Written by Fernando Maciá
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It is at times when the real estate market is experiencing a downturn that the most intelligent decisions must be made as to where to invest available resources in order to obtain the maximum return on investment. Let’s see how a high-performing website can go a long way in helping us weather the lean times and be ready to take advantage of the next stage of expansion.
Compared to other promotional strategies, the Internet still has a great advantage if we compare its costs in relation to the results obtained. And, given Internet usage habits and the trend for the coming years, this advantage can only be expected to continue to grow.
As we have already discussed on other occasions, the complete marketing cycle of a website comprises strategies that can be grouped around four key moments in its relationship with the user:
- Traffic attraction strategies
- Strategies for converting visitors into customers
- Customer loyalty strategies
- Strategies for converting loyal customers into prescribers
Let’s see what tactics should be used to obtain maximum performance in times of crisis, in each of these key moments.
Traffic attraction strategies
Online advertising
Traffic attraction strategies include, on the one hand, online advertising -mainly banners- and on the other, search engine marketing both in terms of natural search engine positioning and pay-per-click.
Online advertising generates brand recognition(branding), which) higher than search engine marketing but, given that the most likely scenario in the short term is a crisis scenario, our recommendation would be to opt for the latter, since the cost of acquiring quality visitors (people whose profile matches that of our potential customer) is much lower in either form of search engine marketing and the conversion rate from visit to customer is also higher.
Search Engine Optimization – SEO
Okay, search engine marketing. But...natural SEO or sponsored link campaign? The answer would be “both” but in a smart way. Let’s see how.
Natural search engine optimization is the strategy that will ensure a constant and, in general, increasing flow of quality traffic from search engines to our website. It is also going to be, of all the forms of visitor acquisition, the cheapest by far in relation to the cost of a sponsored link click or a visit from a banner.
The market downturn may have surprised us with a corporate website clearly focused on branding, conceived more as a richer and more eye-catching support for printed promotional material than as a lead generation channel in its own right. This is why if our website has been focused on generating a message based on seduction through eye-catching tour virtual, videos, 3D animations, and highly interactive experiences through an intensive use of Flash technology, it is time to change the chip and make the leap from this concept of “virtual showcase” to “virtual showcase”. towards a web site as a business unit in its own rightas one of the most important -and in time it may become the main- marketing channel.
Websites focused on making a visual impact on the user have had a certain raison d’être during the time when, rather than selling, homes were being sold. The website acted as a kind of substitute for the sales booth and offered, virtually, the same information that the potential customer could get there: information on developments, house plans, specifications, location, environment, prices… The potential users of this website were people who already knew about the promoter or the promotion and it was usual that there was a new domain for each new promotion in which the information about it was posted.
In this context, traffic coming from search engines was a perfectly dispensable added value, since it was not necessary to search for demand on the Internet, but rather demand was generated in an immediate environment or through offline advertisingand the website was merely a support to the demand already generated. The use of these high-impact technologies for the user, but which take an expensive toll in terms of search engine positioning (animations, videos, virtual tours, Flash sites, etc. are not suitable for achieving good search engine rankings) could be perfectly coherent within the framework of this scenario.
In mid-2006, however, second home sales began to slow down somewhat. At the same time, the real estate market is undergoing a remarkable change: more and more buyers are turning to the Internet as the first source of documentation in their decision-making process. There are companies that quickly embrace the new trend and decide to divert their investment in print media (ads and classifieds) to online media: their own real estate websites and insertions in vertical real estate search engines (urbaniza, globaliza, idealista, nestoria…). These pioneers soon discover the enormous potential hidden in the Web.
However, many companies that had recently invested heavily in developing high-impact Web sites are bitterly disappointed to discover that their portals suffer from a congenital problem: those same technologies that generate the richest user experience condemn their websites to invisibility in Internet search engines.. Their websites communicate very well with potential customers acquired in other ways but have no potential as generators of new contacts, since they cannot be properly positioned in search engines.
PPC: Google Ads
Rather than discarding or renovating existing websites, many developers and real estate companies are reaching into their financial pockets and starting to buy the visibility they couldn’t get naturally from the various sponsored link programs and real estate vertical search engines. And so, throughout 2006 and 2007 we have witnessed a progressive escalation in the cost per click of sponsored links for real estate searches, especially in our most profitable recent market: English. Costs per click are being paid in the range of 1 to 3 euros for each visit generated on a sponsored link.
Obviously, in this escalation of prices, there have been companies that have been left behind because of their inability to meet increasingly expensive online promotion budgets. As the cost of generating quality traffic has increased, the desirability of maintaining existing web site architectures – unsuitable for search engines – rather than undertaking a major overhaul towards more search engine friendly portals has been questioned more and more, until today it has become an unavoidable necessity.
So it is important to understand this change: potential customers are no longer contacted through print ads, classifieds, billboards, mailings, etc. and from there they are referred for further information to a website where, after a high-impact presentation, the goal is to get a visit to the sales booth or a inspection flight.
