Integrated Marketing Communication Plan For Rentobuy.com.au

Company Overview

Rentobuy.com.au is a company based in Perth(Australia ) and was founded in the year 2012 by Mr Robert Zackerman and his friends. The company works in the space of housing and provides  buying, selling & renting solution to the population. The company works in the space of e-commerece as it’s a real estate web based portal. The company was founded by a couple of Engineers  from Monash university who wanted to disrupt the online real estate industry. The idea behind this model was problem these guys faced while hunting for an apartment to rent in Western Australia, because of lack of information available online and only 1-2 players doing something in the digital space, the concept strike to these young college passouts and hence rentobuy came in existence. At the same time real estate industry was in boom and the penetration of digital literacy was even reaching the rural population, so it all made a great sense to go forward with the idea of rentobuy. The idea was received well by venture capitalist and after Series A round of funding the company came in existence on Dec 4 2012.

At rentobuy, the traffic which is coming on the website gets diverted either for looking residential properties to buy, sell, rent & leasing activities, with renting & buying services leading. The USP of the company is providing 100% verified listing and leads, which are passed only after somebody enters his phone number and gets him verified, this is something which makes us more competitive in the industry. The website is extremely customer friendly and makes the navigation for even a first time user a delight, filled with ease of surfing and loads of information to consume fitted in a neat and uncluttered web space. Floating advertisement and company policy of not clouding property listing with bundles of paid and sponsored ads makes the website really easy to load and gives customer an experience of surfing.

The company has developed a data science lab which helps to work on the data available online along with consumer behaviour in real estate, based on the finding the team came up with some fantastic findings viz relative comparison of pricing in different localaities, amenities, popular localities, location density, children friendly localities etc, combining all these features makes rentobuy as one of its kind company working in web based real estate space.

Target audience: It can be defined as the audience/people whom the company sees fit for its product or services, someone who is not using their services/product can at least promote them by word of mouth, can influence people in the surrounding and so on. This is one of the most powerful concepts when it comes to marketing because of the sole reason that if the targeting goes wrong, no other strategy would work because the audience selection is wrong, resulting in an absolute waste of uncounted money spend on advertising. It can also be defined as demographic of people who would be interested in company’s product/services, because these are the people who would eventually put money in the pockets of the owners. Hence it becomes really tricky and at the same time extremely pivotal for companies to select their target audience (Thorson & Moore, 2013) the segmentation can be on the basis of geographical, demographic, physiographic and behavioural.

Target Audience

The target audience in this case is considered keeping in mind that we at rentobuy are doing only online advertising and not going with the traditional means of advertising, hence the reasoning for target audience.

 
Communication objectives/goals: These can be understood as the desired result a communication strategy is intending to achieve. To put in other words, how the firm would like to resonate with its audience and answer the important question of what, why & how in the minds of customers. A very well defined and measurable communication objective lays down the success of any communication strategy as one is primary to another. Communication objectives must have:

• Relevancy: The message should be relevant to the target audience, without relevancy to the target audience , any brilliantly designed communication plan can fail
• Clarity: The message should be loud and clear and not confusing
• Consistency: The message should be consistent , inconsisitency in communicating message might turn off your audience
• Medium: The communication channel is really important keeping in mind the target audience, some of the relevant medium are: Radio, TV, print,Digital, social marketing, influencer marketing, mailers, newsletters, etc
• Structure: It should have all, a body, opening line & a closing line
• Primacy/Recency:  After a week or so , any business communication can only be remembered because of one or both the things: Power and memorability of its opening  or the close. Similarly Primacy is known as the effect of remembering the first few items presented and similarly recency as the effect of last few items presented, and as the individual might differ in both primacy/recency it becomes of great importance to have both the basis covered and make an impression in the beginning as well as in the end.
• Psychological rule: (7±2 rule) It states that no matter how much information is given in an advertisement , a human brain can absorb and remember only some of it, the range of his absorbtion of info ranges from 5 to 9, so its of primary importance to keep the communication limited rather than bombarding the client with lot of information.

Creative advertising:

It is the abilitiy to design & develop ideas that are novel and useful. Newness, usefulness & originality defines creative advertising.The creative elements describe what to say , how to say and where to say it, a perfect mix of all these concepts make it a creative advertising (Ashley & Tuten, 2015)Before working on a style of creative advertising , lets understood briefly some of the creative styles:

Generic Message: It is the simplest type of advertising style, this type of messages provides information about the brand, without making any claim regarding the superiority over other brand/rival brand. This type of style can be used when the audience is informed and the advertiser wants to just educate the audience, or else when the advertiser is the market leader in its category.

Pre-emptive message:  In this type of style, a brand makes a claim, before the rival brand has done it, and the rival brand cannot use the same as the point of differentiation.

Unique-Selling Preposition Message:  The name itself explains this type of creative style, the brand uses a unique selling proposition unique to its brand , claiming some kind of benefit in the process.

Positioning Message: In this type of messaging the brand tries to establish its position in the minds of the consumer , and for future reference they can relate to the positioning of brand established for their purchasing behaviour.There are multiple ways of positioning, listing down some for better understanding.

