Categories
Content Marketing News Social Media Marketing

Helping Tradepeople Turn Quotes into Customers

Online marketplaces bridging the gap for tradies

tradesmen carpenter painter plumber electrician turning quote into sale


THE AREA A LOT OF TRADESWOMEN and tradesmen struggle with is turning prospects into customers; in particular getting their quotes and estimates approved so they can commence work. But online marketplaces like hipages, Airtasker, Oneflare, ServiceSeeking, and a raft of others, are helping to close that gap.

Online payment facilities

online marketplaces for tradesmen and tradeswomenThese marketplaces are helping to protect the money of the consumers using them as well, but offering escrow services. Airtasker, in particular, was the first online marketplace in Australia to add a payment facility to its platform that allows customers to pay for a job, which will be held until the job is complete and both parties are satisfied.

Helping small businesses grow

hipages logo tradesman tradeswoman turn quotes into sales onlineHipages and Oneflare are owned by News Corporation (majority owners of Realestate.com.au) and Domain Group (operators of rival property portal Domain) respectively. Both real estate portals are investing heavily in growing their ancillary revenues — that is, revenue from sources other than property ads — by recommending services that homebuyers and sellers are likely to need next. To this end, Domain recently launched a mortgage lending service called Domain Loan Finder, as a joint venture with Lendi.  

If you’re a builder, removalist, cleaner, plumber, electrician, labourer, painter and decorator, or other kind of trademan or tradeswoman, then advertising on either hipages or Oneflare is probably a no brainer. As Realestate.com.au and Domain begin to offer these services directly from the real estate listings on their sites, apps, email marketing, and so on, this where most homeowners will find their next tradie.

If you’re a tradesperson, then advertising on either hipages or Oneflare is probably a no brainer. As Realestate.com.au and Domain begin to offer these services directly from the real estate listings on their sites, apps, email marketing, and so on, this where most homeowners will find their next tradie.

Oneflare and Hipages, through their association with Domain and REA Group, will become sites for highly skilled tradespeople, while the Airtaskers and ServiceSeekings will remain sites for lower-cost tradespeople.


tradespeople turning quotes to salesFor help determining the right places to advertise your business online, contact the team at Virion for more information about our content marketing services to suit your budget.


 

Categories
Content Marketing News Social Media Social Media Marketing

Google Delivers More Leads for FREE!

Learn how to make Google love you

how to be found on google tradesperson online business


FOLLOWING ITS ACQUISITION BY AMERICAN telecommunications company, Verizon, Yahoo! is officially no more. So it should go without saying that Google, officially, is the premier search engine if you want your business discovered online.

It’s official: Google is the premier search engine if you want your business discovered online.

Google offers lots of tools to help businesses get discovered by its algorithms, including Google My Business, a free tool that gives your business a listing at the top of Page One on Google Search, as well as a place marker in Google Maps.

Create a Google My Business account

Many business people, including tradespeople, use cloud accounting software like MYOB and Xero to do their bookkeeping. Similarly, many tradies and others already have websites. However, even though your business may already have a website that’s been indexed by Google and shows up in search results for specific keywords, you won’t automatically have a Google My Business account.

You need to set that up separately, by entering in your business information — including your business address — which will be verified by Google. Once your business is verified by Google, you can then begin adding and adjusting your business’s logo and other imagery.

Then get the FREE Google Website

A website is an absolute must for any business operating today. Even if you primarily get leads from offline sources, or you do the majority of your work face to face, a website is still an invaluable tool for turning those prospects into customers.

To revisit the tradesperson example, very few people engage the services of a tradesman without doing some research online first. Your business’s website will be their first port of call. If you don’t have a website, they’ll look for reviews on a Google listing to see what other customers have said about you.

If they can’t find either, unless you were recommended by someone they know, they may choose to go with another business, which has a website, Google listing, or both. At the very least, it just tends to give people peace of mind.

Google now offers businesses with a Google My Business account a free website, already optimized for its search algorithms, and for mobile devices. It’s also easy to use with your custom domain, and is Google AdWords ready, for when you’re ready to kick your marketing up to the next level.


Mobile apps for real estate agentsWant help setting up your Google My Business account and finding more leads for your business? See our digital marketing strategy.


 

Categories
Content Marketing News Responsive Mobile Website Social Media Marketing

Get Your Quotes Approved Quicker Online

How to quote ON THE JOB

on the job quoting quotes tradespeople

FOR TRADESPEOPLE, SOURCING NEW WORK and ensuring you’re getting paid on time, are integral parts of running your own business. As a tradie, the time between quoting for a job and it being accepted by a client can often run into weeks — or worse, months — which can adversely affect your business’s cash flow.

Unlike other small businesses, which can quote for jobs without having to leave their office, a tradesperson has to measure and quote for each job in person. It’s in a tradesperson’s best interest, then, to convert the vast majority of those quotations into jobs.

Quote online, in real time

Many tradespeople, while they may using a cloud-accounting package like Xero or MYOB AccountRight Live, they’re not using it efficiently.

Each time you go out to measure and quote for a new job, draw up the quote on your smartphone or tablet, and send it to your prospect while you’re still talking to them (some cloud-accounting packages allow you to send quotes and invoices by text as well as email).

Each time you go out to measure and quote for a new job, draw up the quote on your smartphone or tablet, and send it to your prospect while you’re still talking to them.

Sending a quote to a prospect before leaving, gives them the opportunity to ask any questions they may have, and may just result in immediate acceptance. But even if they don’t accept right away, it shows you’re keen, capable and ready to do the work.

If they have to wait a day or more for the quote, it could send the message you’re too busy or not interested. It’s also gives the prospect time to “cool off” from the initial excitement, and potentially have second-thoughts about getting the work done.

Connect to your sales software

The next thing you need is to make sure you have a full history of correspondence with your prospects. If you’re not already, you should start using a sales application, like Hubspot. Its basic plan is free, while its premium plan costs US$50/month. Hubspot connects to your Gmail account, and lets you send tracked sales emails — you can also connect it to an application like AWeber or Mailchimp to send marketing emails.

