How to use social Media to our advantage in the real estate business Build a Funnel That Converts

How to use social Media to our advantage in the real estate business

It's imperative to understand the social media funnel of real estate

A sales or marketing funnel is the journey that the customer experiences while making a purchase. Depending on the product value the complexity of the funnel may vary but the journey would be similar or steps may get combined. The higher the value of product the more careful we need to be while managing the customer. The other part we need to be mindful our process maybe as complex at the back end the customer journey should always be made simpler.

The Social Media Funnel for inorganic marketing

A Large opportunity in the current business

Digital awareness spends happens at call to action

Facebook and Instagram understand that well and they then play on the bids and the business ends up spending more than what would be needed if larger eforts are put into a proper awarness program. It will also reduce adhoc pressure based decision which end up to be more harmful than beneficial for the brand.

Its important to mention that the marketing funnel cannot be treated in parts. Each and every part of the funnel has a critical role to play in the success of the digital marketing strategy. So tagging each post with the targeted funnel will help in improving the digital strategy and what is working too.

Let us address each part of the funnel seperately.

Awareness

Awareness is like suspecting that a customer might buy - like a cold call. It is as simple as seeking interest towards land as an investment. This is where the process becomes critical and it’s not about selling a product. But, about what value we offer as a brand, build trust, and motivate the customer to know more about the brand. It’s also important to add that this is where the landing page becomes important, and the content has to be highly engaging.

These are good creatives towards buiding awareness

Let us just break these two powerful sentences of HOABL (The House of Abhinandan Lodha) brand. Peace of land has lot of value for those who seen how land get’s stolen or occupied by anti-social elements. So, peace of land indicates that our land is in safe hands forever. To top it the brand is willing to commit towards liquidity in case of emergency. Which too is a powerful commitment. I am sure those who have seen this at the start of the funnel will end up improving the conversion in a large manner.

Awareness an important aspect of digital marketing to reduce cost

The beauty is that it does not cost much

The cost for such campaigns is very low to give a semblance to it. It cost around 1.4 Paisa to show the ad. Similarly, it cost around Rs. 1 per website visit. So, how do we take it forward?

The answer lies on how well we engage the customer on the website, how good we are in creating content that is of interest to the customer. Finally, building in a strong brand recall. Then leading the customer to take an action.

The important point to mention are these are interest based action and not necessary that these customer will purchase now. So we cannot pass each and every lead to the sales team but at the same time cannot be left without a proper engament. So different bucket need to be created based on their intent.

This leads to a proper digital website strategy engaging customers. Finding their needs and intents using SEO and the content they are engaging with.

So how do we seggregate a launch and a general awareness program

A general awareness program is an on going brand awarness program that would lead to swelling up of cold leads. Which can then be effectively used for nurturing and generating quality leads out of them. Get them to latch on our App. Get our email whitelisted so that we do not need to spend on digital marketing to connect with these customers again.

A product based awareness can change to a specific awareness campaign around the components of the product. Like a land parcel near Mumbai or Pune, A place to build a second home with all five star ameneties, a get away from the daily hustle bustle, etc. Using remarketing on these specific leads to filter the hot leads from the hot ones.

Prospecting is an Art and the crux to any kind of sales

Getting a person on a website is the easiest part

Getting the interest of a person physically was easier. It took around 30-40 seconds. But, getting a person interested on the internet is tougher. It may drop within a second, a nicely designed website that takes time to upload could lead to vital loss.

Technology part -Use HTML and avoid Javascript in Website Design

First time user have to load the whole page

We make a common error while testing the speed of the page and it's performance. We should use two tools to find the performance. Use a tool like https://pagespeed.web.dev/ to test the speed and performance, second we may try to test incognito as the whole website gets uploaded. Not to miss a good host like AWS is definitely beneficial.

Don't Sell Now - Create interest leave a mark

So now that we have got the customer on our page. This is where it becomes interesting and complex. we should never have a single pitch for every customer but the challenge lies on how to seggregate the various personnas. First we need to make an assumption on what kind of personnas are buying the product. Based on them create different visuals, creatives at the awareness and create different journeys for each one of them. Then use search engine optimization page on each journeys to identify where the customer or specific personnas spent their time, what created interest, what did not, time spent on the page, etc. This is wehere we create a brand impact, on how we are going to help the customer solve their problems, on how we as a brand are different, why should the customer rely on our brand, why us ultimately.

How to create interest

This is where we need to share to the customer on how we as an organization can support him and add value. The potential customer should feel that the information is valuable and should ask for more information from us. Show the value of our business through content, such as blogs, educational videos, guides and webinars. Answer the questions our customer is searching for. This in turn will bring potential leads to our website, where we will have the opportunity to build more awareness and trust. A combination of educational videos on Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Leading you to our wbesite.

