Describe about the Case Study for Strategic Marketing Management for Challenges to Financial Inclusion.
The real estate sector of India is growing at a fast rate and is recognised in the global platform (Chadchan and Shankar 2012). The growth and development of the real estate sector of India can be seen through the developments in the following fields:
Retail
Entertainment industry like multiplexes
Hospitality and hotels or resorts
Economic services like schools and hospitals
Information technology enabled services like BPOs and call centres
It is expected that by 2020, the realty sector will reach US$180 billion (Ibef.org 2016).
With the growing real estate market in India, property prices are constantly on the rise (Gandhi and Walton 2012). With the technological advancements enabling users to access property information via cell phone apps, and search for properties via portable personal devices such as iPad, various online property portals have emerged around the world, even in developing nations like in India.
With a population of 1.25 Billion (2013) in India, the real estate market is worth an estimated of $25 Billion and growing (Brosius 2012). Since April 2000 until June 2014, the Real Estate sector that includes construction projects, built-up infrastructure, housing and townships has been able to gain a FDI worth US$ 24 million (Schulte 2012).
Due to low level of bank funding provided to the real estate sector and attractive valuations, the private equity (PE) funding has grown at a steep rate (Crowe et al. 2013). It has been seen that in the first quarter of the year 2014, Delhi NCR has able to gain PE investments worth Rs 80 crore that accounts to be US$ 13.22 million (Taylor et al. 2012). It is expected that the initiative of the government to introduce policies and subsidies that will help the buyers and the developers will fruitful for the real estate sector in the year 2014.
The commercial sector of the real estate has grown at a steep rate (Deere et al. 2013). The biggest example of the growth of the commercial real estate is the city of Mumbai in India. It is estimated that Mumbai is ready with returns of around 12 to 19 percent in the coming five years. Bangalore and Delhi NCR acquire the second and third position respectively. Bangalore is expected to give a return of 12 percent and Delhi NCR is expected to give a return of 8 to 11 percent (Baka 2013).
The residential sector of the real estate in India is also flourishing tremendously (Khanna 2013). Some of the factors that have resulted in the growth of the residential sector are:
Steep growth in the population of the country
Migration in the urban areas
Plenty Job opportunities in the service sectors
Increase in the levels of income
Easy financial help
The numbers show a clear growth in the residential sector especially in the city of Bangalore. India has been able to witness the growth of units in eight major cities (Sarathy 2013). In the first quarter of the year 2014, the number of new developments has increased by 55,000 units, which accounts to be an increase of forty-three percent in the real estate sector (Sami 2013). Mumbai and Chennai come second and third after Bangalore. In the first quarter, Mumbai has been able to witness a growth of 10,698 units and Chennai has been able to witness a growth of 7436 units. The growth rate is 93 percent and 191 percent in Mumbai and Chennai respectively (Searle 2014).
It is estimated that there were about 10,000 property sale transactions in the six major cities alone in India in 2013(Rouanet and Halbert 2016). This included Mumbai, Delhi, Calcutta, Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad. The transactions comprised of sale of residential and commercial properties. Although, it is difficult to record the statistics, it is estimated that around 30,000 property rental transactions took place in 2014 in major cities in India (Chatterji 2013).
The demand for the properties is always high near the business hubs that are located in the business districts in the metropolitan cities of the country (Mrinalini, Nath and Sandhya 2013). However, only the luxury and premium real estate developers are attracted to those due to the high price of the areas.
In India, residential property is advertised through brokers who maintain database of properties available in the local area. Meetings would be organised with prospect buyers and the brokers would typically receive approximately between 1 to 2% of the property sale value (Ananth and Öncü 2013).
Property Developers traditionally advertised their products and services locally through billboard advertisements and through advertising in online realty portals (Rapoport 2014) . There are currently several Online Portals offering a marketplace for sellers and buyers. Subscription is charged for sellers wishing to list their property on the portal. However, no dedicated online marketplace for Property rental listings and shared accommodation listings exist currently.
