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Even the best real estate projects cannot make sufficient sales without a solid marketing strategy. While the residential real estate market witnessed a temporary slump due to the pandemic, there is a renewed interest of homebuyers with the onset of vaccination drive and resumption of normalcy across the country. For real estate professionals, it means that you need to strengthen your marketing practices to build brand awareness and engagement with your target audience.
Since we live in a digitally-driven age, overreliance on traditional modes of marketing and advertising is not enough. Social media is an attractive choice if you are looking to increase outreach. It is estimated that in 2021, there will be around 448 million social network users in India -- in other words, ignoring social media is no longer an option.
One of the ways to market through social media involves working with social media influencers. Influencers boast a large following on social media platforms and are regarded as experts in their domain. Most brands across industries use them as a medium that can weave a powerful narrative about the brand or its offering and present it to the audience.
Influencers on various social media platforms can help with the creation, curation, and distribution of content. Collaborating with such influencers, whose opinions can influence your target audience, can make word-of-mouth marketing easier. Depending on the follower count, there are different types of influencers:
- Mega influencers: Such influencers usually have above 500k followers. They have an assorted audience and can provide maximum reach
- Macro influencers: The follower count is between 100k and 500k. Such influencers are ideal for targeting a broad demographic such as young men.
- Micro-influencers: The follower count is between 10k to 100k. Such influencers tend to focus on a particular niche and cater to a specific kind of audience.
- Nano influencers: The follower count is between 1k to 10k, but they can get a higher level of engagement due to the close relationship with the audience. However, the reach can be extremely low.
Let’s explore how the residential real estate market project can leverage the power of social media influencer marketing:
Improve brand recall and site visits by involving influencers at different intervention points
Every real estate project follows a lifecycle, and involving influencers at each stage can help
you reap benefits. Remember, real estate is part of a lifestyle that influencers are selling to
their viewers. By roping in influencers at various stages, you can seamlessly market the
project on social media.
Take, for instance, the pre-launch stage of your project. You have just announced a new project and want to create a solid buzz. Team up with a lifestyle influencer to cover the pre-launch event through a series of Instagram Stories. For the other stages of your project, such as when you are open for booking, or the bookings are almost about to close, bring on board other influencers.
You can also rope in Twitter influencers to tweet about the project during the pre-launch day to create awareness about it. Casa Grand used the same strategy a few years back when 100 Twitter influencers tweeted about their project “Casa Grande Tambaram” before the launch day. On the launch day, “#CasaGrandeTambaram” was trending in India.
As each influencer has a distinct following, using different influencers for different stages of the project will give you a better outreach.
Highlight the amenities of your real estate project
You need to be hyper-relevant to your customers and highlight all aspects of your project. It
also helps in boosting the brand awareness of the project.
For example, you can collaborate with food influencers to promote the social infrastructure of the locality where your project is located. You can create a series of “a day in the life” videos where lifestyle influencers show your customers what a regular day in the condominium could look like. Have a standout feature like eco-living that you wish to highlight? Get on board beauty & wellness influencers to talk about this USP through videos or posts.
Authenticity is at the heart of influencer marketing. Leveraging your communication to show someone who the audience can identify with will help you generate excellent traction. Apart from giving your brand much-needed visibility, collaborating with influencers is also a great way to bring a home to life and appeal to your target audience’s psyche.
Highlight different aspects of property to different TG
Need to advertise vastly different property types such as an integrated township, luxury apartments, and a co-living space? The answer is -- work with influencers across categories.
For luxury apartments, get luxury lifestyle influencers to create content weaved around such an apartment. It will inspire the target audience to visualise the aspirational life they would ike to lead.
For a co-living space, you can approach like-minded Millennial influencers who can speak about the amenities, create multiple stories around the advantages of living in a co-living space, and also shoot walkthroughs to help aspirational millennials connect. Similarly, collaborating with mom influencers can be the perfect way to highlight the benefits of staying in an integrated township.
In each of such collaborations, using the relevant keywords can make it easy to reach users based on their interests and what they're passionate about.
How to utilise the influencer generated content for higher engagement
Setting up an influencer marketing campaign can only get you so far. If you want to occupy prime real estate -- staying on top of the mind of your target audience -- you need to keep producing enough content to ensure they remain interested.
Repurposing the existing content created by the influencers is an easy way of achieving this. For example, you can use the creative prepared by the influencer, optimise it for your social media channel, add a new caption, and post it to your social account.
When you are creating digital ads for Facebook, YouTube, or Instagram, use influencer content to save time and money. You can also pull out some of the popular posts from the influencer marketing campaign that performed well and repost them on your page with a new caption. You can also directly reshare the original post of the influencer on your page.
How to evaluate the performance of your influencer marketing campaign
Finally, knowing the right KPIs can help you to calculate the success of the influencer marketing campaign.
The most important ones you should track include:
- Conversions: The ultimate goal of any marketing campaign is to boost sales. Track the sales before you launched the campaign, during the campaign, and once the campaign was over to see if the campaign made a difference.
- Referral Traffic: Monitoring referral traffic helps you assess the new visitors who came to the website because of the campaign. You can retarget such visitors and make them convert later. As with conversions, always compare the pre-campaign traffic to post-campaign traffic for accurate results.
- Reach and Awareness: Enhancing your brand visibility is arguably one of the most significant benefits of implementing an influencer marketing campaign. That’s why it is vital to specifically track the campaign’s reach by looking at the number of new prospects due to the campaign. Track the impressions on the posts shared by the influencer and compare them with your pre-campaign numbers.
Also, check the campaign’s impact on your pre-existing prospects to find out if the
influencer clicked with them.
Final words
Authenticity, relatively lower-costs, and the promise of high engagement make influencer marketing an essential tool in every marketer’s kitty. Given the exponential growth of micro and nano influencers over the past few years, missing the influencer marketing train can push you down the curve.
Also, in conclusion, looking out for local influencers to amplify your reach in the area where your property is located will be highly helpful. Instagram because of the culture of the content shared by users seems like an attractive platform to run your campaigns on.
If you want to reach out to your target audience, establishing a presence in their digital hangout is invaluable, and the right influencers can help you achieve just that.
The author is the founder of Kofluence, an ad-tech influencer marketing platform.
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