How, using only social media, drive sales for a residential development company?
The real estate market in Ukraine, and in Lviv in particular, is extremely competitive and it is getting more and more difficult to use traditional search advertising. This is where targeted advertising on social media comes to save the day, allowing you to segment the traffic and reach the most relevant audience.
Residential real estate is one of the most complex areas to promote because the audience considers many factors before making the purchase, and purchasing decisions can take months to make.
The team at Panem loves working with complex niches because such projects and tasks help our targeting specialists improve their skills.
The target customer’s pain points:
- lives in a rented apartment
- lives with relatives, which makes them feel uncomfortable
- worries about the future
- feels unprotected and that’s why wants to buy an apartment to be more confident about the future
The target customer’s fears:
The target customer’s fears are often associated with the reliability of the construction company, legal aspects of the agreement, and the infrastructure of the residential development.
Here are some of them:
- the construction won’t be completed at all or won’t be completed on time
- low-quality construction, non-compliance with construction technology
- fraudulent schemes, such as “double selling”
- forged sales documents
- additional payments or interest charged when signing the agreement
- there will be poor infrastructure and lack of basic social facilities nearby the housing estate
Project Strengths:
- a reliable developer with a good reputation
- active social media pages
- direct connection and communication with the manager, which allows us to quickly confirm new ideas
Project Weaknesses:
- high competition in the residential area where the construction is underway
- no website
- an audience that is extremely difficult to identify and encourage to make an instant purchase
THE PROCESS
- Promoting any project starts with preparation and developing a strategy. We analyzed competitors’ advertising and identified our project’s strengths and weaknesses.
- We received access to the client’s Business Manager and CRM for integration.
- We performed a detailed analysis and audited the client’s advertising account and former campaigns, and checked Facebook trust level.
- Everything considered, we devised an advertising strategy covering audiences, geography, and offers.
- We integrated application forms, messages, and commentaries from ads with the client’s CRM for faster processing.
PROJECT ANALYTICS AND STRATEGY
Before launching any advertising campaign, we segment audiences for various tasks. We craft a separate offer for each audience to precisely address their needs.
We also set the evaluation criteria for each audience:
- works well
- has a potential but needs improvements
- doesn’t work
We determined audiences in advance, taking into account our previous experience, client specifics, and the offer, eventually making changes based on the results.
We do not provide detailed data on the target audience and budgets due to commercial confidentiality.
We used different offers, creatives, and messages for different audiences. First of all, we divided users into those who have children and those who don’t, and prepared different offers for these audiences.
HOW WE ORGANIZED THE WORK
We started with formulating hypotheses: we brainstormed ideas, even the craziest ones, analyzed them, selected the best ones, tested them, measured results, made adjustments, and repeated it all over again.
Social platforms are very dynamic, and launching 1 or 2 advertisements for an indefinite period doesn’t work here. Audiences and creatives can quickly become irrelevant, in addition, the market constantly changes, meaning social media ads require constant monitoring, analysis, and updates.
MAIN STAGES
Stage 1. For each campaign, we prepared several versions of advertisements featuring different layouts and text, and launched them.
Stage 2. We closely monitored the results of the first stage. We have internal KPIs for each type of advertising — upper limits for the cost of leads, their number, etc. When advertising was too expensive, we analyzed the campaigns, examined the ads, adjusted them, switched off those that didn’t work, and created new ones. When the results were good, we continued the campaign.
Stage 3. We examined each campaign, each ad copy, each audience and their feedback. Also, we analyzed the top-performing ads: kept them working and used them for other campaigns, making adjustments as to the audience and the type of advertisement, redistributing the budget as needed.
Stage 4. We analyzed the campaigns holistically, documenting the best- and worst-performing audiences and approaches. We planned the campaigns for the ongoing month taking into account the results of the previous campaigns.
This action plan allowed us to effectively use the budget and get inexpensive but quality leads.
We went on launching new advertising campaigns with various offers, including special offers for users who were interested in the housing estate but didn’t fill in the application form.
Also, we kept constantly maintaining user loyalty.
Together with the client, we made a decision to create a page on LinkedIn and target advertising campaigns at LinkedIn users.
THE RESULTS (ALL CAMPAIGNS)
Leads (filled-in application forms for buying apartments): 352
Average cost per lead: $1.78
For Lviv with its intense competition among residential developers, these are great results.
CONCLUSION
Real estate is and will always be a challenging niche to promote on social media. High competition, a long process of deliberation when making a purchasing decision, and the price for real estate are key factors that affect the result of advertising and the number of quality leads.
So what helps us succeed? To put it briefly, clear and specific advertising offers, explicit creatives, testing hypotheses and platforms, and, of course, close collaboration between the targeting specialist and the client.
