Post-lockdown, our organic traffic number has grown by 80%: Snehil Gautam, Housing.com

Online real estate portal Housing.com recently launched its latest TV and digital advertising campaign, ‘Yahaan Search Khatam Karo’, featuring well-known Bollywood actors Manoj Bajpayee and Rajkummar Rao. The campaign went live across TV and digital media with Housing.com spending a total of Rs 40 crore across platforms.

Conceptualised by Lowe Lintas, the campaign focuses on amplifying Housing.com’s positioning as a full stack digital real estate platform and is likely to reach out to over 10 crore customers across various media. The campaign films aim to showcase the brand as a single-stop-solution for all housing needs – buying, selling, renting and moving in, and other property related services. The campaign takes a humorous approach to these common problems and also highlights how these tech platforms have changed the real estate sector completely.

In conversation with Adgully, Snehil Gautam, Head of Growth & Marketing, Housing.com, Makaan.com & PropTiger.com, talks about the idea behind the campaign, their marketing strategy, a look back at 2020 for Housing.com and their future plans for 2021.

What was the idea behind this campaign?

The idea was unique, where we focused on traditional and cultural beliefs followed in India, where people think nothing can be achieved without trying hard and going through a struggle. This stands true even for real estate consumers, who think that acquiring real estate is a time-consuming process. With Lowe Lintas, we focused on inviting people to housing.com and making their research work easier than before. We focused on minimising the pain of the customers by maximising the gain from our campaign.

How did you decide on taking Manoj Vajpayee and Rajkummar Rao for the campaign?

The story needed great acting ability, besides we were focusing on the seller community, which is usually in the age group of 40+, and the buying community, which is in the 30-35 age group. Hence, Rajkummar Rao and Manoj Bajpayee were suitable actors to connect with our audience/ customer base. The youngsters, who go for renting the flats, are more active online and on social media, which helps us increase our reach with these customers.

While we focused on Tier 1 cities, post-lockdown the Tier 2 cities have a different segment of customers who are not very aware about the social sites of real estate companies. This is come as a huge opportunity for us to target this customer base. Comparing the situation before the lockdown and after the lockdown, our organic traffic number has grown by 80%.

What is your marketing strategy for this 15-month campaign? Could you share some insights?

Starting with this, we have gone live for the India vs England cricket series. We also plan to make a return to IPL and leverage it heavily in the 2021 edition. We are focused on creating brand awareness and achieving pole position in this sector.

Digital is big for us and we will be live continuously across social media, YouTube and other platforms. Wherever there is huge viewership, specifically IPL and shows like ‘The Kapil Sharma Show’, we make sure that we are present there. We are focused more on television for increasing the brand penetration.

However, considering the cost and ROI, we are present more on digital platforms and will be spending more on this for better reach and brand promotion. We’ve spent nearly Rs 40 crore on this campaign across all platforms.

What are your insights from 2020? Going forward, what are future plans for housing.com in 2021?

The pandemic period offered us a very good opportunity to keep investing in branding to increase our brand awareness levels and our traffic numbers on the platform are at an all-time high and get higher year on year. All this can be attributed to the risks we took during the lockdown as we did the IPL campaign, and now this campaign with Manoj Bajpayee and Rajkummar Rao has created good brand visibility for our organisation.

The year 2020 has been good for our brand image. The housing market is returning to normal and is expected to do much better in 2021 as compared to 2020.

Marketing
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