The Best Digital Marketing Plan for Real Estate
Image courtesy of Aston Martin Residences
Thereโs been a shift towards digital marketing in the real estate sector, and businesses that fail to adapt are falling behind. Digital marketing allows marketers to reach a global audience, build a unique brand reputation, and ultimately close more real estate leads. Here is our guide to creating an effective real estate digital marketing plan.
8 Things To Think About In Your Digital Marketing Plan
The online landscape is difficult to navigate, and creating the best real estate digital marketing plan is easier said than done. Businesses should never throw content at the wall and see what sticks. Instead, they need to carefully curate their strategy to successfully reach target goals. This begins by asking the right questions โ and answering them. These eight questions are essential to any real estate marketer creating a digital strategy.
1. What is the goal?
Goals are essential to creating a successful real estate marketing plan. Without specific goals, you wonโt know how to measure the effectiveness of your approach. By creating a pathway from objectives, to solutions, to results, your digital marketing plan will be efficient, streamlined, and practical. Goals for your real estate development marketing plan might be:
Bringing in investors and raise capital for a new project
Pre-selling 50% of units before breaking ground.
Increasing hotel ADR (average daily rate) by 10%
Attracting clientele from a previously under-targeted demographic
Establishing your companyโs unique brand voice
There is no โone size fits allโ approach to digital marketing for real estate. You must be deliberate in crafting particular strategies to achieve your unique goals.
2. What real estate sector are you in?
Different real estate sectors and property listings require very different real estate marketing ideas. You wouldnโt market a luxury resort the same way youโd market a commercial office space or a residential development. Your niche will affect every aspect of marketing including your audience, brand voice, and content strategy.
Although itโs vital to consider the type of real estate youโre marketing, businesses shouldnโt fall into the trap of creating marketing materials that are exactly like their competitors. Instead, use digital marketing to draw attention to the qualities that make your brand different from the rest.
3. Who is the target audience?
If your digital marketing plan for real estate company exposure isnโt reaching the right audience, it wonโt have the impact that you want it to. Marketing a luxury retirement community on Tik Tok is like running ads for Rogaine on Nickelodeon โ not very practical. There are limitless differentiators that you can use to identify your targeted market, including:
Location โ Will they be able to travel to your property?
Age โ Are you marketing to seniors? Business people? College kids?
Income Level โ Can they afford what youโre selling?
Interests and Hobbies โ Does your property have a golf course? Is it near a race track or a ski mountain?
Marital Status โ Are you hoping to attract families?
History โ Have they bought or sold similar real estate in the past?
Once youโve identified your audience, you can develop a digital marketing proposal for real estate that speaks directly to them.
4. What is our brand identity?
Your brand identity is what sets your business apart from competitors. Aspects of a brand identity include your brand personality, tone of voice, visual approach, and mission statement, such as a focus on sustainability. This identity should be consistently communicated across all marketing materials, both online and offline. Effective real estate marketing plan examples with unique brand identities include:
Taos Ski Valley: Purpose-driven. Strong emphasis on sustainability and protecting the environment. Family oriented, inclusive, down to Earth.
Auriens: Classy, refined, exclusive. Targeted at those entering the โthird-act of lifeโ.
Embassy Gardens: Community-oriented. Younger, hip, the place-to-be. Pet-friendly, exciting, lots of hustle and bustle.
5. What platforms should we focus on?
Marketers must carefully pick and choose which online platforms to focus their property marketing plans. Digital marketing for real estate encompasses everything from social media to email marketing efforts, so companies need to assess their goals and use their resources wisely. Here are a few platforms to focus on:
Website: When potential buyers are considering a purchase, they hop on the internet to research the seller. This is why having an appealing website is vital. Your website should prioritise things like visual appeal, usability, selling points, and mobile functionality.
Email: According to Sleep Advisor, more than half of Americans start their day by checking their emails. With an average open rate of twenty one percent, emails sent to leads are far more likely to be clicked on than advertisements on social media platforms.
Social Media: Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Tik Tok are ideal social media platforms to reach a large audience, establish a brand voice, and connect with leads. Companies in the real estate industry companies should prioritise growing their follower count through interesting visual content, consistent posting, and community interactions.
6. What type of digital content should we create?
When creating digital marketing materials, companies must get creative in their approach, leaving no ideas off the table. Here are a few examples of effective online content:
Video Content โ Social media is the home to great visual content, from professional videos showing off beautiful architecture, to community posts shared by residents and visitors.
Blog Posts โ This type of content builds trust in your authority and voice in your sector. Consider starting a blog discussing topics relevant to your brand identity.
SEO โ By using a search engine optimization strategy, you can boost your online presence and get more clicks on Google.
VR Tours โ Providing virtual tours of your properties is a great way to show them off to people who canโt attend an in-person showing.
Paid Ads โ Businesses can use paid ads to target potential clients. Itโs vital to analyze your ad performance and A/B test different designs throughout the digital marketing campaign.
7. What is our digital marketing budget?
As more and more consumers buy online, companies allocate more money to digital marketing. Some strategies prove more costly than others: Professional videographers, SEO strategists, web developers, and marketing experts will all take a chunk out of your budget.
Businesses are more likely to reach their goals when theyโre able to see their real estate digital marketing proposal through from beginning to end, without sudden cutbacks or pivots.
8. What is our timeline?
Inexperienced digital marketers can get frustrated when their desired outcomes take longer than expected. This is why marketers must establish realistic deadlines for their objectives. For example, if your hotel needs to secure a certain amount of bookings by the end of the month, it would be unwise to pour your budget into SEO marketing, as search engines often take time to update and demonstrate results.
