10 Ways to Get Qualified Leads For New Development Sales
Takeaways from some of the best real estate project marketers in Vancouver
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In Vancouver, our local UDI chapter is kind enough to host regular events for the real estate industry. Quarterly socials, monthly women’s meetups, learning opportunities, and other events, are a great way to meet people in the industry, get the latest scoop on trends, and stay on top of all the moving parts of working in real estate.
We were lucky enough to snag one of the few spots in this month’s coveted Lunch and Learn: Top 10 Ways to get Qualified Leads for Your Development to Increase Sales.
The talk was hosted by two prominent members of the real estate marketing community in Vancouver: Darian Kovacs of Jelly Marketing, and Alex Wan of Periphery Digital.
The two gentlemen went into some of the major ways that they’ve seen their developer clients effectively generate new development leads, provided insight and examples of some social portals to invest in, and even had time to go into some questions from attendees.
Read on to see which of these methods for improving qualified lead generation might work for your next new development.
1. Know Your Marketing Funnel
A crucial aspect of new development marketing is understanding and working on all aspects of the marketing funnel. Campaigns directly geared towards conversion — towards gathering new leads for the project or organization — are important, but top-funnel efforts around project and company awareness shouldn’t be overlooked either. Awareness campaigns help prospects find your product, and pave the way for sign ups and eventually closing on the sale.
Once you start paying attention to all areas of the marketing funnel, it’ll be easier to plan out your content and budget to suit your end goals. By first making sure that people understand your brand and your project, your team can then create lead generation campaigns that convert more effectively because the foundation has been laid.
Takeaway: Start at the top with brand and project awareness.
2. Print / QR Codes
It was a surprise to see Alex Wan lead with this one — most marketers would say that their companies are moving away from traditional marketing streams, and into the digital.
However, well-executed marketing campaigns in the right channel can be very effective. A major complaint against print marketing is the inability to track ROI — but Wan cleverly provided a ‘hack’ for this, by suggesting that marketers use a scannable QR code on the printed advertisement. Most people have smartphones, which can scan the code right from the phone app. That way, potential leads don’t have to type in long URLs into their phone, and you can more easily attribute leads and closed deals to particular campaigns.
Takeaway: Use print in conjunction with QR codes to create trackable, stand-out campaigns.
3. Wechat
A social media platform that is much more popular in China than anywhere in the West, WeChat is the dominant app there, and has a lot of potential for any developer hoping to reach a Chinese audience.
An important distinction between WeChat and something like Facebook is that WeChat has expanded functionality, especially in how it can be used to purchase items, and has a more lasting ‘stickiness’ for users because of how integral it can be in Tier 1 cities like Beijing and Shanghai.
Best practices for this platform include treating it like an email list rather than a social media platform; it’s important to run campaigns to promote the account, and then push out relevant company content. Plus, by targeting the realtor community, rather than buyers, a developer can ensure that their content is getting passed on to buyers via those agents on a more regular basis, instead of having to capture a new audience with every project.
Takeaway: Wechat is a great portal to reach the Chinese demographic, as developers can push content to realtors, who then tell current clients about the latest project.
4. Multi-Language Landing Pages
In Vancouver, there are many buyers from out-of-country, particularly from China. Periphery Digital shared their findings that having Chinese language landing pages helps to improve registration rates.
Of course it’s logical to make ads in different languages, to target different demographics. But if the ad is in Chinese, and the landing page or website is in English, that can be very jarring. Wan noted that there was a 40% drop in registrants in those situations, versus when the same ad went to a Chinese landing page. If there’s budget, developers should take it one step further and make sure they have Chinese language options for the entire website — one in Traditional, and one in Simplified.
Takeaway: The user experience from ad to landing page should be seamless — including having the same language.
5. Lead Ads (Facebook)
Plenty of developers run Facebook ads, but an important distinction between those and Lead Ads is that Lead Ads don’t require the registrant to ever leave Facebook. Instead of sending a user to a separate landing page, Facebook Lead Ads pop up within the app or website, with prepopulated fields pulled from the user’s Facebook account.
This simplifies the process of registration and makes the user more likely to submit. These forms can be linked to the CRM or contact database via something like Zapier, ensuring that the right data is getting passed along. Having the contact information makes it much easier for your sales team to filter out unqualified leads, lower the amount of time looking for contact info, and overall allows them to follow up much more easily.
Takeaway: Use Facebook hosted forms to make it easier for registrants to submit their information.
