Mikhail Kelim: Promotion of a company selling overseas property on the Russian market, considering Russian property buyers' specifics (transcript of a report)

At the moment, advertising methods quite often cannot answer the market conditions, which have changed due to the crisis, providing the results that are not relevant to the funds spent on the campaign. On the INFOREAL Congress, Mikhail Kelim, co-chairman of the Forum Organizing Committee, head of the “Prian.ru – International Property” web portal, has reported on how to improve the effectiveness of overseas property advertising.

Certain agencies in Russia are able to provide high quality advertising services, but they can be counted on the fingers of one hand. The fact is that, among the advertisers, there are virtually no professionals specifically focused on promoting overseas property. All agencies deal with real estate, cars, candies and so on: they have a wide profile, respectively, are unable to understand the specifics of your business.

In order to provide you with the most effective advertising services, the agency should know the competitive advantages of your company, its history, etc., as well as they must have an idea of the country where you offer property. Understand its specificity, competitive advantages, the type of offered properties, price ranges, location, term of exposition, etc. Collecting such information is a long and detailed work, and almost no advertising agencies can perform such a task. Agency’s staff should meet you and spend a few hours discussing the specifics of your business; in fact, no one understands your product better than you do. In general, the effect of the campaign may be split on two parts: 50% depend on the advertising position and 50% personally on you, on your understanding of the product and the customer.


What determines the success of advertising campaign

The first word that everybody thinks of is “the budget”. But at the moment it's not quite true. Currently there are three main components needed for an advertising campaign to be a success:

1) knowledge of technology;
2) efforts that you are ready to invest in the campaign;
3) budget.

“Budget” was placed on the third line intentionally. When there are three thousand companies advertising on one market and many have large budgets it becomes meaningless to compete barely with money. One possible solution to this problem is the customization of advertizing campaign.


Knowledge of technologies and invested efforts

If the advertising campaign is carried out by template, you simply spend your money on nothing. When working standard, you can spend dozens thousand Euros and receive no results. Therefore, technology and efforts are at the forefront.

Ad campaign should be planed in detail. Once you've spent a few hours to identify the competitive advantages and benefits of your properties, it is necessary to understand the specifics of a client, analyze all available media, compare the different sources and choose the most suitable one. Then you need to choose the specific types of advertising that are most suitable for your task, articulate the goals of your campaign and only after that, start the promotion.

Preparation takes a tremendous amount of time, but it is simply necessary if you want your money to work. Most people start thinking about advertising only when they order a specific position. You should not forget that a sufficient number of promotional tools, whether online or even radio, allow you to alter your campaign even after you've placed the ad: you launch a campaign, receive certain effect and after that you can make some adjustments. However, very few people use such possibility.

After launching the campaign, you still need to apply exactly the same amount of efforts, than before its beginning. It is necessary to constantly monitor the advertising campaign, understand the effectiveness of implemented methods, and make the appropriate changes.

A very frequent case: a company buys a banner, for example, on Prian.ru. A Banner costs 3 thousand euro, for this, on an individual basis, a client receives some additional advertising opportunities, such as property listing.

However, these opportunities are most commonly not used, because the company has its own view on an advertising campaign and, of course, frequently the client has no free time or is simply lazy. Often the clients’ psychology goes like this: I paid money - bought a banner – the effect must come. A person simply prefers not to notice the fact that he/she received a bonus for purchase of this banner, and in complex they would give a much greater effect than a banner alone.


Budget

The crisis has forced many, even successful, companies to reconsider their expenses and understand that money should be spent wisely. Unfortunately, the optimization of the advertising budget is often reduced to sweeping aside either the most expensive or the cheapest means of promotion. However, the main criteria that should guide the optimization of advertising expenses, is not the cost, but the price-to-efficiency ratio.


Goals of ad campaigns

Frequently, clients call our office and say: “Guys, we want an exhibition” or “We want ad”. When asked “Why?” the first and most common answer would be “We want sales”. However, you should clearly differentiate the goals of the campaign, which are:

1. Sell a specific property. Suppose you have a luxury property unit and you need to sell it. Accordingly, the entire advertising campaign should be focused on the sale of this particular property.
2. Sell a specific unit as soon as possible. Such a goal implies a completely different ad campaign.
3. Sell any property from your assortment.
4. Sell a service. This goal needs an absolutely different approach. Certain companies work not on the basis of property units listed in their database, but they rather select the offers on the market. That is, they need to advertise the service, their brand, and its position on the market.
5. Create or strengthen the brand of the company. Few do it, but if you are pursuing this goal, you need exclusive advertising methods.
6. Conduct a market research. An ad campaign is launched in order to understand if a particular product or service is interesting to the buyer or not. Builders often do such thing: start advertising properties which are on the project stage, and analyze the number of calls - identify, whether their offer is demanded by potential buyers.
7. Create a representation of the company in the information space. This is a small, but important goal. Example: you are working through “word of mouth advertising” and you’re satisfied with the way your business goes, but you began noticing that the clients addressing you are often surprised that you have no advertising; you do not take part in the exhibitions, are not represented in the Web. At the moment, the absence of advertising has just become a bad taste. In order to create a representation of the company in the information space, again an entirely different ad campaign is needed.

There is also another goal, which is actually false. It’s commonly pursued by the managers of advertising departments or heads of advertising agencies. The goal is: growth of technical indicators. This is most clearly observed on example of internet portals, when they seek to increase the visiting statistics, the number of calls, etc. But you should not forget that any technical indicator should have a purpose directly related to the outcome. You have to understand the affect it has on your business.

Compliance with the criteria of a successful advertising campaign stated in the beginning of the report will be enough to ensure that 90% companies working on Russian market would increase the effect of their advertising campaigns.

Author: Mikhail Kelim