Image courtesy of Wardian, London
The Best Real Estate Digital Marketing Plan Examples
Since digital marketing is the new default approach, we need to consider plans that go beyond traditional marketing practices. In the example below, youโll see how our real estate marketing plans require both digital tools and careful market research and targeting to lead to impactful engagements that actually drive sales.
Just take a look at our approach as demonstrated in our case study on Johari Beach Residences.
Case Study: Johari Beach Residences
Johari Beach Residences is a luxury property development in Zanzibar that had been facing the challenge of appealing to international buyers while Zanzibarโs luxury real estate market was still in its early stages relative to other beachside destinations.
This was a unique challenge, so when we developed a real estate marketing plan, we opted for a digital strategy that both turned heads and delivered measurable results.
Hereโs how we did it:
Establishing a Distinctive Brand Identity: Positioned Johari Beach Residences as an exclusive yet welcoming oceanfront resort community that appealed to buyers at various price points.
Differentiating Through Features: Highlighted unique amenities and lifestyle offerings to make Johari stand out from the crowd.
Understanding the Target Market: Identified our ideal buyer personas, along with their goals, investment priorities, and lifestyle preferences. Our personas research informed our messaging, making sure we consistently positioned Johari as a mix of luxury and investment potential.
Pairing PPC with Tailored Landing Pages: Utilized PPC (pay-per-click) search ad campaigns, which directed visitors to custom landing pages made to be perfect responses to their web search needs. Each page showed off a different side of Johariโs value, from its oceanfront views to its income-generating potential.
Automated Email Sequences: Implemented automated email campaigns tailored to each stage of the buyer journey. These sequences kept Johari top of mind, nurturing leads with valuable insights, and maintained engagement throughout their decision-making process.
Lifestyle-Driven Social Media Presence: Designed visually stunning content that highlighted the destination and lifestyle awaiting at Johari Beach Residences. Focusing on Instagram drove more organic engagement.
Leveraging PR Outlets: Placed our media in well-known outlets like Luxuo and Business Insider Africa to better position Johari as a premier investment opportunity, raising awareness and enhancing its reputation among affluent international audiences.
With an understanding of Johariโs audience, data-driven insights, impactful content, and mapped customer journeys, our approach for Johari Beach Residences was seamless: an engaging experience from discovery to purchase.
Our Strategic Digital Marketing Plan Approach
We aimed to tell stories, build trust, and guide clients at every stage of their journey, with an emphasis on digital touchpoint. Here are some of the cornerstones of our plan:
Content Strategy Development: We focus on composing stories that inspire action.
Customer Journey Mapping: Making sure that every step is designed to foster engagement.
Lead Generation: Using the power of social media, AdWords, email campaigns, and more to generate more high quality leads.
Building Digital Assets: Designing digital renderings, image libraries, floor plans, and social content calendars to engage buyers with pre-development content.
Improving our SEO: Optimizing keywords, phrases, and digital pages for visibility, searchability, and quick loading times to appear front and center in search results.
Social Media Posting: Using the built-in social media algorithms, tagging systems, and dynamic content allows us to showcase lifestyle content that truly resonates with our audience. This way, weโre engaging with our potential clients instead of simply marketing a product, which is a great way to attract strong leads.
Email Marketing: We use a hybrid of automated and hand-personalized email campaigns to keep different categories of potential buyers engaged and up to date on the latest developments
Campaigns Across Borders: Our outreach landed in over 30 countries, with tailored messages to resonate with each audience.
Conversion Optimization: We opted for campaigns across a variety of channels to drive over 2,000 leads in just 12 months, with a correlated increase in conversation rates.
The Results
Our key results at Proven Partners go beyond just visibility. We also focus on how accurately we can capture the right audience, at the right time, with the right message.
Our Johari Beach Residences campaign is an excellent demonstration of the power of strategic and targeted digital marketing plans in action. We attained:
Boosted Sales Worldwide: Our marketing plan contributed to successful sales from across 11 different countries, each with its own market.
Social Media Engagement: We grew the social media following to over 11,000 followers on Instagram, with over 1,000 followers joining in the first 30 days. Plus, Johari boasts an engagement rate of over 4.5% โ a leader among local competitors.
Raised Property Value: Our efforts increased the average price per square foot by 14%, with the overall sales value of the development increasing by 42%.
Learning every aspect of the digital marketing landscape at once is certainly overwhelming, but thatโs where the right plan and execution can become your strongest allies. You can space out your goals and focus your energy on what will make the biggest impact.
Still, having an experienced partner can make this journey even smoother. Proven Partners can show you their insights for crafting the ideal digital marketing plan for transforming your real estate business.
Proven Partners Can Help You with Your Real Estate Digital Marketing Strategy
At Proven Partners, we understand how challenging it can be to cut through the noise of a crowded real estate market. Maybe youโre frustrated by low-quality leads, or tired of pouring money into campaigns that donโt generate meaningful returns.
Weโve helped countless real estate professionals overcome these exact hurdles by designing digital marketing plans that speak directly to your target audience. Our teamโs deep expertise in real estate marketing ensures we can pinpoint the best channels, tactics, and messaging to showcase your properties, boost engagement, and increase conversion rates.
Let Proven Partners develop your customized digital marketing strategy that truly delivers results. To learn more, check out Proven Partners digital marketing page.
