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The consumer experience (CX) is at the core of our value chains in the real estate development industry. CX is equally fundamental for business and personal consumers. Buyers, sellers, tenants, investors and real estate professionals base their buying behavior and brand loyalty on the level of service and engagement they receive.
The Importance Of A Digital Presence
It’s a fact of business life: You need a modern website and an engaging social media presence. Digital marketing has a great reach and allows precise targeting of prospects. The result of this reach and precision is scalability and enhanced ROI compared to conventional marketing approaches.
Your website and social feed in tandem serve an abundance of vital purposes:
• Establish credibility.
• Convey knowledge
• Inform your prospect on industry trends and best practices, as well as your company’s story, leadership and values.
• Allow you to lead the sales dialogue.
• Bolster SEO performance.
At the least, you should focus on LinkedIn (personal and company profiles), Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. To supplement, enlist additional networking and media channels that cater to and offer targeted and scalable access to your ideal prospects.
The nature of the content you should be posting to generate buzz about your business and properties depends on the tastes and needs of your target market. Capital-attracting content for real estate developers includes:
• Thought leadership articles addressing questions and issues specific to your market.
• Curated industry news.
• Market updates, analyses and projections.
• Training and support videos and webinars.
• Community interactions and consumer stories.
Nurturing Relationships With Stakeholders Through CX
Brand-building CX begins with availability and communication. From a real estate standpoint — multifamily, for instance — your end users are your tenants. Your tenant satisfaction and vacancy rates are directly tied to your tenant’s customer experience. Social media and online tenant portals featuring mobile access allow tenants to stay connected with each other and management, strengthening the sense of community, improving service and streamlining your operational costs.
The same philosophy is applicable concerning investors and other stakeholders in your development ventures. The quality CX you provide for tenants is appreciated by all those who consume your content: investors, bankers and other industry partners who enable transactions to close.
Taking a proactive approach to your online brand position and anticipating consumer trends and communication preferences assists in developing an inviting and results-generating CX that provides timely knowledge and answers.
Visual Content Is Key
Across sectors, visuals drive interest, stir emotion and inspire action. However, take care to include sufficient written content to convey your story and value proposition to investors. High-quality imagery in conjunction with compelling words builds the most momentum in your lead generation efforts.
Consider these points to improve your visual and written footprint online:
• Share videos featuring active staff and prospects.
• Employ high-resolution imagery of properties and projects.
• Utilize or create images conveying stories relevant to your customers’ interests.
• Develop clear messaging and easy-to-read formatting.
• Correctly format for each channel to ensure the most impressions. Each networking platform has specific requirements for dimensions of particular ad placement types. Facebook, notably, has a guideline text limit of no more than 20% of the image area.
• Integrate paid social media for more impressions and clicks.
Integrate Paid Social Media
It takes a considerable amount of time to develop organic social media engagement and growth and generate a following. Sponsoring ads on social media grants a substantially extended reach and the ability to target your prospects based on career, position, income level and many more psychographic, lifestyle and demographic factors.
In terms of ROI, well-targeted social campaigns rank highly for accredited investors and other prospects. Paid social media supports faster online presence and thought leadership growth, and results in immediate conversions when backed by cornerstone content and optimized landing pages.
Capturing Leads And Monitoring ROI
Your social media efforts, organic and paid, require close monitoring of impressions, click-through rates, bounce rates and conversions. In addition to monitoring results and costs directly in your platform dashboards, it’s an excellent supplemental strategy to employ Google Analytics and other third-party website traffic and SEO monitoring tools. These utilities enable you to assess and optimize ad spend, placement and results continuously.
A handful of the best strategies to monitor and capture investor leads entering your funnel include:
• Implement a CRM/ERM to track leads and prevent prospects from falling through the cracks.
• Review and export reports weekly.
• Use a high-quality landing page on your website to greet and convert leads.
• Make each landing page specific to the type of leads you’re targeting (e.g., accredited investors, commercial tenants or the general public).
• Coordinate content and a publishing schedule with your public relations team and strategy.
• Optimize ad spend and placement to achieve the most reach and conversions within budget.
• Run small test campaigns and iterate to find the best-performing content in terms of engagement and click-through.
Cultivating Loyalty
Online social and professional networking has undoubtedly pervaded your life and opened opportunities in all facets. The current digitally driven business and economic landscape offers an open channel to prospects and improved ROI for real estate developers seeking capital. Investors and consumers demand convenience, value and connectivity, and award their loyalty to brands that focus on building positive CX through social engagement and thought leadership.