Unlike the United Kingdom, there are no estate agents in India, where a database of properties rentals would be maintained (Jongwanich and Kohpaiboon 2013). Property owners and tenants have to rely on newspaper ads and online portals like the below.
With the emergence of web-based technologies, it is possible for sellers and property owners to reach a wider market (Ramaiah et al. 2013). With high demand for housing in the metropolitan cities, property owners, and property developers could advertise properties nationwide.
As a new Enterprise entering the web based Property Portal competing space, it is very important for KAMRAFINDER.COM to identify the target market, understand the needs of rapidly changing socio-economic climate of the State. It is also essential to define the company’s unique selling point (USP) and the value proposition for its customers (Bhagat and Jones 2013).
The four key questions within the value proposition (Tovstiga 2013) were asked during the initial workshops and brainstorming with the business partners. These discussions raised further questions, insights and some answers including strategic facts that were later discovered in further research (Searle 2014).
Why does KAMRAFINDER.COM want to pursue this market segment? Is there an alternate market segment?
The existing property portals list Properties for sale. Revenue is generated through subscription from sellers wishing to advertise and list their property for sale. There is currently no dedicated online portal for Property rental listing. Furthermore, there exists an opportunity to provide a platform for shared accommodation for young professionals (generally single working people) in major cities who are only looking for a room in a shared accommodation (Halbert and Rouanet 2014).
The existing portals were cluttered with advertisements from developers and builders looking to promote their new builds on the front page, resulting in a poor customer experience. The homepage and the subsequent landing pages lacked structure and were not user friendly. KAMRAFINDER.COM would see this as a weakness among the competitors and would look to leverage the skills within the team to provide a positive user experience.
We felt we could learn from the mistakes of these existing portals and offer an enhanced user experience with an aim of giving our primary customers (property owners and tenants) and secondary customers (Investors) a visually superior online platform.
Where does KAMRAFINDER.COM see an opportunity?
Although some established portals (with focus on real estate and property sales) had rental listings, none of the portals offered a marketplace for renting rooms in shared accommodation or Paying Guest (PG) type accommodation. This is an untouched market segment. We at KAMRAFINDER.COM felt that being the first to provide a dedicated online marketplace for shared housing rentals, and paying guest type accommodation, we could capitalise on these alternate market segments (and associated revenue streams) discussed in more detail in Section3.1 of this report. This is in addition to conventional Property Rental Listings.
Figure 1:
(Source: Drucker 1994)
What will KAMRAFINDER’s differentiated offer be?
Some of the proposals included offering subscription free rental property listings in the first year of launch, whilst not compromising on the user experience and user friendliness that will be evident from the first touch point (that is, on the landing page) (Thomas 2014). We felt that by focusing on making the Portal intuitive and informative, we would generate more traffic that is one of primary business objectives of this Enterprise. There were proposals to offer premium content such as blogs and articles about “how to effectively advertise properties for rent”. Blogging on “Tips on attracting corporate lets” would potentially attract more visitors to the Portal. Providing a dedicated page for listing of small-related businesses such as Tradesmen – plumbers, electricians and property interiors specialists, would potentially increase traffic to the Portal.
How will KAMRAFINDER.COM make a difference?
The intention is create a Rental Property portal that becomes a trusted source of both information (rental trends) and comprehensive database of easily searchable rental property listing (Shatkin 2014). Although the first year will be subscription free, the intent is that the primary source of revenue would be through subscriptions and advertising of trades services on a dedicated page. (Plumbing, Electrician, Carpenter etc.) (Fereidouni and Al-mulali 2014). The board also considered advertisements as a source of revenue, but decided that it did not resonate with the initial strategy of KAMRAFINDER.COM.
With an experienced graphic design team that have combined experience of 20 years working on developing various ecommerce portals, the team can create an unparalleled user experience (Squires and Heurkens 2014). Over the last six months, the company has analysed its approach to launching the portal and has documented business processes that are proven to generate and grow traffic to the Portal. It is this understanding of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and the impact of Social Media that is a key differentiator (Mitra and Ray 2014). The co-founders behind this Portal have strong online marketing experience complimented with an understanding of property trends and infrastructure. Having dealt with brokers, for property purchase and sale, provided valuable insights into the typical challenges faced by customers (Pethe et al. 2014). Marketing is the key to generate traffic and superior user experience is the key to retaining those users.
