Real Estate Digital Marketing Strategy – A Complete Guide

In this article I will be explaining in detail the ideal digital marketing strategy that can be adopted to effectively market a real estate project. The setting is in the Indian market scenario, however it can be adopted in the same shape anywhere in the world.

Focus Profile – An Apartment or Villa Project

The digital marketing strategy varies based on specific circumstances and roles within the real estate industry.

The approach will be slightly different for different scenarios, such as real estate agents, under-construction, pre-launch, or ready-to-move properties, realty aggregators, and listing portals.

However, for the purpose of this strategy, I will focus on the perspective of a builder aiming to sell flats or villas in a tier-1 or tier-2 city in India.

Essential Assets For The Success Of Real Estate Digital Marketing

1. Website

This strategy article is not for Prestige Estates or the Lodha Group. But, being a builder who is taking off, you need a forward-looking strategy. Create a framework that is not too expensive, yet can evolve with you as you grow big. You may be a Sobha Developers in the making!

Choose a WordPress theme from hundreds of available themes. It saves your precious marketing budget, when compared to building a website from scratch.

For our reference, we will take the example of Godrej Properties.

Home Page

The homepage reflects your brand. A good homepage gives a brief about your company, people behind the show, latest project or projects, values that are important to you, and happy customer testimonials.

Property Page

Property page is a microsite for that particular property. It must give as many details as possible. Godrej has done it beautifully, while keeping it simple yet intuitive.

The details are a mix of visual and informational. Gallery of real photos or artist’s impression, location, amenities and floor plans.

Notice how there is a project-specific contact form, instead of a single form for all the properties. It helps not just segregating contacts for specific projects, it also helps email marketing, creating an email list specific to a property.

Supplementary Pages

Pages such as About Us, Vision Statements, Contact Us, Privacy Policies etc make up the rest of the pages.

Home page and property pages are central to our marketing approach.

You may get the website designed by a trusted design agency in your city with a good track record, or have a freelancer on platforms such as Upwork or Fiverr do it for you.

2. Google My Business (GMB) Profile

Google My Business (GMB) is now called simply Google Business. In popular language it is referred to as Google Local Listings, Google Map Listings etc.

One of the common mistakes builders make is not creating a Google Business Listing at the launch of the project.

Example of a Google Business Listing – “Flats for Sale Near Me” search

Depending on the location where you are searching from, the results will differ. However, please notice listings with no reviews are ranking in the second and third spots of Google local listings.

Google business or local listings appear on the first page of the results and there are only maximum of three listings, followed by “More Places” link. It is called as Local Pack. For searches with local intent, they usually appear. They almost always appear when the search term includes “Near Me“.

I did this search sitting in Bangalore, from an upscale area of the city. Yet, the competition for this low-hanging fruit is so low.

When I look up the search numbers of Flats for Sale Near Me on Google Keyword Planner, it tells me on average it is searched for 12,100 times a month in India! Besides, other related keywords as you will see in the screenshot of Google Keyword Planner below.

At the initial stages of launching your project, have a Google Business Profile created for it. If you have more than one property under construction, have a unique listing for each of them.

What are the benefits of Google Business listing for a real estate property?

☑️ Local Visibility – Your property has a chance to be featured prominently on Google’s first result page (SERP – Search Engine Result Page), when people in the vicinity of the project search.

☑️ Google Map Direction – Having a business listing for your project, makes it easy for buyers to locate and visit the property.

☑️ Google Map Integration – You can embed Google Map location on the property page of your website. It helps website visitors and also helps improve your Google Map rank.

☑️ Trust and Credibility – The reality of our times is that the credibility of a business is only as good as it is visible on the internet. Prospective buyers do a vigorous appraisal of your company and project even before they speak to you. And social endorsement in the form of Reviews, is one of the main influencers of credibility.

Google Business provides room for you to add a lot of information about the project such as address, phone, project name, project brief, property images, plan, videos and regular updates of the progress.

Being a strategy article, it is not within the scope to give a step-by-step guide to create Google Business listing. But, you may refer to the guide I wrote for a different article.

