Online vs Offline Marketing ? What is the best for a real estate agency ?

                     Are you having these challenges?

1. Not having enough customers

2. Unable to identify prospective clients

3. Failing to provide for the family

4. Unable to pay back a loan

About The Author

Cain Ndhlovu is the founder of Sunrise Digital Marketing Agency in Harare Zimbabwe. Cain help real estate agencies, conveyancers,

property search sites, company registering consultancies and any micro, small to medium enterprise by freeing them from digital marketing through doing this service on their behalf, supplying them qualified leads and enhancing their sales.

I understand your pain …

 

In 2007 a friend called Thando helped me to get employment as a sales negotiator. The remuneration wasn’t desirable because it was a commission only arrangement that meant no sale no income.

A national economy that was nose diving, competition and the company’s poor marketing conspired against my sales.

These moments were difficult because I was just a school leaver without any relevant training. The only thing I knew best was writing poems a high school passion and my master piece which was titled Wilderness Wanderer talked about a beautiful girl in search of true love. But surely how could I write love poems for prospects?

However, with the passage of time as I tried things to see what could work I managed to turn poem writing to property article writing. My generous friend noticed this new development, its marketing potential on the world wide web so he helped me set up my first blog Property Matters News  in 2012.

 

The Results

 

The year 2014 was a turning point because I earned Usd 1 000.00 through my new real estate blog. It all started when I wrote an article titled, “ Financial consequences of purchasing property from a seriously-ill seller and other purchases to avoid ”. The post found resonance in the heart of a Harare lady who after reading it decided to sell her land in  Madokero. The lady had an outstanding balance on a Msasa house she bought from a seriously ill seller. She decide to urgently settle the balance after reading the post.

This marketing method is called content marketing and its effectiveness was an eye opener for me. There are many other methods and I would like to talk about them also because I want to give you marketing options to consider.

These marketing methods can be categorized into two namely online or digital and offline or traditional. 

Probably the dominant narrative these days is biased towards online marketing. If truth is to be told both offline and online marketing have their respective set of advantages. However, with the growing accessibility to the internet as is always reported by POTRAZ (Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe ) and with more and more people consuming information on the move online marketing certainly prove to be much more beneficial and advantageous than offline or traditional marketing. Lets therefore, make a comparison of the two in terms of the following points;

1.Covid 19 Lockdown

The Covid 19 lockdowns affects the physical movement of people through laws penalizing individuals travelling without approved reasons like the need for essentials.

Most offline marketing campaigns are affected by the lockdown because the distribution of their materials depends on physical movement of people known as human traffic.

On the other hand the lockdowns are benefiting online marketing as more and more people go online to seek digital alternatives to what they can no longer get physically e.g online shopping, virtual church services, virtual meetings on platforms like Facebook and Zoom, e-learning, news etc.

This therefore, increase the presence of people there and making online marketing lucrative.

2.Cost Effective

To place a small advert in the classifieds of a print newspaper like the Herald last time I checked was around Usd75. The advert had a day’s lifespan. On the other hand to start a digital marketing campaign the costs starts from vertually nothing because most effective channels (Gmail, Blogger, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc ) are free. With good digital marketing knowledge (i.e creating buyer persona, determining the purchaser’s journey, mapping content to the purchaser’s journey, creating the content e.g blog articles ) a business can generate leads for months at negligable costs. Costs may emanate from data bundle purchases and with only Usd 13 you can purchase 8Gig worth of monthly data. This is if you choose the make do with what is there route that involves using your mobile phone to hotspot for the laptop.

Digital media allows you to assess and review campaigns at no cost. LinkedIn allows you to edit your profile features anytime you want. For example you can edit the heading if it happens that you have new keywords to add. LinkedIn headings are key lead generating features and  including keywords on your LinkedIn profile helps to get discovered by prospects searching using LinkedIn’s internal search engine and enhance your sales. On the other hand to readapt offline channels and reprint and redestribute in accordance with a new campaign will prove to be much more cost heavy in comparison.

3.Precise Targeting 

The  best promotional campaign is customer focused this is Marketing 101. This means before starting a promotional campaign you should determine who your buyer is by creating a buyer persona that detail things like your ideal customer’s location, gender, age, where they are employed, their position in that organisation etc. In fact you should note down as much as possible about your customer in order to have the best marketing effort.

The traditional means of marketing uses the spray and pray method, where an ad runs over a platform with substantial reach with the hope that a few people who love what they see, hear, or read would make a positive approach. On the other hand digital platforms like LinkedIn & Facebook provides tools that makes it easy to create a buyer persona and to effectively target your marketing.

For example I provide digital marketing services for estate agents and LinkedIn’s search function helps me get important buyer persona detail like their real estate agencies ( organization of employment), position in that organization, name and surname, emails, cell phone numbers, gender, and location which is Zimbabwe (as you can see above) . This makes it easier to craft a customer focused campaign that resonate effectively with my niche and increase chances for best results.

