Month: April 2022

How Was BeyondWalls Born?

BeyondWalls is India’s leading Integrated Prop-Tech Ecosystem that can address any type of challenge in Real Estate. Initially, the company was a part of Amura Marketing Technologies, a Pune-based digital marketing firm. Amura came into being under the leadership of Vikram Kotnis, a serial entrepreneur. He joined hands with four of his college friends to found Amura in 2010.

Like most startups, Amura’s entry into the market wasn’t a cakewalk. At the time, most companies and marketers were reluctant to go digital. The founders spent a lot of time educating clients on the need to move from traditional media to digital platforms. In the next five years, the smartphone and internet penetration boom helped Amura overcome its initial challenges.

One of Amura’s core motives was to enable marketing automation for Real Estate agents. The firm had the vision to be India’s one-stop transparent & trusted platform for developers, channel partners & homebuyers. By 2015, Amura Real Estate was able to reach 15 lakh people across 80 countries worldwide. Our most popular features included lead conversions, real-time sales assistance, and real-time customer behavior analytics. These features increased the credibility of the digital experience for Amura’s clients.

Taking forward this experience, Amura materialized its vision through its brand name, BeyondWalls. BeyondWalls is an independent leading Prop-Tech partner for channel partners and developers alike. It is now an all-around property selling and technology integrator for B2B & B2C customers who dwell in everything Real Estate. BeyondWalls also has a Real Estate CRM solution under its wing that enables a sales & marketing partnership platform.

Marketing in Real Estate

Given its wide parametric range and customer profile spectrum, marketing in Real Estate involves various complexities. The foremost necessity is to set up an entire automated marketing funnel at specific stages of brand development. The marketing funnel helps developers learn more about the journey of each prospect as they move from first coming across the brand to using its services to becoming a long-term client.

If you’re a developer, you may use profiling tools and analytics to understand the needs and preferences of your prospects. Some effective profiling tools include Integrated ROI tracking and bulk SMS shooting. Based on the information gathered, you can have a personalized interaction with them to gain their trust. Thereafter, you can aim at converting your lead by integrating known marketing & sales techniques.

To address the challenges of Real Estate marketing, BeyondWalls Real Estate collaborates with its in-house CRM tool which is one of the leading CRM software designed specifically for the Real Estate industry. It’s an end-to-end platform offering the benefits of Real Estate marketing automation and post-sales management, among multiple other features.

Let’s take a look at some of the crucial features.

Marketing Automation Features of the Real Estate CRM

1. Segmentation & Cohorts

With its customer segmentation feature; you can now divide your clients and devise relevant strategies for each segment. You may do so based on 250+ attributes and connect to them via email, SMS, and WhatsApp. This helps you gain insights into how your customers are reacting to your messages and form a database to review their potential. Besides, the platform’s AI- & ML-driven engine already generates a pre-populated list of leads with the maximum probability of conversion. To make your information more data-driven, you may go through the entire history of your prospects and follow the necessary steps to push for closure.

2. Lead Nurturing

Take advantage of the built-in drip marketing to set up a series of SMSes and emails to notify leads regarding sales events. When you set up a drip, funnel analytics gives you an overview of which leads are at what levels. You can figure out what percentage of leads are dropping off and how many are proceeding to the next level. The analysis will help you implement feasible strategies to move leads further towards conversion.

You can send automated messages to leads to help strengthen relationships. For instance, you may automate a note of thanks or a feedback report after a site visit or offer a discount if the lead is in their final stage. Based on your lead’s reaction to these messages or notifications, the tool will generate a score to give you a more holistic idea of their potential.

3. Marketing Attribution

After you put up ads across diverse media, you need to actively keep track of the entire funnel. Leads might try to reach you through various channels. Through the marketing attribution feature, the CRM integrates with your Google Analytics account to help you streamline this process. You can gain insights into the results of your campaigns and create better strategies for an improved outcome.

The CRM designs a complex marketing attribution model to offer a bird’s eye view, from immediate impact to first-and-last click. Depending on the perspectives you gain, you may alter the direction in which the data must flow and create reports accordingly.

4. Google, Facebook & LinkedIn Integration

There’s no denying that social media has brought about a digital transformation in Real Estate industry. The CRM leverages this factor to improve lead generation and productivity. The platform automatically captures leads from LinkedIn, Google, and Facebook ads and accumulates them in a single repository. You can then allocate them to your team members, depending on the workflow. You can also easily track the cost attribution from Google Adwords and Facebook.

Another social media platform where you can put up lead-gen ads is YouTube. The CRM integrates with YouTube as a Google Premier Partner and captures leads, and adds them into its lead routing workflow.

5. Property Portal Integration

The CRM makes property portal integration simple! This enables your leads to flow seamlessly into your account in real time, saving time and effort. In addition, you can attribute a fixed cost for different portals as a whole. It identifies the exact sources and calculates the cost from various portals to give you an overview of the specific returns.