6. Translate Marketing Budget into Sales
When running your awareness and lead generation campaigns, it’s imperative to keep good track of the source — what campaign, platform, or partner did the lead register from? Use different forms for each, or set up your forms or CRM to track them. A software like Spark is great for this because it seamlessly maintains data as part of the team’s workflow, has options to run marketing attribution/conversion reports, and allows you to track the trends accurately.
Once you have this data, your team can work backward from the amount they spent on each type of campaign, and figure out how much they should be spending in order to hit a certain number of qualified leads. For example, if Facebook Ads generated 50 leads, and 10–20% of them are qualified, you can divide that into the total amount spent on the ads to work out the cost of each lead. To take it even further, find out how many of the qualified leads becomes a buyer, and use that to find out the cost of acquiring a customer on that particular channel.
By paying mind to the relative success of each different source, you can create a balanced marketing budget that allows your team to get the highest amount of return.
Takeaway: Understand what your marketing budget is getting you, and use it to allocate spend and improve sales.
7. Experiential Marketing
As the name implies, experiential marketing is all about creating an experience, and using the media generated around it to tie back to the product. This is especially useful for teams working with smaller budgets, because there’s plenty of room for creativity.
The example by Jelly Marketing was of a local water park, who advertised their summer season by placing free tickets around the city — in huge pails of water, in public fountains, and other places where people would have to get wet to retrieve them. Kovacs shared that this created a natural desire to share and post, and the project received hundreds of thousands of impressions.
Takeaway: Get creative and design an experience that makes people stop, pay attention, and want to post about you.
8. Pitching / Editorial Hustling
Marketing in recent years is about buying media space — purchasing room for an ad in print, online impressions on a social media platform, or sponsored articles in relevant publications. And advertising is quickly converging with editorial. This means that the stories editors select for their publications are often up for sale or pitch, and your team can take advantage of that to build press for your project or company.
Understand a journalist’s investigative interests, and identify some that can relate back to the brand narrative of your company or project. This makes it easier for you to pitch stories that will appeal to them. Not are you helping them by providing relevant stories, you’re creating a relationship with a reporter and making it easier to get press around your content.
Takeaway: Pitch relevant content to journalists to get press that leads back to your brand or project.
9. Targeted Ads
Facebook is a great place to generate leads because it’s more engaged than Instagram, where many people mindlessly scroll, but still a social platform where people spend their time. When setting up the ads, using the different targeting options can make a huge difference in the effectiveness of the ad campaign.
Basic targeting lets you focus the audience around high level information such as location, age, and gender, while detailed targeting can drill down to job title, education, life events, interests, and even behaviour. These are isolated to within the app, but because of Facebook’s prolific presence in most people’s social media activity, there is a lot of information to be accessed. For example, Kovacs shared that one client found that recently divorced men were a prime demographic for a certain project, so the team targeted the ad as appropriate — many people update their Facebook statuses after a shift in marital status.
If you already have a list of qualified leads, and want to expand on it, Facebook also allows you to upload a list (minimum 1000 entries) and will target people with similarities.
Takeaway: Use Facebook’s extensive ad targeting options to finely direct your ads to the right people.
10. Be Aware of Trends
With each of these methods, it’s important to keep track of the number of leads acquired, cost of each lead, as well as how many of the leads acquired through a particular channel convert into a sale. Knowing the costs and return of each channel is important for your reporting, and over time, allows you to build up to identifying a trend within your marketing. It’s useful to know how your efforts are impacting your company and your project so that you can anticipate and adjust as necessary for the best results.
Empower and educate your team with the tools to gather, analyze, and report on data. Take advantage of software and training, so that your team can properly run reports and attribute impact to their efforts. Kovacs’ final point was to share his training program, which empowers his clients to understand and utilize digital marketing — building up knowledge and skillsets that strengthen our industry.
Takeaway: Empower your team to track data and ROI with relevant tools and education, to build up strong data skills that your team can use to their advantage.
Lead Generation for Development Sales in 2020
To end off the event, Darian Kovacs and Alex Wan answered some questions from attendees around lead generation in an increasingly global world. The rumour is that movement from Hong Kong as a result of the political situation could create an influx into the Vancouver market — but Wan says that odds are it won’t. Regardless, building awareness is important for companies as Vancouver continues its trajectory into becoming an increasingly global city.
Lead generation for real estate, and new development in particular, can look forward to a shifting landscape of technology-based, digital options across platforms as we move into 2020. Even in traditional channels like print, newer technologies are making it possible to improve trackability, transparency, and understanding of ROI. No matter the size of your marketing budget, lead generation remains a crucial part of new development sales.
Better data, technology, and a little bit of creativity are the keys that will carry your team to success from prelaunch to project close.
Which of these methods for better qualified lead generation is at the top of your list?