4.Global reach

Millions of Zimbabweans are in the diaspora mainly in countries like the UK, USA, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Botswana and South Africa. As the local economy goes under people in the diaspora can provide a solace for local real estate because they are employed in prosperious economies. For example some pundits in the USA are already predicting the revival of the American economy despite a covid 19 catastrophy due to the new president Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion economic stimulus. Many Zimbabweans in that country will be benefiting from this and they will be investing home mostly into secure investments like real estate because as it is correctly said, “ Be it ever so humble there is no place like home.”

Online marketing is the best channel that can help estate agents access this lucrative diaspora market. Unfortunately, offline cannot because its reach is only local.

 

Online Marketing Options

So what are the online marketing options a real estate agency can consider? Here are some good examples.

1. Do it yourself social media campaigns

2. Online classifieds

3. Search engine marketing

4. Digital marketing agency

  

 

1. Do it yourself social media campaigns

 

This is online marketing done on social platforms like Whatsapp and Facebook by lay people lacking digital marketing know-how. Consequentially, results are poor simply because the platforms aren’t being put to best use. For example in order to market effectively online one must first create a buyer persona. Unfortunately a lay man doesn’t do this due to lack of knowledge.

 

            owledge.er persona. Unforively online one must first create a buyer persona aspora market.ere. 2.Online Classifieds

 

These are print classifieds gone digital. On one hand credit can be given to online classifieds for helping many estate agents reach the diaspora. On the other they are not reliable as an all in one lead generation platform supplying leads for all aspects of real estate.  For example its difficult to generate property mandate leads using classifieds because getting a mandate require trust and online a blog is the best tool for creating trust and expert positioning. Unfortunately, online classifieds don’t have blogs.   

 

3. Search engine marketing

 

A very powerful marketing method because it uses search engines like Google, Yahoo etc. It is powerful because virtually every internet user in the world uses search engines to find information. A business benefits from search engines through two ways namely organic and none organic. Organic is when your site or blog gets exposure on search results without you paying for it and none organic is when your site or blog gets exposure after you have paid Google or Yahoo for this.  

However, this method only works when you have a site or blog that is search engine optimized or SEO.

 

 5. Digital Marketing Agency  

 

Digital marketing agency basically involves someone doing digital marketing on your behalf. There are many advantages why this can be a good option for real estate agents as follows;

(a) A digital presence

Many estate agents like most micro, small to medium enterprises in Zimbabwe do not have a meaningful digital presence at a time in history when its critical to have one. Covid 19 has curtailed almost all physical activities!

A digital marketing agent helps you get a digital presence. For example if you can at least get a free LinkedIn account that is optimized it will go a long way because on its own it helps you get discovered by prospects searching for your services on the world wide web.

(b) Focus on core activities

Since digital marketing agency is all about someone doing digital marketing on your behalf you will have the freedom to focus on your core activities namely real estate activities like listing presentations, property viewing, inspections etc.

Also this helps you benefit from digital marketing but without the requisite know-how. Usually, real estate prospects (e.g buyers, sellers ) are sent to you especially on whatsapp - its easy for you to take it from there.

(c) Sustainable method

Sustainability is all about something that will not stop working in the future and leave you stranded . Through the use of latest technology and concepts digital marketing agency is able to place into the sales pipeline prospects in all four stages of the purchase process. This means you are not only guaranteed prospects ready to buy today but also those who will buyer tomorrow. This way the marketing method becomes sustainable. Remember buyers are in four stages as follows;

(1) Awareness – those starting to know about their problem or need.

(2) Information gathering – those now aware of the problem and researching more about it.

(3) Comparing options – those who have gotten enough information about the problem and now want the best option to address the problem or need.

(4) Purchase decision – those who are ready to make a decision to buy.

4 Common Digital Marketing Mistakes

 1. Not marketing your website or blog

Many believe that once a site is live it will market itself and visitors will flock to it in their millions. This is fallacious of course. Why ? Because without real efforts to distribute your site’s content especially on social media and search engines your site is wasted resource. There are over 1 billion websites on the internet today so what are the chances of someone stumbling upon yours?

 

2. Having unrealistic expectations

Sometimes this is caused by the assumption that online initiatives have overnight results. Yes there are cases of exceptional success but these are rare at best. If you are wise you don’t base strategy on exception but on rule . The rule is that online success is built upon hard work not shortcuts.

 

3. Engaging in shady practices

A programmer once told me he could improve my blog’s ranking on Google for certain key words. When I asked him to explain how I discovered that his methods were what Google Inc call SEO spam or black hat methods that may involve tricking the search engine into giving you a better search ranking for certain key words. Google has invested millions for combating SEO spam that is why they have developed Google Penguin a software dedicated to punishing websites involved in what it may deem black hat methods. Being penalized by Google is something difficult to fix.

 

4. Marketing to everyone

Many companies (estate agencies included) erroneously measure a website’s success by the quantity not quality of visitors. For start-ups, micro, small to medium enterprises (MSMEs) successful marketing is usually niche marketing. A site require the right visitors because at the end of it all you need visitors who will convert to customers.