Real estate promotion is not easy. High competition, unclear customer requests, inability to directly influence the product – all this hurts marketers. Our colleagues from the call tracking service and end-to-end analytics
Ringostat made a list of the main pains of a new-build marketer, and suggested pain relievers for each.
Pain # 1. Long shopping
In real estate, the buying decision period stretches over months, if not years. So most of the marketing work is planning for the future. If an online store can immediately link marketing activities with current traffic and predict sales, then in real estate, the effectiveness of advertising becomes noticeable months later, when users who see an advertisement are ripe for buying.
Because of this, you have to rely on intermediate conversions – calls, and study their marketing sources. But even this data is rather “dirty”, phone spam, people who call with an inappropriate request and those who simply made a mistake in the number are attracted to the calls of interested leads.
What to do
You need to study not all calls, but only targeted ones from potential customers. Targeted calls are the easiest to distinguish from telephone spam in terms of duration – sales managers usually quickly turn off irrelevant conversations.
Real estate promotion is not a sprint, but a marathon, and in order to evaluate the effectiveness of advertising in such a marathon, you need to pay special attention to analytics and data selection. To evaluate individual campaigns, calculate the cost of a targeted call (CPPC – Cost per Proper Call), this will save time on analysis. CPPC is displayed using a simple formula – investments in a campaign or channel must be divided by targeted calls received from that channel.
Based on this data, it is already possible to draw a conclusion about the profitability of campaigns.
Pain # 2. High customer acquisition cost
It is not a cheap task to convey to a potential buyer the existence of a particular developer and object. At the same time, a marketer is usually required to reduce the cost of a lead in order to get more leads with the same (or even reduced) budget. It’s easy to go wrong here and turn off conversion ads that don’t directly convert but indirectly participate in your buying decision.
How to solve
To assess all these indirect involvement, you need to integrate call tracking with traffic analytics systems (for example, Google Analytics, Yandex.Metrica) and track the multi-channel funnels that led to the conversion. Thus, you can more accurately assess the effectiveness of marketing channels, and better optimize your budget.
Multichannel sequences in the Ringostat call tracking interface
Pain number 3. Cannibalization of search results by aggregators
Surely every real estate marketer has a question, why work on SEM (Search Engine Marketing) when the entire TOP is occupied by aggregators in both organic and paid search. This is especially painful when it comes to brand queries – the company first invests in building a recognizable brand, and then pays aggregators for leads based on intercepted brand queries.
But our research based on 212,000 calls showed that organic search results from Google brought developers twice as few calls as PPC advertising, but more than large aggregators.
What to do
It’s important to have an accessible, trustworthy, easily found site. Choosing an apartment, a person can reach even the third page of the issue in search of information about an object or developer. Therefore, it is important to occupy them with useful information, at least for brand queries, when a person is looking for information about you.
Pay special attention to outreach, because articles on popular content sites get to the top of the search results faster than articles on a young site of a new object. By the way, it is for outreach that information requests such as “How to get a mortgage” are useful.
Pain # 4. Reputational risks
There is a lot of negativity in real estate. A few unscrupulous companies are enough to undermine the credibility of developers in general. And here it is quite possible to understand the buyers – they want to live in their cozy apartment in ten years, and not go to the rallies of deceived shareholders between court sessions. In any city there is a developer, whose reputational problems have to be dealt with by colleagues.
How to fight
It is worth working ahead of the curve with the negative, so that the visitor does not even have the thought “What if they are deceiving me”. And any doubts about the good faith should be shattered by confirmation that you are a reliable developer, who has everything in order with documents, partners, suppliers and contractors.
We have described the main fears of customers in the article “Changing a developer’s reputation: Analyzing customer fears.” But in order to find out the concerns of your customers, regularly monitor social networks and forums for negativity not only for you, but also for the developers of the region as a whole. Also, listen to targeted calls that failed the deal – you’ll find arguments that turn customers away. You need to examine customer objections and concerns by listening to calls. Then it is worth highlighting the main concerns of your target audience and proactively dispelling them.
Pain # 5. Misuse
By listening to the records of the dropped calls, you will most likely find a big problem with inappropriate requests. People who are trying to buy an elite apartment with maternity capital, or demand an apartment in houses of the first stage, when the fourth is on the way.
How to train
To reduce inappropriate traffic, you need to study and typologize inappropriate queries and in advance, using content marketing tools, weed out non-targeted audience.
For example, site visitors are at the very beginning of their searches and do not understand the difference between an apartment and an apartment. This is just great, because you have a chance to become a source of valuable information for them and play on the effect of novelty.
If you are confused with a developer from another region, you need to separately emphasize where the objects are located. With an influx of those who cannot afford an apartment in your residential complex, pay attention to the source of the calls – perhaps one of the partners mistakenly indicated a price lower than the real one.
Pain # 6. Sales flaws
Well, how can it be without the confrontation between marketing and sales, the intensity of which is growing from niche to niche following the average check. In our practice, there were cases when “no calls” meant up to 60% of missed calls. Therefore, if you follow all the previous recommendations and are confident in the quality of your work and the resulted leads, then call tracking will help to identify the number of missed and unprocessed calls.
What will help
It is important to keep track of the number of missed calls, because who else, if not you, know what it costs to attract an interested client. Communicate to the sales person and the head of sales the idea that every missed one is just a waste of money. In addition, managers may not understand the product, report incorrect information, and even be rude to customers. Therefore, it is important to periodically listen to the recordings of calls, especially those that the sales department has noted as inappropriate.
Fortunately, one of the benefits of a long selling period in real estate is that the client has time to change his mind and come back.
conclusions
A distinctive feature of real estate marketing in the long period of making a purchase decision. This creates additional challenges for measuring campaign results.
The first page of real estate search results is busy with aggregators. However, this does not remove the need to create and promote your own website. When choosing real estate, people go beyond the first page of Google.
Reputational losses of competitors can undermine trust not only in a specific unscrupulous company, but also in a niche as a whole. Therefore, in working on your reputation, you need to tune out the mistakes of competitors and in every possible way emphasize that you are not going to repeat them.
Call records can help you identify and cut off non-targeted traffic. Listen to calls that were targeted in duration but didn’t drive the customer further. Perhaps some marketing activities are understood ambiguously and need to be clarified.
Another reason for the client’s failure to move through the funnel may be a flaw in the sales department. Study the recordings of conversations and keep an eye on the missed ones to be able to reasonably defend your work when a conflict between marketing and sales is brewing.
The material was prepared by Olga, Ringostat.