Believing is achieved through seeing or hearing. This is how advertising comes into the picture.
Advertising continues to be one of the most effective means to promote a product or business. But in today’s technologically-inclined evolving marketplace, does it still have the same value than it did before?
The primary and most common goal of any business is to generate leads and eventually convert to customers. In the real estate industry, this means generating more buyer and seller leads.
However, with the vast number of lead generation and referral platforms appearing online, the increasing number of subscriptions and the proprietary methods of these programs have resulted in bumping up costs of vendor leads for agents by as much as a couple of hundred dollars each.
This makes it more expensive and increasingly competitive for real estate agents when scrambling to get potential leads and customers to add to their professional database and networks.
Consumers ignoring general or non-targeted advertising
Surveys have shown that no less than 86% of Australians ignore sponsored ads on Google’s search engine results page (SERP) and click on the first few organic search results on each page.
The same thing happens with pay-tv ads where viewers often skip the ads or mute it on free-to-air programs.
Shifting market behaviours that affected the real estate marketplace
There have been a lot of changes that have taken place in the marketing and advertising sphere that affected consumer behaviours that made traditional practices irrelevant and created new opportunities and challenges in the process.
Ad portal rates are on the rise
Real estate agents used to provide ad portals with listings and data in exchange for free advertising, which is no longer the case today.
Real estate vendors today pay a premium to advertise on major property portals. Signing up is still free for a start-up account, but as you move along you begin to receive notifications to upgrade to a premium account to advertise to broader or more dynamic audience networks.
The social media disruption
Several years back, organic reach for a brand page using Facebook used to be pegged at a standard rate of 16%. Today, however, that number stands at only 0.09% and the platform’s share prices have doubled.
Boosting your pages on Facebook now costs more than you think especially if you want to target a broader audience, but it is still worth it.
The power of the ad portals
Real estate businesses are becoming dependent on ad portals to advertise their listings. According to a recent study, ad portal agencies have been seeing this demand as real estate agencies have been securing long-term ad contracts ranging from 24 to 36-month agreements.
In order to keep their ad portal client base, these platforms have been developing new and better ways to attract ad clients and increase their share prices.
This is how major property portals have been making money in advertising and explains how traditional advertising is losing over social media and digital marketing methods, which sadly many businesses fail to realise.
Social media is the future of advertising
Social media advertising is still one of the newest yet affordable advertising channels today. Back in the day, advertisers used to shell out thousands of dollars to gain access to the network’s customer base.
However, with the right knowledge and mindset, you can actually save a lot of money using social media sites such as Facebook, as long as you know how to go about it.
You might be unaware that technology has provided us with the necessary tools to do things that were once thought impossible.
Technology has allowed us to collect data from people accessing your website, as well as vital information from site visitors that are made available on-demand anytime and anywhere.
Smart advertising
Taking advantage of this data helps you chart your marketing campaigns through digital marketing and targeting. Instead of splurging on ad packages that promise to provide optimum reach, a lot of real estate agents understand the importance of targeted advertising as a way to maximise reach and save money on top-tier ad packages.
Marketing managers need to scale up their ad campaigns to generate the best results for their clients and stay abreast with the latest on listing presentations and industry intelligence, this way vendors do not get to spend much on ad portals.
Lead generation breakthroughs
While it is a generally accepted idea that running ads to people who have been to your website might help generate leads, Google Analytics says otherwise.
According to a recent study, people who visit websites to look at a property but do not inquire about it are likely dead-end leads and have no intention of making a purchase, they are just clearly “curious” about the property.
An effective strategy by enterprising real estate agents is through targeting where they focus and determine the intent of visitors on their websites. For instance, locals visiting your website to scan through listings could mean they own property in the area.
Triggering time-bound boosted ads to these site visitors, the real estate website sends a call to action through social media and generates new leads each time and the audience gets refreshed after the expiration of each boosted ad.
Real estate agencies could spend a minimum of $5 each day for the ad and be able to generate a number of leads at a much lesser cost compared to traditional advertising which could cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars each month without any guarantees in the absence of a communication channel.
Develop ad strategies to meet the demand of the times
The biggest advantage of social media marketing versus traditional advertising is that real estate agencies get to have more business intelligence and be able to measure their performance more efficiently and strategically.
Real estate agencies get to have more direct connection channels with their market prospects instead of advertising at-large which can cost more and not be able to guarantee the results.
With data and digital marketing resources well within their reach, real estate advertising can be exciting and cost-efficient in the real estate industry.