Figure 2: Unique competing space
(Source: Mehrotra et al. 2014)
In order for KAMRAFINDER.COM to succeed, it is necessary to create its own (UCS) Unique Competing space, ideally a space without competitors. This may be impossible, but in leveraging the online marketing expertise within the company and a good strategy, we believe that we can create a new online marketplace for Landlords (providing house share for professionals and young couples) and Tenants (couples and young graduates) looking to find economical accommodation as well as traditional Property lets (Rajan 2014).
Using the UCS framework drew out questions such as: “What does the target market consist of?”, “Who is our Target Market?”, and what requirements for information does KAMRAFINDER.COM fulfil? Secondly, “Who is the Competition?” In terms of the internal organisation, what are our strengths and how can weaknesses be addressed?
Competition and Customers
Competition was seen from two groups of portals. One definition of competition was any online portal that offered property rental listings, in other words an online marketplace for customers looking to let or rent properties (Sornette and Cauwels 2014). Visitors to such portals would typically consist of property owners, looking to let properties and tenants looking to rent from them for a fixed term.
Competition from established Property Portals is shown in Figure 2. The primary focus is on Property Sale Listings and less focus on Property Rental Listing. Visitors to these competitor portals would typically consist of first time buyers, investment buyers and casual visitors. It was clear that majority of competitor web portals focused on Property Sales only (Ghertner 2014).
Very few Portals provided Property Rental listings. Furthermore, none of the portals had shared accommodation listings (Chadchan and Shankar 2012). The board also felt that by making the portal informative with subscription free access to interesting blogs and articles related to Property Renting process, property find process and promoting the benefits of using KAMRAFINDER.COM, would add value. In addition providing a demographic listing of tradesmen such as Plumbers, Electricians, Carpenters, builders and locksmiths, would also improve web traffic (Gandhi and Walton 2012). The aim of the Social Media Marketing is to extend the area of the Unique Competing Space (UCS), whilst preventing competitive forces from reducing this space.
Shared boundary with Competitors (1)
There are pressures on both sides of this boundary. The threat to this boundary from Competitors is the fact that they can easily develop a similar portal to KAMRAFINDER.COM, with existing resources leveraging their position, market share and customer base. Our board believe that these established portals currently do not focus on the Property rental market segment. There could be copycats, based on the success of KAMRAFINDER.COM.
Customer Interface boundary (2)
The initial goal of KAMRAFINDER.COM, is to move this boundary outwards. Pushing the boundary outwards would mean that more demands and needs of the customer are being met. Identifying these demands was carried out during a brain storming session and led to a number of insights.
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Strategic Insight: Marketing/Media push
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Creating and engaging with a community is paramount. Hits and web traffic to the portal can be generated through marketing smartly through social media. Providing users with useful insights like property prices, property rental returns etc., could also influence positively on pushing the Customer interface boundary (2) outwards. Producing interesting blogs and directing readers to the portal has also proven to deliver increased hits. |
Internal Threshold (3)
The internal threshold boundary is also important for the portal’s growth. Maintaining the ease of access and visual experience of the portal across multiple platforms (PC, Smartphone and personal hand held devices) is vitally as important as the other boundaries. The Portal must be capable of delivering a pleasurable viewing experience across all such platforms. Developing a Smartphone App is also being considered as a future strategic goal to keep up with constantly changing Internet and communications age. A recent study by Deloitte has shown for Mobile Apps it is not always easy to turn activity into revenue (Curtis 2014). The Key Success Factors for any new online venture must include turning “hits” or web traffic into revenue.
