Top Heads Brainstorm Marketing Strategies

After the break of almost a month, ICCPL and Realty & More were back on August 14 with the 11^th edition of their Realty Web series. With the unlock process gradually gaining momentum in the entire country, the topic chosen for discussion was ‘Media and Marketing Strategies post-COVID-19’. Marketing and communications heads of top realty firms took part in the webinar which was also joined in by ICCPL Founder Dushyant Sinha and anchored, as always, by Realty & More Editor Palash Roy.

Kicking off the discussion, Siddhartha Sood- Head, Marketing & Corporate Communications, Gaurs Group, said, “We are going bullish on digital a lot and we are also exploring new technologies. He said his company was also exploring OTT, to see how to get on to that. “It’s very cost-effective. A lot of video content needs to be generated. So that is the one way ahead”, he said.

According to Divya Puri, Vice-President, Corporate Communications, DLF Limited, very important learning that we all got from the pandemic outbreak is that “your existing customer is your biggest endorser of the brand”. There is no better medium, he said, than to “get an endorsement from your existing customer on what he is experiencing in any of the properties that you have”.

Kunal Behrani, V-P, Sales & Marketing, Unity Group, said whereas everything was creative earlier, now everything has become video. “Itna lockdown mein time mila hai ki hum log sirf video, video aur video hi dekhte ja rahe hain,” he said. One more thing which has changed overall, according to him, is that “we are now even looking at the short-term goals.”

Behrani said earlier if there were 100 walk-ins, and suppose there were four to five conversions, now there are 12-15 converts from 100 walk-ins. So that is the kind of concentration which has happened, he said. “I think the number of walk-ins overall, of course, has gone down. It has not gone up, but the number of conversions which is happening due to those walk-ins has actually gone up”, he emphasized.

Talking on similar lines, Rakhi Sharma-VP- Digital Marketing, Bhutani Infra, said, “This time I’m getting more serious buyers. These buyers know what they want to buy, they are very sure of their purchase. Only then they are approaching us.”

Virtually endorsing the earlier two speakers, Komal Verma, Marketing Head of Sunworld Residency, said, “We get digitally-filtered end-users, leads which are genuine. Serious buyers, end-users, basically! We are getting that kind of response. And it is good, as it saves a lot of time, theirs and ours too.”

Putting a specific query to Jayanta Barua, Head of MarCom at Signature Global, who is primarily dealing with affordable category with more volumes and less margins, Roy asked: “How do you manage to afford Vidya Balan like film stars? To this Barua replied, “We are having approximately 1 percent of the budget of the total sales revenue which we keep for our affordable products. So my budget is 1 percent and we are keeping a paisa on 50 paise for our corporate activities. So when you talk about any shows, webinars, doing exhibitions, sponsoring events to make your chairman a voice, for all these things we are having around 50-75 paisa kept for the same. We do not go overboard than 2 pc. So this is like the bottom air which we normally keep. Two percent is on the highest side.”

Amit Arora, Group Head of Corporate Communications & Public Relations, Housing. com, said, “Nowadays all the builders are seeing is that even though the walk-ins are less, the conversion rate has gone high. That is because of the reason that all the search and discovery of a property has gone online. As per our understanding of the market, there is 90 percent of searches and discoveries in today’s time are happening online.”