By sending your quotes and other sales emails through your sales software (Hubspot also lets you make free voice calls anywhere in the world), they’ll be tracked, so you not only have a full record of your correspondence with that prospect, but you’ll also see when they’ve opened your emails, clicked on links, opened documents, and so on.

You can also share your calendar with prospects so they can see times when you’re available to complete their job, without having to call and find a suitable time.

Follow up, follow up, follow up!

If you don’t personally have the time to follow-up, you should have someone do it for you — hire a virtual assistant, for instance. A lot of the time, depending on the job, people are still weighing up whether to get the work done and when. A phone call is often all it takes to get a quote accepted.

If you can’t get hold of them on the phone, then “automate” your contact with your prospects. Use your sales software to send “sequenced” emails — that is, a series of emails scheduled to go out at a particular time, when the recipient has or has not taken a particular action. 

If you can’t get hold of them on the phone, then automate” your contact with your prospects. 


real estate agent brand building

For help creating sales and marketing messages that will deliver more leads to your business, contact the team at Virion for more information about our content marketing services.


 

Categories
Content Marketing News real estate agent Real estate agent software real estate agents

How Does CoreLogic RP Data’s New Comparable Sales Report Stack Up?

It’s a great tool for ‘touching base’ with your database

real-estate-agent-keep-in-touch-with-databaseCORELOGIC RP DATA RECENTLY RELEASED a new report that’s available to all real estate agents who are currently subscribed to the CoreLogic service. The report is called a Comparable Sales report and it’s part of CoreLogic’s new Signature Reports platform.

This reports platform draws on CoreLogic’s extensive property data sets to allow agents to generate reports that provide an overview of a particular suburb, including recent sales, trends, property images, and so forth. However, it’s just one of many similar services available —  so how does it stack up compared with what realestate.com.au and Domain provide? Here’s three things we can tell you about it: 

1. CoreLogic’s data is reliable and accurate

As the market leader for property data and insights, you can trust that CoreLogic’s sales data is accurate — it is used, after all, by media companies to generate the auction results they publish online and in their newspapers. The property portals, like realestate.com.au and Domain, however, rely on self-reporting from agents and scraping data from agent websites and other property portals. Furthermore, because many agents choose not to report the final sales price, there is a significant margin for error. CoreLogic, on the other hand, employs its own team of researchers who meticulously collect property data from several primary sources to ensure its accuracy.

2. CoreLogic’s Comparable Sales Report is automated

Yes, there is more information available at realestate.com.au or Domain, for instance, these sites include their suburb profiles, featuring information on demographics, the numbers of buyers looking for property, average days on market, and so forth. If you want that data using the CoreLogic Comparable Sales Report system, it would need to be pulled from those websites and imported into a compatible CRM that allows you to generate reports and brochures.

3. CoreLogic’s Comparable Sales Report is free and easy

If you’re subscribed to the CoreLogic service, which, let’s face it, most agents today are, then you already have access to their Signature Reports platform. This allows you to generate your own Comparable Sales Report, complete with your own agency logo, agent photograph and contact details.

The Comparable Sales Report is a great way for real estate agents to get new listings and stay in touch with homeowners in their database.


Virion is a digital agency that specialises in helping sales people, particularly real estate agents, build their online profile using content and digital marketing. This, in turn, helps salespeople grow their databases and obtain new listings.
It doesn’t matter how new to the game you are, or how little you know about online marketing, to begin building your online brand, contact our team to discuss which digital marketing options will work for you. Alternatively, to learn more about digital technologies that help real estate agents build an online presence, subscribe to our blog.

 

Categories
Content Marketing News real estate agent real estate agents Social Media

How Real Estate Agents Can Fill their Facebook Timelines with Content CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP

Quality Blog Content, Mentions and Quotes about YOU and Exclusive Advertising

lismore-real-estate-agent-terry-wallace-lowest-vacancy-rates-in-nsw-lismore-good-property-investment-granny-flatsThe cheapest way to get great quality content for blogs and Facebook posts is to share it with others. If an article is shared with many people the cost of producing it is much lower person. The problem is that most of that content is NOT about you and it’s not written with YOU in mind and that’s where we are a little different. We offer

  • content licensing with over 120 blog posts (check them out),
  • blog articles that feature or mention you (see an example about granny flats in Lismore), and
  • exclusivity so we won’t mention another real estate agent in your area.

Real Estate Blogs

There’s a lot to write about with real estate because most Australian’s love talking about it – particularly right now when most people are making great capital gains! Our blog posts are designed to help vendors understand what goes on when they are ready to sell their property so discuss:

Stay Front of Mind with Facebook Posts or Website Blogs

Facebook has become a massive part of our daily lives (whether we like it or not) and that includes real estate and how vendors find real estate agents to sell their home. An important part of marketing your services as a real estate agent is to be constantly in front of vendors so whether you decide to go the whole hog and get a website and blog or setup a Facebook Page and fill it with interesting posts it’s important to be sharing regularly.

The problem with most content that you share is that everyone else is sharing it and it doesn’t necessarily come back around to you. Wouldn’t it be great to share an article on your timeline that actually includes YOU in the content? That were we make a difference, we includes your quotes and local property market information to help you stand out from the crowd. You can read about our writing for you below, but when you become a licensee you’ll get an exclusive area so your competitors won’t show up!

Stand Out in your Local Area

There’s nothing quite like getting into the news or being quoted about the local property market and as part of a content licensing package we’ll do just that – include you and comments about your local area so you stand out from other local agents. As part of this package you’re able to share information with us as you please or we’ll ask for it from time to time, it’s up to you.

Learn more and Sign up for just make contact and Request a Quote

How Much Does it Cost?

$49 per month.

Yep, there’s not much more to say, it’s cheap, it’s great quality, and it’s exclusive so get in quick and fill your timeline.

 

 

Categories
Content Marketing Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) Facebook Advertising News real estate agents Social Media Wordpress Website Training Courses

Five Ways to Select a Trustworthy Real Estate Agent

Is your preferred agent who they say they are?

If you’ve been following this blog of late (if you haven’t, then you can subscribe here), then you may recall that in a couple of our recent posts we talked about the different tools that are available online to help homeowners find a reputable and trustworthy real estate agent. In one post we talked about the darling of lead generators and comparison websites, OpenAgent; in another, we talked about rating sites like RateMyAgent; and we’ve also discussed looking up an agent’s license using licensing databases in your state or territory.

