The Future for Online Real Estate Marketing – “Moving Beyond the Advertising Dollar” is the major theme for this year’s Property Portal Watch European Conference in Madrid 28-30 September.
Marketing is the new frontier for property portal technology and strategy.
According to the experts it’s all about developing premium, rich media content that turns conceptual ideas into highly interactive, engaging calls to action which generate more leads.
“As the advertising market rapidly matures the property portal classified listing model need reinvention,” claims Stuart Leo, who is the founder and operator of Blirt a disruptive digital real estate marketing business based in Australia.
“Waterfall trends have left the world at the beginning of the greatest customer revolution in history – ‘The Experience Economy’”, he says.
Leo says listings and display ads are just a small part of the required solution.
“Leading marketers are prioritizing customer satisfaction and revenue growth as priorities and delivering full funnel digital experiences,” he says.
This means focusing on the entire customer journey in a strategy Leo calls ‘opportunity acceleration’ which supports a sale using platforms which engage the user throughout their ‘buying journey’.
Leo asserts ‘opportunity acceleration’, where the sale process is influenced once the prospect becomes sales qualified, is the new lead generation.
“Not all leads are equal and marketers can now tell sales which ones matter and which ones don’t,” he says.
And, he says, journey-focused marketers must be content driven because content plays a role across the entire journey, not just at the start of it.
“Here’s the thing; journey engagement works.”
High engagement-based media such as video, display, email and social is essential and used to support a sale in alignment with sales teams.
“These activities are triggered via automation platforms connected with CRM data and fire workflows into platforms such as Google & Facebook,” Leo explains.
“We’ve found in our property work in Australia that opportunity acceleration programs can: increase velocity of a property sale by up to 40 per cent.
They also decrease the cost of a sale by up to 50 per cent. One dollar invested in opportunity acceleration can see up to $7 saved in cost per sale for the developer.”