Posts tagged marketing

5 Biggest Real Estate Marketing Mistakes

Before we jump on to talking about Real estate marketing mistakes, let’s build a platform for our argument.

If you look at any big company anywhere in the world, the first investment they make is in real estate. Just look at how much properties Ambanis & Tatas own in India, how much properties Google & Facebook own in the United States. Even an ordinary or early investor also thinks of investing in the real estate to secure his earnings and get assured returns.

However, with the challenging economic situations Real estate marketing has become a difficult and challenging process. It is a continuous process

With growing rentals and changing lifestyles, owning a property is the priority of every married couple. They prefer to pay EMI than to pay for their rent. Talk to your 5 friends and see their current status, either they already have a home loan or planning to get one this new year 🙂

Time is never the same

However, with the changing times, specifically during these days, when nobody is even thinking of an investment, real estate as well gets a hit. Every time there is a recession, the real estate market always gets a hit. It has become really important for real estate companies to plan for situations that are going to come in the future.

From your project timelines to marketing spend, everything has to align and a calculated fund needs to be collected from the profits you make to handle such critical times. If I would have released this post 6 or 7 months earlier (before COVID, when I had written it but didn’t publish as it was not complete) nobody would have paid attention or would have considered listening.

But now, the situation is different, very few, I am saying very few companies are being able to survive during this time. For most people, everything is shut and no sales happening.

It also goes back to the time, when you were in a rush to generate leads and sell your properties. I understand you need floating capital to run your business, but you could have paid some attention towards building a brand that people would rely on. That people would say, they will take care of our investments, they will help us sail through this crisis.

What would you get this post?

As I am all about marketing, and bread and butter are about marketing, in this post I am going to mainly focus on those crucial advertising & marketing blunders that could have saved you in difficult times.

If you are a marketer, or a realtor and reading this post, I want you to please go through all the points mentioned in the rest of the paragraphs, and let me know your thoughts. I am telling you, if you can accept and understand these mistakes and rectify them, you will be in a better position down the line in next 3-4 years and your brand will be more powerful than it was earlier. And you will have a far better potential to fight against situations like these.

So without wasting any time further, let’s start with those critical mistakes of real estate companies that are causing them to lose in the longer run.

1. Corporate Communications Vs Marketing

Yes, if you are a big real estate developer, you would surely get it where I am heading to. The reason for keeping this as the first mistake is because this can be rectified easily. Most of the companies Communications team or Corporate Comms are different than the marketing teams. In various companies, you would see a differentiation with the Marketing team and Retail teams. I am not against having marketing, communication teams separately.

The mistake is they work in silos, the retail or marketing teams focus is towards products and sometimes brand, corporate comms is busy building corporate identity and doesn’t care of an individual customers’ opinions.

For a small developer, they may not have corporate comms or even marketing manager, for them, it is Just their sales head who is handling both the responsibilities. In that situation as well people simply forget brand building activities and jump on sales, because he or she doesn’t have any KPIs of the brand, his management is interested in only sales figures.

It is not wrong to focus on sales, but if you would have spent some time building your strong presence with your consumers. If your customers would say, I vouch for this brand, you would still have seen your sales happening despite the situation.

Let’s make it simple

Let me make it super simple and easy to digest for everyone, you need to give equal attention to your marketing activities and corporate communications, at the same time there should be sales happening always to survive. All you need is to align all these teams together, create interdependent KPIs so that they have no choice but to work together.

And that leads us to the next mistake…

2. No single system to align your Sales & Marketing

We discussed in earlier point to have all the teams working together and no silos. But if you don’t have a system to handle this, your efforts are going in vain. At the end of the day, there will be blame games, there will be no synchronization.

A single platform that brings sales & marketing activities all under one dashboard would not only help your teams to align but will also help you to monitor things in a far better way. You will be able to track returns from all of your real estate marketing activities.

Consider having an evolved platform like Eloqua or Hubspot that can help you to create various workflows to align your teams and work complementing each other. Have track of everything and optimize your campaigns in a far better way.

And that leads to our next point…

3. No Systematic Approach to Conversion Optimization

Conversion optimization could only be possible when marketing, sales & the top management of a real estate sales, broking or development company would start working in sync with each other. (As already emphasised earlier)

When I am talking about conversion optimization, it is not just about having a sales funnel, or running an offer ad, or having pixels and analytics installed. It is not even about sending emailers on and off and expecting people to revert.