Any decent digital marketing agency can create this listing for you. Or there are a large number of really good freelancers on Fiverr or Upwork.

3. Social Media Profiles

Objective of digital marketing is to get found by your online target audience. Wherever they may be present in good numbers, you should be present too.

Create professional social media profiles in Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter (Called X Corp now). Each of these social media allow you to create a business account.

Link to these social media profiles from your website, usually in the footer area.

It is very rare that a single person devotes equal amount of time to each of his/her social media accounts. Someone may be more active on Facebook while another spends time mostly watching videos on YouTube.

So, in order to ensure most of your target audience has seen your project/s, create profiles in all the major social media.

It doesn’t cost anything to create these profiles, except the fees you pay the expert to create these profiles.

What are the important factors to keep in mind when creating the profiles?

☑️ Brand Consistency – Maintain a consistent brand image across all social media platforms. Ensure you use the same profile logo, cover photo and brand colours to ensure recognition and professionalism.

Notice the consistency of brand messaging across platforms of Godrej Properties

☑️ Fill Out All The Details – Try to provide as much information as possible in each social media platform. Take your time, but aim for close to 100% profile completion.

☑️ Use High-Quality Visuals – The power of visual quality resonates with people’s emotions. Prospective buyers subconsciously associate an account featuring high-resolution visuals with a reputable and quality-oriented company.

☑️ Unambiguous Bio – Every social media platform offers you the space to add a few lines of bio. Use it to your advantage and communicate in simple, clear and straight-forward words.

Check out this useful guide to craft your social media profile strategy

4. Email Marketing Platform

Regular email communication helps nurture the relationship that began with an interest through conversion and post-purhase relationship. It is a common thread that runs through the customer-journey.

Mailchimp is the most popular email marketing and marketing automation platform. The free plan allows sending up to 1,000 mails a month at the time of writing of this article.

Some popular alternatives to Mailchimp are – MailerLite, ZOHO, Brevo (Formerly Sendinblue) etc.

Get an account in one of these platforms.

We have now created the important assets we require for the successful implementation of Real Estate Digital Marketing Strategy.

In the next section, we will learn various stages of Real Estate Digital Marketing Strategy.

Applying R-E-A-N Strategy To Real Estate Digital Marketing

I am going to structure this article around the R-E-A-N concept.

R – Reach
E – Engage
A – Activate
N – Nurture

R-Reach (R-E-A-N)

Let’s call our real estate construction company by a fictional name The Realty Group. The Realty Group has got its new project plan Realty One, approved by the local municipal body. With the statutory requirements in place, The Realty Group is ready to implement the project and the groundbreaking ceremony is already concluded.

The current objective for The Realty Group is to raise awareness of its new project, Realty One, among potential buyers or key influencers in the buying process.

In other words, the company has to Reach its target buyers and influencers.

Let us explore the ways in which The Realty Group can achieve this task.

1. Search Marketing

Search marketing is the combined term we give to leveraging search engines such as Google and Bing. For our discussion, we will limit ourselves only to Google, it being the dominant search engine.

Let’s see the number of searches for “Flats for Sale in City“, per month (from Google Keyword Planner) –

• Flats for Sale in Bangalore – 12,000
• Flats for Sale in Hyderabad – 9,900
• Flats for Sale in Pune – 5,400
• Flats for Sale in Chennai – 6,600
• Flats for Sale in Gurugram – 3,600

Let’s see how different localities within a city perform –

• Flats for Sale in Whitefield – 1,600
• Flats for Sale in Gachibowli – 880
• Flats for Sale in Dwarka – 1,300
• Flats for Sale Kharadi – 720

Then there are other variations, such as “Apartments for Sale, “Houses for Sale, 2 bhk Flats for Sale” etc.

It is evident that search engines are a great source for sending leads of people, who are already looking to buy a property. They are at an advanced stage of customer journey, who we call a warm audience.

We will now put on the hat of a person, who is looking to buy a flat in Whitefield, Bangalore and searching for it on Google.

At the top of the search result page, you will see the sponsored results. They are also called Google Ads or Google PPC (Pay-Per-Click).