The way people access information on the World Wide Web is constantly changing. With the advent of Personal and portable hand held devices, it is vital for a new portal to be accessible on multiple platforms (Brosius 2012). Development of people resources, and adaptability to rapid technological advancements are linked and enable pushing third boundary outwards.
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Strategic Insight: App
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An App is an application downloaded to a Mobile or Tablet device that engages with the consumer, delivering content and interactive content. An App could be developed and distributed through iStore and Android app stores. Apps are normally free and monetising these are proving harder as Deloitte has discovered, (Curtis 2014). |
During a series of workshops, the board brainstormed to define measurable business goals, with focus on short-term goals (Schulte 2012). It was clear that monetizing from the portal through property rental listings would be a long-term goal, but the immediate target was to generate web traffic and register property rental listings. The top three short-term business targets were:
Achieving 10,000 to 50,000 hits (page views) per month within the first year of launch
Register a minimum of 500 residential property listings per month in the first year
Newspaper Campaign to promote the services and product offering
Aim to build a database of Tradesmen in major cities in the first three months.
Communicate Success stories and Testimonials.
Goal 1 could easily be tracked using Google Analytics. Goal 2 could be measured internally through Portal’s Content Management System.
To achieve these business objectives KAMRAFINDER.COM needed to consider all three dimensions of the value disciplines (Treacy and Wiersema 1993). Carrying out this exercise provided many strategic insights that the Enterprise could pursue.
Customer Intimacy
Whenever there an organization takes the help of a customer-based approach, it adheres to the following factors:
Listens to the customers
Live up to the requirements of the customers
Focus on long-term relationship with the customers
Once the organization will aim at continuously improving the services given to the customers, it will be able to develop an intimacy with the customers that will be long lasting (Crowe et al. 2013) . Customer relationship management (CRM) will be used to excel in the strategy.
The growth of the business can be understood with the help of the following business model
Figure 3: Customer Relationship Management model
(Source: Taylor et al. 2012)
As the model suggest, the growth of the business is mainly depended on three factors:
Acquire
Retain
Extend
An organization needs to acquire the customers and the business, retain the customers and expand their business. In the process, information technology, shareholder value creation and marketing orientation will help the organization to create a strong foothold in the market.
One of the ways to measure the success of Marketing and Customer Intimacy with an online portal is to track the number of hits achieved in a period and the track the amount of time spent by the user on the specific pages (Deere et al. 2013). Purpose of the user’s visit to the portal can be derived in various ways. If tone was a registered customer, one would normally logon to browse property listing or post a new listing. If the user is visiting to read interesting articles, this can also be monitored and reported (Baka 2013). It was evident during brainstorming that by providing innovative and informative content would add value and aid to convert a user into a customer.
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Strategic Insight: Targeted Social Media marketing can generate hits and improve customer Intimacy. |
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Blogging on Social Media will help drive hits. A more sustained and widespread social media policy and engagement may increase hits substantially. Promoting success stories and channelling the feedback to improve the service and product offering will deliver value and positively strengthen customer intimacy. |
Product Leadership
Two factors are important for the organization that aims at developing a product leadership in the market:
The characteristics of such organization are:
Similar Portals did not currently have dedicated Property rental listings. The board unanimously agreed that the current competitor sites, lacked structure, were complicated to use and were cluttered with advertising. Designing the new portal to address these issues, would offer a superior product with a visually enhanced viewing experience with no ads. It was debated and agreed that Subscription free rental listing in the first year, was not sufficient to achieve Product Leadership (Khanna 2013). A good balance of Newspaper and Media Marketing combined with Social Media marketing is the key to cementing sizable market share in the segment.
Operational Excellence
The organizations that will provide the customers with products that are of high quality at price that is suitable by all types of customers, then the organization is said to be focussing on cost leadership. The focus of the organization is to streamline the process internally.
With any Enterprise, achieving operational excellence is a continuous process. Implementing processes to evaluate constantly changing needs of customers combined with development of internal people resources through training and coaching will improve organisational efficiency (Sarathy 2013). Sustained growth and innovation to improve Organisational Efficiency will deliver Operational excellence.
