On Thursday, 12th of October 2023, Manager, Charlotte Titmuss, hosted our first Re...
On Thursday, 12th of October 2023, Manager, Charlotte Titmuss, hosted our first Residential Property Marketing Seminar. The morning brought together marketers from a variety of property and real estate businesses. Together they reflected on their marketing efforts of 2023 and look ahead to marketing strategies in 2024.
Attendees heard from our panel of residential marketing leaders:
The morning covered a range of topics around property and real estate marketing strategies, including:
Keep reading for our key takeaways from the morning’s conversation.
The real estate industry has been undeniably challenging over the past few years, with several changes to keep pace with. To set the scene, Charlotte asked our panellists to share the biggest marketing trends they’ve seen throughout the year.
Each of the panellists specialise in a unique area of the real estate industry. Gina McMorran’s focus is on student accommodation, and in her market, affordability is key.
Throughout the year, potential customers have been more indecisive around whether to buy or not. As a result, Gina shared the growing importance of selling your product’s added value in your content marketing. The value-add piece has been incredibly important over the past 12 months and will continue into the new year.
Representing the real estate agents’ perspective, Fiona Stewart shared how it’s crucial to engage more personally with your target audience. In order for customers to trust you to sell or let their property, you must demonstrate that you understand their concerns.
In the real estate agency world, it’s important to avoid only focusing on where or how properties are listed. It's important to understand what your potential clients are thinking at the time and adapt your messaging accordingly. As a result, many marketing teams should expect to become more flexible and reactive with their strategies in 2024 and beyond.
In every industry, it can be difficult to secure the appropriate marketing budget when the economy is struggling. Our panellists shared a few ideas around how you can secure the budget to grow your marketing efforts.
Historically, real estate businesses have had limited access to data. However, with increasing investment in digital marketing, we have seen this change.
The increased amount of data available to organisations has allowed marketers to communicate the impact and importance of their marketing strategies. Voicing the value of your marketing teams to businesses.
Kerri Sibson recommends keeping customers at the heart of that conversation. Use the data available to demonstrate your invaluable knowledge of your target audience.
While marketing teams want to test new ideas, it can be difficult to do so with a limited budget. Fiona shared the 70-20-10 budgeting approach for anyone who might be experiencing this. With this method:
This allows teams to introduce new marketing strategies, whilst continuing to execute what works.
One especially tricky area to secure budget for is placemaking and brand building.
“Placemaking has become such a buzz.”
While placemaking is undeniably important in property marketing, it can be difficult to communicate its value to the wider business. Kerri shared how placemaking can generate strong communities that will increase property values and sales. As marketers, you need to ensure that you can effectively communicate this to the board to retain your budget for placemaking.
Looking to the future, our panellists shared what they believe marketers should be focussing their efforts on in 2024 and beyond. Our leaders largely agreed that we should be building marketing efforts around attracting the future generation of homeowners and renters.
Kerri shared the importance of looking further up the funnel and building long term nurture campaigns with future customers. Creating educational content for those still at university or living with their parents allows you to nurture potential buyers.
While these customers won’t be transacting right away, they do have a potential future with your company.
Gina echoed that this is an important strategy within the student market. In this sector, nurturing often starts when they’re already a customer. Retention is extremely important in this field as it helps to keep the cost per acquisition low.
No matter what sector of the industry you’re in, thinking about long term nurture campaigns will be key moving forwards.
Building a social media strategy will be key to reaching new generations of homeowners and renters, expanding on to platforms such as TikTok.
If you’re considering growing your presence on different channels and social media platforms, it’s important to recognise that you’ll need unique content for each. Audiences interact with each platform in different ways and your content marketing strategy needs to account for this.
This doesn’t mean you cannot re-purpose your content, however. For instance, Gina shared how they see success with re-purposing organic, authentic TikTok videos as Facebook ads.
A big thank you to our speakers and attendees for making this morning so informative. It's great to see that so many people found it useful to network and share ideas with one another.
If you missed out on this event but would like to join us at our next one, register your interest below.
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