For every click on these ads, the sponsoring company pays Google a fee, which is the CPC (Cost Per Click). In this instance, the cost ranges from Rs. 30 to Rs. 180 per click.

Taking an average, be prepared to pay Rs. 100 every time Google sends a visitor to your website.

I will not delve into the process of creating Google Ads. Assuming you will hire an agency or a freelancer to do this for you.

If you are a hands-on DIYer, there are a number of courses on Udemy.

Recommended Google Ads Strategy

Phase – 1:
☑️ Campaign Objective – Leads or Traffic
☑️ Placement – Google Search
☑️ Geo-Targeting – World
☑️ Keywords – Broad Match of Flats/Apartments/2BHK/3BHK…In Locality & City (Ex: “Flats for Sale in Whitefield“). Include your brand name and project name as keywords.
☑️ Negative Keywords – Broad Match of words that are not relevant, such as land, plot, commercial, rent, other cities, other localities etc. Expect this list to be in hundreds. Keep updating this list as new search data is generated after launching the campaign.
☑️ Ad Copy – Try to mention price-range and location in Ad Heading, to discourage non-relevant searchers from clicking and draining the ad budget.
☑️ Assets – Use Assets (Extensions) such as Call, Lead-Form, Callouts & Sitelinks. Mention the USP of your project in Callouts.
☑️ Conversion Tracking – Set-up conversion tracking for lead-form submission and phone calls.
☑️ Budget – Start with a low budget (Say 1,000 – 2,000 per day) and keep increasing it every few days.

Phase-2:
☑️ Campaign Objective – Leads or Traffic
☑️ Placement – Performance Max (PMax)
☑️ Geo-Targeting – Locality + 5 to 10 km radius
☑️ Ad Copy – Try to mention price-range and location in Ad Heading, to discourage non-relevant searchers from clicking.
☑️ Assets – In addition to assets as explained above, you will be adding images, videos (such as walk-through video), logo for PMax campaigns.
☑️ Conversion Tracking – Set-up conversion tracking for lead-form submission and phone calls.
☑️ Audience Signal – Google lets you to define your target customer persona. This includes specifying the age group, gender, income level, and parental status. Choose a profile that aligns with the positioning of your project.
☑️ Budget – Start with a low budget (Say 1,000 – 2,000 per day) and keep increasing it every few days.

In Phase-1, you will cover all those people who are searching for an apartment in your locality/city. Pull Marketing.

In Phase-2, you will give Google the freedom to push your ad on all the platforms it deems fit. It includes, search, Gmail, YouTube and Display Network. It is a combination of Pull & Push Marketing.

Flats For Sale Near Me Searches

When creating essential assets, you had created a Google Business Listing (Google My Business) for your project. You will leverage it to your advantage to target people who are looking to buy a property in the project locality.

☑️ Embed the project map location on the property page of your website
☑️ Use the same Name, Address & Phone (NAP), as given in Google Business listing, list your project in all possible property listing websites
☑️ Start collecting reviews from customers and if possible from people who made inquiries
☑️ From time to time add project updates as posts. Updates can be about the progress, photos, any new statutory body approvals such as RERA approval, Occupancy Certificate, Fire Clearance etc
☑️ For more tips, please refer to my other post here

2. Social Media Marketing

Social media is a Push Marketing strategy, where you display your brand name and marketing collateral to your target audience, when they are checking their social media timeline.

Together with search marketing, social media offers a synergy to your digital marketing outreach. It helps them move along their buying journey.

You can’t make people open their wallet, before opening their heart first!

~ A Marketing Mantra

It takes multiple touch points before you can convert cold audience into a sale. Being present on social media channels where your target audience spend time, you improve your brand recall, which then helps when they search on Google and see your ad for instance.

What are the best social media platforms for Real Estate Marketing?

1. Facebook
2. LinkedIn
3. Instagram

YouTube also offers great potential, but PMax campaign we set-up in Google Ads covers it.

Facebook / Instagram Ads Strategy

Facebook owns Instagram. You can create ads on both Facebook and Instagram through a single interface on Facebook.