An Organisation that has a good balance of Product Leadership, Customer Intimacy and Operational Excellence will have Competitive Advantage over the Competitors (Sami 2013). Quality of Product, ability to deliver Quantity at cheap costs, and providing value added services in a new market segment is recipe for success for an Organisation entering a new market segment.
Figure 4: Value Disciplines
(Source: Treacy and Wiersema 1993)
External context focused
The Macro Economic Environment in which an organization or sector operates will influence its performance (Searle 2014). Depending on the amount of reliability provided by the health of the overall economy on the company’s business, the amount of the influence will vary accordingly. PEST analysis below enabled the board to draw key insights on the real estate property trends in India.
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Political |
· With the Government allowing 100% foreign direct investment (FDI) in this sector, the number of foreign firms owning real estate projects in India has seen an inclining trend. Government Tax Breaks for Property Buyers (First time and Investment) has increased the number of Housing Loan Applications, which has resulted in demand for more Property developments. · Government policies with respect to Stamp Duty can impact the real estate market, resulting in more property rental transactions. |
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Social and Economic |
· The Indian real estate sector continues to be a favored sector for investments from international as well as private investors. In the upcoming years, the residential as well as commercial segments of the real estate industry is set for major growth, aided by the government’s plans and initiatives to boost this sector. In August 2013, the Indian Rupee had crashed to a record low of around 68.825 per US$ (Rs 100 per British Pound). This immediately encouraged large corpus of FDI in the Real Estate segment. · With Inflation on the rise, more and more young professionals and graduates prefer sharing a flat or house with other people. Homeowners on low income, who have a spare room or two to let, also welcome this. Paying Guest type accommodation has been popular for several years, where the rental charged included two or three meals a day. This generally is a win-win situation for the landlord and the tenant. · Instances where people relocated to another city due to a new job or other reasons, it was increasingly difficult to find a property to rent, due to lack of streamlined channels to search for properties to let. People usually relied on word of mouth marketing, through friends and family, which took time. · Acquiring a first home has become a mammoth task for first time buyers due to rising house prices, rising inflation, rising bank interest rates and stringent financial and credit requirements. With stricter banking regulations, housing loans are tending to become out of reach for working class people in India. · A combination of such factors has resulted in increase in property rental transactions. Additionally people tend to rent for several years, before they can afford to buy a place on their own. Young working professionals have relied on financial support from family to cough up deposits to get on the property ladder. Without such support young graduates and professionals, have to rent until, they can save up sufficiently. · KAMRAFINDER.COM can add value in listing shared accommodation and paying guest type accommodation in addition to conventional house and flat lets. Currently, no portal that listed commercial properties like, office space, warehouse rentals, corporate building leases and retail unit rentals). This was seen as another alternate market segment that could be explored further. There is no streamlined portal or organization offering this service in the major cities. |
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Technology |
· With the Electronic speed crazy age of Smartphone, portable personal devices and handheld devices, more and more consumers want to be able to access information on the palm of their hands. With development of Communications Infrastructure in the country, it is necessary to keep pace with the innovation in Technology to sustain growth. It is one of the future objectives to develop a Property Rental search App that can be accessed with a Smartphone or hand held electronic device. Investment in developing internal resources is also the key to sustain growth with the rapid technological advancements. |
Figure 5: Porter’s Five Forces Analysis
(Source: E. Dobbs 2014)
Michael Porter provided a Framework that models an Industry as being influenced by five forces. The Strategic business manager seeking to develop an edge over rival firms can use this model to better understand the Industry context in which the firm operates. According to Porter, “An industry’s profit potential is largely determined by the intensity of competitive rivalry within that industry.
Competitive Rivalry
It is believed that there is low rivalry among Property portals for the service that is offered (Rouanet and Halbert 2016). There is no clear market leader and the market share keeps shifting, and is directly associated with listing costs for properties on the portal. A segment is disciplined if rivalry among firms in an Industry segment is low. However, a Maverick firm with a competitive advantage can displace the otherwise disciplined market.
