Off Plan Real Estate Marketing: Using Digital Marketing to Sell More

Creating digital marketing campaigns for real estate takes strategy, specialty and skill. However, creating digital marketing campaigns for off plan real estate is a whole other ballgame. Off plan real estate refers to the selling of property before a structure has even been constructed and these developments are usually marketed to real estate developers or early adopters of developers so that a buyer can secure more favorable finance terms. 

With the above in mind, marketing for sales of off plan real estate requires more strategy, specialty and skill than any other form of real estate. In this article, we outline top digital marketing tips to help sales soar for off plan real estate. 

Digital Marketing Tips for Off Plan Real Estate Sales

Having an 'online presence' is not enough when it comes to off plan real estate. You need to keep up with your target market and digital trends in order to reap lucrative rewards. Let's take a look at the most important digital marketing assets and tools to help with your off plan real estate sales efforts.

High-Quality, Lead Capturing Content

They don’t say “content is king” for nothing. Content marketing is vital for successful off-plan real estate marketing and lead generation and forms the foundation of all your other marketing efforts going forward. With high quality website content and blog articles, you are able to build trust with your audience, gain lead data, improve lead conversions and connect with your audience. Content marketing also serves another purpose, that of Search Engine Marketing. By applying SEO tactics to your content creation, your website will rank higher in the search engines results, ensuring your site gets discovered by those actively seeking your offering. 

When we say “quality content,” we don’t just mean that you need to spam your blog page with keyword rich text for the sake of SEO. Of course, inserting certain keywords and key-phrases for SEO purposes is important but you need to create content that is helpful, builds trust, establishes you as an industry, is shareable, informative and directs a viewer to take a specific action. With regard to off plan real estate content, you can create content that helps your prospect, be it an article outlining the benefits of purchasing off plan and also provide helpful real estate related content - from interior design ideas to financial advice. All of this adds value to the viewers life and builds trust between them and your business. 

It is also important that you use your content as an opportunity to capture high-quality leads. This comes in the form of “lead magnets.” An example of a lead magnet is a free, downloadable e-book that provides valuable, industry specific information. The catch is that in order for a potential customer to download your e-book, they will need to fill in their contact information. This is a win-win situation as the lead benefits from your e-book - while you are given information that you can use for remarketing campaigns and lead nurturing opportunities. 

Landing Pages for Lead Generation

We cannot state this enough - quality lead generation is key to successful off plan real estate digital marketing and there are a variety of tactics you can use to gain greater leads. Above we mentioned lead magnets, and it is important that you also focus on creating high impact landing pages designed for lead generation. A landing page is a web page that a user 'lands' on after clicking on a social media post or Google ad. Instead of simply having the user click through to a generic page in hopes of them finding your call-to-action, a landing page immediately invites them to subscribe to your newsletter, sign up, or download your lead magnet. 

Essentially, these pages are built to collect prospect information that you can use for further lead nurturing and relationship building (through email marketing, remarketing etc.) 

When it comes to off plan real estate marketing, your landing page represents the beginning of your lead conversion process and it is here that they will enter their information in exchange for a helpful resource (blog, e-book, newsletter etc.) The information they provide should include their name, email, industry and contact number. Through landing pages you are also able to track where your leads come from (website, social media etc.) and you are able to learn about their online behaviour, what website pages they have visited, and how they have engaged with your brand. This information is vital to the lead nurturing and sales process as it helps you decipher which leads are more qualified then others and which require more nurturing. 

Quality Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is a marketing and sales methodology that is used to rank prospects against a scale that represents the perceived value a lead represents to a business. Essentially, a lead score determines if a lead is sales ready or of high-value. 

Through lead magnets, website tracking and social media initiatives you are able to capture lead information and score leads in order of importance - tracking them as they move from the awareness stage through to the sales-ready stage. Lead scoring allows your off plan real estate sales team to spend their time where it counts – with qualified leads - saving them time and increasing your bottom line. If sales time is wasted with unqualified leads, your off plan real estate company will suffer. Pursuing qualified leads can increase sales productivity and guarantee a better return for your business. 

So, where do you begin with lead scoring and how can you manage the process effectively? This is where Customer Relationship Management comes into play, also referred to as CRMs. These systems assign numerical values to each of your leads - helping your marketing and sales team keep track of their progress and create campaigns to suit where each lead is within the buying cycle. 

Learn more about the process of quality lead nurturing and how it can increase your sales, here. 

Lead Nurturing Workflows and Automation

As stated previously, a powerful CRM is able to track your leads and score your leads to help your marketing and sales teams learn which prospects have a higher priority and helps you decipher where prospects are within the sales journey. Once you understand your prospect and where they are in the buyer's journey - it is time to implement lead nurturing workflows.  A CRM such as HubSpot helps you with this process by delivering automated communication to build relationships with your contacts. This is done through automated and highly personalized email marketing. 

These emails are characterized as being highly personalized and based on a lead segmentation strategy - that is: the messaging within your emails will be tailored to suit where your prospect is within the buying cycle, thus delivering messaging that is important to them and where they are in the decision making process. 

Your email content should be set up to reach your individual prospects where they are in the buying cycle. That is: the awareness,, consideration or decision stage.

Automated Emails for the Awareness Stage Should Consist of:

• Educational Videos - Videos explaining the off plan real estate process as well as digitally generated visual walkthroughs of what the property will look like upon completion. 
• Informative and Appealing Infographic - designed to breakdown complicated information - especially important when it comes to off plan real estate. 
• Blog Posts - informative and helpful blogs that provide useful information about your industry and showcase your business as an industry thought leader.

Automated Emails for the Consideration Stage Should Consist of:

• Email Newsletter - continue to provide educational content to keep your development top of mind and help your audience understand why and how they should invest in an off plan real estate property.
• Educational E-books - take a deep dive into specific topics that your leads are interested in as they consider making a property purchase. 
• Case Studies or Testimonials - present prospects with real examples of how your previous or current developments have added value to the lives of your customers.

Automated Emails for the Decision Making Stage Should Consist of:

• Pricing Related Content - Share your pricing structure and provide a clear breakdown of your pricing structure.

• Set up Site Meetings: Invite your prospect to walk through the site with your sales representative.
• Documents: Send through the relevant documentation that your prospect requires in order to make their decision. 

Customer Relationship Management

In order to achieve all of the above seamlessly, off plan real estate marketers should invest in Customer Relationship Management software such as HubSpot. CRM is a strategy that businesses use to manage interactions with customers and potential customers, helping organizations streamline marketing processes, build and nurture relationships, increase sales, improve customer service and ultimately make more sales. 

Quality CRMs such as HubSpot provide a single place for marketing and sales teams to implement, manage and track all their efforts. Not only can your marketing team run all campaigns through the platform, they are able to track the success of every campaign in greater detail in order to learn what is working and what is not working.

Your marketing team and sales team will also gain greater insight into your leads through the platform, identifying warm opportunities by tracking lead behaviour and understanding where each lead is within the buyers funnel. 

In Conclusion

If you are looking to generate leads for your real estate business through the power of digital marketing, we can help. 

Since 2005, Nexa has provided inbound marketing and sales lead generation for the real estate industry.  We are proud to be the region’s leading and only HubSpot Diamond Agency Partner and have been recognised as thought leaders and innovators within this field. 

Contact Nexa today and drive highly qualified sales leads for your business.