However, we realise that, if you’ve never sold property before or it’s been a long time since you’ve had to go through the process of finding a real estate agent to sell your home, the process can be a little daunting. So we put together this roundup of the five steps you should take to ensure that you’re selecting the most reputable and trustworthy real estate agent to represent you.

Before we dive right in, we should point out that this list assumes that you’ve already done some rudimentary market research of your local area, and you have a couple of agents names in mind already:

1. Check the licensing register in your State

This is an important first step. Although it’s unlikely you’ll turn up anything untoward, on the off chance that you do, this will help you to discount that agent right away. This is especially important for people who are selling holiday homes or investment properties in areas they’re not very familiar with. You might even like to search for that agent in other states and territories apart from your own, just to make sure they didn’t get into any strife elsewhere before setting up shop in another state. The registers for each state are listed below:

Service NSW

Consumer Affairs Victoria

Regulated Industries, Licensing and Legislation Register Queensland

Department of Commerce WA

Agents Licensing Board NT

Consumer and Business Services SA

Property Agents Board Tasmania

Business and Industry Licensing Public Register ACT

2. Visit the agents’ websites

Do a search of each agent and see if they have their own website that’s separate from their agency’s corporate website. Have a look at the kind of information they provide on their website. Do they publish regular market updates? Do they provide any information about how they work? Have they answered a question or provided information about the sales process or current trends in the market that you found useful?

Give priority to the agents who see the value in providing buyers and sellers with helpful information based on their experience in the industry over the agents only interested in self promotion.

3. Check the agents’ social media accounts

Most agents have some social media presence, so don’t forget to check what they’re doing on Facebook and Twitter and so on, before appointing them as your agent. Look at their feeds to see how they’re interacting with other users online — are they responding to the inquires and comments that have been left for them there? What kinds of comments have people been leaving on their Facebook pages and tweeting to them?

Social media is usually the first port of call for people who are either really satisfied with the experience they’ve had with a business, or really dissatisfied. How an agent deals with both forms of feedback reveals a lot about their character and how they conduct themselves.

4. Read the reviews left on ratings websites

You’d check out the reviews left for a restaurant or hotel on Yelp or TripAdvisor, wouldn’t you? So why wouldn’t you visit a real estate ratings site, like RateMyAgent or RealSatisfied, to see what kinds of reviews have been left for agents there? Keep in mind that for both RateMyAgent and RealSatisfied, agents can pay the platform a monthly fee to manage their profile and the reviews left for them there. What control that gives agents over how they deal with negative reviews is unclear. You might also like to check TrustPilot, which is another ratings websites, though one that doesn’t specifically cater to the real estate industry.

5. Interview the agent in person

Once you’ve done all the online checks you can, it’s time to line up a meeting with your preferred agent (or agents), to see if they’re as impressive IRL (that’s in real life, for those of you playing along at home) as they are online. Don’t be afraid to tell the agent you’re still considering other agents — how they handle this comment will tell you a lot about the sort of person he or she is.

Quiz each agent about recent changes to legislation or real estate practices that might affect the sale of your home. The way they answer these questions should reveal to you how closely they monitor changes in their industry, and, in turn, how committed they are to CPD. This is the final step in deciding which agent is best suited to sell your property. You should also spend some time discussing commission, marketing options, sales methods, and other areas that will affect the sale of your home.

By the time you’ve worked your way through this checklist, you should be ready to appoint a real estate agent to sell your home — congratulations!

If you would still like to learn more about the real estate sales process, including how to manage inspections, offers and following up with buyers, you can download our free educational guide. Alternatively, for more real estate news, insights and analysis, subscribe to our blog.

Categories
Content Marketing Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) real estate agents Social Media

How Do RateMyAgent and RealSatisfied Compare to LinkedIn?

The truth about testimonials

In nearly every guide to selecting a real estate agent, homeowners are instructed to look at, not just an agent’s sales history, but also how satisfied the buyers and sellers who dealt with that agent in the past were. Most agents will include a few testimonials on their websites and in the shop windows of their offices, but those are mostly subjective, because they’ve been cherry picked from a stack of other similarly glowing reviews. People are more aware of this now, so they’re more sceptical about relying on testimonials supplied to them from the agent.

Enter two real estate agent ranking and review sites: RateMyAgent and RealSatisfied. Both services provide a platform for buyers and sellers to leave honest reviews, so that future vendors can use this feedback to make their decision about appointing an agent to represent them in the sale of their home. They also provide detailed statistics about each region throughout Australia, including the top agencies by market share, the number of recent sales in the region, and the number of active agents and agencies operating in the area.

Ratings sites offer tools for agents, too

For agents, a platform like RateMyAgent, which was developed in Australia, and is now in beta mode in the United States, where it plans to launch a US version of it’s service in September, provides a range of tools, such as the ability to broadcast reviews on the RateMyAgent website to your social media accounts, create listing reports that contain detailed statistics about recent sales history for prospective vendors and clients, connect RateMyAgent to your website and include a live feed of client reviews, and more.

Of course, there’s also LinkedIn, which allows agents to include much of the same information in their profile, and also has the capacity to handle recommendations from people they’ve worked with in the past. But LinkedIn is a tool that’s mostly used by recruiters to find staff, and is likewise used by individuals who are looking for work. While there’s certainly no harm in an agent creating their own LinkedIn profile and using it to connect with other professionals, it’s unlikely to help them generate new leads and get more listings.

Consider your online presence carefully

The internet is practically teeming with social media platforms and other tools to help businesses develop their online presence, but just because there’s a platform, like LinkedIn or Pinterest or RateMyAgent or something similar out there, it doesn’t mean you have to be using it to have success online. Remember that the more social media accounts and other platforms you’re active on, the more time you will need to spend keeping them up-to-date, even if many of them fail to deliver any new leads.

With this in mind, develop your online presence strategically by selecting the platforms and channels that are most relevant to you, your business or industry, and your clients, and only creating a profile on the ones that will help you to achieve your goals. Before investing time in a particular platform, look at its performance metrics and consider whether they’re aligned with your own business goals. If they’re not, then there may be other options that are more worthy of your time.