When a competitor acts in a way that elicits a counter response by other firms, rivalry intensifies. The intensity of rivalry commonly is referred to as being cutthroat, intense, moderate or weak, based on the firms’ aggressiveness in attempting to gain an advantage. The board view this market segment to be disciplined with no clear market leader.
In pursuing an advantage over its rivals, KAMRAFINDER.COM can choose to implement several competitive strategies detailed below.
Changing prices – Raising or lowering prices to gain a temporary advantage
By providing subscription free listing in the first year of launch, KAMRAFINDER.COM can establish a market share (Chatterji 2013).
Product differentiation – Improving features, implementing innovative technology in the product and service offered. Improving the visual appearance and designing the portal to be user friendly, will enhance user experience (Mrinalini, Nath and Sandhya 2013). Biggest differentiator would be that with no ads, and providing shared property listing, this will encourage more hits. Features including “Hot Property” feature listing for Premium members and “Property verification services” would differentiate the portal from others. Providing rewards in the form of discounted premium listing, for leaving feedback after a successful introduction (Ananth and Öncü 2013).
Providing dedicated customer support lines for Landlords and tenants would add to positive brand image.
Initially revenue generation will only be through charging trades people or property related trades business to advertise their services on a separate dedicated page. This is currently not available in any of the other existing property portals (Das 2014).
Revenue generating Services would include reference and credit checking tenants.
Publishing information on rental trends by city, free rental advice for registered members and publishing various renting and relocation guides to generate page views
VRIO Analysis
VRIO framework was used to analyze sources of the Enterprise’s internal competitive advantage. VRIO analysis asks four questions => Is a resource: Valuable? Rare? Easy to Imitate? And is a firm Organized to capture the value of the resources? A resource or capability that meets all four requirements can bring sustained competitive advantage to the organization.
Internal people resources (design and development team) were valuable and key to the growth of the organization. Although skill set was not rare, they were difficult to find, recruit and replace. Using the framework in Figure 6, the people resources provided temporary competitive advantage.
Using the VRIO framework, the additional services offered by KAMRAFINDER.COM are unique, they can be easily be imitated. Moreover, the filtered database of construction related tradesmen and businesses could be easily replicated and copied (Shah 2012). Although the database is only available to registered members, anyone can register to gain access to this information. Rental trends are another premium feature, which currently is published elsewhere. This feature would only provide temporary competitive advantage, but can be duplicated easily on other portals. Tenant Credit and reference check service is something that is not offered currently, would be valuable to Landlords, and is difficult to imitate (Rapoport 2014). With marketing and organizational effort, the firm can be geared to capture value. This will help sustain competitive advantage. Other special portal features such as Property of the month, verified properties, recommended tenants etc. will add value and assist sustain competitive advantage.
Figure 6: Strategic Management and Competitive Advantage VRIO Framework
(Source:J.B. Barney and W.S. Hesterly 2006)
As part of the management workshop, each member of the board was asked to independently come up with three activities for the launch of the portal to be successful. It was decided that members would then read out the three activities, any similarities will be categorized under a common theme, and any differences will be debated to finally arrive at key success factors (KSF) (Jongwanich and Kohpaiboon 2013).
The results surprised us all and we came up with activities that could be classified under three broad themes: “Brand Marketing”, “Hit Generation” or “web traffic” and “Operational Excellence”. This more or less resonated with the results of Value Discipline Analysis (Ramaiah et al. 2013).
Hit Generation and driving web traffic is part of providing a user-friendly portal. Ensuring that customer support staff our trained at communicating effectively with customers, was also very important to maintaining customer intimacy and ensuring there no service downtime is key to Operational Excellence (Bhagat and Jones 2013). Security of critical customer information had to be taken seriously.
Effective Marketing is also an important ingredient to the success.
Analyzing the internal strengths and weaknesses enabled some harder questions to be asked both of the company’s resources and what they should actually be used for. For example, the realization that being good at Online Marketing did not just translate into strength, rather there was a financial gap in finding the funds for a successful marketing campaign.
