LEAD GENERATION NEW MODELS OF IDENTIFYING POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS

BY Realty Plus

The basic function of any marketing is to generate leads. It’s the starting point of making sales and revenues. The question arises on how to efficiently and effectively qualify the leads, nurture those leads and convert them into sales.

KV Sridhar, Chief Creative Officer Global, Nihilent Limited expressing his views stated, “Currently, the entire lead generation process is automated with no human intervention. But the consolidation of data particularly in real estate sector is a challenge as it is generated from varied disconnected sources. In real estate the industry average of CTR is around 3.71% which is similar to the finance industry. It means we are not sharpening the target segment clearly. The user journey in case of property buying is quite tedious, and is not an impulse buy unlike FMCG. The generative AI and automation of content to some extent has made the entire process more effective.”

Ashish Kukreja, Founder & CEO, Homesfy shared his experience, “We do a lot of brain storming before we get into any lead generation. Every project comes with its own set of challenges, we focus on how do we connect with the specific set of consumers and plan strategy accordingly. Every project comes with different ticket size and micro markets that needs customized approach. For example, Facebook may not work in South Mumbai but will be effective for low budget micro markets of Mumbai. This is at the top of the sales funnel, going into the middle, creating brand awareness becomes important that includes a lot of video content and gathering customer’s reactions. As we progress, we give right set of information to our agents so they can do justice to the leads. This is how we broadly approach lead generation as a concept.”

Ayushi Ashar, Director, Ashar Group & Member - Managing Committee, MCHI-CREDAI added, “In real-estate there are no blanket rules as the marketing strategies vary depending on location, target market, pricing and product. Identifying your target customer becomes very critical and therefore a lot of time is spent on ascertaining what really the micro market brings and how we can find the right type of target audience for that micro market. There are multiple layers in real estate, so it’s not just your digital identity that leads to lead generation, but everything combined together from brand reputation to product and consumer trends, The pattern of communication changes from one market to another even within a city. It’s a very target driven kind of lead segmenting and with the advent of new technologies one can easily analysis consumer’s trends that helps personalise your communication and in turn generate genuine leads.”

Bala Kumaran, Founder – Director, Brandstory.in gave his perspective, “When we deal with the high value, high volume and high sales cycle based product eco-system, the story format keeps changing with the segmentation component. All of us are dependent on the Google, Instagram and Facebook lead contribution, e-mail and SMS marketing and the contribution mixes alter depending on the budget and risk appetite of each individual brand over a period of time. I strongly feel video content is very important. Before, talking about metaverse or AR/VR, between the Google content and the written content to an AR/VR, there is a whole space of video framework that needs to be upgraded. The challenge is to produce large volume of videos at low investment but at a quality that your brand desires. Content can transform into vernacular asset to engage the customer little more through useful content. Messaging needs to be contextual.”

Dhruba Ghosh, EVP & Head of Marketing, Provident Housing Ltd. & Purva Land shared his thoughts on what more can be derived from a lead that is generated. “The crux of the matter is that only 25% of leads are generated with the money that we spend and at the end of the day less than 2 percent of the leads actually work. So how do marketers make best use of these leads and the data of the consumer and ensure that it works harder for us. Each lead acts in multiple ways and can generate further leads. But we fail to use data in an efficient manner. It is important that we drive within the organisation that each lead becomes more for us in terms of adding multiplicity to that lead itself. While we capture the data we need to ensure that more quality data gets developed around the lead that is being generated from various touch points. Because a lead for home-buying per se doesn’t stop at just the individual, it’s the family which gets involved and they beleads to be reached out at the same time with a different approach. How we communicate and create a customer journey for each of these leads across the entire mapping and differentiating between the first and the subsequent communications is a critical aspect. Richer the data, more you will be able to nurture the lead and get qualified leads.”

As per Navin Chand, AVP Marketing - Xanadu Realty real estate creates a product which has a lifecycle of about 3-4 years from a launch to handover, unlike FMCG products that have quite a long shelf life and therefore recovering marketing investments gets easier. “Real-estate doesn’t give the leverage of long product lifecycle and most of the sales still happens on site visit. Building a strong brand recognition thus becomes essential. For instance, recently a few projects saw 60-70 percent bookings at the launch because of the strong brand value of the company and the FOMO created about the product. It is all possible with the right way of capturing data, correctly analysing it, using insights in best possible way for the business from marketing, sales to post purchase.”

Vivek Agarwal, Co-founder & CTO, Squareyards spoke about managing the lifecycle of the lead. “Real estate is really a push product and the sales cycle extends anywhere up to 45-90 days and sometimes even more. The challenge is when we generate the digital leads, a lot of them are discarded for not even being qualified. In my experience I have seen, when these same leads are given to another salesperson without a prior background, they turn into qualified and even sales. The inference drawn Is that in the first instance, either the sale pitch was not enough or the customer was not in the right frame of mind or due to some other external factor, the lead did not work out. So we started measuring the calls, the connected time and the conversation, bringing the data back and scoring them and bringing all discarded leads which were falling out of the funnel back into the funnel. That’s how we have been able to reduce our lead generation costs in big manner, not requiring 1000s of new leads every month. What kind of messaging that you send matters. We have been using generative AI for last 2-3 years for improving the quality of listings on our platform. But, in the end, it’s not about the lead generation but about how do you nurture those leads, manage those leads and how do you make sure that your sales person are talking in relevant language to the customer based on his own context. That is what matters.”

As per one of the reports 52% of our time is being spent on digital channels. That is where we should look at to get people’s attention.

Technology has been a great equalizer giving smaller companies equal opportunity to reach out to the potential customers without large investments.

If you are outsourcing part or all of the lead generation activities, make sure they don’t prioritize quantity over quality and that they fully understand your ideal customer profile.

Clearly define “lead,” “prospect,” and “opportunity,” to better understand where your customers stand and how to deliver the right solution to them at the right time.

While lead generation has long been the go-to strategy, new approach to marketing is demand generation.

Tags : lead generation models customers marketing approach marketing sales revenues KV Sridhar Chief Creative Officer Global Nihilent Limited Ashish Kukreja Founder & CEO Homesfy Ayushi Ashar Director Ashar Group & Member - Managing Committee MCHI-CREDAI Bala Kumaran Founder – Director Brandstory.in Dhruba Ghosh EVP & Head of Marketing Provident Housing Ltd. & Purva Land Navin Chand AVP Marketing - Xanadu Realty Vivek Agarwal Co-founder & CTO Squareyards