If you’re looking to kick start your online presence, using social media or a platform such as RateMyAgent, contact our team to discuss which options are best suited to you and your business goals. Alternatively, to learn more about digital technologies that help real estate agents build an online presence, subscribe to our blog.

Categories
News real estate agents Social Media Social Media Marketing Wordpress Website Training Courses

How Do You Know You Can Trust a Real Estate Agent?

There are online tools to help

In a previous blog post, we talked about the new era in real estate that allows homeowners to compare real estate in their local area with just the click of a few buttons, using lead generation and comparison sites. As easy and efficient as a lead generation site like OpenAgent may be, and although they’re structured in a fashion to help maintain their independence so they can provide objective information to homeowners, they are a business, after all — and one that seeks to double their revenue in the next 12 months.

This means they have a vested interest in converting each user who comes to their site and hands over their contact details, by matching them up with a real estate agent. For some homeowners, who are either time poor or new to the real estate sales process, using an intermediary like OpenAgent will make the process a whole lot easier. For everyone else, however, they may prefer to do the legwork themselves, so they can be doubly sure they’re appointing the right agent to sell their home.

All agents have to be licensed

Although most real estate agents will disclose their license number on their website, business cards, or by hanging their certificate of registration somewhere in their office, like Bill Tsounias a real estate agent for McGrath in Sydney does, it’s always a good idea to verify that information yourself. In NSW, for example, the Service NSW website includes a portal where you can check a real estate agent’s license.

In addition to seeing that the agent is licensed, it will also list any conditions associated with the license — i.e., whether they may exercise the functions of an auctioneer — any compliance issues, such as disciplinary actions or prosecutions against the agent. It will also list any associated parties, and whether a manager or receiver has ever been appointed before, which provide key details on the financial health of the license holder. There are similar registers in all other states and territories.

First impressions still count

But for all the research you can do into an agent’s license and recent sales history, one of the most important things you can do is to have a conversation with them, be it over the phone or in person. Their manner and temperament, and the way they explain key issues to you should help you decide which agent you feel most comfortable with selling your home. These first impressions still count, even in the digital age.

It’s company policy for McGrath agents to list their license number on their website so it makes it a lot easier for buyers and sellers to verify whether an agent is licensed to handle a particular real estate transaction. It also shows that McGrath is committed to honesty and transparency, an important ingredient in the success of any real estate agent today, and like McGrath, Bill Tsounias is just as committed to being a genuine and reputable real estate agent.

He’s come onboard with Virion to create his own professional website, where he can showcase his current listings, share information about his recent sales, and provide tips and advice to homebuyers and owners about the real estate market and what to expect when buying or selling a home. We have other agents on board who keep clients and vendors up to speed with information and listings using Facebook and other social media. 

To begin building your online brand, contact our team to discuss which digital marketing options will suit you and your digital marketing goals. Alternatively, to learn more about digital technologies that help real estate agents build an online presence, subscribe to our blog.

 

Categories
Content Marketing real estate agents Search Engine Optimisation Course Wordpress Website Training Courses

How Do Real Estate Lead Generators Find an Agent for You?

Is the internet helping to keep real estate agents honest?

For homeowners looking for a real estate agent to sell (or rent) their property, it’s traditionally been about visibility. The agent with the most signboards, ads in the local paper, the greatest street presence, so to speak, always got the most listings. But just as it did for other business models, the internet is disrupting the real estate industry’s decades-long way of doing business.

Lead generation and comparison websites, like OpenAgent and Local Agent Finder, promise to deliver leads to agents, while also promising to cut through agent spin to help homeowners to find the agent who is truly best suited to sell their property. They promise all that, and to retain their neutrality in the process, even though they don’t charge homeowners a fee for their service.

How lead generation sites work

OpenAgent is the darling of real estate lead generation sites. It’s raised $12 million in venture capital since it launched in 2013. In the last 12 months, it’s also doubled in size, and in that time, matched more than 10,000 homeowners to sales agents; in the next 12 months it hopes to double its revenue. The way OpenAgent operates is pretty simple, and not much different to other sites of its kind. OpenAgent collects information about real estate agents and their sales records by scraping it from other sources, such as Domain and realestate.com.au, while also encouraging homeowners to write reviews about their experiences with a particular agent on their site, which it vets before publishing online.

Agents don’t get to submit their profiles to OpenAgent, nor is their inclusion on the site optional. If they’re a licensed real estate agent, with listings on a property portal, such as realestate.com.au or Domain, they’re automatically listed on the OpenAgent website. When a homeowner registers their details with OpenAgent, they’re able to peruse the recent listings, sales and reviews of all the agents in their area. OpenAgent then follows up by calling each homeowner to get a clearer picture of their property and the kind of agent they’re looking for. Following this, OpenAgent then provides the homeowner with a shortlist of agents to choose from.

OpenAgent doesn’t disclose a homeowner’s details to an agent unless they’re instructed to do so, at which point they contact with the agent on the homeowner’s behalf. If OpenAgent does introduce a homeowner to a real estate, who is ultimately appointed to sell the property, they’ll stay in touch with the owner throughout the process, to ensure the agent is being held accountable; they’ll even help the owner negotiate a better rate of commission. Once the property is sold, OpenAgent then takes a 20 percent fee from the agent’s agreed commission.

What this means for agents and homeowners

Success as a real estate agent today, in an era of lead generation and comparison websites, requires honesty and transparency. Agents can no longer cloak the sales process in mystery or exaggerate their sales history, because, whether a homeowner does their own independent research or uses a comparison site like OpenAgent to do the legwork for them, they’ll find out which agents are truthful and reputable, and which ones aren’t.

With so much information freely available on the internet, whether it’s about an individual agent and their track record or about the local market itself, homeowners now spend less time researching an agent’s credentials and more time weighing up whether they like and trust prospective agents. One of the first things a homeowner will do, once they’ve received a shortlist from OpenAgent or even a recommendation from a friend or relative, is look them up online.

Agents with an extensive web presence, and who are able to show people that they understand the market, that they’re open and honest about their previous track record, and that they’re friendly and approachable are more likely to win a new listing, than those agent who still operate under the old model of smoke and mirrors.

