Find leads before the ‘other guys’

What if your website could help you be the preferred agent right from the start?

In this video interview, Alex Roose of ActiveCampaign – a leading global marketing automation system – shares his learnings on how to refine your sales and marketing processes and win more listings using smart thinking coupled with website data, automation to personalisation. 

Get an edge over other real estate agents and speak with prospective sellers first. Set up your website to work with ActiveCampaign and you’ll be the first to know when a contact is ready to appoint a real estate agent.  

Click below to watch the video.

Following is the video transcript.

Melanie Hoole

I’m very excited today to be with Alex Roose from ActiveCampaign, an automated marketing system that has arrived in Australia from the United States. 

I use ActiveCampaign with my clients, in fact, its part of the key components to the real estate websites my team and I build. Today, we’re going to blow your mind as to what you can do with sophisticated marketing technology. 

Sophisticated marketing with automation

So, Alex, can you give us a little bit of background on ActiveCampaign?

Alex Roose

ActiveCampaign is a CRM and marketing automation tool that’s designed specifically for small businesses. 

In essence, we’re able to help small businesses build sales and marketing alignment within their own business, help them generate more leads, then nurture those leads to close more sales.

Melanie Hoole

I know you already have property clients (including my own) but you also have other clients who aren’t in the property industry. What do they use ActiveCampaign for mainly?

Alex Roose

We have hundreds of different people who use the ActiveCampaign marketing system, who are in property or finance. Much of the time they’re using ActiveCampaign because they want a sophisticated marketing tool to reduce manual marketing and sales tasks within their business. 

Generating leads and then nurturing them

It’s not only to generate more leads but also to be able to nurture those contacts once acquired. 

With ActiveCampaign, they can see where prospective clients are on their purchasing journey, then make sure they’re showing them the right messages at the right time. 

Ultimately, ActiveCampaign helps them to stay top of mind. 

Melanie Hoole

Could you give me an example from your own experience in dealing with real estate professionals?

Alex Roose

The thing is, in real estate, we tend to get the same types of messages. For instance, I might get weekly property updates or I might get a Reserve Bank of Australia interest-rate announcement. 

The problem is that everyone’s pushing out the same message and you start to lose a little bit of trust with your audience. The messaging becomes almost like spam. 

So with content, what works well is when a business can look at their target audience and ask themselves: ‘Why did that person reach out to our business? How can I engage with them and use property marketing to tailor messaging that’s relevant to them?” 

The end goal should be that the potential client sees you at the right time and wants to engage with you.

Why marketing funnels are so important

Melanie Hoole

Could you explain what you mean by the ‘top of the funnel’?

Alex Roose

The top of the funnel is about what you do as a property agent to generate more awareness that will generate leads. 

Some of these activities might be producing content and that content could be a blog or might be you presenting at events; it might be you producing content for social media such as Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn. 

Live stories are popular now; it’s things like that that put you at the top in that awareness stage when people are trying to find more information about selling a property or renting their investment property, or they want advice on home renovations.

Melanie Hoole

ActiveCampaign is much more than just mining an existing database or tracking behaviours in email. 

The thing I love about your ActiveCampaign software is that, for me as a digital marketer, it helps me sync the database to Facebook so that we can start building audiences in real-time and behind the scenes specifically for that agency. 

How smart automation works with your real estate website 

Alex, talk to me more about how your software works in conjunction with a website. 

Alex Roose

ActiveCampaign works really well with websites. Taking your point, with Facebook, we can take the website and essentially plug it into ActiveCampaign so that when leads are generated off the website we’re able to follow up those leads and keep people engaged. 

We’re able to better understand who those leads are, we can profile those prospects and we can also sync that to Facebook so we can retarget those people. And this can all be done through the ActiveCampaign interface. 

Your sold property page comes into its own 

Melanie Hoole

So it not only talks to your email database, it sees where people go on your website. For example, with my clients, we monitor anybody that’s going to the Sold pages. 