I am talking about having a systematic approach where you have sales and marketing working hand in hand to optimize the overall conversion rate and maximize your real estate marketing efforts. Get more intelligent with your sales and marketing. Make use of an intelligent tools like Eloqua, Marketo or Hubspot that can help you gather lead intelligence, score your leads, create workflows, automate things, measure every touchpoint and have all of your marketing channels under one dashboard.

You need to build your conversion flywheel instead of having a funnel. As promoted by Hubspot, we should all move from having funnels to having a flywheel where your important actions of attracting, convert and delight go hand in hand.

Funnel to Flywheel

Consider you are getting 100 lead a month, and you are spending around 50 USD per lead. You are spending 5,000 USD a month to generate these many leads. You are currently able to convert 1% of the total leads, which leads to discarding of rest 99 leads. If you add it up to a year you can look at how many leads would go wasted and how much many eventually just went in vain.

Also, at the end of the year, you would again start a fresh campaign to start generating leads when you don’t have a system. But when you would have a system that not only captures these leads, it gives you insights about the people such as pages visited, time spent on each page, responded to which communication or have ever checked email or if they have downloaded a floor plan or a property brochure. This kind of insights will help you create better campaigns and nurture these leads further.

This would help you to optimize your conversion rate and surely you can increase it by 3-4% just by implementing a system.

Check out Hubspot’s philosophy of going from a funnel to a flywheel.

https://www.hubspot.com/flywheel

4. Not Giving Importance to Brand & Community Building Using Social Media

I have seen a lot of developers in India, a lot of property brokers in the middle east, they don’t pay attention to using social media as a brand-building tool. They majorly focus on running lead ads or conversion ads and trying to sell them the inventories they have. I am not asking you to stop those, I am asking you to consider the social media for a long term vision when working on real estate marketing.

Let’s understand it this way. Right now we are all going through a tough time, every business is struggling, and surely thinking of an alternative way of generating business. Wouldn’t it be great if you had a huge fan base that listens to you, connects with you and engages with you on various topics that you share? You could have just went out and started another conversation with them during the crisis.

But, right now you don’t have that audience. You never shared anything to help your audience make a better buying decision earlier, why would they listen to you now?

Am I making sense?

If this has started to make sense, let me come to my point. Real Estate companies should give utmost importance to building their online brand. Connect meaningfully with their TG and help them make smart buying decisions.

You need to be sharing value-driven content, that helps them achieve their objectives, helps them to fulfil their dream of buying a house or getting returns on their investment. Listen to what they think, engage with them through social media channels, start a dialogue and have constructive discussions with your audience online.

This way, you will be able to create a brand that would not just survive in the difficult times, it will surge and come out shining during the unprecedented times.

Check out 7 step formula to create right social media strategy for your brand: https://faizanization.com/7-proven-steps-to-succeed-in-social-media-marketing/

5. Least or no importance to Data-Driven Real Estate Marketing

Honestly, this post is not about all the real estate companies, there are some great examples too. I would be writing a review of 10 real estate companies who are doing great in the region (next month). I am talking about the majority of the companies those who don’t pay attention to data in their real estate marketing campaigns.

One, you don’t have a system to keep things organized, two you don’t pay attention to data and your decisions are mainly based on assumptions and opinions. However, the ideal way should be to take decessions based on insights and data.

All your real estate marketing campaigns should be driven by data, and for that, the first step is to capture the data in an organized way using the right tools. Getting help from a data scientist can help you further to optimize your campaign and results.

Let’s conclude

This brings us to the end of this post. Things are always easier said than done, but if you can have everything properly in place it would do wonders for your business. And, honestly, it is not that difficult as well. Thanks to technology, everything is easy, with one or two right tools you can avoid all these mistakes and get better results from your marketing efforts in the long run.

Do not forget to connect with me on Social Meid channels. If you liked this blog, I had written a similar blog for overall digital marketing mistakes that you should check out: https://faizanization.com/digital-marketing-mistakes-you-should-avoid/

5 Close Friends of a Digital Marketer

Digital Marketing Digital Marketing Tools Featured Social Media Marketing August 5, 2018

In our real lives we, need friends who are a go-to option for us and every time whenever we need anything we simply go to them for solutions. Similarly, for a digital marketer, there are quite some tools & platforms that are nothing but friends of a digital marketer to help them excel, help them grow and become a better marketer. In this post, I am going to list some tools and platforms that I use every day and that helps me, my team and I am sure they help a lot of other marketers too. They stand by with us as friends and that’s the reason I am calling them “close friends of a digital marketer!”