To learn more about the real estate sales process, including how to manage inspections, offers and following up with buyers, download our free educational guide. Alternatively, for more real estate news, insights and analysis, subscribe to our blog.

 

Categories
Content Marketing Facebook Advertising Real estate agent software real estate agents Social Media Social Media Marketing Wordpress Website Training Courses

Is Facebook Going to Become the Next Big Thing in Real Estate?

What ‘data’ makes Facebook so valuable?

As the most successful and most widely-used social media platform in the world, Facebook has amassed a lot of data over its 12 years of existence. That data is what makes Facebook so valuable, but it’s also what guides its business decisions. Facebook knows what emerging trends will be the next big thing, before you could even conceivably call them emerging trends. It’s how they knew to acquire Instagram; to introduce online advertising; expand into news publishing, by developing its Instant Articles service. Facebook is also a major platform for businesses, because of its emphasis on building communities, with whom you can share and discuss information that’s important to you. And all that data Facebook has under its belt, makes it easy to target people not already a part of your community.

Indeed, Facebook is also a major focus of nearly every real estate agent we speak to when we’re discussing their digital marketing strategy. Every agent wants to be on Facebook, and given that it’s more popular than… well, to borrow a phrase from John Lennon, Jesus, it makes a lot of sense to be using Facebook as part of your content marketing strategy. But there are a lot of real estate services using Facebook in ways that have the potential to disrupt the real estate model even further than it already has been.

Using Facebook as a directory for real estate agents

All that data Facebook has under its belt, in addition to the sheer volume of people who use Facebook on a daily – if not, multiple times per day — basis, has made it a very useful platform for real estate businesses to create online directory resources that connect buyers and vendors with real estate agents. The American-based HomeASAP service is the number-one real estate agent directory on Facebook, with over 457,000 members in its directory. As a directory that also connects buyers with real estate listings, it has the power to change the way people look for and buy real estate.

Although real estate agent directories aren’t new — there are plenty similar services, like followit, Local Agent Finder, Agent Select, etc — HomeASAP is unique because it’s directory is hosted entirely on Facebook. Only buyers, vendors and agents with a Facebook account can access the directory, further evidence that Facebook has, itself, become a search engine in its own right. And because the service is hosted on Facebook, you’re able to capture more data than if a person were to anonymously visit your a website.

Could Facebook topple the Big Two property portals?

Facebook Social media and digital marketing to sell real estate and property in Newcastle, Central Coast and Lake Macquarie

Facebook allows agents to monitor who’s visiting their page, and it also provides them with a casual way of engaging with potential buyers and sellers who may not be ready to speak on the phone yet. This isn’t possible on a property portal — whether it’s an app or website. Sure, you can track them by inserting a line of code into your website, but they’re still anonymous until they give your their contact information.

With Facebook, you know who’s visited your Facebook page, and you can make contact with them by making a friend request. Because Facebook also makes it easy to share and disseminate information right from the platform itself, it has the potential to topple the property portals, which currently provides agents with little promotional or marketing opportunities, and likewise provides only very rudimentary statistics about who has viewed their listings.

Considering that, second only to Google, Facebook is the world’s most used website and is responsible for generating a quarter of all web traffic, it certainly has the potential to become a powerful player in real estate. If Facebook isn’t already a part of your content marketing strategy, you’re missing out on valuable lead generation opportunities, not to mention potential buyers who may be looking for their next home.

Success on Facebook begins with a successful strategy

Facebook is the ultimate social media platform, and even though it’s an effective platform to build your online profile and market your services to potential buyers and sellers, your success is still entirely dependent on whether you’re using Facebook in the spirit in which it is intended — a social network to connect with people and share information that matters to you, with the emphasis being on the word ‘social’.

To be social means to have a free flow of information that people will engage with, comment on and share within their own, wider social network. If you want to keep people engaging with the information you share with them, you need to create a strategy that starts a conversation and encourages others to continue that conversation.

Learn Digital Marketing or get our help

To use Facebook to begin building your online brand and find out which digital marketing tools will suit you and your digital marketing goals get a free digital marketing consultation.

Alternatively, learn about digital marketing in our online Digital Marketing Training Courses or read about technologies that help real estate agents build an online presence, subscribe to our blog.

Categories
Content Marketing Real estate agent software real estate agents Social Media Social Media Marketing Wordpress Website Training Courses

Build Your Online Profile Using a Mobile App

You can now create your own beautiful business apps

Now that property marketing has mostly moved online to property portals like realestate.com.au and Domain, a real estate agent’s ability to leverage their current listings to get new ones has been significantly eroded. This is a trend is set to continue as the real estate model becomes further disrupted by technologies that shift buyer behaviour from searching for properties, to waiting for a notification about one that matches their requirements. These days, if an agent is to build brand awareness from which they can generate new listings, they need to spend time building their profile online, and the best way to do that is to use content marketing.

Content marketing involves creating and publishing original and engaging content online. The content you create can be anything, from educational videos to informative blog posts to downloadable guides. But if you want to get really original and really, really engaging, you could even create your own app that you can use to push all sorts of content and notifications directly out to vendors and buyers alike.

Applications are the future of online marketing

Apps are where the future of online marketing is going, as more and more people use devices — like smartphones, tablets and even smart watches — rather than desktop computers and laptops to access information online. Applications also improve the user experience, while providing the developer with valuable information not usually available when a person simply browses a mobile version of a website.

Developing your own custom app is now increasingly simple, just as creating your own website is, thanks to WordPress and other such content management systems. An app development system like Flok, for example, allows you to easily create your own app — and a beautiful one, at that — and then promote it using social media, email and SMS marketing, with a built-in analytics dashboard to measure its success. Apps work best for businesses with repeat customers, so try to create your app with the goal of encouraging people to use it regularly.

It’s time to build lasting relationships

For too long, a lot of real estate agents have neglected to build lasting relationships with their buyers and sellers, seeing the sale and purchase of a property as a one-off transaction that’s not likely to come around again anytime in the near future. This was all well and good when people turned to newspapers, shopfront windows, and signboards to find out about a local agent in their local area, but this isn’t how the real estate model works anymore.