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Strengths · Strong Online Marketing experience · Professional Network with influential business Entrepreneurs · Good understanding of Property Rental Market · Good understanding of Real Estate markets · Superior product – the portal · Strong Organization with good leadership · Strong people values and HR support functions to develop staff · Training and development opportunities from experienced Entrepreneurs · Revenue through alternate streams and not through advertising · Ideas for alternate revenue streams |
Weakness · Limited Financial Resources and Marketing budget · Reliance on Social Media Marketing · No main revenue streams in the first year of launch, due to business strategy to not charge for property listing · Lack of Data security expertise within the organization · A new brand, yet to launch · Lack of technical skills to develop an iStore and Android App. Probably need to outsource this activity · Lack of Skilled IT support personnel to ensure minimum downtime |
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Opportunities · Entering a Commercial Lettings market segment · Strategic Alliance with Corporate for letting and property management for corporate guesthouses · Innovation and Technology · Innovation and Continuous Improvement into Operational processes · Featured Marketing in leading newspapers and business magazines · Tenant Reference check service as alternate revenue stream · Subscription revenue from listing and verifying tradesmen and small home-related businesses |
Threats · Copycat portals are potential threat · Existing portals with large capital can copy the idea and enter this market segment · Loss of skilled workforce to competitors · Strong competition from copycat portals |
The various internal and external frameworks helped develop interesting strategic insights into the sort of features that would improve the product and services offered, thus creating value (Searle 2014).
Features
Subscription Free Templates for rental contracts would be added value to members.
A forum for users to provide feedback and propose additional services they would like to see was also proposed.
A separate page for Reviews of Tradesmen and businesses
Maintain and Publish rental trends classified by demographic areas in major cities.
Loyalty / Reward schemes for referrals
Featured property listing: Featured listing of Property rentals by City.
“Verified” badge for Properties verified by the customer service department.
Dashboard for property owners providing detailed summary of Properties advertised, number of page views, number of likes, contact details of prospective tenants and provision to edit, delete or add more properties (Halbert and Rouanet 2014).
Facility to add links to the portal and post property ads on Social Media sites.
Free Rental Yield Advice to Landlords.
Dedicated listing of house-share / shared accommodation and paying guest type accommodation.
Revenue generating Services
Tenant Reference and credit checking service to Landlords. This service would consist of requesting bank statements, payslips and reference requests from employer and previous landlord. There is currently no agency offering this service.
Another avenue for Revenue generation would be premium subscription based listing of Commercial Property Rentals (Thomas 2014). This could include Office space, corporate building leases, retail units and warehouse leasing.
Yellow Pages Database of Tradesmen and Home related businesses. Dedicated page for listing of registered and vetted tradesmen and home related businesses such as Electrical Suppliers, Plumbing suppliers, home appliance suppliers and bespoke furniture Suppliers in each of the major cities (Shatkin 2014).
It was evident that to launch the new portal in the market, a significant Marketing campaign was essential. With limited financial resources, people resources and virtually no brand awareness, KAMRAFINDER.COM has to choose from one or a combination of the following strategic marketing options.
Option 1: Social Media Marketing and Internet Marketing channels (B2C).
Internet marketing is much bigger than Google and Facebook. The following are the marketing strategies that organization uses to drive traffic to their portals.
1A) Search Engine Optimization
When users search on Google, two types of results come up: paid and unpaid. Unpaid search results rely on algorithms that determine the relevancy of your website compared to the search terms or keywords. Where you land on these unpaid search results depends on search engine optimization (SEO). Solid SEO can determine how high up you appear in the search results, often called your page rank.
1B)Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaigns
PPC Campaigns are where an organization defines certain keywords and combination of keywords and certain geographical parameters and pays Google to show up in paid search results. PPC campaigns can burn through the marketing budget unless the keywords are selected carefully and configured accurately for targeted marketing. The higher an organization is prepared to pay for the keyword, the better the position of the search result listing. By leveraging both SEO and well-configured PPC campaigns the Portal can achieve high page rank and better position in the listings. This helps generate web traffic to the portal.
