Real estate marketing, sales, and online lead generation are constantly evolving. The Romanian real estate market is highly dynamic, but despite all the changes, there are a few tactics and tools you can use to make sure your properties attract as many potential clients as possible.
As a developer or real estate agent, you've probably felt at least once the need to diversify your efforts when it comes to promoting and selling your properties.
Over the past 4-5 years, advertising platforms have changed, many of them no longer work the way they used to, and your results most likely aren't as strong as they once were.
We've prepared a comprehensive real estate marketing guide for 2025 below, designed to help you with your promotion and lead generation efforts and to put your real estate brand top of mind for as many people as possible.
What You'll Learn in This Article
1. Who This Real Estate Marketing Guide Is For
If you're a real estate developer or work in the industry as an agent or broker, this guide is for you.
You'll discover strategies and tips for promoting residential developments and properties and attracting more potential clients in 2023.
In this guide, you'll find information about:
- how to start with a real estate market analysis
- how to identify the target audience for your properties
- how to set marketing objectives
- how to choose the right marketing channels to achieve your goals
We'll also walk you through the benefits of online and offline marketing, as well as ways to leverage public relations to build your brand and attract clients.
We hope you'll find our real estate marketing guide useful, and we wish you success in 2023!
2. Building Your Marketing Strategy
A real estate marketing strategy is essential for promoting and selling properties. More often than not, a well-crafted strategy can make the difference between selling units in under a year or stretching the process out over a much longer period.
Here are some key steps for developing an effective real estate marketing strategy:
1. Market and area analysis: Before you start promoting properties, it's important to have a deep understanding of the market and the area where they will be built. This includes researching prices of similar properties, demand for certain types of properties, market trends, and the buying preferences of people in the area.
If people in the area where you're building a new residential development are looking for low or mid-range apartments, developing an ultra-high-end project could be a mistake.
That doesn't mean those properties won't sell, but it will require a much larger investment in marketing to attract new clients.
2. Identifying your target audience: Once you've analyzed the market, you need to identify the target audience for your properties. This can include factors such as age, income, interests, and location.
The more detailed this information is, the easier it will be to choose the right channels to reach your target audience.
3. Setting marketing and sales objectives: After identifying your target audience, you need to set your marketing objectives. These could include attracting a certain number of potential clients or selling a specific number of properties within a given timeframe.
4. Choosing the right marketing channels: Once you've established your marketing objectives, you need to decide how to achieve them through the right marketing channels. These can include online marketing, offline marketing, or PR efforts.
5. Creating a marketing plan: After deciding on the right marketing channels, you need to create a detailed marketing plan.
This should include a budget, a marketing calendar, a list of specific actions, and how all of these will be used to generate the number of clients you need.
3. Online Marketing
In recent years, online marketing has been the most effective method for attracting new clients to real estate properties.
The vast majority of real estate projects managed by us at ADACITY have been sold with over 70% of leads coming exclusively from online advertising channels.
Here are some important steps you should follow to ensure your properties get the exposure they need to sell.
1. Building a Website
It's the best place to build and promote a residential brand. Use your website to showcase your residential development in the best possible light and to communicate the message and identity of the brand you're building.
It allows you to provide detailed information about properties, such as photos, descriptions, prices, maps, or a list of finishes and amenities. This can make the search process much easier and faster for potential clients and will help qualify them much more effectively.
How Do I Choose the Right Platform for Building My Website?
We get this question very often from clients and partners. In most cases, when dealing with residential developments, individual luxury properties, and presentation websites in general, our recommendation is to use an existing CMS. Webflow, WordPress, or any other CMS will make the setup and ongoing management much easier.
Today's CMS platforms are so advanced and well-built that you'll be able to achieve 99% of what you want by using them alongside a custom front-end tailored to your brand, without needing a website with a custom backend.
2. Using Real Estate Listing Platforms
Promoting a residential development through real estate platforms is still a solid way to gain exposure and attract potential clients, even though their effectiveness has declined recently.
The right real estate marketing mix should also include these types of platforms to ensure maximum visibility for your properties.
Platforms such as Imobiliare.ro, Storia, and OLX also offer property promotion options, sponsored listings (Top Listing, Silver, Gold), and accounts for real estate developers or residential developments.