On the contrary: the web is now the first point of contact with potential buyers. Then it will be time to qualify each contact and produce the visual impact by other means, certainly more appropriate than through the web.
This is why part of the investment that was previously allocated to other media is being redirected towards highly informative websites (users come to the web mainly in search of information, not to be subjected to advertising impacts), with a high potential for natural positioning in search engines for their related search concepts and with a usable architecture: printable versions, fee calculators, integration of functionalities such as Google Maps, presentation of similar models, customization by language, by user preferences, searches through different criteria (availability, location, purchase/rental, new/second-hand housing…).
Then it will be time to qualify each contact and act accordingly: to this one I send a newsletter, to this one a full color catalog of the promotion, to this one a DVD with the presentation video, virtual tours, etc. and to this one I offer a inspection flightThe potential that we can appreciate in each one of them is a function of the potential that we can appreciate in each one.
Optimize your Web site to improve SEO traffic
So, the first decision should be to optimize your website as much as possible to improve the potential for traffic generation through natural search engine optimization. This is definitely a necessary condition, although, as we will see below, it is not sufficient.
Once you have optimized your website for search engines, in the medium term you should be positioned for a large number of searches related to your niche market. Logically, there will be more generic or competitive keywords where you will not have managed to climb to the top of the rankings.
Complement your SEO with Google Ads
It is in these “gaps” where you should complement your natural search engine optimization strategy with investment in sponsored links.
These two strategies, natural positioning and sponsored links, should always complement each other and never overlap: sponsored links should not appear in those searches for which your website already enjoys top positions naturally.
And in the management of your sponsored links campaign, count on professionals. The experience curve in paid link management is a huge asset that can save you a lot of money in the long run. The most successful Pay Per Click campaigns are those that are continuously monitored, that are segmented in a much deeper and more focused way, and that target those geographic markets and those keywords with the greatest potential to increase click-through rate (CTR). A good CTR is key to lower the price of the click. And, of course, do not forget that in sponsored links the objective is to achieve the highest number of visits with the same investment, and not to be in the first position of the sponsored links.
Internationalize your Web site: foreign markets
When competing on search engines, also consider exploring new markets. You do not need to translate absolutely all of your web content, at least not until a certain market has proven its potential. But one of the cheapest ways to survey the potential buyer in a given country is to create a “satellite portal” or “satellite portal”. microsite with content in this language, with its own local domain (.fr for France, .it for Italy, etc.), with a summary of the main contents of your website and your real estate offer localized and adapted to local demand. We can present only the part of the offer that we believe is most appropriate for that country and refer potential buyers to further information about the company or the products on the corporate website in English, for example.
These international microsites, apart from the sales results they provide, will generate a valuable wealth of information, since in the statistics we will be able to see where the visitors came from, what search terms they used, what navigation routes they took within the site, what contents interested them most and which of them ended up in contact.
These local websites will have the advantage of a better positioning in the search engines of each country and of being able to compete in language areas on the Internet that are less competitive than Spanish or English. A network of websites in different languages is a relatively small investment in relation to the quantity and quality of first-hand information we can acquire about the potential of a given country. By comparing historical data on the evolution of traffic in each country, we can make decisions to develop local websites in certain countries, or even try complementary off-line promotional actions, and definitively abandon others.
Strategies for converting visitors into customers
Conversion optimization: CRO
A real estate portal does not convert a visitor into a customer directly online: it is not an e-commerce.
The goal of any real estate portal is to produce leads. Conversion can be measured online if, for example, our website has forms that allow users to register, subscribe to a corporate newsletter, request more information by mail, ask us tocall them back, etc.
In many cases, the conversion will take place offline: the contact will end in a phone call. If this is the case, we should have ways to measure this type of conversioneither because we ask all users the origin of the contact (how they met us) or because we advertise a unique phone number on our website: all calls coming from this phone number will have been generated, unequivocally, on the website.
Indexable and usable websites: the key to success
Although we have already mentioned it in the previous point, the performance of a website depends essentially on two aspects. The website must be:
In general, no one considers Amazon.com’s website to be an aesthetic prodigy. But most people who have had some experience with it say it does “superbly” what it has to do. The Amazon.com website is an example of good usability. And what we find in many real estate websites are very nice portals aesthetically, but very little usable.
Since the current crisis scenario forces us to make the most of our resources, we must find a way to provide our websites with the maximum value and usability with the minimum investment.
If the objective of the website is to be called, the contact number must be in a prominent and clearly identifiable place in the layout of the page, always visible during the navigation through the different sections, included in any printable version and correct for each market (do we include +34? is the toll free number accessible from abroad? etc.).
We must also foresee that our visitors will get a gradation of involvement. Thus, there will be visitors who will want to call us themselves. Others would prefer to be called by us. Others will give us all their postal data and others just a Hotmail box.