If somebody’s looking at the Sold pages, there’s a high chance that they are thinking of selling. They might not have even picked up the phone but the real estate agent can give them a call and say ‘Hey how are you?’. 

Before making the call, that agent has the background knowledge that the person they’ve called has been looking at the Sold pages on their real estate website. They might even have been on the Sell with Us page. So it’s kind of like Big Brother, right? 

Alex Roose

I think this is a massive opportunity. Many people aren’t thinking outside the box of what they can do with marketing sales systems. 

Most of the time, it’s about building leads but there are many other opportunities to use ActiveCampaign. 

For example, as you mentioned before, you might want to go to your website and analyse what pages are showing high interest from buyers. 

Spot a potential sellers ‘intent’ to sell

So for instance if I’m on the Sold page or if I’m on the case study page, I’m showing quite high intent that I want to sell a property or I want to at least have a conversation with someone to see what this agency can offer me. 

For the real estate agency, they can create systems to understand who is looking at these pages, as well as when they’re looking at these pages. It gives them that advantage over the next agent who doesn’t have these types of systems in place.

Melanie Hoole

Right, so you can call the client before the potential clients have a chance to pick up the phone and ring any other agent because you know early in the piece what they’re likely to need. 

You know that the potential client is looking to see what this agency can do and how they could use that agency’s services.

Alex Roose

Exactly. What we’re finding is that many people are a bit reluctant to inquire because they know once they do, they’re going to get sales calls. 

So when they’re in the very early stages of their sales journey and they’re looking at different options, they want to be in ‘stealth mode’. They don’t necessarily want people to know that they’re looking at selling just yet. 

Pip other real estate agents to the post

But as a property agent, you’re able to understand very early on their journey when they’re thinking about it and that will give you the advantage over everyone else because you can get in at the beginning. 

This is more advantageous than when they’re finally ready to go and you find yourself in a tender between multiple different agents and you’re fighting for the business. 

Melanie Hoole

I love the fact that the potential seller won’t necessarily know that you’ve noticed them trolling through your website and then they’ll just think, ‘Oh, wow, it was meant to be ‘that agent’. I was on his website yesterday. How weird is that he’s ringing me? It’s like it’s fate.’ 

Alex Roose

Exactly. A good sales and marketing process allows you to talk to people at the right time. 

Again, many people don’t want to fill out a form because they understand that they’re going to get a call. But if you’re able to call people after they’ve engaged with content you think is relevant, it’s going to make the conversation a lot smoother for yourself. 

But you’re also talking to the people at the right time. You know that they’re actually thinking about selling or renting right now and you’re able to tailor your conversation around that.

Melanie Hoole

Right. It’s all about finding warm leads. Those people who are in the moment, with that intent. 

So intent is a word that you use; they’re showing intent in what they need. They’re looking at your property management services or they’re looking at your sales services. 

How segmentation keeps you relevant

Can you talk a little about segmentation? Because we can do some really clever things in the ActiveCampaign system, once we’ve identified what the contacts in the database are interested in.

Alex Roose

Sure. So, whether you’re a property agent or you run your own agency, there are many different ways you can use segmentation. 

If you’re an agency, you might have multiple different services. If you’re an agent, you might have multiple regions or areas you can farm for selling. Segmentation allows you to be very specific. 

For instance, if I’m looking after the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney, there are many different individual suburbs I might sell to. Every single person in each different suburb is looking for different features within those suburbs. 

I want to make sure that I’m telling them the right things at the right time. I don’t want to send generic marketing updates about all suburbs. I want to show them specific pockets that are relevant to them. 

Bondi is completely different from Double Bay and I want to make sure that the messaging is specific and relevant for that person who’s looking at Bondi or Double Bay. 

About this video series

Hoole.co’s video series brings together the best digital and social media minds in the real estate industry, to share the wonders of the web and magic of mobile. Subscribe to Hoole.co or follow us on social media (below) for free tips and tricks to grow your reputation and attract prospects, digitally.

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.