In a recent report published by Assocham, it was found that people in real estate business spend about 2500 crore annually for the publicity of their business. However, in this new era of media marketing, digital marketing has definitely proved to be a game changer ! Although, a healthy mix of conventional as well as non conventional marketing channels seems to be effective, digital media certainly leads by a margin when you speak from an ROI perspective for a real estate industry. With the advent of digital media, people now believe in tracking the penny to penny spends on each marketing effort while getting good returns expected to derive from it.
According to Brand Equity Foundation Report on the Indian Real Estate Industry, it was found that real estate in India is the second largest employment generation sector after agriculture and contributes 6.3% to India’s gross domestic product. Moreover, foreign direct investment in Indian Real Estate industry is expected to touch $25 billion in the next 10 years while annual revenue is expected to touch 180 billion by 2020. Enormous growth potential in this industry has attracted the interest of good number of startups.
Biggest Challenge – Stiff Competition
One of the biggest challenges faced by the real estate company is the stiff competition and boosting their digital presence for generating leads. With so many people associated with this business, getting leads is sometimes considered as one of the biggest challenge being faced by entrepreneurs. Therefore companies need to create full proof and innovative digital marketing strategies.
Investing in web design and user experience
Various research conducted have shown that startups invest a lot of time and attention on the web design and user experience in order to differentiate themselves from the bigger and established players.
For example, Housing.com has an excellent interface with the property search button in the centre. The best part about their interface is that it is map based and all search results related to property can be seen on a map. Moreover, it also gives you an option to shortlist properties that can be viewed later to take a final call. Only thing that sets them back is that they do not have large number of property listings, which leaves users with very few options to choose from.
Utilizing Social Media
Almost all the startups in this space are utilizing social media to build brand, acquire and engage customers. Of all the social media platforms, Facebook seems to be a favorite tool of almost all startups to interact with customers and also promote their services. At present, housing.com has over 2,15,000 Facebook likes while Magicbricks.com leading the industry with 2,28,685 likes on their Facebook page.
When we talk about other social media platforms, Google+ and LinkedIn are in the process of grabbing the interest of startups while YouTube as a marketing platform has not been used much by either of the real estate startups. However, PropTiger is utilizing this channel to upload videos and till date has 40 videos uploaded on their YouTube channel.
Big players such as 99acres and Magic bricks have established themselves in this space while startups are working hard and utilizing this channel to capture a big chunk of this growing market.
