Print, outdoor to gain from realty sector this year but digital will take lion's share, says Snehil Gautam of Housing.com

Elara Technologies, the parent company of Housing.com, PropTiger.com and Makaan.com, will divide its media spend equally on digital and TV to drive more traffic to its platform, along with gaining more brand awareness. 

“We have two major objectives from the strategy point of view — brand awareness and acquiring heightened traffic for platform so that our sellers get their share of ROI. Our aim is to advertise where our core audience is,” said Snehil Gautam, Head of Growth and Marketing, Housing.com, PropTiger.com and Makaan.com. 

The move to run digital and TV campaigns during IPL helped the platform in leveraging the advantage of highest viewership. Although, for the last quarter of 2020, it wasn’t inclined on moving to TV.

“Looking at the present market trends, we are planning to alter our media mix for 2021 by introducing TV campaigns, supported by digital. Real estate is not a push product, so we execute digital campaigns throughout the year and come to TV for events with high viewership,” he added.

Gautam said a good number of projects being launched in the real estate sector will lead to an increase in outdoor and print advertisements. However, he added, majority of the spend from the developers will go to digital channels.

Sharing his growth plans for non-metro regions, Gautam said, “There is a new audience segment that is going online. Their preferred channel for communication is WhatsApp, they prefer content in their native languages and they prefer videos instead of long written content. So everyone, including our agency partners, will have to change and adapt from the existing set of norms."

Earlier, real estate project marketing was one-sided in nature but now it has transformed into engagement and personal connect mode via webinars and virtual tours.

Gautam said advertisers should move from transactional communication to more information and engagement-led advertising.

“The utility of Interactive marketing campaigns is the best learning from the Covid-19 crisis. The result-oriented impact and its capability to hit the right spot much faster make it extremely helpful for the users,” he added.

He mentioned how the frequency of engaging with consumers on digital channels is on the rise for real estate players. Housing.com launched an initiative called ‘Housing Live’ — an online platform — where the owner can directly connect with the buyers or tenants to show them around their houses.

As it aims to become the number one real estate player in the next three years in terms of brand, traffic and business, Gautam said it already is the fastest-growing platform and now plans to grow across India and not get limited to tier I cities.

In the pandemic, it almost doubled its traffic from tier II and III cities, while the spike from tier I cities was just 40%. Due to these rapid and significant changes, he said that it is important to invest in market and consumer research and while this is a very simple strategy but mostly ignored.

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