1C) Social Media Marketing
Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube can reach millions of the intended target market. A corporate profile page helps engages with current and potential customers. This can help achieve customer intimacy. Providing links from social media pages to the portal, will aid improving page ranking. This also drives web traffic.
1D) Mobile Marketing
Still in its infancy, millions of Smartphone users are clamouring to get the best applications and mobile technologies available. Mobile phone users download free mobile games from the Apple Store and Google Play (Android Application store). There are ads embedded in the free games that help monetize by In App Advertising. This is one of the economical channels for Marketing for organisation with a smaller marketing budget.
1E) Video Marketing
Billions of people share and view original videos at YouTube, Founded in 2005, YouTube stands as the third highest ranked search engine in the world, after Google and Facebook. But how do you create that one video that goes viral? What elements do you need to take your video from 100 views to 10 million views? Despite the challenges, experts predict that Video Marketing will outpace the growth of traditional TV advertising.
1F) Display Advertising
For the organization, which has huge budget for online marketing, they can adhere to display advertising. Also referred to as banner ads, advertising with a site with high traffic whose audience fits the target market can be very effective. A person can buy an advertising space going by the site that has the huge number of hits. A featured banner ad promoted the brand, attracting traffic to the desired portal. Placing banner ads can also help with search engine rankings since the ads create a link back to desired portal, increasing the authority in search engine algorithms. Google predicts that by 2015 display advertising will reach $50 billion.
1G) Online PR and Article Marketing
Blogging and Article Marketing are effective techniques to promote new portal launches. By posting an article on social media or blogging about the unique offering of the site on various social media and PR websites helps generates impressions. The posting is another parameter that Google Algorithm uses to decide where to position the portal. The better will be the impression; the better will be the position.
Considering all the above options would help develop a successful Internet marketing strategy.
Option 2: Marketing through Newspaper and Magazine Advertising (B2C)
A featured ad promoting the online marketplace for share property rental, commercial rentals and conventional property renting in the leading newspapers could potentially generate a lot of page hits
Option 3: Marketing at Property Expo events in India (B2C)
Property Expo events attracts a lot of interest for people interested in purchasing second homes or investment homes or timeshares. This is probably one of the best locations to meet landlords and encouraging them to register as members and promoting the value added services and the portal’s unique selling point (USP).
Option 4: Marketing through Strategic partnerships with developers (B2B)
This may be a good strategic option to explore, as top tier builders attract a lot of public interest in new developments. Sponsoring mutually beneficial events in a premier venue in the major cities, may help share costs and at the same time property sharks who invest in Residential Properties could be potential customer of KAMRAFINDER.COM.
Option 5: Market through TV / Media (B2C)
This option requires a significant marketing budget, which really limits the possibility of pursuing this option unless there is a corpus of funding from Venture Capitalists.
Due to the previous Digital Advertising and Online Marketing skill sets within the board, it was decided to utilize the Marketing budget to pursue selected Option 1 (Online Marketing channels), Option 2 and Option 3 simultaneously.
At the start of the workshops the Strategy challenge roadmap was used to draw out facts and questions. These informed the frameworks and models that were subsequently used to analyse the strategy and to formulate the strategic options. The workshops continued to draw out further facts and questions.
In carrying out this strategy assignment there has been a realization that many companies would benefit from carrying out similar exercises. The whole process was iterative and at times, it was difficult to convey this in the written word. Often, questions and frameworks were populated out of sequence with questions being raised to which answers were unknown. The questions themselves would be subsequently asked as part of another framework.
The process involved jumping between high levels and supporting frameworks, this might show that it is difficult to remain focused on high-level strategy without getting into detail.
There is a big question about whether the new online venture will be a profitable venture or not. In carrying out this assignment, we have been fortunate to be able to progress the development of the portal alongside it. Online Marketing channels are certainly an economical, however it is also a time consuming exercise. The Hits conversion ratio can be poor compared to conventional Marketing techniques.
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