1. The Inspiring Friend of a digital marketer:

This friend like in real life is always inspiring, keep us motivated, helps us to do one extra mile to achieve better and bigger. So who could be a friend of a digital marketer that inspires? I won’t just mention one friend in this category, I have a list of friends who keep inspiring me. Some of these friends might appear in multiple categories as well. So just use them whenever you need.

Think with Google Keep yourself inspired with the latest trends in digital advertising (especially what’s happening with Google and related products (Ads, Analytics, YT, etc))
Creative Hub Facebook Keep yourself inspired with amazing design ideas for Facebook advertising and stay ahead in the game.

I feel these platforms are very important in the overall journey being a digital marketer. They not only provide first-hand information with case studies and new tool updates, they also help us to stay connected and inspired. And that’s the reason I have included them in my list of “close friends of a digital marketer”.

2. The Guru Friend of a Digital Marketer:

Don’t you have one guru, who keeps you teaching new stuff? Not talking about the friend who just does blah blah but an actual Guru who you needed the most in your Practical exams, the one you needed just before the paper to revise the syllabus quickly. Yes, I talking about the actual Guru Friend. Well, for a digital marketer there are plenty of such friends, who would never let you down, when it comes to learning something, or if you are stuck with something. They will always give you the latest information about digital marketing or social media.

Digital Marketer for overall digital marketing.
Backlinco For SEO
Social Media Examiner – Social Media
Sorav Jain – Social Media Marketing Tips, Digital Marketing & Blogging
Gary Vaynerchuk – For Social Media, Blogging, Business
Neil Patel – For everything digital

3. The Support System of a Digital Marketer

We all have that one friend who is a support system, we always rely on him/her to have our back. We leave a lot of work on them and just relax as they will take care of it. Wondering, who could be that for a digital marketer? Again, I have a list of such friends who are the support system, without whom I think a digital marketer can never function.

CRM Yes, a CRM is everything a digital marketer needs. Added with automation, a CRM helps you work even when you are sleeping. That’s the beauty of it. I am not gonna share a list of CRM vendors, however, Salesforce and Hubspot are the two I have been recommending to people.
ChatBot – A chatbot if created well helps you to engage with your audience in real time and collect data at the same time. It is always a good idea to have an AI chatbot added to your website.
Email Automation: Get your entire email notifications, thank you emails and even followup emails automated. This helps you relax as you know every new signup will get an automated email and the activity will be tracked for the next action. This as well becomes possible with the use of a Good Marketing & Sales CRM software.
Social Media Scheduling & Automation: It could be Hootsuite, or Sprout Social or any other software that you use, which helps you relax for the month or two once you have scheduled your entire calendar for social media, no hassle of going and posting every day on each of the platforms. It becomes your one-stop solution for all the social media channels.

4. The backbone of a Digital Marketer

Do you think, you can survive without that friend who holds you every time when you are in need? No, we all have those close friends who will do anything for us no matter what and will stand by whenever we need them. Can you guess which tool could be those friends for a digital marketer? Let me list it for you:

Google Analytics – Everything we do online, need to be measured. Analytics helps us to track the traffic of the website, a number of sessions, from where these people are coming, how much time they are spending etc. Which is actually very useful for every marketer.
Search Engine Console – The best free tool to see your Google indexing and ranking status. You can see which keywords are ranking, what is the click-through rate, which titles are working better and optimize your content accordingly.
Google Ads – You can’t totally rely on organic traffic, you need to beat your competition by being on top with Google Ads. It is not just about search ads, Google Ads is the platform to let you advertise on Google Display Network & Gmail Sponsored Promotions. (Previously called Adwords)
Facebook Ads – Organic only strategy does not work on social media too. You need to buy ads to reach out to targeted people. Facebook Ads is the best platform to help you achieve that. There are different types of ads you can run to reach out to your audience on Facebook & Instagram.

Rest everything is just a story, the life a digital marketer revolves around the above 4 and alone them can help you achieve great results.

5. The Gossip Friend of a Digital Marketer

You would be wondering already if this exists for a digital marketer. Yes, for sure. I believe all the platforms that give you information about awards, campaigns, and ads, in general, are nothing but the gossip platforms in the digital marketing industry or in the overall advertising industry. Would you like to guess this one now?

However, these platforms keep you updated on what’s happening around you or in the industry like that friend who keeps you updated about what’s happening with other friends. These are very important to keep an eye on your competitors, who is doing what, which agency won which client. And that’s the reason I keep them in my list of “close friends of a digital marketer!”

