Digitalisation Will Help Real Estate To Be More Organised

Vikram Kotnis, Founder and Managing Director of Amura Marketing Technologies, in an email interview, explained the functions of newly introduced Real Estate Sales & Marketing Automation platform Sell.Do

How did you get the idea to start Amura?
Entrepreneurship gives you an opportunity to implement ground breaking ideas and along the way create a team with a unique culture. It introduces risk but is equally fun!

Today most of our decisions are in some way influenced by the digital medium. With growing access to mobile technology and ever expanding digitally empowered population, the percentage of spending on digital of the overall marketing-spends in India; is growing exponentially. Digital marketing is as much about technology as it's about marketing - giving the marketers more precise control on the spending, targeting and measurement. With digital, we saw a huge opportunity and started working on solutions and services around digital marketing with a vision to be the largest performance-driven digital marketing company in India.

How are Real Estate companies adopting to the digital marketing?
Real estate being one of the most unorganized sector in India, there is a lot scope of improvement to make it more organised using digital technologies. Currently most of the developers are using search advertising, property portal listings, banner advertising, social media advertising, content marketing, video marketing, experiential marketing using Virtual reality etc.

Latest trends being content marketing, video marketing, assisted buying in e-commerce model, sales and marketing automation.

What new technology/digital adoption has helped the real estate sector?
Since the real estate sector is highly competitive, gaining and maintaining a lead over competition with the right use of the right technology has become imperative for all players in the sector. Biggest concern in the industry is connecting the marketing efforts with Sales conversions.

Real estate being one of the most unorganized sectors in India, there is a lot scope of improvement to make it more organised using digital technologies. Currently most of the developers are using search advertising, property portal listings, banner advertising, social media advertising, content marketing, video marketing, experiential marketing using Virtual reality, etc. Latest trends being content marketing, video marketing, assisted buying in e-commerce model, sales and marketing automation

What is your marketing technology through this platform?
Amura Marketing Technologies with its ad platform – Sell.Do is India’s Real Estate Sales & Marketing Automation platform providing services to more than 150 Clients across India. Sell.Do helps companies manage their leads, sales opportunities, marketing, reports and all type of communications like telephony, SMS and email from a single dashboard. Sell.Do is the only product in India which comes with a Big Data solution to give valuable insights on customer data to a developer. Sell.Do empowers developers to automate their pre-sales, sales & marketing processes & improve efficiencies while delivering excellent customer support at the same time.

Sell.Do has effectively solved many pain points facing the industry today - right from Lead Loss, Data Theft to monitoring & managing the Sales & Sales team performance. Sell.Do has helped connecting these dots leveraging technology tools in terms of Cloud Telephony, Email / SMS automation , campaign tracking & pipeline analysis across both online & offline channels. With the help of Big Data solution as part of Sell.Do, a decision maker in an organization can track the entire customer journey right from 1st enquiry till a booking. This gives valuable insights into the successes of a marketing strategy & also corrective steps to be taken for better success.

Using Sell.Do, developers have taken intelligent decisions to take control of their marketing activities & also sales approaches. Sell.Do has put in place lead nurturing best practices available to a company essentially helping them embrace a customer centric approach.

How much investment you have made till date? Who all are your investors?
Amura is a completely bootstrapped company. We have never gone for any funding round, and have always relied on our revenues to drive the growth. Our offerings have been very well received since the very beginning, which meant that we always had very strong cash flows. In fact, we have heavily invested our profits back into research and innovation - which has helped us stay ahead of the curve. The founders always believed in sweat equity, ensuring we put in our best efforts to reach where we are today. The company has commendably grown in last 5 to 6 years from 5 members to a strong team of 200. We have some of the best talent working across marketing, technology, creative, video, advertising, content and strategy.

What is the trend of digital marketing in India?
Mobile platform as an emerging market
Mobile phones have undergone tremendous evolution. Today, it is a core component of the modern consumers’ life. There is no escape from ads and promotions when you are using mobile. That is how ubiquitous mobile advertising has become.

According to IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau), mobile advertising industry experienced a worldwide growth of close to 60% in last financial year. Today, this industry is nothing less than $50 billion. The market for mobile advertising is not merely growing; it is exploding. In fact, this medium is expected to outgrow all other digital ad platforms. Taking that into account, the future certainly promises to be bigger and better for the industry.

Recent market survey suggests that close to 60 per cent of the inventory has moved on to mobile from desktop. Marketers and advertisers have realized this. As the future lies in mobile marketing, we as marketers are taking big steps to incorporate the power of the platform in their strategies.

Increase in market share of content marketing
As per the above stats, it is quite distinct that mobile space is something every marketer should ideally be leveraging upon. However, certainly the type of ad format would make lot of difference. (Difference - ROI matrix in proportion with the ad format)

Speaking of which, content marketing is certainly the next big thing in the overall online marketing space. It is an integral part of any advertising campaign to generate engagement among the audience towards the brand.

Content marketing is an intelligent way of educating the user about the brand and the relative product; this is an inbound way of advertising which generates audience engagement within the segmented dataset.

Since it works on the taglines as trigger and relative content on the landing page as direction, user tends to spend more time on site. This also depends upon the sync between the content present on the landing page and the relative tagline across different websites.

In recent time marketers and advertisers have started implementing this strategy across all the verticals and this has resulted into the increased conversion ratios.

(Generic stats are not available. gets into the exclusive property of amura)

Effectiveness of sales and marketing automation
Implementation of sales & marketing automation helps in visualizing the customer journey thus helps in deriving the marketing strategy around it.

Creating process around the customer journey enables you to gradually refine how you target & nurture the leads. Another powerful benefit of it is the ability to reach in a personalized way across different online and offline methods.

Such tools do allow us to achieve the business goals (Sales) and take the next best action in order to improve customer experience and business results. Automation tool empowers organization to capture, analyze, and apply, in real time, insights from both structured and unstructured Big Data. This is majorly customer data and comes from multiple sources, including phone calls, mobile apps, emails, chat, social media, video, and transactions

How many clients you have already in your bag? Can you please name a few?
Major clientele of Amura includes flagship developers like Oberoi Realty, Shapoorji Pallonji Real Estate, Hiranandani Developers, Radius Developers, Kolte Patil Developers, Panchshil Realty, Ansal Housing, and Puravankara. Along these Amura provides solutions to 100+ other real estate clients.

Real estate sector is bit down these days. How much growth you are expecting in this fall season?
2016 may well bring the kind of investment activities that were seen in 2007 – the previous peak year which saw investments of more than $8 billion into Indian real estate.