Before diving into the article's content, some concepts, and terms that we need to grasp.

Investor: is an organization (or sometimes an individual) that owns capital or is assigned the right to manage and use capital to invest in the construction of a project. The Investor must take full responsibility to the investor and the law for the quality, construction progress, cost, and investment capital as well as the legal regulations. Vingroup, Novaland, FLC, Sacomreal, Dat Xanh, etc. are popular investors.

Real estate consulting and brokerage firms: also known as real Estate brokers. The main activities of these companies are real estate valuation, real estate advertising, real estate investment and business consulting, legal consulting, real estate project marketing management, real estate prices. Some investors also own brokerage companies such as Dat Xanh, Sacomreal, etc. Some companies only specialize in real estate consulting and brokerage such as CBRE, Savills. Some real estate floors only sell or receive exclusive rights to sell products to certain developers.

Depending on the project, it can be divided into level 1 or level 2. floors 1 naturally receive higher incentives and benefits from the investor and redistribute to level 2 floors to support sales.

Real estate agents: Real estate salespeople are employees who are currently working for real estate developers or exchanges to sell projects for which they are responsible. For each sold project they receive a commission as defined by the company.

Real estate brokers are independent people, not part of companies, standing between buyer and seller, and receive a commission on each property they sell as agreed with the seller.

Buy-to-use customers: are people who buy real estate for the purpose of use.

Investment buyers: are people who buy real estate with the goal of reselling and earning a profit instead of for use.

Characteristics of the real estate industry

The real estate industry is a very specific industry in which a lot of real estate agents and brokers are also the ones who have to run ads and find clients by themselves - jobs that normally belong to marketing.

Some developer companies will sometimes have a sales team for their project (in the form of exchange) and will have a marketing team that will deal with advertising, finding clients, and communicating. trust that customer through to the sales team. Novaland is an example of this model.

Some companies are investors, but the marketing department will only carry out brand-building advertising, not finding customers. Finding clients is assigned to real estate brokers and Sales Staff will have to do the advertising themselves to find customers. And this is often the source of many of the problems and difficulties we face.

Real estate is a highly competitive industry

Real estate is a highly competitive industry and can be said to be a bit "bloody". For example, apartment project A has about 1,000 apartments opened for sale but in fact, there is more than 3,000 sales staff from many different floors involved in the sale of this project. For investors, they do not care about anything other than selling for 1,000 apartments in this project, and in the end, no matter how many people participate in selling, the number of apartments is only that much. Of the 3,000 sales staff involved in the sale, some will be able to sell 4-5 units, some get 2-3 units, some can only 1 house, so in fact, the number of brokers who can sell a house is only about 1/3. The remaining 2/3 will not sell any units. This creates a few problems:

• Waste: all sales staff usually receive an amount of money from the company to support sales (how much is depending on the company but usually 5-20 million) and at the same time they themselves because want to sell the goods they are willing to spend another part of the money to run ads. At this time, the amount of money that more than 2,000 salespeople spend on advertising to sell products but in the end, they cannot sell anything, it is a terrible waste. And too high competition also pushes advertising costs in the real estate industry up to an alarming level
• Advertising spam: because the sales staff for the same purpose of theirs is to sell at all costs and with such a way of thinking, they are sometimes willing to use methods such as spam of digital messages. phone or email, creating fake, inaccurate content to get user information (for example posting ads to sell the house at a very good price but when the customer calls to ask, it is all and direct customers to buy one other unit)
• Unfair competition: you are even willing to do many ways to destroy each other. For example, using automatic tools to click on competitors' Adwords ads and push prices higher. You do those things, but sometimes you don't think about the consequences of these things happening on the whole market and the opposite effect on you. High advertising prices are also partly due to behaviors like this.

Real estate is a long-term industry

But a lot of parties are thinking short-term with seasonal approaches. Usually, the process of selling real estate has 3 stages:

Pre-project: including resource preparation stages, filtering potential customers from previous projects, understanding customer needs.

Conduct the project: need to build sales tools, find potential customers, consult sales, and collect customer information.

