EMAAR Digital Marketing Strategy: It Is All About Connecting the Dots…
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EMAAR Digital Marketing Strategy: It is All about connecting the dots… Preface: Emaar, a group this big, if wants to escalate its Digital marketing crusades then it’s all about connecting the RIGHT dots… at the right time. Dots… 1. Process Flows 2. Departments (Marketing, Legal, IT, Operations, Finance, Alliance, Corporate etc.) 3. Activities (Which can influence Marketing & Sales in any sense) includes all Digital, Event, Database etc.) 4. Channels [{offline: Print/Press/TV Media, Events like Trade Shows, Property Fairs} {online: Digital including all channels i.e. Organic, Display, Search, Video, Social Media, Email, Referral & Direct}] 5. Conversion/Customer acquisition Techniques [Retargeting, Emotional Intelligence using offline and online techniques] {This zone is all about innovation} 6. Budgets 7. Automation [Campaign Execution, Brand Monitoring, Data Tracking/Analysis, Optimization & Repeat] All the above are gears & cogs which have to work together to attain the desired objective of the company, which for any company is “Revenue” so the macro KPI for any marketing activity be it digital or offline would be ultimately measured by customer acquisition. 18th Aug: Update, I published this blog on 16th Aug evening at around 8 PM, and checked the status on GOOGLE at 10 PM 18th, it ranked on the key phrase “EMAAR digital marketing strategy” on 1st and on “EMAAR digital marketing” at 3rd rank on the first page. “ In this research, I will just focus on Digital Marketing, I will try to externally audit current digital activities, identify the “GAP AREAS” and try to provide my recommendations as of how “EMAAR” can escalate its current DM crusades. ” Contents: 1. EMAAR… a Little Enlightenment on the Group. 2. Let’s Audit… how deep are they? 1. SEO Highlights! 2. Website design… the oomph factor! 3. Technology… Did they automate? 4. Reverse Engineering the Traffic … What they have on the platter? 5. Advertisement… What, Where & Why are they Spending? 6. Social Media… Where do they stand? 3. Test the Waters… What to Spend? (Budgets) 4. Honey Show Me the Money? (Objective & KPIs) 1. Product… What has to be sold? 2. Sales Approach… 5. Digital Marketing Process Flow 6. Digital Implementation Strategy… What exactly will give results? 7. Conclusion EMAAR… a Little Enlightenment On the Group. As per Wikipedia, Emaar Properties was founded and incorporated in 1997 by chairman Mohamed Alabbar. As one of the leading developers in the UAE, Emaar gradually diversified interests in real estate including both commercial and residential property development, as well as malls and hospitality. Emaar has collective presence in 36 markets across the Middle East, North Africa, Pan-Asia, Europe and North America EMAAR is listed as no #801 in world’s biggest public companies by Forbes, with a current market cap of $14.6 Billion Some of the iconic projects of Emaar properties are Burj Khalifa, Dubai Mall, Dubai Marina & Downtown Dubai. The Dubai Mall officially opened in 2008, and Burj Khalifa in 2010. By 2014, Emaar was holding over $11.4 billion in real estate investments. Emaar Properties is also listed on the Dubai Financial Market and was the first property company to offer shares to foreign nationals. The Company with a strength of 10000 employees reported its 2016 revenue as $4.307 Billion, so we are talking about a company which needs no recognition but of course, there is always a scope to grow, to go to the next level. Let’s Audit… how deep are they? If you have a competent experience working with corporate then you can easily articulate that researching 4Ps of marketing, doing SWOT analysis of the product and creating process flows is still the easy part but actually implementing them on ground with a consensus of all the departments is a difficult drill, the same way auditing a website and creating a digital marketing plan is the easy part but to actualize them with perfection that can actually invoke the desired result is the challenging part. Let’s take up the challenge, …well I have already taken it SEO Highlights: The website is in 2 languages – Arabic and English with the total of 27035 URLs in which 9961 are HTML URLs, missing titles are 7059 and duplicate are 2898 … that’s awful don’t you think so?? well wait, there is a small glitch. Each of the URLs has 3 versions and all are live i.e. no 301 redirects are done. E.g. • https://www.emaar.com/en/what-we-do/communities/uae/downtown- dubai/29-boulevard.aspx • http://www.emaar.com/en/what-we-do/communities/uae/downtown- dubai/29-boulevard.aspx • https://emaar.com/en/what-we-do/communities/uae/downtown-dubai/29- boulevard.aspx