With the threat of disruptive technology at the forefront of everyone’s mind, we caught up with Stuart Leo, founder of Blirt, a customer experience specialist. Stuart was a keynote speaker at the recent Property Portal Watch conference in Bangkok, and as a marketing and automation expert, we asked Stuart to give us his thoughts about recent innovations and what may be around the corner which could challenge the real estate industry including the portals.
Firstly, can you tell us a little about Blirt?
At Blirt we’ve spent the last 15 years in the world of the internet, where marketing and technology are really coming together due to the availability of huge amounts of data, such as that supplied through social media activity. The harnessing of that data has given birth to an entire new industry which aims to make it easier to reach and convert customers in amazing new ways.
What we call the ‘experience economy’ is underpinned by the fact that it has become easier to find information. I can be playing around having a cup of coffee in a café of a Saturday morning and updating my social media pages while still looking for that dream property – that’s really exciting and has profound implications for customer interaction.
Our customer is in far greater control today than they ever have been. They can find out everything they need; the information is at their fingertips and, as we all know, knowledge is power. So the power has now shifted to the customer side of the equation. There are tools to help developers, people selling property, people looking for property and tools to communicate and make it easier to sell.
Can you tell us a little more about how things are changing?
It’s 2016 and marketers are looking to influence and communicate beyond the lead conversion. We used to spend most of our advertising budget on big ads, billboards, television and radio as well as newspapers. But now we as marketers and communicators are looking to support a lead generation process through a customer journey. It might mean providing the lead with email updates or the relevant content in their Facebook feed. The property portals of today are all about just getting that lead conversion – getting someone to an open for inspection. But that is changing.
There’s a global trend where the social world is getting closer to the listings world, whether through customer comments or advocates for that property, such as friends and family. It’s very easy for that content to be shared. We’re beginning to understand the customer journey and the portals need to look at providing the right content support through that journey.
Will there be a time when agents could go straight to social media to market their listings?
If we look at other industries we begin to understand how digital platforms have allowed buyers to connect more easily. We are facing a world where there’ll be different methods of buying and selling; that might mean that the agent has less reliance on the portal and data from social media becomes more important. Similarly, the portals need to look at how they add value.
How should real estate agents be marketing to stay profitable and relevant?
I still believe people buy from people, so there will always be a role for the real estate agent in the future. Agents should be actively using digital tools to maintain relationships and perhaps a flyer in the letterbox isn’t the most effective way of doing that.
Real estate agents ought to be collecting good data and understanding potential customers. So if there’s a trigger in the data to say ‘we’re getting married’ or ‘we’re having children’ or ‘I need this’ then that’s a trigger to an action that starts an automated journey. That logic can be preset, managed and run in the right way, at the right time, as opposed to dropping a flyer in ten thousand letterboxes at the same time; that’s just not efficient.
So how does social media help real estate agents?
Analytical platforms today are extremely powerful and it’s possible that the agent’s CRM system can tag information if someone they have an email address for has watched [for instance] a video on Facebook. That video might be about choosing a school. This should then start a CRM journey; the person is added to a targeted database for that particular life event; they get more relevant emails and marketing material because they watched a video on social media.
The world of social listening is very powerful now. We often think that just because we post on social media it’s private; it’s not. It’s a public space, and social listening tools can collect that information and go ‘here is information that fits’. Facebook taught themselves to go ‘this person fits a certain audience’; for example, a young-mother audience. Those social cues, things we say and do, put us into particular audiences that advertisers would want to talk to.
Who are the companies to watch in this space?
The big guys are doing interesting stuff. Realestate.com.au is doing interesting things. Domain has released a whole bunch of really interesting tools. We’re a great advocate for the salesforce.com platform. Anyone that can break down walls between dehumanised listings of property and gain more human eyes, social interaction and engagement. I think you’ll see really interesting work coming from some start-ups as well.
iProperty Group, who are portal leaders now owned by REA, presented their business intelligence dashboard for developers with some great information. If I own a block of land in Asia, how many dwellings should I build, how big should they be, what price should I put on them? It’s not just about sales data but also search traffic data.
One of the most interesting guys to present at Property Portal Watch had some interesting technology [myrealestate.com.au] which included artificial intelligence. If you are comfortable with a tablet or a mobile device, it’s much easier to say, ‘Show me this budget in this area’ and have a whole bunch of properties come back to you. I think voice activation and virtual assistants are all spaces that are on the edge right now, but will be mainstream for the future.
Anything that makes the buying experience easier, less costly, more pleasurable, faster – that’s where the future is. We’re interested in delivering better customer experiences, so anything that helps that is a benefit to the industry.
