THE POWER OF A PERSONAL BRAND IN DIGITAL MARKETING

WHAT IS SOME OF THE BEST DIGITAL MARKETING TOOLS OUT THERE  

“Yeah, so I think it’s sort of understanding who your ideal client is as well can be a really good starting point. So that then when you are coming up with content and sort of talking to your community that you’re building, it really resonates. So I think that would be a first thing. Just really understand whether it be that local community, what’s important to them. Are they families? Are they older, are they downsizing? So really dig into that, understand what are those key things that are important to the audience you’re looking to build and really hone your content towards that. So when it comes to that as well, authenticity is always so important. So come from a place of trying to educate, inform, there are always things that have been strong, passionate parts for me when it comes to anything I do online and the way I represent both our products and solutions and that sort of thing. But what we want to do is make sure that it’s consistent. So I think one thing that the platforms and most of them are all the same. They’re rewarding, consistency, rewarding, sort of the volume and quality. And so, we want a balance of good amount of quantity of posting and of using the different parts of the social media platforms. Like you always talk about reels and leveraging that part of social media accounts, but then also look to businesses and part of our services are creating efficient and automated where you’re interested in turning that on distribution of your properties. So, one thing you are always educating your team on is it can’t be just the just listed, just sold, just leased, but they can form a key part to your story and your results and that consistency in being seen. But how do you then layer on top that sort of what did the interest rate on hold mean to the consumers right now? So, should you list, does that mean we’re going to see growth? Does that mean we’re going to see more properties come to market? What are all those factors that no one’s got the crystal ball, but how can we put that spin on it, localize that and really hone in on, once again educating, informing your community and what’s genuinely happening on the ground, not talking holistically. I think that the people see the headline of channel nine news or whatever newspaper that can be so broad. So how can you hone in localize and then really provide impact of what that means to the local market would be my, some of my best suggestions on helping you get a following, a trusted following and they see you as that local expert.” 

 

WHAT DO YOU GUYS DO AND HOW CAN PEOPLE UTULIZE YOUR PRODUCTS?  

“What appealed to me, I joined this business in April of this year and coming from a background with a large portal, portals are great and amazing, satisfying the interest in property for the very active audience typically. So what I really loved about what the Realty media group business had done and the way realty.com au differentiates is the ability to leverage social media and social media pages. So over 3.8 million posts have been completed by our team on getting those properties further than just onto an active portal. So that’s generated over 350,000 active audience. So around people who are just passively following the market, keeping an eye on what’s happening and coming in and out of real estate mode, but ideally engaging with property outside of a portal. So that’s been hugely valuable to us. We’ve got a thousand Facebook pages across the country that all geomap and target certain suburbs that fall into regions and specific areas and also specific property types like rural properties, prestige properties, those sorts of things to help satisfy the interest in property. And people like Australia’s have one of the highest levels of interest in property in the world. So where they’re the sort of things where in our market it’s so important we’re delivering this information up to them because there’s that craving in interest in finding out more. So, what the business went on to do is because the portal space is competitive, it was around how can we help to really level up and help an agent when it comes to promoting property. And in a market where we’ve seen such shortage of stock and other different sort of scenarios in the market, there was a lot more properties transacting both on and off market. But ads can provide an effective way for a homeowner and an agent to put a property in front of an audience but not necessarily impact that first impression because an ad is seen and then disappears. They’re great ways where you can test a property on the market as far as price. You can test the property on the market as far as exposure before you go full to market where it’s then in front of everyone. All of those data points are captured. And one of the biggest things as an agent back in my day was you get one chance at a first impression. So when you are putting anything on the internet, it’s there, it’s captured and it can be used against you later. So people then start saying, well it’s been on the market for over a certain amount of time, we expect to pay less. All of those things very much create a challenge or a hurdle. And I’m a personal believer that every property, no matter what market, what condition within that first two to three weeks, there should be opportunity for an owner to sell. So there should be great amount of feedback and interest in a property and to put yourself in a position of strength and creating that urgency and competition. Auction was a favorite of mine and it’s something that I worked towards helping create that ability for negotiating upwards rather than often with a price set negotiating downwards. But also in that scenario, one of the biggest frustrations for consumers is what price, they’re the most common queries that come through our platform. And the other portals is price guide. So they’re the things where in Queensland especially, there is no price on an auction. It’s very difficult. Other states there is price guides, but one thing that is just so important is the ability for you to guide consumers through this journey and ultimately matchmaking the right buyer and the right seller to a successful sale. So, use technology, automate where you can. So, we’ve got the ability, if an agent wants to switch on just sold for example, this is really popular at the moment that every property they sell has an automatic budget attached and an ad that goes out promoting that sole result that’s great at just being consistent front of mind and getting on the shopping list. All of those sellers in your local market. And then that’s where all of your additional content that you produce helps to tie it all together, build that trust and credibility again and make sure that when you’re in the living room it’s not so much then about why should we choose you? They’ve already made that decision. So then it becomes very much of when can we get started. We really bought into the way you promote yourself, promote your properties and the results you’re getting. They’re very much aware.” 

