Digital strategies for individual agents

While I am always conscious that each real estate agent we work with is individual, my team and I will always delve deep and get to know our clients in order to produce unique and highly tailored solutions.

As you read through the two case studies that follow, you’ll notice how we fashioned each ladies brand, copy style and ghost-written content to showcase their individual personalities, histories and sales strengths. After all, no two individuals – even real estate agents – are the same!

There is an art to creating a personal brand and leveraging digital and social media to showcase your stellar sales reputation. Read on to learn how a professional and highly reputable real estate brand is created.

CASE STUDY #1

Karen Page, Individual Agent

Karen Page, a mother of four teenage daughters, lives and works in the Pennant Hills area as a real estate agent under the Ray White banner. Previously a Human Resources professional, Karen switched to real estate as a new career challenge, and today works under two co-principals as a sole agent. Originally from rural Australia, Karen possesses a grounded attitude to life. Having raised her own children in Pennant Hills she has deep knowledge of the benefits of the area for families.

Karen Page’s challenge

Karen needed to build her personal reputation as a viable choice of local real estate agent for home sellers in her farm area. Her main goal was to grow her income to the point where she could engage an assistant.

As a busy real estate professional, Karen had neither the time nor the technical expertise to grow her personal brand and local reputation through digital and social marketing. Her social media pages weren’t set up properly and even with a Google search, she was hard to find. Her existing imagery and headshot photo failed to convey her warmth and personality.

In addition, Karen wanted to buck the trend and avoid being grouped with real estate agents that she perceived to be more aggressive and cut-throat. She wanted to show that a real estate agent can fulfil another more supportive role, one that still comes with the tenacity of chasing leads and closing deals.

The Hoole strategy

Before we launched into any marketing activities, we conducted a full review of Karen’s online brand identity and personal reputation. Through our in-depth review process, we surfaced what makes Karen stand out from her peers; that is, her key points of difference. We also homed in on Karen’s niche, the demographic that made up her target audience and then matched her personality traits to marketing messages that would resonate with her potential clients best.

We updated all her online profiles (across the real estate portals, Facebook, LinkedIn and Rate My Agent). With the strategic use of keywords and phrases in her written copy, today Karen fills the entire page 1 on Google. We also created a Google business page for her to help ensure she shows up for real estate agent search results and on the Google map. (Note: a Google My Business page is free with a Google account and is a great way to give a real boost to your Google SEO rankings.)

Next, we built Karen a personalised agent website, at www.karenpage.com.au to showcase ‘Karen Page’ rather than Ray White. The addition of this tailored real estate website ensured Karen had a marketing vehicle through which she could deliver relevant and interesting content to her contact database and attract new leads. We posted a blog each week and emailed her database to drive people to her new website. The blog and email were amplified through Facebook and Instagram with a modest budget.

Next, to ensure that her imagery reflected the true in-person Karen, we did a photoshoot with Karen and her daughters. Our imagery was aligned both with Karen’s ethos and the character of the local area and portrays Karen as warm and friendly. Serendipitously, as we were shooting, a local Great Dane chose Karen as his new best friend and we were able to capture those moments for posterity (and for use on local billboard signage).

Karen is now well-positioned to grow her individual brand and ensure she maintains a strong brand reputation.

CASE STUDY #2

Jacqui Rowland-Smith, Million-Dollar Agent

Jacqui Rowland-Smith, originally from a media background, spent much of her early career travelling the world. Switching to real estate she changed careers so that she could remain on home soil with her two young boys. Home (and her real estate area) is Mosman, a highly desirable harbourside Sydney suburb. Warm-hearted and always with a twinkle in her eye, Jacqui has a mature attitude and deals well with pressure.

Jacqui Rowland-Smith’s challenges

Mosman offers excellent returns for experienced real estate agents and is highly competitive as a result. Although Jacqui is already a million-dollar agent, she is acutely aware that Mosman, with its 80 or so agents, is a bit of a boys’ club.

Jacqui loves where she lives and works so she’s the ideal candidate from whom to get local knowledge. She was keen to make a connection with the women in the area, who tend to be the prime decision-makers when moving and selling homes. And to do that, she needed more than word-of-mouth referrals.

Jacqui needed to enhance her personal brand and amplify her reputation as a highly experienced million-dollar agent who is likable and easy to deal with. With the average property price at around $4 million, sellers (mainly high-net-worth individuals) need to be assured that their agent has the expertise to run a sophisticated marketing campaign and negotiate to extract every possible dollar from a home buyer. (This is where real estate agents truly see the value in maintaining a highly visible personal brand and strong local real estate reputation.)

While Jacqui is well-connected in the area through her boys’ school and her support of local charities, she felt that her limited online profile was more aligned with the real estate brand under which she worked (which was first McGrath and now Di Jones) rather than showcasing her own identity and personality.

 The Hoole strategy

After our reputation management strategy sessions, we began with the basics and updated all of Jacqui’s online profiles (including pages on the real estate portals, Facebook, LinkedIn and Rate My Agent).

Next, we created a personalised real estate agent website, with a unique URL at www.jacquirowlandsmith.properties that allowed us to deliver regular ghost-written articles, which were posted across Jacqui’s social media accounts, using her voice, on topics that resonated with her local demographic. Jacqui, a former journalist and TV professional, needed this marketing vehicle to tell her story so locals would actively seek her out to sell their properties. We homed in on local home seller questions or pain points such as the eternal conundrum of “buy first or sell first” or how to downsize while staying in the area.

To showcase Jacqui’s sales successes over the years, we created a unique map with property pins highlighting all the homes she has sold across the Mosman and Lower North Shore area, in prime position on her real estate website home page.

Importantly for Jacqui, we build all our websites in WordPress and our clients own their sites. When Jacqui switched agencies from McGrath to Di Jones, it was easy for us to update the site to reflect the new brand logo, corporate colours and styling while retaining Jacqui’s personal branding.

Over the five years, we’ve worked with Jacqui, we’ve educated her on how digital marketing works. Jacqui has even invited Hoole.co to help train new members of her admin team in managing her many digital and social media channels.

Seeking professional help?

If you would like to discuss how we could assist you with improving your brand messaging, developing your key points of difference and growing your visibility online, book a free consultation.

Written by Melanie Hoole

My team and I specialise in helping real estate and property professionals perfect their personal brand, build a first-class digital profile and implement inbound marketing activities to attract leads. If you are unsure which direction to take with your digital marketing contact me for help.