When your planned community's marketing strategies don't resonate with your ideal target market, that dissonance costs your company money. Either fewer ideal buyers are attracted to the homes and communities you're advertising (leading to a prolonged process), or the ads resonate well with a slightly misaligned group (meaning some of the costly finishes and designs in the community will have a poor ROI).
Both of these circumstances hurt your company's bottom line throughout the project and can even lead to fewer long-term profits over the community's first and second generation. Luxury real estate ads that don't reach the right market can even hurt themselves during the course of the campaign, as explained by Forbes Councils Member Sam Mehrbod:
"Bad targeting will not only result in your ads being disapproved, but it also will heavily impair their reach and cost per click. Believe it or not, many ads fail in this way."
That's disastrous from the first day of your marketing campaigns, and a misstep at the start is hard to recover from. In this article, we'll discuss how to find the right target market for your next planned community and how to craft luxury real estate ads with the best chance of engaging them.
A buyer persona is a detailed profile with information about your ideal buyer's demographics and preferences. When you know who your brand is for and whom your company is specifically serving, you can better create services and planned communities that address their needs and wants.
While buyer personas are crucial during the initial community planning stages, they're even more instrumental when your team is creating marketing strategies. The more details you have about whom you're trying to engage — their family unit makeup, their needs and desires in a neighborhood and included amenities, their hobbies, and beyond — the better you can craft content that both memorably and substantively answers their questions.
Detailed personas also let you know where and how to place your luxury real estate ads. Different buyer groups access different types of media consumption, spend their time on different websites, and listen to different sources of media. When you know where your audience spends their time, how they do real estate research, and what types of media hold their attention, you can speak directly to them on the best possible platform.
When your marketing team has fully fleshed out buyer personas to work with, they can sympathetically create campaigns that address unique real estate pain points or questions these luxury buyers have.
Individual personas, which are made up of characters that possess specific characteristics, are better than lists of general specifics because you can pinpoint specific audiences, and the resulting ads are more personable.
Luxury real estate, more than any other real estate market, needs robust buyer personas with exact details. Slight differences in preferences, styles, and other considerations can make the difference between a quick conversion and a missed mark. Because homes in planned communities are such a substantial purchase, it's not enough for your community to be nearly perfect — it needs to be a perfect fit.
Buyer personas will help you formulate the messaging of your luxury real estate ads. But, provided they're detailed enough, the profiles will also guide you on what types of ads to focus on and where to place them. Three of the most popular types of luxury real estate ads are digital display ads, paid search, and paid social.
Display ads are a type of pay-per-click (PPC) ad that appears on the web pages your target market frequents. While these ads may interrupt a user's experience or linger on the periphery of their focus, they are an excellent choice for building brand recognition. You can create text-based or (more ideally) image- and video-based display ads and place them where your target market prefers to visit.
Paid search ads are sponsored results that appear when users type queries into search engines. These ads rise to the top of the search results page so your target market can immediately see your brand and your offer. Paid search ads are often combined with content marketing strategies that draw in organic traffic, too. Between high-ranking content and paid search ads, your community project can fill up the first page of results so your target market can easily find you and understand your community's value.
Paid social campaigns reach likely audiences through a combination of your preferred demographic information and the platform's algorithm. These ads are social media posts with images and videos that integrate with your audience's feeds so they can see appealing tours and images of your constructions.
Luxury real estate ads need to have carefully designed content to appeal to your audiences. Two of the most significant elements are the images and the language.
The images used for any real estate marketing can make or break the sale. It's essential that all the images in your campaigns have a high production value, show each space in the most appealing light, and have vibrant colors that showcase the quality of construction.
Pixelated, blurry, or substandardly lit spaces — like those on general real estate listings — won't make your community feel luxurious, or worthy of the high-end price. So invest in professional photography to take images of staged homes, community spaces with smiling faces, and crystal-clear close-ups of amenities.
Choose precise, appealing, and descriptive words for all of your content. While you don't necessarily want to be formal or overly wordy, select words that both fit your target market's searches and which convey the right tone.
Descriptions like "lush finishes" and "grand rooms" give your ads a certain emotion; additional descriptions with specific features are just as crucial. We recommend carefully building a library of language that you'll want to use for the visible ad text and language to use for image alt-text, keywords that match with your paid ads, and other technical elements.
Constructing your ad campaigns is just as important as constructing the community itself. With the proper research and prep work, you can see a higher return on investment for every ad campaign and reach your target market faster. Choose Milesbrand as your partner for creating the right branding and luxury real estate ads to make your project a success.
Contact us today to learn more about how we can partner with you to create successful real estate ads for your homes and communities.