Even though you run ads and campaigns on diverse mediums, the CRM allows you to manage your routine for every portal. This guides the lead to get in touch with the right team.

6. Lead Capture & Survey Forms

With the CRM, you can track lead data and get an idea of their behaviors and preferences through a lead survey. You can create lead capture forms to understand what your lead desires and quickly add them to your site. You may keep sending the same link to gather additional information and gain in-depth knowledge to build a detailed profile.

You may also create survey forms to get feedback from your customers on your product and service. Based on the data gathered, you can implement plans and strategies to improve their experience. For their benefit, customers have the option to schedule a site visit or an online meeting at their convenience.

7. Bulk Marketing

The CRM allows you to send out emails and SMSes to a bulk audience while personalizing campaign lists for various stages of your funnel. These lists help you contextualize the information going out to different sets of customers.

The platform also sends you a report on the outcome of your bulk email and SMS campaigns. A high number of views and responses add to the lead score, giving you insights into the intentions of your leads. Based on these reports, you can create remarketing campaigns on Facebook and Google to reach a larger audience.

Sales Automation Features of the Real Estate CRM

1. Lead Management

The CRM incorporates an advanced lead management software that handles all the work with the click of a button. It comes with a host of features whereby you can seamlessly manage leads and their data. You can integrate it’s lead forms into all your digital assets for efficient tracking and viewing. Even if you contact your leads via different sources, the data gets accumulated in one place. Besides, the software verifies every lead by sending an OTP link on their phone number and email ID. So, you can rest assured that the lead data is valid.

If you’re running short of time, you can simply use smart filters to pull out lead information in a second. The tool also enables automatic scoring for different leads to help you gain insight into their intentions and close sales quickly. Another useful feature is the option to create multiple sales pipelines. You may customize these pipelines as per the developments in your business and take the next steps accordingly.

2. Pre-Sales & Call Center

The CRM provides cloud telephony service that facilitates remote working. The platform also supports on-premise interactions. The online call center helps improve productivity by reducing turnaround time with in-built IVR, voicemail, and greetings.

You can automatically track leads from numerous sources in real-time with the help of vanity numbers. In addition, it presents intelligent call routing that can be utilized in two ways. You may automatically distribute incoming leads based on pre-defined rules or in a round-robin pattern. The second option is to categorize them based on factors like location, expertise, hierarchy, etc. The tool also has a sticky routing feature to ensure all leads get assigned to the same salesperson.

If you’re a manager, you have the option to break into ongoing sales calls to check quality. In other cases, the salesperson themselves can invite you to join a call and share your expertise. Your team can save valuable time by choosing the click-to-call feature. This allows them to make calls from within the system.

3. Workflow Automation

With the CRM software, Real Estate agents can now streamline their workflow to be on top of the pipeline. The platform notifies the salespeople regarding calls from leads through auto-scheduled follow-ups. After understanding the team bandwidth and routing workflows, the insta-connect feature enables auto-dial every time an inquiry is made.

Managers can auto-schedule tasks for their teams with deadlines. In case there’s a delay or any escalation, they receive reminders and notifications to handle the same.

4. Team Collaboration

The CRM empowers teams with cutting-edge technology to create a seamless experience for the lead. You can customize the access to lead data for different team members based on their requirements. You may also attach relevant notes against leads to help other team members gain insight into their profiles and manage them in your absence. A valuable feature in the tool is the auto-generated updates on each prospect’s journey. This helps you understand the buyer’s intentions and behaviours to accordingly manipulate your business in the future.

Managers can create dashboards to keep track of their team’s performance and observe sales progress. They can also access call recordings to analyze the team’s capabilities or shortcomings. With the insights gained, they can develop a game plan to help the team improve in the weak areas.

Final Thoughts

By developing innovative and user-friendly features, the CRM has managed to carve a niche through Real Estate sales automation. The platform combines the powers of ML and AI to help Real Estate companies make smart endorsements and close deals faster. Leveraging the benefits of this advanced CRM software, BeyondWalls is spearheading the transformation of the Real Estate sector with automation.

Google can be your business driver if implemented the right way. How so? Well, once people decide that they want to buy a house, they automatically become your audience pool. Seldom it happens that people see your ad and decide to buy a house. But in most cases, a purchase decision is already made by the interested party, which implies that the person was already looking for a house on the internet with relevant keywords, comparisons, and shortlisting properties.

A marketeer’s job is to be present in the result of these searches with convincing message to choose your project over others and reach out via other media to make them choose your product.

How can you ensure your google search campaigns are optimized correctly to achieve this?

