Marketing automation is everywhere. As more and more businesses move towards digital transformation, there’s an inevitable push toward automating time consuming processes, and scaling the tactics that generate revenue. In the past, marketing has been seen as totally separate from sales, but today, digital media has brought the two teams together, aligning the sales and marketing cycle from brand awareness to closing a deal. At Elegran, closing this loop has allowed us to scale a real estate business more like a tech company, and enabled some great wins for our sales team.

Learning to Market at Scale

Marketing automation has closed the loop in the consumer lifecycle, allowing our automated processes to streamline the time consuming administrative tasks our sales and marketing teams used to have to manage manually, and generating the intelligence to let ROI drive business decisions.

At Elegran, we built a complex, multi-channel marketing strategy covering search engine optimization, search engine advertising, display and re-marketing, inbound, content and social media marketing, email and many, many more media channels… As a result, we had a large database of leads to feed our sales team, but lacked the high level insight to follow every prospect all the way through the sales funnel.

While “automation” and “scalability” are two of the biggest buzzwords heard around our management team, real estate has typically not been a scalable business model. Overhead always limits expansion, as managing a team of independent contractors becomes increasingly difficult with a larger team.

Leveraging Marketing Automation to Streamline Processes

Once we had a marketing automation platform in place, we saw that building an organizational data architecture would provide the foundation for growth and scalability, and empower both our sales and marketing teams. To create this structure, we dove into the entire consumer journey of a client, from their first exposure to our brand as a prospect, to the needs of a long term client working on a repeat deal, and every potential step in between.

This meant thinking about real estate as a lead ecosystem, with a continuous churn to understand where the bulk of our clientele was at every potential step in the purchasing process. Our consumer research resulted in four categories: Awareness, Follow Up, Nurture and Re-Engagement. Each stage was further organized by lead type (Landlords, Sellers, Buyers, Renters, Brokers), as well as micro-segmented by buying criteria, such as price point, neighborhood or amenity.

End Result: Success!

This segmentation then allowed our marketing team to create hyper-targeted drip campaigns, with messaging catered to the lead type, and serve dynamic content to consumers based on their buying criteria. For example, a buyer in Chelsea in Manhattan might receive an entirely different email than a renter looking in Midtown… automatically.

Thanks to these drip campaigns, prospects that would have been discarded or overlooked last year were categorized, then converted into luxury real estate clients, and our business has grown rapidly as a result.