Coach: Josh Cobb, CEO of Stepps
Key Points
- Big Data involves being relevant to fewer people through your marketing, as opposed to create advertising that many people tolerate.
- Digital marketing is measurable and it is advantageous when finding out what content of yours is relevant to certain audiences
- As digital marketing advisors, you need to a) drive website traffic and b) constantly present relevant material to your subscribers, it will cost you less than promotion on Facebook or Instagram
Quote
“Are you the most relevant real estate agent when it comes to marketing in your local market? That’s what data provides you, is relevance.”
Video Notes/Transcript
If I said to you guys are you the best at managing big data in your local market? You wouldn’t even know what that means, but if I said to you ‘do your clients and prospects believe that your marketing is the most relevant to them?’ That resonates a little bit more.
It’s being more relevant to fewer people, and I think that has two direct impacts on business, and that is either saving costs or increasing revenue, and in marketing that’s all we care about.
Are you the most relevant real estate agent when it comes to marketing in your local market? That’s what data provides you, is relevance, and it provides you information about people that then you can create marketing you know for a fact they’re interested in. As opposed to what we typically do in real estate, which is create advertising that people just tolerate.
I like to use the example that, if we had a property that was a three bedroom, two bathroom house, on a 700 square metre block, eight kilometres from the CBD, and you just sold that property. It was a record price for the area, and you were to do, say, 1,000 letterbox drops. DL cards out to the local neighbourhood about that property.
You don’t know who they are, and living in these properties you’re just handing out these DL cards to make it very clear that you’ve achieved this fantastic price. Would that be as effective as delivering DL cards about that property to 100 people that you know for a fact own a property with the same size block of land, the same amount of bedrooms, they’ve owned it for two or more years. Which one do you think would be more effective in generating revenue or reducing costs?
I believe that it’s agents who use data more effectively are going to be the ones that win the game. Everyone else is continuously interrupting peoples’ lives, it’s the agents who are becoming what people are interested in, and that’s what data will help you do.
When we get into the online space, that’s where we can measure things far more effectively, so digital marketing is measurable. It’s far more measurable than offline. You’ll never know how many people, when you deliver a DL card, how many people have picked it up out of the letterbox, walked past their front door and not chucked it in the wheelie bin on their way in.
When it comes to Facebook, we know that they’ve got the lions’ share of audience when it comes to the digital space, and they’ve already build the audience for us. We can essentially tap into that using the filters and the information that we have available to us today.
When it comes to marketing in 2017, I don’t know about you guys, but my belief is that when someone is on your website, you’ve got something that you don’t necessarily have on Facebook. That’s their attention.
As digital marketing advisers, there’s two things that we’re interested in. One is website traffic. Not the portals or Facebook. How can we get people on our platform? As many people as possible. That’s number one. That’s not the be all and end all. It’s how many people have gone to our website and converted either into a lead or a subscriber for our content.
An email gets the biggest bad rap in real estate. You’ve got to be on social media. You need to be everywhere on social media. When you send someone an email, if it’s relevant to them you know for a fact they’re going to get it. That is not the case on Facebook or Instagram or any other social media platform.
You can pay for the privilege to get your post on Facebook to as many people as possible, but when you have someone’s email address and they’ve handed that over to you, you haven’t just popped them in there and populated that and spammed them. They’ve gone to your website and subscribed, what you have is their attention. Number one.
Number two, if you are continuously delighting them with information via their email inbox and they’re engaging with you, it’s costing you a lot less to reach that person than it is through Facebook or Instagram.
When the market goes the other way and you can communicate with tens of thousands of people via email for free. While everyone else is reigning back their advertising and marketing spend, which they do when the market goes the other way, it’s the first thing that gets wiped off the balance sheet, and you can communicate with 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 people via email.
That is a huge insurance policy, I think, in real estate, is building an email list, and making sure that the content is relevant, and that’s the key to email. If it’s relevant people will open it. You guys open email, right? You all open email because it’s relevant to you.
Everyone says be someone’s agent before they need one. I don’t think there’s any better way in 2017 than creating content, putting it on their website, driving people away from social media back to the website to consume that, and hand over a piece of contact information. All you need is email.
We don’t need their first name, their date of birth, where the kids go to school. All that stuff yet. All they are is a subscriber. They’ve just showed: “That’s interesting to me. Here’s my email. Keep giving it to me, and when I’m ready I will let you know that I’m ready to sell.”