I hope you liked this list about close friends of a digital marketer and you will also add them to your list. There are hundreds of other tools marketers use. These were just based on our use and what tools we use. We are happy to increase our friends’ list. Please comment below the names of other tools, platforms or software as your friends. I will include relevant ones on my list of “close friends of a digital marketer”.

Thank you for reading this post. Please show some love, by sharing it with your colleagues or friends who you think can get benefited. Have a great day/night/evening 🙂

Ma asSalama.

If you are looking for some quick social media tips to follow, you can refer to this post:

13 Quick Social Media techniques to get great results in 2018

Social Media Marketing MasterClass – August 2018

Business Content Marketing Digital Marketing Events Featured Influencer Marketing Social Media Marketing July 31, 2018

Are you a business owner who is struggling to promote your business with social media? Or a marketing professional who is willing to disrupt and learn the modern age digital marketing technologies? Are you a student who wants to build a career in the ever-growing industry of social media? Or a brand manager who would like to learn social media to keep up with the latest trends? Are you an everything digital enthusiast who has never been exposed to the true power of social media marketing? Or a freelancer who wants to grow his customer’s list through social media?

If you want to get results from social media for your business or brand, we have a solution for you. Meet me in one of its kinds social media marketing MasterClass where we will learn the skills and strategies to win social media marketing.

Key benefits of joining our workshop

A comprehensive workshop for start-ups, SMEs, CEOs, thought leaders, artists, students, and freelancers to learn social media marketing.
From the basics to the secrets of social media, you will learn social media in an interactive format with me who has spent a decade working with digital marketing.
At the end of the workshop, we will make sure you are ready to market your own business, your own personal brand or the company you are working with through social media channels.
You will also get a chance to learn how to create a digital marketing strategy for a business with examples of big brands.
The course will also help you to grow your personal brand, build an audience and become an Influencer in your domain.

Topics to be covered in the MasterClass

-> Digital Marketing Ecosystem
-> Content Marketing & Digital Channels
-> Social Media Marketing
-> Content Creation & Curation
-> Social Media for Customer Support & ORM
-> Social Media Strategy
-> Social Media Advertising (Paid Ads)
-> Influencer Marketing
-> Social Media Tools
-> Connecting the dots with social media case studies or success stories

Here is the format/agenda/schedule of the workshop

Other Key-Takeaways

Certificate of participation
One-to-one consultation for your business or your career
Three months execution plan for your business / your personal brand, that you will follow by spending one hour every day
Weekly webinar access (for three months)
Strategy framework template
Customer service process framework template
Free PowerPoint templates to create social media posts easily & amazing slideshow presentations easily.
Free social media calendar templates & some other cool stuff to make your life easier.

Download the Workshop Brochure:

YOU CAN DOWNLOAD THE BROCHURE FOR DETAILED CONTENT OF THE WORKSHOP FROM THIS LINK: http://bit.ly/SocialMediaMarketingMasterClass

Register yourself for the workshop:

Get your queries solved:

If you have any doubts or queries before registering for the event, feel free to connect on the following number, simply call or click the same to send a message on WhatsApp

+91 7028668473

Why Social Media Marketing?

if this question of why social media marketing still haunts you and you are still wondering why you should learn social media, this could be most probably because you belong to the any of the following:

Somebody tried social media for his/her business and have told you it does not work.
Or you have tried using it but have not seen any growth.
You may still be living in ignorance and never tried to figure out if it could benefit your business.
Probably you are a traditional advertising guy still sleeping in the print or TV world
You understand the value of social media but don’t think you can learn it yourself.
Or you don’t think if it would be useful for your business.

The reason could be any of the above or could be one that is not even listed here, whatever your reason is, let’s try to communicate that with some factual arguments.

The answer to why Social Media?

(The beauty of Social Media Marketing)

Social Media is such a beautiful tool that has been created as a blessing for everyone. Be it a consumer or a business owner. Here are a few points that clearly distinguish social media marketing:

Majority of humans now to spend a fixed number of hours daily on social media channels.
People love to follow & communicate with brands on social media that they use in their personal lives.
As a business, you can engage with your audience in real time.
You can reach out to the right audience based on demographic and psychographic targeting.
You can get feedback on your product or services you are selling.
There are a great possibility and ease of building a community of your loyal customers.

In addition to the above-mentioned points, the following slides will give you some more reasons to love social media: