Pro Tips on Real Estate Location Targeted Mobile Advertising

Location-targeted mobile advertising can bring enormous potential to your real estate business.

These 4 major trends can very well paint the picture of the huge opportunity. And why running hyperlocal advertising campaigns using mobile rich media components are no longer a far-fetched thing.

  • Increasing migration of users from desktop to mobile, specifically smartphones—making consumers becoming more accessible to brands and businesses, which calls for effective communication.
  • Advancement of big data sets mobile produces, such like purchase intent, demographics, audience segment, current location, etc. that enables us to have more sophisticated communication with each other.
  • The progression we’ve made in technology, which allows us to have interactive, rich media ad content—videos, haptics effect, gyroscopes, map, gamification, reward systems, etc.
  • Elevation of targeting data solutions such like GPS (global positioning system), WiFi access point availability, beacon technology, proprietary targeting algorithms from myriads of vendors, etc.

Today, you can create super high-quality, location-aware mobile ads not just to make sales but generate more leads, create more advocates, proliferate meaningful messages, create brand authority and much much more.

hyperlocal mobile advertising for real estates

Advertising using hyperlocal targeting can help remove the barrier to sales and bring genuine values to your consumer. That can be one of the single most important criteria in marketing today.

Consumers today behaves differently when it comes to making any purchases. What they seek, besides the quality of your product, is your brand affinity and confidence in your brand. Unlike traditional business dealings, consumers today care about how your product and services make them feel. And that’s what makes you stand out from your competitors.

Most of the time, consumers tolerate mediocre products because it comes with superior brand services. And that is why I’d say it is the single most important criteria for businesses today—create values for your clients.

This means the increasing need for more sophisticated ads that are ever harder to plan and execute. However, take away all the worries and noises. You will realize that you just need to focus on one thing,

“How do I give them exceptional experience while hunting for the dream home, when and where needed?”

Here are some of the things you can do for your clients and make your brand shines brighter than your competitors (even through ads).

When one do property hunting, be it for rental, purchase or investment, I’d say these are the three key things they look at (first)—location, price range, and product (look-and-feel, size, etc.).

This information is vital for your audience segmentation and ads targeting. With the vast availability of data sets on your target audience’s preferences, you can customize the ads with different messaging for your target.

How do you create great ad experience with these 3 key information?

First, let’s talk about the location. Some of the few reasons location trumps over everything else are the living condition, environment, neighborhood, and amenities in the vicinity. People want to stay in a safe, secure and livable community. Even for property investors, investing in such neighborhood brings better returns on their investment.

Provide a map with the locator on the property you are offering. Users can quickly grasp where and what’s nearby. Or you can show street view of the property on the map so users can scroll and view the neighborhood environment.

real estate - location targeted mobile ad maps real estate - location targeted mobile ad maps streetview

Notice how all these are giving your users opportunities to interact with your ads. This is good. You can collect interaction data, what the industry call Secondary Actions or SAR (secondary action rate). SAR can help you understand your users’ behavior even more and as well as for future campaign optimization.

On price range factor, let’s say you need to sell a lot of properties or mixed housing properties with different price ranges. Promoting your properties to everyone with generic ads will be like throwing salt into the sea.

What you can do to avoid that is to
(1) segment your audience into categories, i.e. affordable, mid-to-high, and luxury
(2) create a theme for your campaign
(3) customize the message for different categories
(4) display the personalized ads to the segmented audience

Next thing your potential buyers look at is the product itself. And delivering products like a house in digital form is an exciting challenge for creativity. Imagine giving your target audience a virtual tour of your show unit, executed via an ad at that. Wouldn’t that be interesting?

You can provide a Virtual Open House where users can have a 360-degree view of the house. It’s highly interactive which gives an awesome ad experience to your target audience. Your brand affinity score will improve tremendously when you give exceptional ad experience.

Here’s an example of a video you can include in your mobile rich media ad.

Location Targeted Mobile Advertising Planning & Strategy

For property project managers, you can do drip ads campaign and create a buzz even before the launch of your project. To do that, firstly you will need to do two things, (1) know who you are targeting and where you can reach them, i.e. their browsing behavior, and (2) understand their buying journey.

real estate - location targeted mobile advertising

Based on the above buyer’s journey, you can execute your ads in phases to deliver the right message (creating values), at the right time (location wise) and right moment (of the buying journey).

Here’s an example of how you can strategize your ads according to the buyer’s journey. Roll out your ads in batches according to the time frame of their journey.

Awareness Phase: Like a teaser, the goal is to attract interest. Meaning, give them enough to want to find out more. A 3-min video ad works best.

Consideration Phase: You’ve already whet their appetite, now is the time to give them more to retain the interest. You have to give them more information about your property. Perhaps a virtual tour of the show unit on your ad can educate them on what’s they will be getting.

Decision Phase: This is the moment where they have seen multiple projects. They are evaluating which property to buy/rent/invest. You have to help them make the decision. It’s time to have a more personal touch with your Sales rep. Give them an easy call-for-booking feature on your ad, so they can make an appointment to check out the units and talk to your Sales. At the late stage of this phase, they might have already narrowed down their choices and contemplating some critical decision points. Throw in some time-frame rewards or value offer through your ad to urge them into converting, e.g. 0% interest if you book now.

When you roll out your ads, here are a few location-based mobile targeting strategies you can apply.

  • Place-based Targeting: A method usually coupled with the use of beacon technology to identify the users’ location by detecting users’ Bluetooth on smartphones so you can provide specific time-frame ads, especially during an event like a property roadshow.
  • Location Aware: A method that usually displays your ad timely when users are close to a particular location identified through GPS data (global positioning system).
  • Hyper-Contextual Targeting: A method that uses hyper-local data to deliver contextual messages that are meaningful to the audience. This method is usually used to drive purchase intent.
  • Geo-Fence: A method that creates a virtual fence through IP address, WiFi location or GPS data to target ads based on physical location or location of interest.
  • Geo-Conquesting: A method that applies GPS, IP address or WiFi location data to reach out to and engage target users when they are physically in or around your competitors’ area.

What else can you do to offer exceptional ad experience?

Book An Agent

There are a few ways you can let your target audience to book an agent to inquire about or check out the property. Let them make a call to an agent via your ad with just a tap-to-call. It’s instant and direct. You can arrange a launch party or real estate open house event. Then provide a tap-to-save-the-date on their calendar.

Third Party Testimonials

Peer reviews and testimonials are one critical factor for decision phase. Consumers today are highly dependent on what others think to help them make buying decisions. You can provide that by adding social media feeds on your ad. They can view what other says about your company, your project, and services.

Time-based Reward Points

Buying or investing in property involves many parties and financial obligations. To help them make the buying decisions without wasting precious time on worrying about percentages and additional charges. You can provide a limited offer of fees waiver or 0% interest and what not via your ad. To be entitled they have to claim using your ad within a stipulated period. This way you can track the effectiveness of your campaign and know your ROI.

Tips from Pro

For first time buyers, I’m sure there are a lot of worries on the process of getting a house—what to look for when house hunting, calculating the numbers for loan eligibility, understanding the expenses in a long run, etc. These worries are typically addressed in blogs with long write-ups and whatnot. To make your ad interesting and also to funnel your leads through your site, you can deliver short crisp advises, e.g. tips on your ad in perhaps a playbook or quiz style.

Neighborhood Data

To present neighborhood data on your ad, you can consider providing an interactive 3D map of the vicinity of the property. Using image hotspot feature, your target buyers can select and tap on the area of the map to find out more about the neighborhood.

Conclusion

These are just a few examples offered. With the advancement of technology, there are so many possibilities you can explore. You just have to be inventive in using available data sets, applying the ad technology creatively and utilizing the right ad targeting methods in the real estate industry.

Location targeted mobile advertising can bring enormous potential to your real estate business. Leave your comments below to share your ideas. You can also drop us an email at [email protected] if you’d like to explore your options with us.

Additional Resources:
What is O2O Marketing?
– Online-to-Offline (O2O) Strategies to Grow your Retail Business
– O2O Commerce: The Challenges of an Online-to_Offline Business

Alvin

Alvin is the Founder and CEO of MobileAds.com. He is a go-getter, and adventurous guy who believes in working smart to gain success in his business ventures and in life. He also founded RichMediaAds.com and MobileLanders.com.