Here is a typical exchange you may witness within your business team:

Marketing director: “We need to quickly launch our marketing campaign to accelerate the sales of our properties.”

Digital Marketing leader: “Okay. We don’t have a lot of time… What channels do we use? How much money can we allocate to marketing and what is the best channel ratio?”

Marketing director: “That’s your job…:)”

Marketing campaigns are a critical aspect to drive sales, but unless you’re using an agency that does all this work for you (or guides you through the process), it’s not always easy to get your planning right and ensure your money’s worth in advertising. The more answers you provide, the more questions you get in return.

At Wild Dots, we use 5 main principles to guide our campaign planning and execution and we’re going to share them with you across a series of articles to be released in the coming weeks. In this article, we’ll talk about the first one – developing a multichannel campaign.

What are the marketing channels?

A channel is a source where your leads (potential customers) come from. They can be roughly divided into several primary categories:

• Offline promotion (banners, flyers, printed ads in relevant magazines, etc.)
• Digital advertising (Google ads, Facebook ads, etc.)
• Social media marketing (YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.)
• Email marketing (Periodic newsletters, blog subscriptions, etc.)
• Event marketing

Simple right? Let’s dive in deeper.

Problems with using too few channels

On one hand, it might seem like focusing on a couple of key channels would be the best solution for limited budgets. You can invest more in the things that might convert better than others. However, does this correlate with reality?

Here are three problems that arise when you do this :

1. You cannot correctly calculate your return on investment (ROI) because the data is incomplete and limited to a couple of sources.
2. Your created audience isn’t fully correct either. Your potential customers might spend a lot more time on Facebook, but they do it for social reasons, while all business-related or serious tasks are done, for example, on LinkedIn. Therefore, besides understanding where your audience spends more time needs to be corresponding to the information where your audience converts better. However, if you’re limited in the data sources, you won’t know where the conversion metrics are better.
3. You aren’t pushing your marketing content to its full power. Let me say this: we’re not saying you should use all possible and impossible marketing channels. But marketing a lot of times is a game of trials and errors. Each project is different, even if the industry is the same: real estate development for families. People will react to different stimuli in each given case and this should be tested out.

Marketing Campaign Comparison

To illustrate the ideas we’ve been talking about above, let’s compare two campaign strategies.

Campaign 1: The single-minded strategy

Campaign #1 is built on offline channels (namely, billboards) and a bit of social media marketing. The advantage here is that the distribution of the budget is easily manageable.

On the other hand, what if your potential audience prefers reading printed magazines and you’re missing out on them?

What if your customers have seen the billboard and got interested but they didn’t have a chance to memorize the website address where they could learn more about the property?

What if your customers are looking for a property online, but since you’re not on Google ads or investing in content marketing and SEO, people won’t find you. This is the limitation of the single-minded approach. They work well but they are not accounting for the complexity and probability of catching your audience. Let’s compare this with a multichannel approach.

Campaign #2: The multichannel campaign

Campaign #2 is a truly multichannel campaign, which involves such channels as:

1. Social media marketing (SMM)
2. Search engine optimization (SEO)
3. Advertising
4. Email & call marketing
5. Offline (including events, billboards, flyers, etc.)

The website acts as the main contact point for the potential clients and the information then can be used by the broker to analyze the audience and tailor the message for them.

You can clearly see here that the campaign maximizes the reach potential of the customer by covering the key scenarios of your audience online and offline and ensuring a more robust conversion funnel.

The main challenge to take into account when planning a digital campaign

The main goal of a digital marketing campaign is to gain customer’s attention, therefore the main question that you need to answer here is: WHO IS YOUR CUSTOMER?

In marketing terms, we need to build a target audience profile to understand:

1. What is the age of your target audience? (Different generations rely on different sources of information and their decision making processes differ as well.)
2. What is their location? (Do they live in rural areas or cities? What language do they speak? Are there any cultural traditions that you need to take into account?)
3. Where do they work? What might be their interests?

There are many more questions you can ask to clarify your target audience. The main aim is, however, not just to ask as many questions as possible, but ask the ones that are relevant to crafting the message for your real estate development.

To create a message (or, even better, several messages for different segments of the audience), you also need to write down your project’s features, identify the budget that you are willing to allocate, and start testing the campaign.

What are the challenges in doing this? 

1. You need to understand which channels to use. We have mentioned several of the categories above, but depending on your project’s audience, features, location, and budget, you need to find the best combination of online and offline channels.
2. You need to plan your budget effectively and be ready to adjust the finances between the channels based on the results. Distribute your budget across all channels that you decided to pursue to maximize your outcome and optimize ROI. When you see that some channels are performing better than others, re-distribute the budget.

As a result, the companies often choose a few channels they would like to focus on, disregarding the rest, but as we have discussed earlier, this isn’t the best solution. Best campaigns account for a few key scenarios that will truly capture your audience. Best campaigns also adjust as they go and stay agile.

Conclusions

In conclusion, let’s summarize the key points from the article. To create an impactful coverage for your marketing campaigns that will bring the best cost-efficiency ratio, here are three things that you need to do:

1. Have a clear understanding of who your audience is
2. Determine, based on your audience the best combination of online and offline marketing channels for your business and don’t just settle for offline flyers and social media.
3. Ensure the diversification of channels to capture as much of your target audience as possible. Distribute the budget across your channels to get the highest ROI.

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