After the project: take care of the customer, keep in contact with the customer, manage and organize the information gathered from the project, collect more information

But now most companies only focus on the execution and sale phase of the project and leave behind the initial preparation and after-sales phase. Most of the investor companies and the current trading floors are still not well managed by their clients for each project. The true list of customers is held by the salespeople themselves and at some point if they leave the company these customer lists will disappear. The company gave its salespeople money to run ads and find customers, but in the end, the company did not have an efficient hold of that list of customers.

To solve this problem is not a matter of day one, day two, but it needs to change from the upper management level of the need to build a system that can be managed and monitored. customers and interact with them on each stage.

And in fact, because there is no system to manage customers, real estate companies cannot do the after-sales customer care phase and therefore they cannot do the stage. before sales. And from the lack of pre-sales preparation will directly impact the sales process of the project.

So what can you do?

If anyone can run ads on their own, what can you as a real estate salesman do to compete with other salespeople? This is a question that hopefully after reading this article, will hopefully be able to be answered for you. The answer lies in four factors:

Right Customers

The first important factor is to choose the right customers to reach. And to do this you need to understand the concept of the sales funnel:

In my opinion, you can divide the sales funnel into steps:

- Ordinary online customers, whose needs are unknown: can be accessed by conventional advertising channels such as news sites, the advertising displayed on GDN or ad networks, Facebook, Zalo, etc.

- Customers who are interested in real estate or more deeply interested in a certain project: can access channels like Google, Facebook, posting pages like MuaBanNhaDat.vn, Coc Coc, or retargeting.

- Customers have left contact information on the landing page, called, filled in the lead form, or via chat.

- Customers are being advised to sell by sales staff.

There are two things you need to understand: at which steps are you attracting customers, which channels and how can you have more customer data?

To answer the first question, you need to understand that each ad channel has different targeting possibilities:

Understanding who each channel is able to target based on which criteria will help you understand how you should use them to reach the most relevant leads.

So how to increase the amount of customer data and through that sell more? Have 2 way:

Expand the sales funnel by increasing advertising costs and expanding the input of the funnel, thereby increasing the number of sales at the end of the funnel.

Advantages:

- Quickly increase the amount of customer information

- Access to new customers

Weakness:

- Costs increase

- Increasing quantity reduces quality and efficiency (see more)

Optimize the sales funnel by increasing the conversion rates of each step in the funnel and thereby increasing the number of sales at the bottom of the funnel.

Advantages:

- No additional costs

- Improve long-term performance (see more about ad optimization)

Weakness:

- Do not create new customers

Optimization takes time to see effects

Of course, each method has advantages and disadvantages, but at present what most real estate companies do is the first and less interested in the second (need to have a customer management system as mentioned above. above). The most effective ways, of course, are to both expand the sales funnel and optimize to maximize efficiency for costs.

Right Message

Next, we come to the message element. In order to convey the right message to our customers, we need to understand who our target customer is. How do you build a portrait of your target audience? Some things you can do:

Based on project information:

- Project location: is it located in an existing residential area or is it a future story?

- A project selling price: Is this a low, medium, or high project?

- Financial policy: how the project supports to lend, which bank will lend

- Attached utilities: does the project have a swimming pool, park, supermarket, kindergarten, etc.?

- Project phase: When will this project be completed? 6 months, 1 year, 2 years?

- Competitive projects: Are there any similar projects nearby?

- Can this project be sold to several groups of customers? Buy a house to live or buy to invest?

Based on customer behavior

- Demographic portraits: how old are the buyers of how old? Male or female?

- Online and daily behavior: Are they often active on social networks? What do they usually do in real life (gym, shopping, driving a car), and are their daily activities reflected on social media? (check-in, join groups, share interests)

Needs and wants: What do they want when they buy this project?

- Problems they face in daily life: Does the project help them solve them?

Factors affecting the purchasing decision: location, cost, completion time, etc.

- What do they worry about, hinder and make them decide not to buy?

Asking questions 5W1H

This is a classic but always effective method, ask 5W1H questions and answer them yourself.

WHAT - what do they want to buy?

WHERE - Where do they want to buy?

WHEN - when do they want to buy?

WHO - who wants to buy?

WHY - why do you want to buy it?

HOW - How will they buy?

Observe and ask customers: observe customers and their behavior, and not be afraid to ask the customers that you are consulting to understand what they want and need.