• Positioning by product features
• Positioning by service quality
• Positioning by service
• Positioning by price
• Positioning by social status
• Positionig by lifestyle
• Positioning by aspirations
• Posititoning by values

Brand Image Message: In this type of styling , the advertising only focuses on the brand and not on the features, product, services etc. The aim is to just register the brand in the minds of consumers, it is primarily used by established brands, luxury, beauty products etc.This type of styling focuses on inner needs & experience rather than the product.

Resonance Message: This type of styling uses statements or phrases that users can identify with or resonate with, the message appears to speak on behalf of the audience. It resonates in the the entire realm.

Affective Message: This type of styling creates some kind of feeling in the mindset of an audience, the feeling might be of love, fear, anxiety, joy, sexual attraction, shock, sorrow, security, pride, pleasure,embarrassment, nostalgia and other such emotions.

These type of styles can be then divided in 2 categories :

Communication Objectives

 As explained above, resonance message styling can be described as the strategy wherin we engage the audience in a conversation and message that reflects their values and interest which in turn will result in wanting them to do business with your company. In this type of marketing, brands don’t focus on the price, product, features ,service etc , this can come later, what brand focuses on is being able to vibrate on the same wavelength as the target audience is, that would make a deep connect and would interest them in the brand. It has a 3 fold step to get to the audience:

In short, key to Resonance is conversation, once the audience is engaged with the message, consider advertising department job to be done, and then it’s the product which talks. Hence communication is the most important factor in this type of style, so it becomes extremely important as to what we communicate with the audience:

• Who are we
• What are we about
• Interest alignment with the audience: Values, Interes, product/services

Konwing oneself which can include:

• What is image of the company
• What does the company wants to project- Brand, personality , reputation, etc.
• What is the company seling: Dreams, productivity, convenience etc

And finally being able to articulate the same on different channel which can be on the likes of social media, website, marketing collaterals, ATL & BTL.

Its very important to understand resonance marketing style of advertising is not a quick fix , but it’s a long term strategy based on building relationship.

Objective:

• Getting more people on the portal.
• Helping people find better homes.
• Disrupt the way real estate portal work.
• Change the entire ecosystem in the way homes are being searched.

Abstract Idea of Advertisement: The idea for advertisement is, creating importance and value of home and family in the audience. The audience in our case is very diverse, ranging from people at the age of 18 to 40 years of age, and hence our ad will be targeted to students, young couples, professionals, single people who are hunting for a place to live in and then families who want to stay in suburb and raise their children. The idea will basically revolve around the importance of home for the target audience.

Ad line can be: We help you, not just in finding houses but  in creating homes.

Ethical issues:  These are issues that develop around communication objective, some of them can be:

• Marketing causes people to buy more than they can afford.
• Marketing overemphasizes materialism.
• Marketing increases cost of goods and services.
• It perpetuates stereotyping.
• It creates offensive advertisement.
• They use unfiar tactics
• Marketers prepare deceptive & misleading advertisements.
• Advertising to children is unethical.
• Salespeople use deceptive practices.

The only ethical issue I believe can arise in our advertising plan is, increasing the cost of goods, in this case( Price of house, rent of apartments etc). The reason can be, as rentobuy doesn’t provide a platform to buy homes directly, it can be an additional cost to the property developers and to take care of the marketing cost, the rates of homes go up.

In case of rentobuy, traditional media will not be working as the target audience is millennial and the people who surf net, hence targeting them through online channels of communication makes more sense. Also, Australia as a country is extremely digitally literate and thus the solutions would be cost effective and also yield better results.

A unique idea, to spread the word more about the brand , tie-up with Netflix and creating a series in partnership with it and integrating the brand with the subject of web series, its expensive , but the connect with the audience will be long lasting.

Measurement of online marketing becomes easier as a lot of tools are there which provide us with valuable insight on the data gathered. It helps us in understanding what the user is doing with our content, how much time he is spending , what is the engagement rate, what is click-through rate and so on. Because of specific targeting the result we obtain can be really beneficial, and with the concept of remarketing, it becomes easier for the marketer to remarket the product/service to the user. Some of the measures can be:

• Increase in the traffic on website.
• Getting more unique user.
• CTR-Click through rate has to be between .2-.5
• The traffic driven from banner ads to the website
• The number of repeated mention in the blogs
• Improvement in organic ranking of website.
• Repeatedly the Ad (SEM) appearing on top of the search page beating the competition.
• Number of conversation on social media with our brand name
• Number of times people are sharing, liking, commenting with our content.
• Engagement of the user with a post.
• Number of impression on the banner ads/PPC
• Time invested in the site.
• Bounce Rate- Number of people who after coming on the website from any source , drop out from the home page in less than 40 seconds
• Page views

These are some of the metrics which can be used to measure the effectiveness of any campaign, and with the help of data science and Google analytics we can rework on the campaign targeting and put the resources to good use as well.

References:

Ashley, C & Tuten, T 2015, Creative strategies in social media marketing: An exploratory study of branded social content and consumer engagement, Psychology & Marketing, 32(1), pp.15-27.

Thorson, E. & Moore, J 2013. Integrated communication: Synergy of persuasive voices. Psychology Press. 

Order an Essay Now & Get These Features For Free:

Turnitin Report

Formatting

Title Page

Citation

Outline

Place an Order