Marketing UK Property to a European audience
In case you hadn’t noticed, the UK is now officially in recession. Thank God for the statisticians for sharing that one. Well whilst Brown’s economic miracle may have been toast for the great British Pound, it just might open up an opportunity for canny e-marketers.
If you’ve escaped the doom and gloom lately and headed off to the Alps, or for some other European mini-break, you’ve no doubt found the Pound filling a lot less of your wallet as it’s declined a staggering 20% against the Euro in the past 12 months.
Whilst we’re all reeling from costly holidays and pricey imports (are cucumbers really £1.30?), our European neighbours have gained a perfect opportunity to snap up British bargains, and what better offer is there than the unsold inventory of new homes right now?
According to the latest Halifax figures house prices have declined 16% in the last year, so a £300,000 property now stands on average at a little over £250k. To our European counterparts they would have been handing over a shade above EUR400,000 last year, compared to EUR270k now – a recession busting 32% discount! Now if that doesn’t spark ideas of a powerful marketing message you might as well close the doors now.
So how should you communicate effectively with our overseas investor friends? Well being an online specialist, naturally I am going to focus this article around the tweaks you need to make to your website, and running effective online marketing campaigns. We’ll start with making visitors feel at home…
Is your website ready to welcome an international audience? Two issues to address here, firstly making it easy for them to understand the prices. If you are not considering developing a separate microsite dedicated for visitors from that country, then how about an automatic exchange rate calculation and display the price in their local currency?
Yourcurrencyconverter.com cleverly detects where their computer is located via the computer’s unique "IP address", and unless they are being naughty and deliberately hiding their address it should be accurate. This mean they don’t even have to click a button to get local currency prices.
Yourcurrencyconverter.com claim this personalisation has produced increases in sales of up to 55% on one website. Now I don’t expect any house builder to be ramping up sales that easily, but nonetheless all web users want a smooth and painless experience (something which is often overlooked). Make it easy for them and you will see sales increase. Simple. And even as impressive is the price - around £70 per annum, plus the time to install it on your website which should be fairly minimal.
Second option is consider a landing page written in their native language. Again, detecting the visitor’s IP address you can display the page automatically when they arrive at the home page.
If you were really serious about targeting a specific country, then consider building a microsite written in their language displaying either all available properties, or at least a selection of the best investments (displayed in local currency of course). This microsite can also be optimised to appear in overseas search engine listings to help generate traffic.
A common theme in this article is personalisation, a big path the web is walking down. If you want to engage effectively with your audience then make sure you give the visitor easy access to relevant information, and as much as possible make them feel the content could have been uniquely for them.
After getting your content prepared, stage two is an online marketing campaign to generate traffic to the website or microsite.
A pay per click (PPC) campaign geo-targeted to the countries you want to target is a quick and effective way of reaching these investors, and only displaying the ads in the targeted location so as not to waste budget. However, don’t fall into the trap of simply translating your English campaign into a pigeon version of the foreign language. Consider localisation when you are building your campaigns, i.e. being translated by a native speaker who understands colloquialisms and helps avoid those ghastly (and costly) cultural mistakes.
Investors clicking on your PPC ads will of course be directed to the translated or currency converted pages that you’ve now built!
You may also pro-actively target overseas investors by renting targeted email lists through a broker or email marketing agency. Follow the usual best practice guidelines for email, i.e. ensure it is tested in the most popular email clients for that country, spam checked and size is minimised. And of course…remember localisation of the language!
There are other options to consider, such as search engine optimisation (though results could take a few months), and banner advertising, but hopefully I’ve given you enough to get the creative juices flowing.
Not even seasoned investors know how long house prices and the UK and worldwide economy will stay suppressed, but one thing’s for sure – there are always opportunities, both for buyer and seller, and here is one I suggest you take a closer look at.
Simon Melaniphy is Managing Director of Refreshed Media. We work with house builders including Taylor Wimpey, Crest Nicholson, McCarthy and Stone and Galliford Try. You can contact Simon with any questions relating to the article or call 01202 414101.
