When you have a new real estate project, you need to have effective marketing campaigns set up to find clients and to sell the properties to them. If you have one brokerage agency, the process is straightforward: creating a website, setting up marketing campaigns, setting up analytics, and enjoying the leads coming in.

However, with the trend of real estate projects’ growing in size and complexity, more stakeholders need to get involved in the process and the project might need multiple broker agencies to be enrolled.

How to amplify campaigns’ results instead of downplaying them?

Each agency has its customer profiles, approaches, and strategy and therefore will capture different leads, resulting in larger outreach. At the same time, it’s critical to avoid confusing the audience when they see similar, yet slightly different, information about the real estate property from different sources. Instead of one project promoted by seven agencies, the customers see seven projects. Instead of amplifying the impact, the results end up downplaying each other.

So the challenge for the marketing department is to properly set up the ecosystem and metrics so you can individually track the ROI of each action on the project and to present a holistic image across the stakeholders and channels.

There are three issues you need to address when the number of stakeholders increases:

1. Coordination – there are a lot of processes involved in promoting a real estate property and these processes – both internal and external – have to be managed properly between the stakeholders.
2. Communication – while it’s understandable that different broker agencies would like to keep the trade secrets to themselves, it’s still important to set up communication between the stakeholders to keep in line with the project’s progress.
3. Data management – the metrics, analytics, and research can benefit all parties involved, therefore, a superstructure that would allow proper data management as well as appropriate access to the information for each of the stakeholders, so that each can act as a separate entity, yet within one complex system.

In this article, we’ll talk about how to address the challenge of setting up this superstructure as well as tools and mechanics of marketing campaigns when you have multiple stakeholders working on promoting a single real estate project.

When we consider the project’s promotion process, there are three processes that need to be managed appropriately in order to bring all involved parties together.

Preparation: Communication management

Streamlined communication is the key to streamlined processes and management. The more players involved, the more complex the structure of communication becomes.

Prior to any kind of marketing strategy development, make sure to establish proper communication channels and procedures so that everyone is on the same page. This step would connect the expectations with what is planned.

A communication plan document can include the following information:

• WHAT: information about the project that needs to be communicated to the public. One of the things that also help is a project glossary or a FAQ that collects the main data in one place.
• HOW: the process in a chart form that describes the flow of information among the participants as well as the methods of communication (project management tools like Trello, emails, memos, reports, etc.)
• WHEN: the deadlines for certain milestones, meetings’ schedule, etc.

Implementation: Marketing management

In the days of technological advances and the Internet, the project website has become the centerpiece of the marketing strategy. While both online and offline marketing efforts are important, “All roads lead to Rome” (or, in our case, to the website.)

As a quick reminder, you can find below the result of the research on what clients pay most attention to when searching for real estate:

• 36% of visitors – What’s available to purchase?
• 25% – General info about the project on the homepage
• 12% – Where is this property located geographically?
• 7% – What’s around the neighborhood? (Schools, gyms, stores, nature, etc.)
• 5% – What does it look like? (Either photo/video gallery or a 360 virtual visit)

With the main website, things are quite straightforward. With additional players, who also launch marketing campaigns on behalf of your real estate property, you need to make sure these things are covered as well so that the property image that goes online is holistic throughout the channels.

One way to do it is to create a copy of your main website as a subdomain to your brokerage agency’s website (which would look like newproject.agency1.ch.) The advantage of this approach is that you benefit from the agency’s existing brand awareness. When you have two or more agencies promoting your project, this process repeats (so you get subdomains like newproject.agency1.ch and newproject.agency2.ch), which offers a clear structure to your marketing efforts.

The only thing that you need to keep in mind is that Google doesn’t like identical content. Now that you have one main website and two copies on agencies’ websites, you need to pay more attention to SEO.

Leave only the main website open to Google’s robots for crawling, so that if someone googles your project’s name, they will not see three identical search results with different addresses, but your main website.

Evaluation: Leads management

Finally, we come to the main goal of marketing efforts: gathering leads. When you have several broker agencies working on promoting your project, clear rules have to be established on how to measure the number of leads generated and therefore processed by each agency or broker.

There are three places where the agency might talk about your project:

1. The project’s website under the agency’s domain (newproject.agency1.ch)
2. The agency’s Facebook page
3. The agency’s LinkedIn page

How can people find out about those three pages?

• Social media ads (Facebook / LinkedIn)
• Google ads
• Offline marketing efforts (flyers, big boards, etc.)

Each of these brings potential clients and with the help of end-to-end analytics & metrics, it’s simple to find out which channel brought more leads.

What to do with the leads that come to your main website? Who works with the clients who aren’t associated with any agency? There are two ways to deal with this issue:

1. The general leads are evenly distributed between the agencies, so they work with the leads they have generated through their channels as well as a portion of the leads from the main website.
2. Another option is to add a field in your contact form, where the customer can choose which agency he’d like to work with.

Now that we’ve walked step-by-step through this process and here’s how this superstructure would look if represented graphically:

Summary

It’s possible to have two or more agencies working on selling your houses or apartments and it’s easy to track who is more efficient. Summarizing the article above, here are four takeaways:

• Communication is the key to success whether you have two people working on the project or two dozen. Establish clear rules and share expectations.
• Offer each player a personal playground. The main web-site is mirror copied by each agency and hosted under their domain.
• SEO is done only for the main web-site. Two others have to be closed from indexing to avoid being banned by Google Search algorithms.
• Leads collected from the main web-site are equally distributed between two agencies.
• Together with general PR activities targeted to the main web-site, each of the agencies can also use their Facebook and LinkedIn pages to promote the project among their active audience.

Do you need marketing campaigns & analytics for your upcoming real estate project? Let’s meet for a coffee to discuss details – contact us to set up a meeting.