Search campaign set-up

Typically, when the buyer types in a keyword to search, Google identifies that person in the ‘Homebuying Audience’ category. Now it is your turn to ensure that you are PRESENT for every relevant keyword they might be searching for. That should include –

• Brand keyword

  A brand keyword covers all permutations, combinations of your brand and project name-related keywords, wrong spelling, etc. It is ideally recommended that you are present in the top 3 results for this category of keywords, which means you have an impression share of more than 95%. You should capitalize on this bucket the most as you are running outbound campaigns using push strategies. once people are intrigued by your display ads, they will come and search for your brand directly.

• Primary keywords

  A set of keywords that highlight your project, configuration, locality and price and other related keywords, which intended buyers tend to search. Recommended impression share 80%+

• Secondary keywords

  Keywords that are related to your project but go beyond just your locality and configurations are secondary keywords. For e.g., if you are selling 2 BHKs in Worli, in secondary bucket, you should target keywords like premium / luxury 2 BHKs in Mumbai and homes in South Mumbai, etc. This gets you recommended impression share of 70%-80%. Once you figure out which keywords from the bucket are actually resulting in conversions, split this campaign and bid for the keywords that were yielding good results.

• Competitor keywords

  This is where it will get tricky, you may be thinking of shortlisting 3-4 projects that are in the vicinity and are offering similar products as yours and will consider your competitors’ keywords to bid on and it will get easier. But it does not stop there, for a home buyer, there would be multiple localities in his mind for shortlisting., So, extend your horizons, get into the buyer’s shoes by understanding their psychography based on their demography, and shortlist the choices they would make. Target those keywords and start by targeting an impression share of 50-60% and optimize it based on the conversions you get.

Primarily, there are 4 categories to split your campaign into. But by observing closely, you can further bifurcate them into:

• Top converting keywords
• Keywords for highest impression share
• Top click bait keywords
• Location specific keywords

Hour-of the day and day of the week

• Google dashboard shows when maximum impressions, clicks and conversions are happening.
• Keep an eye on this, spend money during that time and this will save at least 10% of your money on bidding.

Mostly Real Estate searches happen during late evenings, and during the weekends when they visit projects and research further to compare.

Besides this, basic tactics like negative keywords, Keyword-based copies, ad rank, experiments are going to play a very important role in your set-up

PRO TIP: When you launch a project in the market, buyers are present, searching, shortlisting, comparing and making decisions. So, if you know you will be launching in a market that is liquid, put a word out so buyers know they have a choice coming – Teaser / Pre-launch campaign with specific keywords work brilliantly in this regard. Then ensure you give them an incentive that a project that they are looking for is coming soon so register and stay tuned to get priority offers. Then carry forward that keyword, build a recall which will get you the buyer, target that in your branded keyword bucket for top impressions.

Search ad copies:

A successful search campaign does not happen just with the right setup, it needs to capture the entire path to purchase. Right from ‘what you show’, ‘how you make them feel’ to ‘where you lead’ and ‘how you convince’.

You need to ensure the headlines 1 & 2 of your copies have your product, price, brand and location of the project followed your RTB – e.g., offers, USP, etc. To support this, your domain name will also play an important role. The description has extra space to add more features of the project that complement the feature you have used in the headline. For example, your search ad could be something as follows:

Luxury 2 BHKs in Worli | Starting 5.66 Cr | By ABC Brand www.abc.com/luxury2-bhk-worli Description: With xy premium amenities and premium specifications, just 5 minutes from Palladium Mall

Ensure you are adding call-outs and extensions like

• Premium features
• About ABC’s legacy
• Location Advantages

Keyword based ad copies

Understanding what homebuyers search for and showing them exactly what they are looking for is the key. For e.g.: if someone is searching for 2 BHKs in Worli, there are going to be multiple brands bidding on this keyword., What will make your ad stand out?

• Highlight the benefits, and not just the features: How is the community where your property is located like? Is it premium, luxury or affordable? You could highlight its property in your ad to make it stand out from the rest (competitors).
• Use numbers in the copy: Using numbers instead of text means your ad can quickly draw people’s attention. Make sure you use numbers in your ad headline and expertise as well as how many properties have you sold so far.
• Create an eye-catching headline that matches the search query: Remember that users are always excited and drawn to click on an ad that clearly ‘speaks’ to them in person, addresses their situation, and promises to help them out.

TIP: Your search campaign setup does not stop here. PRESENCE is of utmost importance. Get the top 15 searches for your brand and primary set of keywords. Identify what Google is showing apart from the ads and which web pages and domains are in the top results. Target those web pages through your Google Display Network., Make sure you are present there; this will not just increase the recall, but you are also reaching out to the intended buyers in multiple ways leveraging both Search and Display campaigns.

Landing Page

Your landing page experience is going to not just play an important role in making the home buyer register their interest but also for Google to show your ad rank.. With a bad landing page experience, you will lose ad rank, the impression shares and eventually burn your campaign budget.

