# Quick start guide
KPro Marketing is divided in three main sections: Inventory, Marketing and Leads Management. The following diagram that shows the basic flow when using the platform.
Before using KPro Marketing, it is important to understand some basic concepts like the difference between the Inventory and Listings, the schemes and eligibility rules available in the platform, how to publish your listings in different platforms and at the same time bring your leads from them.
# On this page
# KPro Marketing Basic concepts
In order to understand how KPro Marketing works, it is important to be familiar with the main concepts the platform is based on.
# Schemes
As KPro Marketing is focused on affordable homes, Scheme is an important concept for the platform. Properties are usually offered under government-backed schemes, aimed to help first time buyers onto the property market.
To be able to assign some schemes to properties, these properties should fulfill certain requirements, usually in terms of price, location or new build, that are bound to the scheme.
The platform is flexible about adding new schemes coming up in the future, but now the available schemes are:
# For sale
- Shared Ownership: Scheme that allows buyers to own a share and then rent the part they don't own at a reduced rate.
- Help to Buy - Equity Loan: Scheme that offers an equity loan where the government lends money to buy a newly-built home
- Discount Market Sale: Low-cost home ownership product where a housing provider offers a discount on the purchase of a new build property.
- First Dibs: Scheme to ensure that new, lower-cost homes in the capital are marketed and sold exclusively to Londoners and UK-based buyers first.
Although Private sale is not really a scheme, it's included in the available schemes as the option to use when you want to sale a property in the private market.
# To rent
- London living rent: Scheme for middle-income households who now rent and want to build up savings to buy a home. The homes will be offered on tenancies of a minimum of three years.
- Rent to Buy: Scheme that allows you to rent a property for less than the market price for a set amount of time, in which you are expected to use the money saved from the lower rent for a deposit to buy the property after the tenancy ends.
- Discount market rent: It is also sometimes known as Intermediate Rent. This offers home seekers the opportunity to rent a home at a rent that is 20% less than the market rate.
Although Private rent is not really a scheme, it's included in the available schemes as the option to use when you want to rent a property in the private market.
# Scheme groups
When creating properties, you must assign the schemes they are going to be offered under. Most of these schemes cannot be used together, that is why the platform provides the list of possible Scheme groups, which include all single schemes and a group containing Help to Buy and First Dibs.
When you assign schemes to a property, you do by selecting one of the Scheme groups, and the property will be offered under all the schemes in the group.
# Inventory vs Listings
While many of the platforms list the properties directly on portals by adding some extra descriptions and images, in KPro Marketing there are two concepts.
The Inventory, which is your stock of properties, divided in two groups: development properties (new build properties managed as part of a development) and independent units (resale properties or properties loaded as independent).
Listings, which are created from developments and independent units, are the ones used to make properties visible on portals. Once the advertising process ends, usually because all the properties have been sold or rented, listings are archived, but the properties remains unchanging, although probably inactive, until a resale process re-activate them.
Listings must be created from existing Developments or Independent units, and the platform provides two ways to do that, from the details of a development or independent unit, or from the Listing module.
An independent unit can have only one active listing (non-archived listing), while a development can have many active listings, but only one per Scheme group. Listings created from developments can be linked to no properties, but in those cases you will need to specify prices and property details manually.
# Eligibility
In most cases, potential buyers need to be eligible to buy properties offered under some schemes. In those cases you can create eligibility rules to listings and even to properties, so KPro Marketing can check the eligibility for every lead coming to the platform.
Available rules will depend on the property schemes, but in general KPro Marketing supports the following eligibility rules:
- Maximum annual household income
- Minimum annual household income
- Minimum deposit or saving
- Minimum age
- Living or working in specific local authorities
- British, EU/EEA citizen or have Indefinite leave to remain
- First time buyer
For schemes Shared ownership and Help to buy, you can choose let the platform check the eligibility based on the affordability calculator instead of defining specific values for the Minimum annual household income and Minimum deposit or saving. In these cases, you can customize the calculator parameters to use like Mortgage interest rate or Maximum mortgage term.
# Single click listing
This is one of the features of KPro Marketing, that allows you to publish listings in several platforms with a single click. Once published, any change you do to your live listings and properties will be automatically updated in all the portals where they were published.
# Lead aggregation
This is the process of bringing leads from several portals and sources and gathering them in one place to help streamline the sales process. Currently, KPro Marketing can bring leads from Portals powered by KPro Marketing and from external platforms like Zoopla, Rightmove and Shared to buy, but you can also use the KPro Marketing API to bring leads to KPro Marketing from your own CRM.
# Where to start
# Loading the inventory
The inventory can be loaded by using different ways. If you already have all your developments and properties in Excel sheets you can convert them to CSV and use the Importing from CSV tool to upload it.
You can also load it manually, but there are some tools to help you increase your productivity like the one available when clicking on the Bulk insert and Bulk edit options.
Using the KPro Marketing API is another possible option, although this usually requires new implementation on your side o create a JSON structure with all the information, which is better to do in CSV format. This option is better to keep the inventory synchronized with another system you use as the primary source for your inventory.