 

FOR PROPERTY MANAGEMENT SPACES, HOW DO YOU UTULIZE YOUR PERSONAL PROFILE ON YOUR PLATFORM AND HOW IS IT AUTOMATED? 

“For sure. So yeah, realty.com to you is the heart and allows any agency in the country and New Zealand to list their properties onto that portal at no cost. So if you’re not on the portal, let’s get you connected from there, you can simply log into the backend admin area and you’ve got all of those abilities on screen to post an ad hoc ad for a single property. Or once again to switch on automation. Once automation is on, that means that as soon as we receive the feed of that listing, whether it is just listed as a new lease property or whether it is just leased, they’re those key timings when we can really get ahead of that and promote that immediately. They’re the sort of things where we set up that automation, switch it on and get started. The other things is, I often feel, and I yell at my window to agents who I know well when they’re putting a salt sticker on and they haven’t taken the time to tell me what it’s sold for before putting that salt sticker on and they’re just saying, oh look, it’ll be in the newsletter in the next couple of days, it’s too late, I want to know now, but I don’t want to feel special.” So how can you make your local community feel special? And you can use an ad for that. So just prior to going to activating that switchover of a property to just lease, how can you communicate that out through your newsletter through an ad and keeping people informed and making them feel special v i p treatment using ad technology. So yeah, for us we want to give you that ability that you can know that it’s set, know that it’s on, the design is done, the overlay across the property is done and the radius is set. So there’s a lot of, like you said, time spent when it comes to this. When you’re busy, these things can slip by the wayside. Suddenly then you’ve gone, oh, we forgot to promote those last five just leased because we’ve been too busy. Suddenly, we create these peaks and troughs in our businesses where the basics were missed. So, where we can, setting up this automation, I think just provides the budget you’ve allowed for it, you’ve catered for it in your agreements and those sorts of things as well. So often in property management, some of the challenges that have come up have been, oh, well it’s not currently included, so we probably can’t ask for it. Of all our existing owners start creeping it in. Some of our campaigns can be set to as low as a $50 budget. They, that’s a great way to start. And then as you are writing new management agreements up, bringing in a level of marketing, I think you need to be looking at least five days, but more so 10 days. And if you’re a business that’s got some volume of sort of 3, 5, 10 properties being advertised and leased per month, that’s amazing. The owners in the street will drive past the signboard perhaps and see, but if you are streets away and you don’t drive past, that’s Facebook, you’re flicking through another post, another post, and it’s a different property address, another property address. And then one of the ways I I’m seeing that we can take this to the next level is try and tell the story in there. Make it really clear that there were tenants left over, buyers left over how many offers you had, what the days on market were. They’re all really key parts of the story that can help give confidence for someone to take action in their next step in their property journey. So we’re constantly looking at ways where we can dynamically update ads. So there’s agents that are using platforms for online auctions and those sort of things. We’re looking at ways we can dynamically bring in the current bid on a property, on the ad. So it’s always updating because all of those things take time to manage and need to be up to date and accurate based on legislation in a lot of cases. So how can we pull in real time information about the property, about the campaign? And that’s going to help I think, keep people educated and informed of exactly what’s happening right now in any market. What we see a lot of agents when they get started on social do start with lower budget. So rather than trying to spread a low budget across a lot of platforms, we’ve really sort of honed in on where we’re seeing the best results. So Facebook and Insta and where you’ve got your two accounts linked through meta, that allows us to distribute ads across those two platforms very quickly and start getting results very quickly as well. When you want to bring in other platforms like Google AdWords, Google Display, TikTok, LinkedIn, we, we are geared up to automatically distribute to those. But there’s nothing worse than trying to spread a small budget too far and get poor results across all. So our goal is always to get you the best possible results from the budgets you are allowing, but provide flexibility around budget. So, our goal now is typically a Facebook, Instagram combined campaign. We allow you to post the ad from the agency or own account, but we also have a unique way, which is the feedback we get is phenomenal using our ad account and our ad account. We’ve got a couple of different versions of our ad account that we do use. They can be off those thousand local Facebook pages. So when the ad goes out and it sort of says it’s from Morton Bay Local or Ipswich Local or those sort of pages, that’s just another bit of third party validation. So we see agents really leveraging that well. But like you say, for us it’s about that traffic going back to their preferred landing page as well. And agents able to easily populate their preferred U R L, which is often, like we talked about earlier, back to their own website because one thing that I am seeing is agents reaching out saying to me they’ve lost access to their account is managed by a third party, they’ve done something wrong, I can’t get access, the thousands of followers that I had are now gone, I cannot access Facebook aren’t responsive.”