In Australia, property developers need to compete even harder than before to garner high-quality and efficient leads. This is due to multiple factors—namely, the increase in competitor rivalry, market saturation and a newfound hype in digital marketing. Digital marketing for property developers has historically been an underused and underrated piece of companies marketing arsenal.

The days of sitting back and handing over listings to the likes of Realestate.com.au and domain.com.au are over. COVID has ramped up the crucial need for developers to take their marketing digital or be caught missing the boat. Success can be seen across almost any channel: email marketing, social media marketing, or pay per click. This article will outline some crucial reasons why digital marketing for property developers is here to stay.

Establish a Brand Identity

Let’s face it. In recent times, the “property developer” reputation has become increasingly scrutinised. Be it various scandals or poor experiences from consumers “buying off the plan”. As a result of this, Realestate.com.au has released data showing that developer reputation remains the third-highest factor buyers consider when buying off the plan apartments, trailing only to price and location.

Therefore, this presents an inherent need for property developers to strengthen their brand identity and reputation through digital marketing. And, as Dave Ansett from Truly Deeply asks, how does one create a powerful sense of company vision so that a customer is drawn inexplicably to their project and not to one of their competitors?

It is an enigmatic question that causes the company to dive into their brand and who they identify as. Creating value through digital marketing is the primary goal of branding. It is then the subsequent goal of marketing to extract that value into conversions and revenue for your business. The first four branding steps any company should undertake before digital marketing is:

1 – Conduct a brand audit

2 – Establish the companies unique value propositions and messaging statement

3 – Develop creative elements (logo, materials etc.)

4 – Implement strategies

The fifth step of this is to analyse and redefine or refine the brand identity. This is extremely important, as too many changes to a brand severely hinder its long-term effectiveness from establishing intrinsic value to consumers.

Once this has been officially established, it is up to you to ensure that all the ensuing digital marketing aligns and stays consistent with your desired brand identity. Consistency is key in this regard. Begin to utilise this consistency across all channels. Be it social media, emails, websites, or even traditional marketing methods, keep your messaging aligned with your brand strategy.

Optimise Your Website and Subdomains

As a property developer, your website is the go-to source for everything sales and exposure. Nine out of ten homeowners and prospective property purchases rely on the internet as their primary source of research. If your website isn’t listed on Google, you’re losing many potential buyers to other competitors.

 

First of all, there’s no excuse for not having a functional website, with the cost of webspace being lower than ever. Secondly, the return on investment for slightly optimising your website and subdomains is incredibly high. One lead generated from your website will likely pay for most time spent on optimising and hosting. Undoubtedly, a holistic website optimization approach combines various disciplines to make sure your website performs ideally in all areas. These are:

• SEO
• Copywriting
• Analytics
• UX Design (Frontend)
• Web Development (Backend)
• CRO/Landing Page Optimization.

See this as a long term goal. As in the past, property developers utilised short-lived microsites that would become redundant and be reused for different offerings. This is extremely detrimental to your SEO. This is hard enough, with property developers already finding it hard enough to list on the first pages of Google due to goliaths such as Domain.com.au, RealEstate.com.au and AllHomes.com.au, who dominate and saturate the first three pages. Get as many of your listings a possible (open and sold out) to backlink to your corporate website. This will pass on any link benefit to your main site, giving you a proper chance to rank against the juggernaut brands. After all, it’s free!

Build Hype with Social Media

Social media is a vital part of businesses digital marketing, particularly for property developers. The rule for social media follows more of a creative and expressionist route, as engagement is key to the success of this channel providing high-quality leads. Consequently, we have a few recommendations on how to build hype around your social media.

Get creative:

Property developers are fortunate to have access to a multitude of marketing materials. All of these have the potential to be curated into creative, inspiring social media posts. However, creativity is key to stand out. Take a promotional campaign for a new development that is being released by your company. You could utilise the floor plans, design mockups, and rendered imagery to tell a story similar to some of your potential customers. This power of creativity mixed with story-telling is an extremely potent tool for lead generation.

Utilise all channels for their benefits:

Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok… the list goes on and on. Your potential audience is also sprawled amongst these channels, and it’s up to you to target as many of them as possible. Alongside this, curating the subsequent content so it “fits” each channel is vital as well. A popular post on Instagram will likely have little to no effect on Linkedin and vice versa. A popular way to manage this is to purchase a scheduling and automation software such as Later or HubSpot as an all-in-one social media software. This greatly reduces stress and maximises efficiency and quality output.

Be smart with selling:

A common pitfall plenty of property developers fall into with social media marketing is focusing too much on selling. This greatly reduces the potential customer’s perceived value on your product and reduces hype and engagement by a lot. It would be best if you were careful when “selling” to your audience, as effective timeliness can make or break your brand and products perceived value. And that means a lot for property developers.

Reap the Rewards with Solidified Lead Generation

Some would argue that digital marketing without a solidified and consistent lead generation strategy would negatively impact ROI. Although the simple act of creating brand value is enough of an investment, every business wants sales. So, how do we achieve this?

The first step is ensuring that your lead funnel is secure. By connecting your sales team and CRM into your digital marketing, leads that appear and get funnelled will be picked up and nurtured by either the software or your team. Digital marketing tends to provide property developers with some of the highest quality leads.

The second step is to analyse and measure where these leads are coming from and their conversion rate. This will then assist your marketing and sales team in focusing their time and energy in sectors of digital marketing that are turning lucrative.

Finally, if your sales process ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If it does need some TLC, consider developing certain strategies for different communication channels. This is because the sales process does differ slightly across digital marketing medium to medium, and the perfect customer journey means a much higher conversion rate.

Introducing… PiPr.

Scale your sales with PiPr. The all-in-one property portal, for property developers and builders alike. Take a look at our offerings, or better yet, watch a demo today!