Use online tools

Here are some tools you can use to learn about your customers' needs:

Google keyword planner: to see what keywords customers are searching for. Link.

Google suggests: to see words that Google automatically suggests every time you enter a keyword in the search box. Keywordtool.io and Ubersuggest.io are two good tools to help with this.

Google Analytics: provides demographic information, interactions with content, where they come from, etc. based on website visits. Link.

The right time and the right channel

To understand when and which channel should be used to reach customers, you need to understand where your customers are at the stage of the sale and through that can choose the right channel to interact.

Awareness: this is the period when customers start to know about the project through channels such as TVC, PR articles in newspapers, WOM (word of mouth), SMS, and promotional emails.

Review: the client already knows about the project and is considering whether or not to buy. At this point, the best channels to influence their buying decisions maybe Facebook ads, search ads, retargeting.

Buying a house: this is when they decide they want to buy the project. Channels with the ability to strongly influence customers' decisions include sales staff, PR articles, project website, information from banks.

Usage: After purchasing the project, this is the time when they use the project experience or its services. They can comment on the project's service quality on the project's fan page, or join groups, communities (Facebook messenger, Zalo), or right on their own social network profiles.

Recommendation: If they feel satisfied with the quality of the project, they can recommend the project to their friends and people they know through WOM, email, social. Also, if the investor or an exchange can create good promotions, this can make this referral more effective.

You can even do better

Above are some ways for you to identify your customers, send them the right message, at the right time and with the right channel. However, you can do even better in the following ways:

1. Determine customer status

Draw a matrix based on 2 factors: NEEDS and ACTS of the customer. Each element is divided into 4 levels.

Depending on the level of needs and behaviors, we can divide customers into 4 relatively clear groups, and through that, we can divide these customers to the appropriate department:

The sales department will deal with the customers where their needs and behavior are clear as these are ready to buy your project or service.

The telesales/customer care department will target customers in which they have shown one of the two factors but have not enough information to be able to advise and sell effectively. The job of this department is to gather enough information before moving on to the sales department.

2. Build a table to track KPIs

Build tables, on excel, or Google Sheet to be able to track the situation of advertising costs, the price per customer data, or the conversion rate from customer data to customers to consulting or buying projects. In addition, you should also create a habit of viewing data at certain times of the day, for example, every morning at 9:30 and in the afternoon at 16:30.

3. Track and optimize ads

If you are the person running your own ads, this is needless to say and necessary to do. Digital advertising needs to be tracked and continuously optimized to be effective. You can't just set up the ad and then let it run on its own thinking that it will bring you, customers. Without regular tracking and optimization, the effectiveness will decrease over time.

If you hire an outside service to run your ads, you still need to track performance by asking them to report in full metrics so you can measure performance.

4. Flexibility to create a competitive advantage

I take a picture of a beautiful girl to represent the project you want to sell. As below I will point out two do's and don'ts. The first case is what I see the vast majority of parties are still doing.

Customers click on the banner ad and go to the landing page. After entering the landing page, they exit and then see the retargeting ads chasing in other channels. The problem here is that the banner ad is chasing is still the banner they clicked on initially and even if they clicked again, they go back to the landing page they saw earlier. Obviously, the unchanged banner ad will reduce the CTR, resulting in a higher cost per click. Then bringing them back to the site with the same content as the previous one they left is a bit of a waste. So what should better do?

From the beginning, banner ads should also be diverse. Then, when the user enters the landing page, then the banner retargeting chase must also be diverse and change so that the user is not boring. In addition, the destination of the retargeting should not be the landing page that they visited before, but it could be a PR post, a listing, or a video through which to provide newer content to users and increase the likelihood. conversion function.

Through all the above sections, I have presented how you can target customers, build potential customer portraits, choose the channel to convey the message, choose the right time, and also. Share ways you can do better. Thereby, I hope to answer the initial question posed, “If anyone can run an advertisement on their own, what can you, a real estate salesman, do to compete with other companies? Other sales staff? ”. You can also refer to another Pham Phuoc Nguyen article on this topic.

And as I said, this article is set in real estate but there are a lot of things that are applicable and useful for many different industries. Hope it will help you improve the effectiveness of the digital advertising campaigns that you are running as well as reach customers more effectively and properly.