KMC Expert Talks Ep. 01: Real Estate Marketing with Yves Luethi

Reaching your target audience and spreading word about your property is not always easy, especially in the very competitive real estate industry. What media should you use to communicate with your audience? How do you make sure that the right set of clients is listening to your message? Where do you start? In KMC Expert Talks' first episode, VP for Marketing Yves Luethi shares his tips on communicating with your target audience and generating leads through online and offline marketing.

Yves: Hello again! Welcome to today's discussion about real estate marketing.

First, what is real estate marketing all about? What separates it from traditional marketing? Real estate marketing is actually similar to marketing in different industries. It involves segmenting the target market, planning, and use of media, different channels. For example, residential services is more for mass market; if you talk about tenant representation that would be more on the corporate side so you'd be dealing with corporations, multinationals, small and medium enterprises. If it is investments, it could be both: individuals or institutional investors, so a different kind of approach will be used to execute. With all these segments in mind, you have the different campaigns for each of those segments, which will help you try to get more clients onboard or generate leads.

So, online marketing will be a very strong component of our activities. We use different kinds of online marketing, one is called search engine optimization, blogging, social media component with Facebook, Twitter and also LinkedIn. When it comes to the offline segment or activities, we have on-the spot marketing where you have promotion teams that pass flyers out to potential buyers or tenants. It's often (done) in malls and high-frequent places.

When it comes to corporate campaigns, we have of course, PR or Public Relations. (It) is very popular because you would want to build up your reputation through credible sources like newspapers. Newspapers are kind of online and offline. In addition, PR also involves (holding) press conferences where we let our experts talk (and share their knowledge) about certain topic matters. And lastly, to reach investors of course, we have our network. Currently, the Philippines is in a very positive macro-environment, so we are looking into a lot of foreign investors which are eyeing the Philippines for the high yields--we leverage on our network (to reach them).

Last minute tips: 

If you are from a different industry, one thing you need to consider of course, or the three tips I would like to give you in terms of real estate marketing is (actually, they are not much different from marketing in other industries):

One point definitely is (to) be social. Meaning, not just in terms of residential (market), but also commercial (market). If you look at Twitter, you have some of the corporate real estate guys which has thousands of followers so they continuously or daily update their profiles. Obviously they generate a lot of leads out of that. Plus of course, with our smartphones nowadays, you can basically get in touch with your followers, with your Facebook page, with your LinkedIn network, so it's really one of the more important factors.

Number two, I think online is so important that (having) a website which is informative, which is basically eye-catching is really important--it has to be found as well. Your website is actually your business card on an online scale, so that's why it's really important to maintain it, update it, and make sure it always follows the latest trends.

Then, last but not the least is your network. Take care of your network. Sometimes, you meet people and you probably don't get business out of it on day one, but you will get business in like three years, four years down the road. But during that period, you need to nurture that--you need to maintain relationships, even if it's as simple as showing up, bringing them coffee, etc.

That's basically my top 3 tips in terms of real estate marketing. I'm looking forward to our next session with one of our real estate professionals who will explain more about the business. Thank you.