Use real estate listing platforms to post property listings, making sure to include detailed information and quality photos. This will help potential clients get a clearer picture of the residential development and decide whether they might be interested in learning more.
3. Creating Relevant Social Media Content
Using social media (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok) to create interesting and relevant content can help draw attention to the residential brand you're building and grow a following of people interested in the available properties.
Generally speaking, organic content posting doesn't directly generate a lot of leads, but the main benefit is building trust among potential clients in the residential brand, informing them, and convincing them (over time) that the properties they're interested in are the right fit for them.
There are many types of social media posts you can use to promote a residential development. Here are a few examples:
- Property photos and videos: Posting photos and videos showcasing the properties in your development can help potential clients get a clearer idea of what you have to offer.
- Home design and decoration tips: Posting home design and decoration tips can be an excellent way to draw attention to your residential development and build a following of people interested in what you have to offer.
- Special offers and contests: Posting special offers or contests can be an effective way to draw attention to your properties and attract potential clients.
- Development updates: Posting updates about the development, such as new amenities, upcoming events, and construction progress, can help maintain interest among potential clients and encourage online conversations about the project.
- Content relevant to your target audience: Posting content relevant to your target audience, such as articles about real estate trends or home buying tips, can help build a following of people interested in what you have to offer.
4. Paid Campaigns for Lead Generation
An important part of the real estate marketing mix is paid campaigns. These will generate a large portion of the leads needed to sell the residential project and will help expose your brand to the widest possible audience.
The most commonly used platforms are Facebook / Instagram Ads, Google Ads, and more recently, TikTok Ads. There are some differences between these platforms, and understanding them is necessary to use them effectively.
Real estate campaigns on Facebook Ads & TikTok will be primarily directed at well-defined audiences set during campaign configuration. Defining your ideal client profile is an important step before setting up campaigns, as you'll need to define interests or other demographic characteristics of the users you want to show your ads to.
For a solid foundation in running Facebook Ads campaigns, we recommend the course below. It's 6.5 hours long, but once you complete it, you'll have the groundwork for setting up and managing Facebook campaigns.
Google Ads Search campaigns are based on user searches on the Google search engine and are displayed based on well-defined keywords.
The right mix of budget, targeting, and campaign types across all these platforms varies depending on location, project specifics, and audience, and must be constantly adapted to meet your ultimate sales objectives.
Keep in mind that in 2022, Facebook made significant changes to its Ads platform. For all ads promoting real estate properties, the available targeting methods and interests have been severely limited. However, this doesn't mean they'll no longer be effective for your promotions.
5. Email Marketing
For long-term residential projects, a highly valuable channel in the overall real estate marketing mix is email marketing. Over time, building a database of past and potential clients can lead to much faster property sales, as there will be clients from previous projects who want to purchase apartments as investments. And what better place to do so than in the projects of a brand they've already been satisfied with in the past.
Among the other benefits of email communication:
- A much higher open/view rate for all announcements about current or future projects compared to organic social media posts.
- If one of the social platforms you use experiences issues, your database can easily be converted into followers on other channels or platforms.
- Using your existing or potential client database to promote contests and referral rewards.
- Using your database to train advertising platform algorithms (retargeting, lookalike audiences, etc.)
4. Traditional Real Estate Marketing & PR
1. Outdoor Advertising
Outdoor advertising can be an effective way to draw attention to a brand or residential development. When used correctly, it can bring qualified clients from both your target areas of interest and adjacent zones or even other cities. Here are a few things to keep in mind when investing in outdoor advertising.
a. Choose the right locations
Display outdoor banners in places where your target audience spends time or in the area of the residential development (more often than not, the people best suited for moving into a new apartment in a given area are the ones who already live there). For residential developments in tourist areas (the Black Sea coast or mountain resorts in Romania), using billboards near highways can have a positive impact on promotion.
b. Use quality images
Make sure your outdoor advertising features quality images that present the residential development in a positive light. Beautiful visuals can capture attention and help potential clients form a clearer picture of what the properties in the development have to offer.
c. Write short and concise messages
Outdoor advertising needs to be easy to understand and grab attention quickly. Use short, concise messages that briefly convey essential information about the properties and their benefits, and encourage potential clients to get in touch with the sales team.
d. Create banners with eye-catching design
Just like in the online space, outdoor advertising needs to capture attention in the shortest time possible. People are usually heading to a specific destination with their attention on something else entirely. Grab their attention with colors that contrast with the surroundings, large fonts, and designs that are easy to spot from a distance.