Agents need to prioritise building lasting relationships online, long before a homeowner has even considered selling their property, so that when they eventually do decide to take this step, there is only one agent they have in mind — you! If you produce content that covers both sides of the real estate process — buying and selling — then you’ll be able to capture the passive buyers that the market has lost since the decline of newspaper advertising.

Increase awareness of your brand by building relationships with other local businesses

If you haven’t already, reach out to local businesses in your area and build a reciprocal marketing relationship with them. With a service like Flok, you could sponsor a loyalty card for your local cafe by using the loyalty card app to give regular customers of your local cafe a free coffee. Use your branding on the loyalty card app and promote it, both in the cafe, on social media, and through your other marketing.

The best part about using an app, rather than a traditional paper loyalty card, is that for as long as the app is installed on a person’s phone, you can send them push notifications. You can also use it to collect email addresses, so you can continue marketing to them. Since everybody loves coffee, the uptake would be relatively swift and it would be used regularly, providing that you don’t use it to spam users with irrelevant marketing messages.

Success online begins with a successful strategy

Before you can begin using an app to sponsor your local cafe’s loyalty card, you need to create a strategy for capturing user data, determining their interests (i.e., buying, selling, renting), and being able to use content marketing that will cater to those interests.

To begin building your online brand, contact our team to discuss which digital marketing options will suit you and your digital marketing goals. Alternatively, to learn more about digital technologies that help real estate agents build an online presence, subscribe to our blog.

Categories
Content Marketing Search Engine Optimisation Course Social Media Marketing Wordpress Website Training Courses

Technology Savvy Real Estate Agents Get More Listings

Don’t be the loud-talker at the social media dinner table

Think about the last time you engaged someone to perform a professional service for you. Perhaps you were looking for a plumber, an accountant or, say, a digital marketing agency. How did you find them? In the case of the latter, I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that you probably did a search online and came across us that way. This is how the vast majority of people search for professional services these days and, as I’ve mentioned before, it’s how you’ll get your next listing, providing you’re technology savvy.

By technology savvy, I don’t just mean that you know how to use an iPhone or iPad. You’re not even technology savvy if you also know how to use a smart watch. To be technology savvy, you need to be shrewd in the way you use technology, and when it comes to finding and winning new listings, this means you’re using technology to market yourself and grow your online profile in ways other agents in your local area aren’t.

Technology savvy agents start with content marketing

To be technology savvy, you must build your profile online. Many people erroneously believe that building your profile online means creating a website, getting a Facebook account, and then that’s it. What they overlook is that a website needs stuff on it; that is, text, images, videos — in order to make it a website. That stuff is called content, and content is the same stuff that you post on Facebook that your friends like, share and comment on. Content marketing, then, is the publishing of stuff on your website, social media platforms, and elsewhere that you contacts will like, share and comment on, but which also markets you and your services.

The technology savvy part comes in when you determine precisely the kind of content you need to publishing in order to achieve your conversion goals. A conversion goal can be anything that results in the user taking a specific action — whether it’s signing up to receive a newsletter, downloading a market report, contacting you for a property appraisal.

If you have your own, personal Facebook account, think about the kind of content you publish there on a regular basis. It’s typically content that means something to you — typically, you either empathise with the message or you don’t — and that you know will also resonate with your friends and family and greater social network. This is how you need to approach the content you publish in a professional capacity. There is literally no exception to this rule. You must always publish content that is relevant to you and your customers (your vendors and buyers).

Publish original content across multiple platforms

Emphasis here on the word ‘original’. Don’t make the mistake of retweet or republishing content created by other people on your social media platforms. All this does is send all your hard earned traffic to an online behemoth, like realestate.com.au or smh.com.au or the like. Let them get their own traffic. Instead, you should create your own original content, by writing and publishing one or two blog posts a week or uploading a video blog or both. This way, when you push it out through social media and your friends and followers share it among their own social networks, you’re sending that traffic back to your website, not someone else’s.

If you’re going to use social media and, although I caution you to select your social media platforms wisely, I strongly advise you do use social media, you need to ensure you’re using it correctly, otherwise you needed bother. I’ll go into this in more detail some other time in a separate blog post, but the general rule of social media is to be social.

Think of it as a dinner party. You’re sitting around a dinner table with a few friends, acquaintances, and a few other people you’ve never met before. Everyone is chatting and getting along merrily, until some loud-talker enters the equation. All he’s interested in doing is talking about himself. He doesn’t engage with others when they try to engage with him. Instead, he constantly pushes his own agenda, on myriad irrelevant topics, often talking over others as they try to speak. Eventually, everyone gets up and moves somewhere else, leaving loud talker on his own.

Don’t be antisocial on social media

That’s the dinner party equivalent to someone on Twitter or Facebook publishing the same irrelevant tweets or posts over and over and over, without stopping to see if anyone actually cares or finds the content relevant. It’s the Facebook user that never responds to comments left on their page, or makes an effort to connect with others on Facebook. It’s the Twitter user, who doesn’t retweet or like tweets by their followers, because they’re too busy pushing out spammy tweets about their business.

Whatever you do, don’t be that guy; don’t be the loud-talker at the dinner party everybody runs away and hides from. Remember that social media’s primary reason for existence is as a way for people to communicate and keep in touch with each other — to be social. Use social media and your content to start conversations with people, and then make an active effort to keep those conversations going.

Master all that, and you’re well on your way to being the technology savvy real estate agent who gets the most listings. If you’re looking to build your online presence to gain new listings, get in touch with our team to discuss the ways you can begin building your online brand. Alternatively, to learn more about digital technologies that help real estate agents build an online presence, subscribe to our blog.

Categories
Content Marketing Social Media Marketing Wordpress Website Training Courses

Property Appraisals and Market Reports Don’t Deliver New Listings

Are your aware of where your next listings will be coming from?

Things that are stuck in the 1990s: newspaper advertising, signboards, DL cards, property appraisals, market reports … and ok, the macarena. However, sticking only to matters of real estate, if you think property appraisals and market reports don’t belong on that list, you would be wrong. Yep. Property appraisals may form a necessary part of the sales process, I’ll grant you that, but, along with market reports, they won’t win you any new listings.

