Digital marketing is an important factor in reaching your target audience. We have already shared the 5 tips on how to leverage real estate marketing. In this article, we will dive deeper into the details to get the best possible results out of the budget that can be allocated to the project.

The points that we’ll talk about are:

1. Relevance
2. Metrics
3. Testing
4. Remarketing
5. Bottlenecks
6. Budget distribution

Relevance

It’s a good feeling when you search for something and find the answer in Google that matches your request. This means the results were relevant to your query.

How to make sure the content of your real estate digital marketing campaign matches your target audience’s Google searches? There are several ways:

1. You can make assumptions about it based on the information you have about your customers and test them.
2. You can look up statistics about Google search results that will show the questions people ask them most regarding your topic.
3. If you have an existing website, check out what people are already looking for on your website. This, actually, can be a good starting point because you can highlight the keywords that you would like to increase conversions for (as well as see the things that might not be relevant to your business.)

Ask your existing customers, who know you, what kind of things they are looking for. The best type of content is the one that answers the questions people have precisely. For example, “What to pay attention to when choosing a house to live in?”. Project video, a drone made neighborhood photos, 3D floor plans, brochures are very relevant to website visitors’ interest and will increase their conversion rate into leads.

Once you have created the content for the ad or an article, distribute it across social media and email newsletters. Keep in mind that different social media platforms cater to different target audiences. Choose the ones that fit yours.

Metrics

The only way to know that something is performing well is results and they should be measured. An activity that is not measured usually eats up the budget fast and, while there are exceptions, the results it brings are not great.

In terms of real estate digital marketing, before you do anything, you should clarify the goals you are trying to achieve as well as set up proper tools to watch those metrics.

The metrics that you can start with are: 

• Views (aka Impressions). With the help of this metric, you can see how many people have seen your ad or development project website. For example, Google Search Console shows how many times your website has been seen by the users, who were searching for something. This doesn’t mean that your results were shown on the first page of Google, but they were seen nonetheless.
• Clicks. This metric shows many people have seen your ad or website page and actually clicked on it. Besides simply measuring the number of clicks, pay attention to the ratio between views and clicks (CTR) because of a high view percentage together with low clicks signals that people see your results, but it’s not relevant to their request. Consider rephrasing your content to make it more connected to the search query.
• Conversions. When people see your content, click on the ads, and then perform some action on your website (for example, fill out a contact form, a questionnaire, or download a brochure), then this is counted as a conversion. What will count as a conversion for your particular business depends on the criteria that you set, but usually it’s when a person leaves his or her contact information and acts interested in what you have to offer.
• Sales. The most pleasant factor when it increases, but also the hardest to achieve. The flow is the following: the user saw your ad/website, clicked on it, filled out a form, and actually became your customer after several steps of follow-ups (automated or semi-automated) and onsite meetings.

Testing

Once you’ve got done with the metrics, map out several hypotheses that you would like to try out. Some of them will work out and start converting – congratulations, you found a gold mine. Some, however, will not be as successful and that’s okay, too.

What do you need in order to create your test hypotheses?

• A buyer persona (people who you are trying to target via your content – whether ads or website pages). To create it, ask the following questions: How old are they? What is their main occupation? Where do they live? What are their pain points?
• Goals. It can include the increase of sales, getting more brand awareness for your real estate development company, more people to visit your website, etc.

One more key thing to testing – document the changes that you are making so that you can track what worked for your business and your end customers and what did not.

Remarketing

Remarketing is all about bringing people who were interested in purchasing their new home before back to you. It’s like a friendly reminder in social media or email that helps to build upon the foundation of previous impressions.

For example, a person has seen your ad on Facebook and clicked on it. She visited your website, became interested in what your business was offering, but wasn’t ready to commit yet, so she closed the tab with your website, and went away.

Without remarketing, this is it for your potential customer’s journey. Chances are high that she will never come back to your website and, as a result, will never purchase the property from you.

How to remedy that? This is where remarketing helps. Based on the visitor ID (which is anonymous and linked only to an alphanumeric tag in the visitor’s cookie), you can target those visitors who were interested in your business and visited your website with additional and more specific ads. That way, the person who came to you before, will see the banner ad, for example, and think “Oh yeah, I remember. They seemed interesting, let’s check them out in more detail, I am ready to get down to business.”

Bottlenecks

Monitor the conversions for each of the sales funnel and look for possible bottlenecks. A bottleneck is something that stops the visitor from transitioning through the funnel and as a result converting into a customer. For example, it can be a contact form that is a bit too complicated or the apartment details page that doesn’t have a link to the next step in user flow to the conversion page. Sometimes it can be a single question, among many, which causes the visitors to stumble and leave your website.

Examine the user flow on your website in order to identify these bottlenecks. Once you work on getting rid of them, it will be beneficial to your budget since you will be able to get more transactions for roughly the same price.

Budget Distribution

Finally, budget distribution. We left this topic for the end not because it’s the least important, but actually, it’s vice versa. Budgeting for digital marketing for a real estate property is one of the most important steps.

Our advice is to create a separate budget for each of the channels and keep them apart. That way, you will be able to track the activities more efficiently and precisely. If during your testing phase you realize that Instagram actually works better for your audience than, for example, Google Display, due to separated budgets you’ll be able to notice this correlation earlier simply because you’ll have fewer numbers to compare. It will also be easier to create reports and find correlations.

So, how do you get more leads for your budget?

Our digital marketing budgets are always limited (even if some are bigger than others). Therefore, the question of how to best use it is always relevant. In this article, you’ve learned about 6 steps on how to maximize the leads for your property purchases, but here’s a summary:

• Your real estate digital marketing efforts should be relevant to your target audience and measurable.
• Be ready to test, test, test, and then test some more for good measure.
• Make sure your bottlenecks are being addressed.
• Invest in remarketing because the user journey for your customers is not a quick one (due to many decisions that need to be made as well as the sheer cost of the property). Reminding about the properties that you develop is a good idea.
• Distribute the budget across the channels and adapt it accordingly once you start to see the results.