When it comes to contact, the important thing is to consider all these options and not to close the door to any of the potential contacts: foresee ways to maintain contact with all of them regardless of their degree of involvement.
To increase the value that our website offers to users in a cost-effective way, we should consider integrating third-party functionalities, instead of paying for the development of our own solutions. Microsoft Virtual Earth, Live Search Maps or Google Maps are excellent functionalities that help to locate any promotion. Its integration with applications such as Panoramio will allow users to view a multitude of geographically located photographs of the immediate environment. We can display prices in different currencies by integrating the real-time exchange rate of some financial portals that provide this information in RSS format. We can also present the approximate amount of what would be the mortgage payment for the purchase of a certain home: many properties are purchased more for the buyer’s ability to assume a certain monthly payment than for the final amount of the property.
When it comes to providing information on the environment, institutional portals such as Spain’s official tourism portal Spain.info, contains hundreds of thousands of pages of information in more than ten languages. It’s all about finding content that can interest our customers and integrating the right links. The information we will be able to provide will be of much higher quality and the cost will be much lower. There are other similar portals of autonomous communities, city councils, etc. Some of them also have RSS content, features such as webcams that transmit video in real time, weather forecasts, image galleries, etc. that we can integrate into our own pages.
The key is to find the best information and already developed functionalities that can add value for our users and take advantage of them. It will be cheaper and more effective than developing them ourselves.
Customer loyalty strategies
Permission marketing
Real estate sales are not usually repeat sales, we would not so much talk about customer loyalty as visitor loyalty until, finally, that visitor becomes a customer. The decision to purchase a property is a process that usually takes several months, so establishing some means of maintaining contact over time is important.
A person who is going to buy a property and visits us at the beginning of the documentation phase is a contact that we should follow in order to be on his short list of options when he is closer to making a final decision.
If our website has sections such as Future Developments, Next Phase, etc., we must provide a mechanism so that the person who might be interested in buying in them subscribes to the news that are produced so that we can, periodically, communicate the beginning of the works of such phase, the delivery of keys of the previous phase, etc.
It’s all about keeping in touch and staying in your mind for when you have to make the final purchase decision.
Likewise, qualifying the contact in this way will prevent us from wasting sales force time and resources that could “hound” the contact long before it is “ripe” for closing the sale. An automatic system that sends periodic e-mails will allow us to maintain contact easily, cheaply and with a low level of “pressure”, and focus the sales force on those who are ready to close the sale.
At a time when in Spain there may be around 400,000 homes pending sale in just a few months (the surplus of the last five years) and the demand for housing has been reduced by expectations of falling prices and interest rates, on the one hand, and a tightening of mortgage financing on the other, it is important to establish appropriate mechanisms for attracting, qualifying, maintaining and monitoring the contacts that may be generated in the Real estate websites can be vital to achieving a higher percentage of sales when market conditions allow buyers to close on a purchase.
Strategies for converting customers into prescribers
Listening to demand… and adapting to it
From the point of view of a real estate website, the use of visitors as prescribers should be interpreted in terms of the knowledge they provide through the statistical analysis of the traffic that arrives to the website. In this sense, we should configure our statistics system to be able to interpret which properties, property models, developments, geographic areas, housing typologies, price ranges, etc. enjoy the greatest preferences of our visitors.
Periodic monitoring of traffic source searches or internal searches within the Web site would provide us with a real-time market perspective and give us some leeway to make decisions in advance and adjust, as far as possible, the composition of our offer to changing market conditions.
Where is demand being concentrated in recent months? Which price ranges are the most requested in the internal search engine of the real estate portal? What types of housing…? Today, everything is no longer sold. That’s why it’s all the more important to tune in quickly to market trends and react before our competitors to keep taking a share of the ever-shrinking demand pie. Statistical analysis of our website is a valuable information asset. If we are working in several markets, it will be important to disaggregate (not accumulate) the data for each market separately. Although the major currents of the economic cycles eventually spread to all countries – a feature of globalization – the rhythms at which the different phases of the cycle occur in each market are different. Reacting in time by shifting the focus of our promotion from a depleted market to an emerging one can mean the difference between success or failure.
Conclusion
The most optimistic forecasts predict that the next two years will be difficult for the real estate sector in Spain. The most pessimistic ones extend this period up to three years. There is a stock of available homes that, together with those that are currently being completed, will soon come onto the market. If the VPO housing incentive adds new, cheaper housing, this stock could become a problem of even greater scope. The demand for housing, however, remains latent. The expectation of lower prices and cheaper mortgages has held back demand, but sooner or later (perhaps when the subprime phenomenon has been digested and there is more liquidity available in the market) demand will end up buying. The Internet will be the first reference for most of these potential buyers. Preparing our website to meet this demand and making the most of any contact now will be vital to compete in the next two years.