Here’s why:

For a start, there are numerous places to obtain a property appraisal or market report from — the hundred other agents in your local area, both the property portals, the Big Four banks, the Australian Bureau of Statistics, every private research company, mortgage broker, stock broker, investment banker, and list goes on ad infinitum until it’s the end of time and all that roams the earth are robots and drones.

Plus, if I were so inclined, with just the teeniest bit of research, I could gather enough information to create my own market report that, truth be told, would be more complete than any of the ones I could obtain from a business that’s also trying to sell me their services. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t offer prospective vendors a free property appraisal or a downloadable market report — you should! — it just means that it’s not going to deliver you your next listing.

Don’t lose sight of what people are doing online

The internet has fundamentally changed the way people find information, communicate with each other, and look for professional services. When people first make contact with a professional, whether it’s a plumber, accountant, digital marketing agency, or a real estate agent, even, it’s typically after a significant amount of independent research on their industry and past experience. The phone call and the ensuing meeting, by this point, are really just formalities to see how well client and customer will get along — or in the case of an agent and vendor, to see whether the agent’s plan matches the owner’s.

But to get the call in the first place, you need to establish a point of difference between yourself and every other agent in your area, hankering after a new listing. To do that, you need to first accept that your next listing is coming from the internet — not a newspaper ad or DL card. The internet. This means you need to find ways to establish your online presence, through digital and content marketing.

The most important thing to remember as you begin to build your online profile, is that most people use the internet to find information, communicate with others, make a purchase and, increasingly, for entertainment purposes. If you can create content that will cater to one or a few of these reason people use the internet, the more successful it would be.

Honesty and transparency delivers listings

Personalised agent website

When Derek Farmer, a real estate agent with McGrath Neutral Bay on Sydney’s lower north shore, created his personal agent website, its main purpose was educate buyers and sellers about the property market in Sydney, but especially around the lower north shore. Derek created a series of professional shot and edited videos, in which he shared his tips and advice for buying and selling property, and uploaded them to his website, where anyone could access them for free by subscribing to his mailing list.

Content marketing via a blog

Derek also started a blog, where he published blogs that covered all sorts of property market, from the common sales methods used to sell property to the current lower north shore property market trends. He also used his website to showcase his current listings and recent sales successes. Underpinning Derek’s entire content strategy was a desire to provide honest and transparent information about the property market, so that buyers and sellers would come to see him as the trustworthy agent he is.

After observing the success of Derek’s website, fellow McGrath agent, Bill Tsounias, who works at the Brighton Le Sands office also decided to create his own personal agent website. The strategy underpinning Bill’s website is to also create honest and transparent content as a way to stand out from his competition.

While both Bill Tsounias and Derek Farmer offer their vendors a free property appraisal, they both recognise that homeowners who are thinking of selling their homes and are actively researching the market are not going to appoint an agent based on that alone: They’re looking for agents who are honest, transparent about the process and, above all, humble.

Success online requires successful content

If you’re looking for build a successful online presence that will position you as an authority on the property market in your local area, and will also help you to gain new listings, get in touch with our team to discuss the ways you can begin building your online brand. Alternatively, to learn more about digital technologies that help real estate agents build an online presence, subscribe to our blog.

Categories
Content Marketing Search Engine Optimisation Course Social Media Marketing Wordpress Website Training Courses

How to Build Your Online Real Estate Agent Profile

Be selective when choosing your ‘brand building’ social media

In a recent blog post, I talked about how the erosion of newspaper advertising is also eroding an agent’s ability to leverage current listings to get new ones, due to the way property portals like realestate.com.au and Domain serve listings to buyers algorithmically, and the way people, generally, use the internet to find a professional service. If I haven’t already made it abundantly clear, your next listing is coming from the internet, but only so long as the vendor has determined that you’re a major player in your local area. This means, you need to start building your online real estate agent profile.

Currently, most agents rely on their shopfronts, signboards, DL cards, and the word-of-mouth referrals from previous listings, but what would happen if none of those options were viable anymore? This isn’t that much of a stretch. Shopfronts and all forms of traditional marketing are on their way out, while word-of-mouth referrals are increasingly being replaced with likes on a Facebook post, a retweet on Twitter, or a blog post shared on LinkedIn.

Facebook isn’t the be all and end all in digital marketing

Most of the time, when I speak with agents about how they can build their presence online, they fixate on social media — Facebook, in particular. And I can understand why. Facebook has amassed a tonne of data about its users, basically because people are willing to share every last detail of their lives on it. This makes it especially efficient at targeting particular kinds of people in particular places. But Facebook is just one cog in the digital marketing machine. Here’s what else you should be doing

Personal agent website:

Most agents have a profile on their agency’s website, just as Marshall Rushford did on the hockingstuart website, but an agency website only serves to promote the entire agency, not any one agent. Like many of our clients, Marshall wanted to create his own personal agent website, so that he could showcase his current and previous listings, in addition to his recent successes. A personal agent website can also be used to capture prospect data, while regularly maintaining a blog will help to establish yourself as a credible source of market information.

Create your own content:

Nearly every agent I speak to makes one huge mistake online: they don’t create their own content. Instead, they link out to content created by other people — REA Group, Domain, RP Data, etc. Instead of sending a prospect to their website by linking to some original content they published on their blog, the agent sends them all to REA Group, Domain or RP Data, and down the rabbit hole of Domain or REA Group’s endless supply of content they go. Only link to your own, original content published on your website, and send prospects down the rabbit hole of your endlessly informative content instead.

Be selective with social media advertising:

I’m yet to be convinced on the benefits of advertising on Twitter. To be honest, I’m not even entirely convinced on the benefits of using Twitter in a professional capacity, unless you create an separate strategy for it, in addition to your digital marketing strategy. Twitter still hasn’t found a way to transition from a place of anonymity, parody accounts and internet trolls (see: Tay Tweets), which makes it an inefficient way to spend your marketing budget. FaceBook, on the other hand, is highly efficient, due to the sheer volume of data it’s amassed about its users, which makes it easy to target specific demographics and to measure your results after the fact. Instagram and Pinterest are also great ways to interact with people online, from a purely community-building perspective.