Ensuring your landing page has all relevant information with the right CTAs (call to action) is very important in any ad campaign. For Real Estate, we have tried, tested and formulated the best performing landing page flows which today makes it easy for us to ensure this hygiene is taken care of.

• Eye-catching, well-written banner copy
• Strong contextual media
• Multiple, action oriented strong CTAs like “Register Your Interest”, “Schedule A Visit”, “Get A Call Back”, “Get Directions To Site” and “Didn’t Find What You Are Looking For? Tell Us What You Need”.
• Clear features and benefits of the offer from your ad
• Testimonials or other proof points to support your claims
• Multiple ad account and landing pages strategy

We recently experimented with multiple landing pages for multiple ad campaigns. The objective was that we wanted to capture the market during our project launch.

We ran 3 different campaigns through 3 ad accounts with 3 different domains (landing pages) which ensured we had:

• Maximum impression share with us
• Probability of choices being narrowed down to our project increased

This spiked our Cost Per Lead slightly but then our Cost Per Booking was in line as we captured most of homebuyers and with convincing sales strategy ensured they booked with our brand.

We did this only for first month during the launch then switched to single account.

These are tested ways to make your Real Estate Google search campaigns successful.

As real estate digital marketeers, we have all faced some obstacles in our Facebook campaigns. Also, what’s even more bothering is that the CPLs have been continuously going up in the last 4-5 months.

As we are heavily dependent on Facebook and Instagram for lead volumes, we have seen major fluctuations in our campaigns with the latest update by Apple for devices using iOS 14 and above.

• This upgrade has affected the way Apple devices track conversion due to their App Tracking Transparency Framework.
• Certain data collection and tracking are prohibited unless a person opts for tracking.
• This directly limits the ads personalization and reporting, which affects campaign learning, affecting the optimization, thus the CPLs shoot up and quality of leads being delivered goes down.

Specially for high ticket size projects (Unit price above Rs 1 Cr*) most of the TG uses Apple devices (being a premium-end device) and it was crucial for Facebook to find a way around this without violating the privacy of the customers

To help overcome, Facebook is processing a pixel conversion event using Aggregated Event Measurement (AEM)

With AEM we can set up to 8 events on your landing page like lead capture, download brochure and get directions, and prioritize them for sending the signals to Facebook via integration. This will improve the optimization, reporting and measurement, and help the campaigns learn without violating the privacy of the users.

How Does AEM work?

For you to measure events of your landing page on Facebook dashboard, you would have to build the web connection to your Facebook using either Facebook API or Facebook Pixel which you will place in your website.

You get to measure 8 events and prioritize them for your campaign optimization

Eg, if pixel A is racking “Lead Capture”, B is tracking “Download Brochure” event and C is tracking “Get Directions To Site”, which means you are tracking 3 events. Then you can prioritize them the you would like to optimize your campaigns. For example, starting with “Lead Capture” then “Download Brochure” and then “Get Directions”

To have web events configured;

1. Verify your domain (landing page) with your Facebook Business Manager (then your BM has the authority to configure the events)
2. Configure and prioritize top 8 events (you can choose standard or custom)
3. Set up conversion in ads manager
4. Set the attribution window for all campaigns at ad set level and not at the account/campaign level. This will help in campaign optimizations.

Note: In Events Manager on your Facebook Dashboard, Pixel Conversion will show all conversion numbers whereas the AEM will show the ones that have happened through devices with iOS 14 or above. This will help you differentiate, and due to this, your pixel conversions will always be higher than your AEMs.

For understanding your cost per lead, you will have to measure pixel conversion. But to understand and analyse the conversions that have come specifically from IOS 14 and above devices, you can check your Events Manager.

This will solve majority of optimization fluctuations you are facing due to iOS upgrade although, there are a few limitations you might face like;

• Delayed reporting, for up to 3 days.
• Demographic breakdown for AEMs not available currently (this may be available at a later stage as Facebook develops it.
• Targeting limitations – as more people upgrade their iPhones, your custom audiences will decrease as Facebook will not be able to track all demographic details. For this, you can start utilizing broad targeting and let Facebook learn.
• Size of re-targeting audience will also decrease as the upgrades increase

All these factors directly affect our campaigns and costs. Having said that, this is where Growth Marketing kicks in… where you experiment and optimize your campaigns continuously.

At BeyondWalls we have been trying to learn from this since we began implementing growth Marketing. Being a leading Proptech firm in India, this is our signature way of approaching any campaign, and due to which, we were able to make our campaigns efficient.

These learnings can be applied across a range of projects to cater to different sets of challenges in real estate campaigns, not just through one media but experimenting on multiple mediums, using attribution modelling and keeping a tap of consumer events.