What do you need to create Facebook/Instagram ads?

1. A website (Optional but recommended)
2. A Facebook & Instagram business profile
3. Facebook Business account
4. Facebook Pixel installed on the website
5. Ad images and videos

Creating and managing Facebook Business account, ads, pixels, audience, retargeting etc is a skilled job and needs experience. It is best left to experts. However, for DIYers, Udemy has many courses!

Selecting Campaign Objective
☑️ Test multiple campaign objectives, namely Awareness, Traffic & Lead
☑️ Awareness is ideal for brand name circulation for minimal cost
☑️ Traffic objective gets most number of website visits. With proper detailed audience targeting, you can make it to work to your advantage
☑️ Leads objective helps you get interested prospects’ contact details, without them having to visit the website
☑️ More visits you get to the website, more data you feed to Facebook Pixel to better understand the audience

Audience Targeting
☑️ Demographics can be both men and women, in the age group of 25-40
☑️ Residing in 15 kilometer radius of the project
☑️ Detailed Targeting – Split test between page fans of leading developers, real estate interests and life events (newly wed, young parents, newly engaged, new job, job title etc), appropriate to the positioning of your project
☑️ Create Custom Audience after the pixel starts gathering data. By pages they visit, time they spend, actions they take (such as submit a form), for different time-frames
☑️ Create Lookalike Audience of best performing custom audience. Say, top 25% of people by the time they spent on the site. People who submitted the form etc
☑️ Create new ad sets targeting this lookalike audience

Ad Format
☑️ Create separate ads by image, short video and carousel
☑️ Crate an ad by customer testimonial image/video if possible
☑️ Refer to other developers ads for inspiration
☑️ Focus on benefits in the ad text instead of project features
☑️ Send traffic to property page of the website
☑️ Use a non-salesy CTA such as Learn More
☑️ Enable the Pixel

Retargeting Ads
☑️ Retargeting ads are shown to people who have already visited your website, but haven’t taken any action. People get busy with their lives. Showing them the ad again helps winning them back
☑️ Create separate campaign with Conversion/Sales (Bottom of the funnel in customer journey) Objective
☑️ Let this campaign start after a few days from your first campaign is live
☑️ Target the audience comprising top 25% by engagement and exclude the audience that has already taken an action of submitting a form or making a call
☑️ This is the time to offer discounts or freebies in the ad to convert people sitting on the fence or addressing their concerns

What we have discussed above is a typical sales funnel. You move people from the top of the funnel (Cold) to the bottom (Hot)

3. Worthy Mentions

In addition to search engines, display network and social media, there are few other channels that can be explored by a serious digital marketer marketing a real estate property. I have kept it for last because, you explore these options only if you have implemented Reach Strategy 1 and 2.

☑️ Content Marketing

Content marketing is a collective term given to leveraging content in text, image, audio and video format to spread the message of your brand or product. Blogs, infographics, podcasts, info videos etc are different types of content.

Specific to a real estate property, videos are ideal form of content marketing. You can create a variety of videos, such as Property Walkthrough, Amenities Showcase, Neighborhood Tour, Customer Testimonial, Meet The Team (Of architects, engineers, promoters), Celebrity Endorsement (Local celebrity buying a unit in your project), Construction Progress Updates, 360 Degree Views etc.

You will create a YouTube Channel and list these videos, embed them on your website and social media channels. You can then promote the videos on YouTube, display network and social media ads.

☑️ Native Ads

Native ads are content that look like editorial content on a publication, but in fact are sponsored ads. They are sponsored content or advertorials.

Taboola & Outbrain are two leading platforms that facilitate native ads by bringing advertisers and publications together.

Native Ad Example

E-Engage (R-E-A-N)

You have invested money and effort generating the traffic in the first phase of our R-E-A-N framework. We must make the best use of this traffic thus generated.

Only a small fraction of traffic generated takes the desired action of making a call or submitting a form. There may be potential customers in the remaining traffic that didn’t take any action. The focus of Engage stage is to keep the memory of your brand and name of the project alive in their memory.

