Real Estate: The Best Advertising Strategies

How to implement relevant targeting to capture specific life moments, such as searching for a first property?

🏢 State of the real estate market in 2021

The real estate market reached historic levels in 2021, even as the year was marked by a new lockdown due to the COVID crisis. Borrowing rates, which fell below 1%, were a key factor in helping the market resist and rebound to show significant growth.

We also saw a radical acceleration in the digital transition for various players during this health crisis. The inability to leave home and visit properties penalized many major, long-standing real estate players, but it also created new opportunities. New 100% digital startups emerged and began to capture market share in the face of rapidly growing demand.

Without needing to abandon the physical agency model, everyone has realized the importance of digitizing parts of their business and diversifying communication channels to maintain connections with prospects and clients.

Beyond these constraints, we are in an era where consumers prioritize an improved experience in markets that are often seen as stigmatized and outdated. Qonto in banking, Alan in health insurance, Luko in home insurance... these newcomers have successfully met these demands and are showing impressive results.

This explains the strong rise of French PropTech in recent years, with €282m raised in 2020 (vs €503m in 2019) across 39 deals (vs €47 in 2019).

PropTech, or Property Technology, refers to all the new startups offering technological products that simplify the daily operations of real estate companies.

💡 What are the challenges for real estate players?

The various lockdowns highlighted the importance of having a strong online presence and offering a level of service that meets consumer expectations.

Virtual reality tours, more photos on property listings (though there is still much room for improvement 👀), instant messaging/chatbots, digitized project management, electronic signatures, and online appointment scheduling: all are essential actions for increasing the chances of building relationships with prospects and clients.

90% of real estate projects begin with an online search.
Whether you are a 100% digital agency, a 100% physical agency, a hybrid agency, a PropTech firm, or a developer, having an online presence and a consistent customer journey is essential to maintaining relationships with prospects and clients in order to generate leads: scheduling a visit, a phone call, or a chatbot conversation.

For physical agencies, the challenge is also to drive foot traffic to the office. Implementing a multi-local marketing strategy is necessary to ensure visibility for every point of sale.

The difficulty in this market lies in audience segmentation:

How to segment buyers from sellers in order to tailor advertising messages, thereby increasing conversion chances and meeting return on investment goals.
How to reach your target audience at the right time? For example, when an individual is looking to buy their first primary residence?
There are many tools and providers available that allow for precise targeting to maximize your return on investment.

📈 What strategies should you implement to generate real estate leads?

Since the primary goal is lead generation, we naturally lean toward performance-based channels. However, building brand awareness remains essential; we will cover that later.

Paid Search

This channel needs no introduction. Buying keywords on search engines is essential for capturing user intent.
Competition can be fierce, however. That is why it is crucial to conduct an audit beforehand to position yourself on specific keywords.

Using data

As we saw earlier, segmentation is key in this market. A simple media targeting approach is not enough, as you risk diluting your budget too heavily.

At Klox, we work with numerous data providers (Sirdata, Adsquare, LiveRamp, BlueKai, Experian, ZeoTap, etc.) that offer vast audience catalogs.

We have access to over 100 audience pools, including homeowners, renters, and life-stage segments like those preparing to move. Feel free to contact us if you would like to learn more or receive the full list.

Using semantic targeting

Targeting every article on a media site isn't always relevant. But what about targeting the specific articles that match your audience? Pinel law, real estate tax exemptions, rental prices in Nantes? These topics and questions help identify key intent for your products or services.

We use tools that analyze every URL on the web and every word in an article to determine the context. This is extremely powerful for specific needs and when reaching your audience is otherwise difficult.

Geolocated campaigns, Drive-to-Store, and DCO (Wait, what? 🤯)

Primarily for physical agencies, geographic targeting is key to ensuring a local presence and driving foot traffic to your stores.

Advertising tools today are very powerful and precise. In fact, you can measure the impact of your localized ad campaigns on generated traffic. This is what we call Drive-to-Store.

Another challenge: "That's easy to say, but how do we manage over 700 agencies? It's impossible for us to produce 700 different ad visuals with unique messages." This is where DCO (Dynamic Creative Optimization) comes in. This technology dynamically updates elements of an ad visual based on specific criteria, such as an individual's GPS location.

You could, for example, change the agency photo and the messaging based on the city. Convenient, right?

Retargeting

What could be better than leveraging your own data—specifically, the visitors to your app or website?

It would be a shame to miss out on a user who spent 10 minutes on your site and completed your customer journey but didn't book an appointment. Retarget them! They might just change their mind 😉

Bonus Branding

At some point, you will need to focus on branding. It is best to develop your brand image through your positioning and then your content strategy. Advertising is not a miracle cure and will be far more effective if it supports a well-defined and thoroughly developed strategy.

But keep in mind that we have more than a few tricks up our sleeves that might interest you.

Podcast. We can target specific shows focused on high-income professionals, personal finance, or real estate if you wish. Connected TV. Since June 2021, it has been possible to geographically segment your advertising targeting. This is a major development for this channel, allowing local players to take advantage of it.
In-Game Advertising. Why not advertise inside video games? The gaming industry exploded in 2021, and players are spending more and more time in front of their screens. With a message well-adapted to the environment, the impact can be very powerful.
The real estate market is not easy to approach because it touches a huge portion of the population, which makes targeting and segmentation very complex. Using advanced advertising tools (or programmatic tools) allows us to achieve this level of precision in targeting and to measure the results.

Please feel free to contact us if you would like to learn more about this topic. Our experts would be happy to assist you in defining your communication strategy.

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