5. Track your results
Use different phone numbers for each banner through a PBX system, and even different QR codes or links. This way, you'll be able to track the performance of each banner and focus your marketing budgets where they actually deliver results.
2. Organizing Events and Open Houses
Once the homes are completed, organizing open house-style events to showcase them can be an excellent way to attract potential clients.
Leverage your existing community and encourage those who are already part of it to invite their friends, relatives, or acquaintances to these events. You'll find that if they're looking for a new home, it will be much easier to convince them to move somewhere where people they know already live.
For new residential developments, organizing a launch event for each project will help boost exposure both online and in the press, driving increased brand awareness.
3. PR and Influencer Collaborations
Press releases, maintaining strong relationships with journalists, and influencer collaborations can be effective ways to promote real estate projects. Here are the first steps to use them as efficiently as possible:
1. Identify the right influencers and journalists
Look for influencers and journalists who are relevant to the target audience of your residential project and who have an engaged following. For example, if the apartments are primarily targeted at families with children, you can look for influencers who focus on parenting.
Reach out to the right influencers and propose a collaboration. Give them access to the finished homes so they can showcase them to their followers, or run campaigns with discounts and giveaways to draw attention to the project.
2. Create a PR plan
The main purpose of this plan is to attract media attention to the residential project. It can include press releases, conferences, or other PR events.
By doing this every few months, there will always be sufficient exposure for the residential brand, ensuring a steady flow of qualified clients (depending on market conditions).
5. Client Management and Relationship Building
1. Building a loyalty program
Growing a residential brand is a long-term endeavor. The same goes for building a community of people who support that brand and the products it delivers.
Implementing a client loyalty program for future projects from the very beginning can offer significant long-term advantages, including making it much easier to sell properties.
Here are some tips for implementing it as effectively as possible:
- Create a list of benefits offered to clients. Whether you offer discounts or special deals on properties in the residential development, the chance to buy properties during the pre-sale phase of future developments, or material rewards (fitted kitchens, electronics, or appliances), these need to be well-known within the community.
- Decide how clients can earn rewards. Maybe you want to offer prizes for each property purchase or for referrals to other potential clients.
- Promote the loyalty program. You can do this through social media, email, or a banner on your website. The more people know about it, the greater the network effect.
- Monitor the results of your loyalty program. Use reporting tools to see how many clients are participating and how many benefits are being awarded. This will give you a sense of how effective your program is and allow you to make adjustments to improve it over time.
2. Managing online reviews
Online reviews can have a powerful impact on any brand's reputation. Studies show that before making a purchase decision, regardless of the product, over 94% of people check a business's reviews on Google Business. That's why it's important to manage them carefully to build a positive reputation and attract new clients.
Here's what you can do to make sure that reviews, whether positive or negative, don't undermine your property promotion and sales efforts:
- Respond to all reviews, whether positive or negative. This shows that you care about your clients' opinions and understand their needs.
- Offer solutions when problems are mentioned in negative reviews. This demonstrates that you're committed to improving the client experience and that you genuinely care about the experience they've had.
- Encourage your clients to leave positive reviews. You can do this through a feedback form or by encouraging them to leave reviews on relevant websites.
You can learn more about online reviews for your project and how Google Business works in the article here.
6. Conclusion
Real estate marketing is an essential component of every residential brand development plan. In 2023, the major difference between successful residential projects and those that will struggle to sell their available properties comes down to how well they've built a recognized brand over recent years.
By using a combination of strategies — such as online marketing, PR, influencer collaborations, and outdoor advertising — you'll be able to reach the right target audience and build a strong reputation in the real estate industry.
At ADACITY, we've been doing this successfully for over 7 years for residential projects across Romania.
If you'd like to learn more about how we can help you develop and grow a successful real estate brand, reach out to us on this page and let's work together to achieve your development goals.