How do we achieve that? Let’s explore –

1. Retargeting or Remarketing

You may have noticed a product or service that you viewed on a website continuing to appear as you browse other sites. They seem to be following wherever you go! This is Remarketing or Retargeting.

It takes several touch points before a prospect takes an action. Remarketing takes prospects through these touch points and improves the conversion rate.

Remarketing campaign can increase conversion rate by up to 161%

Google

How does Retargeting or Remarketing work?

When a user visits your website, a snippet of code (cookie) is dropped on his/her device. Later, when that user browses other websites that participate in the ad network, the cookie gets activated and shows the ad sponsored by you on those websites.

Image courtesy – Turnkey Marketing

2. Regular Social Media Updates

During the “Engage” stage, your goal is to remain in regular touch with the target audience you reached in the Reach stage. You need a pretext to engage with your audience, so you don’t let them forget you!

Under essential assets, you would have created business profiles on leading social media channels. Now is the time to keep them busy with updates.

The frequency depends on the content you can manage to generate. It is better to share fewer quality content than frequent average content.

Remarket Website Visitors On Social Media

Driven by top-line growth compulsion, most social media channels restrict the organic reach of your posts. For a reasonable cost, you can promote your important posts among page fans and website visitors. Doing so, you will ensure engaging with the audience already reached in the first phase.

3. Email Newsletter / WhatsApp Updates

Under essential assets, you have created an account in one of the email marketing platforms such as Mailchimp, MailerLite, ZOHO, or Brevo. These platforms allow pushing your updates via WhatsApp as well besides sending emails, either as a native function or through a third-party app.

You can replicate the process of creating and circulating the content as explained under social media. I have given a detailed guide of email marketing process for Mailchimp in my previous guide.

You can design a newsletter for each update you are making (at least the important ones) for social media and send it through your email marketing platform to the email IDs you have so far collected. Optionally, send WhatsApp updates.

A-Activate (R-E-A-N)

Activate in this context compares to Convert in a customer journey. And we will treat it as such.

In a typical real estate marketing scenario, the digital marketing team or agency hands over the list of prospects to the sales team. From there it deviates from online to offline. The sales team makes contact with the prospects, usually over the phone.

Typically, the first win for the sales team is to schedule a site visit. The role of digital marketing is limited from this point onward.

Once a site visit is arranged, it is advised to take off the individual from the prospects list on your email list manually. It avoids the inconvenience of that person receiving promotional emails or WhatsApp messages.

N-Nurture (R-E-A-N)

I bought my second flat from the same builder I bought my first flat from. It matters to keep your customers happy and connected with you. Old customers are your biggest brand ambassadors.

If they were convinced enough the first time that they made their biggest life investment on your project, it is likely that they will endorse you among their friends, relatives and colleagues when you launch your next project.

1. Create a separate list of your customers on your CRM platform, and keep them updated with the affairs related to the project.

2. Send periodic email and message updates about the affairs of the project.

3. Update social media pages with these updates. Optionally boost some of these posts with targeted campaigns. Make the best use of Audiences on Google & Facebook/Instagram. It costs a little, but lifetime benefit can be significant!

4. Help your customers create social media groups or WhatsApp group, yourself included.

5. Encourage your customers to add reviews wherever it is possible. Such as Google Business account, Facebook page etc.

6. Retain the list of people who engaged but didn’t convert. Your audiences on Google and social media will still be in place, which you created in the Reach stage. Engage with them through periodic emails and social media updates about your new projects and helpful tips.

Budgeting

Typically, 2%-5% of the revenue is set-aside as the marketing budget. It includes both traditional marketing and digital marketing. Whatever be your allocation, I have given an idea of the break-up for various digital marketing activities below –

☑️ Website Development, Maintenance & Social Media Profile Creation: 10%

☑️ Google Ads (Search and Display): 35%

☑️ Social Media Advertising: 25%

☑️ Content Creation and Marketing: 15%

☑️ Email Marketing & Messaging: 5%

☑️ Remarketing and Retargeting: 5%

☑️ Miscellaneous and Contingency: 5%

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