BEST WAYS TO MEASURE INVESTMENT IN DIGITAL PROMOTION
In all honesty, amidst the global slowdown, Indian real estate is still holding strong and kicking. The reasons can range from the country’s robust micro economics to strong consumption patterns and government’s focus on infrastructure. As Nipun Sharma, Senior Director & CMO India, Salesforce puts it, “Real estate is a popular asset class which over years has performed well. There are good tailwinds, but some very unusual headwinds too. Now the consumer is very well informed and working with a very intelligent buyer puts pressure on the marketers to create a differentiated campaign to be able to break out of the clutter. But, the question arises, how matured is real-estate marketing in India in terms of processes and best practices.” Ashish Kaul, CMO, Hero Realty was of the view that real estate has become a volume game and marketers misunderstand the difference between marketing as communication rather than a business function. “Real estate marketing still has a long way to get matured. Currently, rather than marketing it is sales that is happening and digital marketing is more of a piecemeal strategy. There is no way of knowing whether there is a sale happening through channel partner or property aggregator portal. Ultimately the buyer goes to a platform where he gets better discount. But, the best way to market is to create a product that will pull a buyer.” Rajeeb Dash, Head, Sales Marketing, Adani Realty sharing a different perspective said, “There are a lot of ways one can do marketing, which would vary as per the segment, micro-market and pricing. Today, 70 percent of the leads are coming through digital medium with about 30 percent sale conversions, but it gives much better reach than any other medium in much lower costs than newspaper, print ads and hoardings. In fact, not only the lead generation, but lead tracking from lead generation to booking and sales is now happening online.” Pradeep Vijayadev, Head, Digital Marketing, Brigade Group added, “Creating a compelling content is the key to capturing the interest of the potential buyers. If the information is relevant to the audience, they will interact and engage with the source of the content. And this engagement keeps evolving as the consumer navigates through the buying cycle. Buyer’s information gathering stage includes understanding the specific micro-market, industry trends, rental yields or home loan interests etc. These are the content very relevant to him in his early stage of home-buying process. As they move up the buying cycle they move to the confirmative stage looking for specific content on builders and projects in the micro market, their reputation, construction quality, delivery track record, etc. and the final stage is that of validation where they go for user generated content like customer reviews, expert views and price comparisons. It is all about being consistent, adaptive and being relevant to the audience at every stage of his/her digital journey making sure the content is relevant and capturing their intent.” Tirthankar Ganguly CMO, Kalpataru Ltd emphasized that emotion of home buying is aspirational for everyone whether it is an affordable housing or a luxury property and thus most of the marketing communication focuses on the aspirational value. “We don’t sell brick-and-mortar houses, we are selling what your life is going to be once you start using this home. Thus personalisation of experience is the key. Does the company really know me or the brand manager is trying to straight jacket it. The customer is not accepting that anymore and is blocking out the mass communication. Content is very important in real estate as you cannot carry the product to the customer. Customer will have to be pulled towards the product. Marketers are creating digital twins that mimic the real asset. More importantly, technology today is very democratic, a start-up can offer the best digital tools and one doesn’t need to spend huge amounts.” Kartik Sahoo, Founder, BrandLand Advertising Pvt. Ltd spoke about changing consumer behaviour, “In real-estate marketing, we now refer to what is called the pre-covid and post covid era and the behavioural changes have been markedly different in both the eras. Covid has accelerated the buying and selling of properties online. Replacing brochures & site visits from pre-covid era, virtual site visits and AR/VR have become prominent sales & marketing tools for every builder and channel partner. However, no amount of chat bots, Chat GPT or AI can replace human connect.” Mohit Mishra, Head of Marketing – Office Business, DLF Limited elaborated on the commercial real estate marketing, “Every marketing you do irrespective of what category it is human emotion plays a very important role, irrespective of buying residential property or leasing a commercial property. A relationship cycle is smaller in a residential segment once it is sold, however commercial property is not bought or sold but is leased and hence the relationship continues over the years as you would want lease renewals. Likewise, there are multiple layers of communication with the prospective audience. During pandemic, when people were not coming to offices, it was digital marketing that enabled organisations to reach out to consumers. The entire backbone of commercial real-estate is about engagement and experience and marketing Plays a huge role in it. Residential real estate marketing is high impact, targeted towards selling the particular project in a particular geography and then moving on to the next project. Commercial real-estate marketing is all about engagement with the clients for long term relationships that would benefit across geographies.” TO SUM IT UP Two main aspects of digital marketing are - content (blog post, videos, infographics, podcast, influencers and advertorials) and distribution platforms (website, social media channels, aggregators, affiliates channels and company owned communication channels). It is critical to know how to collect the data to be able to correctly customise an offering. An excellent source of relevant data collection is the chat bot on the website where people engage in chatting and marketers can try and figure out through the queries, the potential customer’s inclinations and thus customize the messaging. Data mining through artificial intelligence is the next step. The best data is collected from people visiting the site. When customer comes to site, marketers capture qualitative inputs from the customers in terms of their insights about the project and what they are looking for. They can customize the communication as per the demands expressed by the visitors. While, digital has a big role to play in marketing, it is now overtly infringing into the customer’s privacy. Customers are getting over communicated with junk mails and spam calls and text messages. The key to result oriented marketing has to be targeted and personalised marketing messages to the potential buyers. Real estate marketing is a volume game. Marketers drive a million leads with a hope to converting at least a few into sales. There is no method to the madness. Realty marketing is still confused between advertising and marketing. It is driven by fancy tools, jackets, and overtly glorification of words and more. Site visits, Chat bots and data mining through AI are the best ways to capture data and accordingly customize marketing communication and messaging. The customer is becoming smarter by the day in terms of technology. Site visits remain an important marketing tool. Being physically in the property is all about experience and emotion of buying. Residential marketing can be considered a One day or a 20-20 Overs cricket match while, commercial real estate marketing in comparison is like a test match. In commercial real estate segment, it is not about what is the value per square feet, but about experience per square feet. Videos are very important as real estate is a very visual product. Digital twins that mimic the real project are being used for marketing. The lines are blurred between the digital and non-digital marketing and it has become an integrated eco-system. Home is an aspirational product and marketing should pitch the experience of a place rather than brick & mortar.
Tags : investment digital promotion global real estate business digital marketing projects Nipun Sharma Senior Director & CMO India Salesforce Ashish Kaul CMO Hero Realty Rajeeb Dash Head Sales Marketing Adani Realty Pradeep Vijayadev Head Digital Marketing Brigade Group Tirthankar Ganguly CMO Kalpataru Ltd Kartik Sahoo Founder BrandLand Advertising Pvt. Ltd