Although it shouldn’t damage the SEO as Google is smart enough to just crawl one of the versions (or you can set it in webmasters) but the smart move would be to keep it clean. So ideally we should divide the total URLs with 3, but again even if the no would be close to 3319 URLs, how come 2/3rd titles are missing, that’s a huge no. On a careful scrutinization, a major flaw came into cognizance. All the press releases which are the actual source of brand awareness and are fresh content for the company lacks proper marketing strategy. For E.g. • https://www.emaar.com/ar/media-centre/detail.aspx?itemId=tcm:223- 46845 [ some Arabic versions are actually English with right to left alignment it is better not to put them online] • https://www.emaar.com/en/media-centre/detail.aspx?itemId=tcm:223-46840 and all of them miss Titles, Images, Open graph protocols, Twitter cards etc, I didn’t even bother to check schema :). Basically, they have populated for the sake of doing it and nobody is harnessing the full value of the newly generated content. SM marketing which is a great source of brand awareness is nil for these articles which is rather sad. If you will delve a little deep on to marketing pitfalls 90% of the organizations struggle for new content generation and I could see that Emaar content creation is regular & huge i.e. 70% of URLs are with new content i.e. PRs/Blogs, but due to the lack of defined content marketing strategy there is a GAP. GAP This is strong gap area and Google resonates with the same i.e. in nearly 2300 content pages, Google indexed only 494 Arabic pages and 342 English pages (with a hustle of https, http and with/without www versions of same URLs) this means Google Webmasters needs a health check. I did a random time check on Google and noticed that Google has not indexed any PR of Emaar from past 30 days, I went on the website and found that they have published 7 PRs and Google didn’t even crawl one of them. *None of the above PRs are indexed (as per present date 10th of Oct) Conclusion: Clearly there is a need for a defined content strategy, proper implementation process flow with a clear objective. *Please note am omitting small SEO checks and backlinking profile as this article is not about Complete SEO AUDIT am just using all the DM tools to identify major gaps at strategic and implementation level. Website design… the oomph factor! They have taken a very clear design with a Lead conversion landing page approach which normally is taken for instant lead generation, I won’t comment on design as I need to audit analytics to analyze the performance of the design, but on an external view my comment would be that design is missing some spot when it comes to luxury experience. It is oversimplified, and images are over optimized i.e. they have lost their glare, the glam feel which is needed as per say, the brand image of Emaar is missing. Real estate is all about heavy investments with USP of lifestyle experience, basically, when you are selling a premium luxury lifestyle then you have to be damn convincing before you are in a position to ask for contact details. Point is, till the time user has not felt the luxury, conversion is not likely to happen, so the first screen with “Register your Interest” doesn’t seem to be a proper call to action. Emaar changed the design of website on June 3rd, 2017, so they should compare the bounce rate, no of pages per visit and other metrics to analyze the design change impact, I can sense that bounce rate might have gone up. Technology… Did they automate? If we study the tagging structure of the website, they have a clean tagging structure, they are using GTM for all the tag management and we can easily make out what technologies are used by Emaar. In Advertising, they are using • Adobe Audience Manager • Cretio • Double Click (Adwords) • Eloqua • Tubemogul • Twitter Advertising In Analytics • Google Analytics • Google Audience manager • Twitter Analytics • Crazyegg GAP Surprisingly they don’t have Facebook Pixels installed, I mean this is strange for me, using Twitter advertising and not using FB ad engine, FB ads cover nearly 80% of social media i.e. Facebook & Instagram database plus their audience partners like Skout etc. This is a strong opportunity for the company, GAP area identified, I will talk about it later in my strategy section. Emaar is also using Salesforce & Workplace by Facebook so it’s good that they have automated a lot of things and process is smooth. They have a separate portal for Agents powered by Salesforce, where all Emaar Agents can log in and collaborate with Emaar. Reverse Engineering the Traffic … What they have on the platter? Now it’s time to do some productive job i.e.