Call to action an important aspect of digital marketing

Call to Actions

These are our serious prospects or buyers that are looking to purchase our product. These are customer that would be looking to more specific information. Considering to purchase from us or from our competitors. This is where our performance campaigns start. It is important to mention that awareness and performance go hand in hand.

The prospects and their sources

Prospects are like gold nuggets treat them well

Through awareness

These are real good leads that have gone through the website, understood the product, read about it, surveyed the market and are looking to buy. Hence will give a good sales conversion as they have been primed properly. The hypothesis is that we have provided proper information to the customer and their journey is smooth without physical intervention

Organic leads

These are the best leads as the customer have reached the website without any intervention through search and have a clearly defined needs.

Through Google Ads

These are who have a clear intent of purchase and searching for a product that meet their needs.

Facebook Performance Campaigns

These are leads that have come as a result of push and while they will convert they will have the lowest conversion ratios.

prospects are like gold nuggets treat them well

Important Points for remarketing

The landing pages of permance campaigns should be different and not the same for Google, Facebook and organic as we end up putting their cookies to capture customer details. Which will expose our leads to both Facebook and Google.

Remarketing is very important and helps in keeping the customers that have visited our website engaged. So we should keep remarketing keeping in mind not share data that is purely ours or data of Google with Facebook or vice versa. If we have nurtured the relationship up until this point, customers should feel receptive being sold to at this stage of the funnel.

Engage the customer on the website The Social Media Funnel digital marketing

Engage the customer and measure his engagement

Engaging is the key

The customer maybe looking for something totally opposite to what we have created or what we believe is engaging the customer actually is doing the opposite. So how do find what is engaging the customer. What content, which creative, where is he spending time on the page, etc.

Technology- SEO -Use various tools to identify the engagement of a customer

Funnel of customer website flow

This will help in understanding the customer behavior as well as identify the behaviour of a person making a purchase versus someone who has come to buy from a future intent to a customer who has just come for window shopping without any purchase intent now or in future. While a very complex mechanism but a critical and integral need of a website. The tool should finally be able to tell you which video was viewed the most, how much time was spent reading an article or a particular paragraph, static image viewed or carousal. Based on the customer monitoring we should be in a position to align content for those who are purchasing.

Technology- SEO -Use various tools to identify the engagement of a customer

The Social Media key performance indicators

What is engagement

“Engaging” content is content that entices people to take some kind of action. This is a problem because it makes it nearly impossible to determine whether one’s content is successful in driving engagement. And most of us know the saying, “What gets measured, gets managed”. But, still we need to put in KPI's in place to measure the performance. This could be the social likes, follows, comments, pageviews, unique visitors, time on page, bounce rate, pages per session, page scroll depth, new versus returning vistors, conversion rate, etc.

prime the customer on the website the social media funnel

Prime The Customer - Need Identification

Once the customer has shown an intent to purchase we should start with helping the customer identify his needs. We could create a detailed journey for his different needs of investment, wealth creation, second home, legacy, etc.

Need Identification

The defined needs and the latent needs

Need identification is used to identify what the customer is looking for, what are his pain points, what are the problems that he is trying to solve and his motivations to make a purchase. This will help create value of our product to the customer. Further, the information gathered will help create a customised offer, pitch and will help in reduced negotiation in turn improving sales conversion.

Simple Ways to indentify needs

Have you yourself made a similar purchase?

This could be a nice way to understand what needs your actual customer would have. Your own behavior and experience towards purchasing the product could help identify the needs better. Some of the questions that could be addressed are "why did I buy the product what did i look to achieve through the product?" "What motivated me to buy the product?" "Why did I buy this product over other competitor product avaialable in the market?" "What other options were available?"

Observation is really important

At times just observing the behavior of other people is sufficient. Keep observing them on why they bought a product and what needs did it fulfill. As they may have totally different needs to what you had. That's one of the reason why everyone buys a different product. Like a second house need is totally different to that of investment. The questions and the problems both of these types of customer would be very different. So you may even start with different creatives for both these customers.

Customer Insighting is another effective manner

Customer insighting of our existing customer is useful in finding more reasons, needs and what motivated them to purchase our product over other competitors product. Similarly customer that did not buy from us could help us make understand on why they went with competitors and what different needs that we could not address. Some questions that could help understand "What prompted to buy our product?" "What problem were you trying to resolve?" " When did you really decide that you needed land?" "What other options did you see before making the purchase?" "What made you buy our product ultimately?"

These are points you need to use for priming the customer

For example, a customer looking for a second house journey should be primed starting with creatives showing second home in awareness program, taking the customer to a landing page focussed on second home, solving problems related to second house, etc.

Social Media - Money Drain?