One market we love working with at Bolt Digital is lead generation for off plan property sales.

And this is because of the impact you can have when you bring an industry that traditionally relies on ‘old world advertising’ (ie newspaper adverts, roadsigns and agents) and market the proposition in a ‘new world’ manner using social networks, artificial intelligence algorithm learning, custom audiences building and engaging content.

It is highly unlikely any competitors in your space will be doing the same thing and as such you can have a clear run on your marketing and low competition on the digital channels you decide to use.

Digital marketing for off plan property developers

Through our work with a number of off plan property developers, we have developed off plan property sales funnel that delivers quality leads of individuals looking to purchase a new home or invest in off plan property.

In this blog, we’re walking you through the launch and early weeks of a lead generation campaign for a Canadian off plan property developer we are currently working with.

(NB, the strategies I am about to share and summarise work for any type of off plan property sales, including holiday homes and apartments and in any country).

Here are some of the results we’ve achieved within a few weeks of launching one of our recent digital campaigns – as seen within our developers new CRM system.

 

You can see here the volume of leads in so far, their potential value based on the off plan property sale starting price and how the developer is progressing them through the pipeline from initial enquiry to starting conversation.

The next steps including inviting the prospect to the presentation centre and then of course convincing them to buy!

All leads have also submitted their phone and our developer is reporting high levels of interest as can be seen by looking at their email inbox.

Even better, some of the prospects are both discovering the developer on social platforms, submitting our registration form and then subsequently visiting the developers website and submitting a second enquiry through there for property information.

Now that is what we call a motivated prospect!

We are also building audiences for our middle of funnel campaigns comprising of

• People who have registered their interest
• Those who opened the lead form but didn’t submit it
• Those who have engaged with our content
• Those who have visited our website.

This means we have a growing number of prospects contained on social media who we can continue to market the development to and build trust by sharing content and updates.

Phase 1: Off plan property funnel set up 

Before the rollout of new Facebook and Google ad campaigns, we always run a full audit which includes analysing where any ads have run before.

 

• Placements: where have budgets fed to

• Optimisations: Facebook goes through phases where it will give preferential treatment/results to certain campaign objectives – we would look to see if the private clinic was leveraging some of these optimisation pockets to their advantage

• Tracking and pixel health: we check to see what sort of data has been “seasoning” the pixel and if this data is being used to further improve results

• CTR and CPC: this helps us use historical data to assess the fit between creative and targeting

 

For the developer in question, we are running a funnel that we consider the foundation of all off plan property sales funnels. It initially involves generating leads from Facebook, Instagram and Google.

Right now, we are asking leads to pre-register their interest in the upcoming opening of the property sales centre and then putting them through an email sequence which emails information designed to keep and pique their interest ahead of the sales centre opening. The set up process of creating the required digital assets and content takes approximately two weeks.

You can see the launch email flow below. Right now there is a 2 week delay between each message in our email automation but as soon as the presentation is open, the speed of this automation will shift to two day intervals between emails.

As the developer’s presentation centre opens and the build begins, we will extend out our funnel to capture even more leads and deliver content to all prospect audiences.

Phase 2: Launch

Choosing audiences for our ad campaigns

To launch, we honed down on four particular customer avatars to use as our initial online audiences to market to place our Top of Funnel advertising. This included new parents and young couples, and commuters within a certain geographical area as well as property investors.

These audiences were tested against each other with a number of creatives.

Testing is crucial at all phases of online marketing but never more so than the beginning of a campaign. What is often surprising in that an avatar you think will rush enthusiastically towards your proposition in doesn’t, whereas in fact another one does.

Within Facebook and Instagram, audiences are tested at an adset level and you can see the structure we use below which enables audiences to move through the testing period.

 

Creative Production

Audiences don’t work in isolation though and it’s equally about producing ad creatives that resonate with the audiences in question. 95% of the adverts run by Bolt Digital are video adverts and we created a number of video ads using our partners existing assets, e.g. interior renders, elevations, floor plans, community footage. Everything from the contents of the ad, to its pace, its dimensions and the copy surrounding it can make a difference between a ‘winning’ and a ‘losing’ ad.

These are then split test against each other within each audience. It doesn’t matter what any of our team thinks as the data clearly tells us which ad is performing the best. You can see some of the creatives that have gone into testing below.

 

Phase 3: Algorithm training

Through monitoring the performance of ad creatives and audiences, and being sure it’s algorithm is learning with each conversion, we are able to guide Facebook in the right direction as to who to put our campaigns in front of.

Within 6 weeks we could see the results of this in action with cost per lead dropping from an initial $20 to as low as $2.51.

This is even more impressive when we look at lead quality –  all leads have also submitted their phone and our developer is reporting high levels of interest as can be seen by looking at their email inbox. 

Even better, some of the prospects are both discovering the developer on Facebook, submitting our registration form and then subsequently visiting the developers website and submitting a second enquiry through there for property information. Now that is what we call a motivated prospect!

Phase 4: Scaling and multi channel

In any digital marketing campaign, there is always more to do and more opportunities that open up as campaigns develop. This one is no different. Our next steps include

• Scaling existing campaigns to capture more leads.
• Assessing and refining our targeting to constantly improve lead quality.
• Identifying opportunities for taking campaigns onto new channels, such as Youtube.
• Driving more website traffic through SEO.
• And much much more!

We can’t wait until this developer opens their presentation centre and we start seeing the leads convert into sales!