Marketing in real estate: how to reduce the cost of acquisition and increase profits

Features of marketing and advertising of real estate

Real estate marketing means big budgets, an overheated ad auction, and a long deal cycle. As a rule, clients decide to buy a home once or twice in their lives, and carefully approach the choice.

Real estate companies run a lot of ads to get in touch with potential buyers. The cost of a lead is high, so the quality of the application processing is of great importance. Marketers have to work closely with the sales team so that the spent advertising budget and efforts to attract applications bring profit to the business. Let’s take a closer look at the complexity of digital promotion in this industry.

6 real estate marketing and sales challenges

Problem 1: Too many sales funnels

You cannot reach different audience groups with the same offer. For each segment of potential buyers, marketers need:

  • offer and benefits of working with the company;
  • a set of pains of clients from different segments;
  • landing page;
  • advertising campaign: audiences, creatives, ad texts.

For each offer, the sales department should have its own scripts and mechanics for processing applications.

Problem 2: Long Deal Cycle

Real estate is rarely bought, most often it is an expensive product. Because of this, objects are chosen for a long time and carefully. From the moment the need is formed (“I want a new apartment”) to the purchase, it can take from 3-6 months to a year or more.

Problem 3: high cost of application with high competition

Cost per click on CPC ads set up for real estate purchase inquiries often ranges from $100 to $1,000, while CPL costs go up to $10,000 or more. Marketers are forced to look for ways to get more leads. At the same time, a decrease in conversion to an application and a purchase critically increases the cost of attracting a CPL application.

Therefore, real estate marketers need to carefully monitor the processing of applications: huge advertising budgets do not want to be wasted.

Problem 4: Misappropriation of the budget

There are clicks – no applications, there are applications – no sales. The quality of processing applications in real estate is everything. It is important to work out the reasons why there may be many missed calls from the sales side, why the conversion to a deal is low, and why there are many calls and few sales.

Problem 5: Many acquisition channels, complex chains of touches

Multi-channel deals and sources of incoming orders are difficult to track. The longer the transaction cycle, the more touches the client makes before buying. Before buying a property, a user can make 10-100 touches, sometimes 500 touches with a company offer. The speed of the decision is influenced by the type of real estate, the type of the planned transaction – for example, using borrowed capital or own funds.

It is important for a marketer in real estate to track all the channels that in one way or another influenced the client’s decision in order to understand which ones work and warm up, and which ones spend the advertising budget.

Problem 6: Poor control of the sales force and customer experience

Due to the high cost of the application, high acquisition costs, marketers are forced to find time to audit the work of the sales department. At the same time, it is very difficult to control the work of managers manually.

Marketers have to:

  • selectively listen to calls and spend a lot of time on it;
  • understand scripts;
  • fight the fact that the call center misses calls;
  • identify the stages at which specialists worked incorrectly.

How to increase the number of applications and sales in real estate using analytics

Real estate sales and marketing problems can be solved. For this you need:

  • combine data from both departments in one platform;
  • start tracking indicators throughout the funnel: from an ad click to a purchase;
  • analyze touch chains and acquisition channels comprehensively to find ways to shorten the deal cycle and reduce the cost of a lead;
  • automate the control of the work of managers: how quickly they answer calls, how successfully they close deals.

❓ Some regions have clicks but no claims.

Many developers and agencies sell properties in key regions. Therefore, they can use a wide geography and show ads:

  • those who live in the region;
  • users from satellite cities;
  • residents of key cities in neighboring regions;
  • regions for which you want to set up ad impressions during the season, for example, before the start of the school year.

Advertising works differently in different regions. If you poorly set up campaigns, do not track the cost of the application, the conversion to the application, you can get a lot of clicks, but not potential buyers.

❓ There is no data on the average time to make a purchase decision.

Roistat has a cohort analysis for such a task. With this service, you can determine how and when different groups of customers make purchases.

The “Sales” metric will allow you to find out how much time the client needs from the moment of the first visit to the site to the payment of the order. Based on the results of the analysis, you can make adjustments to remarketing and retargeting campaigns based on this data.

❓ Long deal cycle.

Before buying real estate, a client makes many contacts with the company – from 10 to 100 or more. It is difficult to identify which touch led to the purchase.

For example, a buyer first searches Yandex for a comparison of new buildings and apartments in the secondary housing market. Then, if he decides that he wants an apartment in a new house, he can search for a selection of apartments from developers, go to the website of a particular developer. The user then sees an ad on Instagram with apartment layouts. After some time, according to one of these ads, he returns to the developer’s website to leave a request to view the object. At any stage, the potential buyer can postpone the decision.

❓ Low conversion per deal.

There can be a lot of requests for advertising, but somewhere in the sales department, processing fails, and the transaction does not happen. Managers can communicate with clients in different ways, it is impossible to keep track of everyone.

Reports on managers will help to understand:

  • which employees and how they process leads;
  • which of them works better on which channels.

Let’s say a manager who brought less revenue to the company can work with deals from one traffic channel. The problem may be that all the leads of the advertising channel were distributed to one employee. You can mistakenly think that the traffic channel is inefficient: it leads applications that do not convert into sales, although in fact the manager does not convert leads from advertising well, so the revenue is low. The company can turn off the traffic channel, although it brings targeted leads.

If the reason for the low conversion is on the side of the sales department, you can try to redistribute those responsible between the channels and help employees build work, find the reasons for poor results.

Also remember about the deal cycle. If it takes from three to six months to sell an object, it makes no sense to look for sales data in the report a week after the ad launch.