# Creating listings
There are two ways to create listings, one is from a development or independent unit details window, and the other is from the listing section. In the latter you will need to select the development or independent unit you want to create the listing from.
When creating listings you will only need to add the description information, and once saved, you can add images, videos or brochures to make them available to home seekers.
When you create listings from developments, you don't need to define which properties are going to be advertised in the listing, this is done automatically, by selecting active properties that match the same schemes as the listing.
The listing edition form provides two ways to get prices and property details fields: Automatic and Manual. When using the first one, every time you change property fields, activate or deactivate them, related fields are kept updated in the listings.
When selecting the manual option, you are responsible to keep those fields updated, but you are free to use the values you want. When you want o advertise properties coming soon and there are no properties loaded yet, the only option available is manual, but once you have create the properties, you can switch it to automatic.
In order to check the eligibility of leads when they register their interest, you can also add eligibility rules. This will have a great impact on the quality of the leads coming from Keaze Marketplace and Homes for Londoners.
# Publishing listings
Once your listings are ready to go live, you can publish them in several portals with one single click. Do not worry about any change you do to your live listings and properties, they will be automatically updated in all the portals where they were published.
# Creating open days
You can create open days to make them available to home seekers that access to Keaze Marketplace or Homes for Londoners, once they registered their interest and the eligibility check process was successful.
From the Open day view you can display the list of attendees or exporting to a file to print it.
# Managing leads
View the leads coming from different sources, check their eligibility, and use affordability calculators to determine which are the best leads for each property.
# Requesting marketing campaigns
Analyse listing performance and increase the number of qualified leads by requesting marketing campaigns. The KPro Marketing team will run your campaigns on Social networks, Google and other media to bring optimized leads to your listings.
# Saving time
KPro Marketing provides several tools to help you increase your productivity on repetitive tasks and allow you to focus on the most important things.
# Universal search
When using the search bar on the top bar of KPro Marketing, you can do simultaneous search on Leads, Listings, Developments and Independent units.
# Calendar
Use the calendar to get an instant view of all your appointments, no matter if they are Open days, In-person or Virtual ones. You will also be able to filter by Listings or Agents.
# Default values
There are some settings to define some default values when creating properties. Fill those settings in to save time.
In the same way you can use the default property values when editing developments to set which values you want to use by default when creating properties for the development.
# Bulk insert and edit
These tools will allow you to create and edit multiple properties using a single form. Although properties fields are never completely identical, you can create several properties by defining the common fields, and then use the bulk edit to change only the fields that are different, pre-selecting the properties you want to update.
# HCA calculators
Set up the default values for Affordability calculators, so you do not need to set these values every time you define eligibility rules.
# The user interface
The user interface uses some common design guidelines, that once you get familiar with them, it will make it easier to work with KPro Marketing. Find below a list of the most important ones:
# Filtering lists
All lists present a set of filters on top that you can use to easily find a row without moving from pages. Available filters will depend on the section, but it is Common to see the multi-field search, that allow you to search a text across multiple columns, and dates filter to do searches based on the creation date.
# Ordering lists by columns
You can click on column headers to sort the list by the clicked column. Most lists are usually single-column sorting, which means you can only sort by one column at a time. In this case clicking again on a sorted column, will change the sort direction, and clicking once again will disable the sorting, returning to the original order.
# Pagination
Although our recommendation is using filters to locate rows, all lists provide pagination to move across pages, and a field to select the amount of rows to display per pages. In some cases, like the list of properties for a development, you can select choosing All the rows.
# Lists and options
Some options like 'DELETE' will be only active when you select a row, even when most lists have a check control to select a row, you can select it by just clicking on any place of the row.
Some actions, like 'Bulk edit', require to select more than one row to get activated.
To edit a row, you should click on the first column link to display a modal window to view details or edit.
# Additional options
Some non-common or additional options are displayed when clicking on the three dots icon on the right of action buttons on top of most lists.
# Modal windows
The platform usually displays forms and details in Modal windows, which avoid navigating to another pages.
Modal windows usually have two modes, Edition and Details. The first one appears when you create items or when click on the 'edit' icon on the overview tab, the second one when you click on 'links' on lists.
When you are editing a form and you want to return to the overview, do not click on the top right cross icon because this will close the whole window, instead click on the 'CANCEL' button on the bottom of the form.
In some overview contents, links are used to provide a quick access to other tabs.
# Working with images
Images are managed by using a common tool that allows you to drag and drop or browse the images to add. Images options vary depending on the type of images, click on the 'INSTRUCTION' text to get help about all options, but there are some common ones that appear when you move the mouse over the image.
- Click on the 'edit' icon to update the caption and alternative text.
- Click on the 'magnifier' icon to view the original image.
- When the name of the image is too long, move and leave the mouse over the image name label for a second to display the full name.
Images can always be reordered by just drag them into place.
Gallery images are automatically centred and cropped to the aspect ratio of 16:9, but you can always re-cropped them.