Success online begins with a successful strategy

You can certainly begin building your online presence by kicking a few ideas around online, but if you’re really looking to have success online, then you need to have a strategy backing it up. We’re a digital marketing agency that specialises in developing online brands, through a combination of online advertising, social media marketing and content marketing.

To begin building your online brand, contact our team to discuss which digital marketing options will suit you and your digital marketing goals. Alternatively, to learn more about digital technologies that help real estate agents build an online presence, subscribe to our blog.

Categories
Social Media Wordpress Website Training Courses

Real Estate Agent Marketing in the Digital Age

How’s an agent to build a brand online these days?

Before the rise of online property portals, detractors of newspaper display advertising long echoed the same refrain: It’s expensive! It’s hard to measure! It’s expensive again! But in its heyday, a newspaper’s real estate section served two very important functions: It guaranteed properties advertised within its pages maximum exposure to active buyers, and it also helped establish the brand of leading real estate groups. But as online property advertising continues to erode the need for newspaper ads, it’s also taking with it the capacity to which an agent can leverage his current listings to win more business.

Property portals may be relatively inexpensive and they may also make it easy to measure how many people have viewed a property, but property portals still can’t replicate the impact of opening the real estate section of your local paper, and thumbing through page after page after page of an agent’s listings. And they’re unlikely to ever offer something even remotely close to the print experience — or at least, the Big Two portals aren’t anyway, given they’re owned by newspaper companies, which have a vested interest in keeping their print assets alive for as long as they can.

The internet has disrupted the entire real estate model

redundant salespersonBut even if newspapers were to close up their print real estate products tomorrow and turn their portals into a quasi digital magazine, replete with beautiful layouts of property advertisements interspersed with real estate editorial, as opposed to serving listings algorithmically, as they do now, it’ll do little to help agents build their brand online.

The internet has fundamentally changed the way people make any kind of decision. In the days of old, if you were buying a TV, you’d go down to your local electronics retailer and have a chat with the sales person; maybe you’d even go to a couple of retailers and get as much information as you could, before making a purchasing decision. Today, that’s no longer the case. The minute a buyer walks in the door of a retailer, they’ve made up their mind. There’s little the salesperson can tell them about that TV that the buyer doesn’t already know.

The same can be said for most homeowners. If they’re really motivated to sell, they’ve been researching the market for a while. By the time they contact an agent (or a couple of agents), they already have a fairly good idea of how much their home is worth, when they want to sell it, and how they want to sell it. They just want to know if you’re the right fit for their already predetermined plan. But we should back up a bit.

Where’s your next listing coming from?

Imagine a world without newspapers, without real estate shopfronts, without signboards and DL cards, because this is increasingly the world we are soon to be living in. As more industries move away from traditional marketing channels, more pressure will be put on the real estate industry to follow suit. A real estate agent sitting in front of a vendor, who also happens to be the CEO of a top blue chip company, is going to have a mighty hard time selling them on the merits of newspaper ads, signboards, and DL cards.

Not that such a scenario is ever likely to happen. A vendor like that would never call the old school agent stuck in 1995. He won’t even know that the agent exists, because without a robust online presence, the agent might as well pack up shop and call it a day. Just think for a moment about that way you look for any professional service, whether it’s a plumber, an accountant, a digital marketing agency.

I’m not even going to bother explaining the process to you, because the mere fact you’re reading this blog post is proof positive enough. We’re a digital marketing agency that specialises in developing online brands, through a combination of online advertising and content marketing. If you’re looking to take your agent marketing into the digital age, then look no further. To kick start your online presence contact our team. Alternatively, to learn more about digital technologies that help real estate agents build an online presence, subscribe to our blog.

Categories
Content Marketing Facebook Advertising real estate agents Social Media

Real estate agent’s frenzied hunt for locals via Facebook advertising

Could Facebook topple realestate.com.au?

Facebook-as a marketing tool for real estate agentsI was recently speaking with a real estate agent about the different ways of advertising both their properties for sale AND their own services as a real estate agent and they couldn’t stop talking about Facebook!

The agent mentioned Facebook over a dozen times and talked about getting a Facebook page to promote themselves locally. In all of this, what stood out the most about this conversation was that we were talking about the future of online property marketing – and this person didn’t mention the major property portals once!

What’s so special about Facebook for real estate?

This individual had just attended a marketing conference and spoken with others about the demographic and geo-targeting capabilities of the social media giant – about how by using Facebook, the agent could target ONLY people living in the suburb. To top it off they thought that if they jumped in now they could own the suburb, so to speak!

Facebook advertising is the service that we ended up talking about and we went on to reflect on what we’d do after we attracted all of those locals to our website or Facebook page. Was it Likes we were after? Shares? Were we getting people to do anything in particular once they got to our Facebook page? When you drill down even further you have to understand the value of one of these actions and match it to your own goals.

Without focus, Facebook advertising could flop

We decided that the focus for the real estate agent’s Facebook advertising campaign would be to reach existing clients, people who the agent had done business with, or at least met, at an open home sometime in the past, and share with them some information and selling tips.

There are several types of Facebook advertising campaigns you can run and the analytics information you get from each will be different. Therefore our campaign was focussed on not only reaching existing contacts, but sharing information about how the local property market is performing (by providing a market report), as well as some solid tips and advice for selling property. The reason we created blogs, featuring genuinely helpful, relevant advice, is because we didn’t want to turn our Facebook audience away from our own website. Furthermore, the information is useful and reveals more about who we are and our helpful selling style.

Facebook ads keep you front of mind

In the end, our real estate agent’s Facebook ads campaign was aimed at getting his image in front of existing clients using a custom audience and sharing useful information that they could share with their friends and colleagues looking to sell their homes. It was partly to offset, as well as test and measure, the performance of their DL mailing card campaign that they sent regularly in the past.

We view Facebook and social media advertising as part of a bigger picture in your digital strategy to build brand awareness. Most importantly, however, it should bring potential customers into your sphere of influence and encourage them to recommend you based on the quality content that you create.

Read more about how we manage the Facebook advertising campaigns for real estate agents for no extra charge as part of our digital strategy.