beat my KPIs.
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