It is very interesting to see how the new trends are taking over the traditional ways of doing business. It is a fact that gone are those days when the customers used to completely rely on the sales guidance and not look at the bigger picture of what the product and the brand is all about. Every sector has seen a radical shift and now days the products are not selling but the offers, schemes and the payment plans are selling. Be in real estate or automobile; a soap or an aircraft; the sales are now dependent on how the product is marketed or highlighted. For Real Estate professionals, marketing is simply obtaining possible leads that might result in even bigger growth in this field. A simple example of this is the fact that Real Estate companies are investing heavily in advertising in Real Estate magazines, which are niche magazines strictly dedicated to issues about the sale of properties. The reason being, they are aware of the fact that the majority of those who read the magazine are either other professionals in the same industry or consumers looking for great deals. It is about attracting and engaging at first through marketing and then the conversions takes place. 

Today the end user has become smart and self aware.  Now the product as a whole straight from the manufacturer/wholesaler is available to the user at such margins that it eats up the breathing room for the ones who used to prevail between the manufacturers and the end-user. Looking at this, the competition in market has also gone so high that the sales people now find it difficult to even compare their products to the existing big whales in the market. This is where the marketing steps in as a support system and gives them the leverage of flaunting their products based on showing them the things which are not real in the market. The business now lies in attracting and servicing the customer requirements by using the marketing strategies. Be it highlighting the product as the best available in the market or the payment schemes attached to the same or the after sale services available to the client; it’s the marketing team that comes up with the avenues of revenue generation. In real estate, marketing does the job of building channels to get new sources of leads. Marketing not only helps you in keeping your current connections close so that they do business with you, but also help you build ways to make new connections for fetching more business. Real Estate marketing is an art of changing behavior so that people do business with you. In fact, Real Estate professionals survive based on ‘name recognition’. People do not want to do business with someone they have never heard of.

Talking about the current scenario, real estate companies are now focusing on how the qualities of their product can highlighted in the market to the best of their capacity so that the end user can reach to their sales team and do business. As per a lot of researches done in the past, the companies have really cut down on FOS budgets. They have eventually increased their marketing budgets so that the natural market where the actual need of the product prevails can be absorbed. The balance market where the end user is not sure about buying the product is attracted using various marketing strategies. Keeping the product and the brand in mind, marketing strategies like relationship marketing, mass marketing, PR marketing, online marketing, offline marketing, event marketing , niche marketing, social media marketing etc are used to make the product & brand awareness reach the targeted customers. To add to it, the marketing is no longer a desk job. Today more than the sales people, marketing teams are available on the streets doing promotional activities and using all the kind of support tools required to boost the sales of their product. So this clearly shows how the marketing domain has become more powerful and is capitalizing on the approved budgets to make sure the companies are getting the most out of it. Marketing has become such an influential tool that the companies are now approaching and tying up with third parties for their brand building activities. Even if we look at some major companies and their P&L’s or their business evaluation charts based on market analysis ; marketing domain is now more target oriented than the sales domain which earlier used to be under the pressure of the profit making targets.

We would here like to share a very simple and one of the most talked about example of our Prime Minister. Look at how he is using the power of marketing and self-promotion as a tool to attract foreign investors and companies to look at India as an upcoming economy using the avenues like Make in India, Skilled India, Housing for All etc. Why is Mr. Modi travelling the entire world and promoting India in general rather than staying back in the country and creating the avenues for the existing unemployed mass of the country? The reason is that rather than pushing the skilled India or increasing the eligible man power as a country; he first wants to create the avenues for such manpower. First the marketing strategies create the base and avenues for business and then the manpower required to cater those needs are evaluated whereas earlier we used to first focus on the manpower and then the marketing team was used to service them. As Steve Jobs used to say, “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them”; Real Estate marketing is now helping customers to buy their dream home.