Real estate professionals now have a wide variety of options they can add to their arsenal of marketing tools, and location targeting has been a rising trend for a while now.
QR Code
We’ve seen tools like the QR code be leveraged by agents to store large amounts of information and share that information effortlessly. When someone scans a QR code with their smartphone, they’re linked to pre-set content information on the internet. Agents insert QR codes on business cards, direct mail and flyers so that potential clients can access information on their websites or visit their social media accounts.
Geolocation
Now, agents are also going hyperlocal. It’s a way for agents to maintain closer relationships with property owners and focus on local property marketing. Geolocation tech highlights physical location of listings and can supply incredible metadata - topography information, soil quality, region maps, building data, etc so that agents who access this information have all the more to work with when it comes to assessing property value. One widespread example of this kind of technology being implemented is the Google Maps Platform, which reportedly comes with many advantages:
- Increased agent productivity by saving them time, money and resources
- Keeps agent informed with valuable business and investment data
- Equips agent with refined data that makes it possible to make better client-property matches according to customer preferences
There are more and more ways of geotargeting, including on-premise mobile location targeting, (where an agent can find out whether a potential client is heading towards, away or is even inside a particular listing, and can target appropriate promotions accordingly), and geofencing, (which is proximity targeting, showing particular promotions to nearby customers more generally).
Online and Offline Behaviour Tracking
Some agents are turning towards software tech that deals with offline visitation behaviour, where a database of location-based audience behaviour is built as a kind of ‘digital map’. It means the agents only spend ad marketing dollars on the most relevant audiences within a city or town - not targeting the whole area.
Location targeting can be implemented in simpler ways too, helping with overall marketing optimization, such as:
- Tracking verified walk-ins of a particular location so as to track activity and improve lead generation
- Setting up a mobile-optimized landing page where all kinds of CTAs are being tracked, from mobile click to calls, to click for map directions, and website click-throughs are all recorded and analyzed to help increase user engagement.
Considering that in the last few years, “near me” searches have increased 500% according to Think with Google, it’s easy to see why location has so much to do with relevance and why it’s so effective in boosting marketing campaigns, (up to 80%, according to some reports).
According to recent Martech Series polls, between 70-85% of respondents (across multiple industries) found a ‘strong and increasing lift and improved ROI on location data-based marketing and advertising campaigns’, and agreed that ‘geo-marketing is the next-big-thing after automation and AI-driven eCommerce’. The study also concluded that some of the most important features that data location provides are:
- Higher quality of data and accuracy
- Location data capabilities at scale
- Geo-marketing working alongside other tech advancements
While this has been a small peek into the otherwise ever-growing world of location targeting, it opens up the discussion as to the new stretch of land that agents can take relevance and personalization to, not only in better understanding prospect visitation behaviour, but reallocating time, money and resources with much more efficiency, especially when it comes to ad and marketing campaigns.
