January 2017 - iDashboard Blog

New Outgoing Feed: AnyBusiness.com.au

iDashboard welcomes AnyBusiness.com.au to our family of portal sites that we upload properties too.

AnyBusiness is a dedicated business broking site, run by specialists from the business broking field.

We are different because we are not a real estate site that has evolved into a business for sale site, instead we established AnyBusiness solely for the business broking industry.

We provide a pure platform for those consumers interested in buying a business so they can easily and quickly find any and every relevant business for sale across the country.

We offer relevant consumer tools to enable:

saved searches
save business listings into your favourites
email enquiries directly to the brokers
email alerts to let us send you relevant business listings via email

Plus, we offer a wide suite of products for brokers and their clients to effectively showcase their business to our audience and maximize the level of enquiry giving it every chance for a quick sale.

This information has been sourced from AnyBusiness.com.au

To send your properties through to AnyBusiness.com.au from iDashboard, simply setup an account with them and they will contact us to activate your property feed.

Running Out Of Social Media Content Ideas?

It’s a tough gig and every social media manager has experienced it – you’re aware that you need to post something, but you’re clean out of ideas. What do you do?

Don’t worry, we’re here to help. Take a look at this cheatsheet of engaging content and you’ll be right back on track for shelling out top-level posts.

Be aware of important dates

If you find yourself sipping desperately on your 3rd cup of coffee in front of a blank computer screen, it might be worth taking a look at your desktop calendar.

You’d be surprised at how well important dates and public holidays can work when it comes to creating timely, relevant content. For example, Valentine’s Day is coming up, which offers an excellent opportunity for running a ‘customer love’ campaign. Give it a go and see how your engagement stats are affected.

Check out popular daily hashtags

Another great source of content ideas is daily trending hashtags. Since people are already talking about them, they make a great opportunity for your brand to get noticed. It won’t just get noticed by your current audience, either. Hashtags are an excellent method of reaching new people who haven’t heard of you and could be interested in your services.

Instagram Hashtags – What Every Real Estate Agent Needs To Know

Give your audience VIP access

One of the best ways that you can cultivate a social audience is by levelling with them and humanising your brand. The next time you’re stuck for ideas, consider giving them a tour of your office, or producing a short video discussing your real estate agents’ hobbies or favourite bands. By making your brand more personal, it’ll be far more relatable to your audience. More often than not, people prefer to do business with friendly brands, as opposed to faceless organisations.

Try out contests

If you’re looking to reach a new audience and expand your online community, running a competition could be a viable option. Before you start it, make sure that you’ve got a prize planned out, as well as a strategy for selecting a winner. Also think about what your audience will have to do in order to gain entry to the competition – will they have to like your photo, or are you aiming for virality with asking them to share it with their friends?

Answer a commonly-asked question

It’s one of the core premises of content marketing because it works. By answering a common question that you think your audience might be asking themselves, you’ll be able to boost your brand authority. The next time they’re in the market for your services, they’ll be that much more likely to get in touch with you over your competitor.

Although this method is typically employed with blog posts, it can also be incorporated into your social strategy. Create a quick Q&A post, then link out to a longer-form blog post to cover the topic in greater detail.

Give your audience a reading list

With so many blogs out there on the internet, your audience might find it difficult to settle on a reliable source of information. If you’re struggling for content ideas, it could be worth a shot. As long as you make sure it’s relevant to them, your audience will be interested in reading the same content as you. For an added touch, why not ask your business owner to share some of the articles they’ve read most recently?

20 Time Saving Real Estate Blog Topic Ideas

Your Guide To Attention-Grabbing CTAs On Social Media

When was the last time you signed up for a monthly subscription? What was it that made you do it? If it was down to the products features or, more importantly, benefits, you probably made your purchasing decision because of a CTA. In this article, we’re going to take you through everything you need to know about CTAs, as well as how to deploy them in a social media environment.

What is a CTA?

CTA stands for Call to Action and essentially, it motivates your target audience to do something. Whether that be signing up to a mailing list or purchasing your product, CTAs serve a vital function in the marketing world.

CTAs are most commonly found at the end of blog posts, where the reader is left finding themselves thinking what they should do next. They often appear as hyperlinks, but CTAs can also appear within images, videos and buttons. In simple terms, CTAs answer the question ‘now what?’.

5 top tips for writing CTAs to die for

Okay, not literally to die for – you want to have some customers left afterwards. Although CTAs have been around as long as direct marketing itself, social media hasn’t. This brings a whole new avenue of unexplored territory for marketers to distribute their best-performing copy.

1. Make your CTAs platform-specific

When it comes to social media platforms, each of them work a little bit differently.

The key to nailing your CTA on social media is tweaking it to reflect the network you’re trying to engage. Facebook pages have CTA buttons that are both clickable and trackable and Instagram have matched it by adding CTA buttons to the ends of their sponsored posts.

2. Skip the jargon

When you’re writing a killer CTA, you need to make sure that jargon doesn’t feature at all. When you’re looking to land business via social media, clarity is your best friend. You should also be wary of utilising humour in your CTA, as it might cloud your clarity.

3. Make the most of emotion

Seriously, human emotion is a powerful tool in social media marketing. FOMO – fear of missing out – can be especially influential. By tapping into this, you’ll be able to conjure up images of exclusivity and immediacy, which more often than not are enough to get people to take action.

4. Never ending testing

With social media, your CTAs are measurable. If you’re getting a bucketload of impressions with your posts, it’s probably time to start A/B testing. With this, you’ll be able to protect your interests with your best-performing CTAs, whilst testing out others to see if there’s one out there that can work better for you.

The key to social media marketing is realising that there’s always something better that you can be doing. Don’t get complacent – keep testing alternatives in search of that one legendary CTA.

5. Keep it personal

Honestly, your message to your followers should be one that levels to them. This is easily attainable with one simple step – incorporating second-person pronouns such as ‘you’ and ‘your’.

By adding a human element to the interaction you’re having with your followers, they’ll be that much more likely to see you as a person, as opposed to a real estate brand.

Try out a CTA in your next social post. If in doubt, remember, a good social post answers the following questions: “what next?”; “why should I?”.

Don’t Ignore These Top Email Marketing Best Practices

Despite how it might look, high-performance email marketing is never easy. Even when you’ve got a keen eye on your delivery, open and click-through rates, it can be easy to slip up.

Take a look at the following best practices to help yourself avoid silly mistakes in the future:

Huge top images are dangerous

If you’re regularly using 300×400 image banners in your emails, you’re skating on thin ice. Although they work well on websites, there’s reason that they perhaps shouldn’t be so popular in emails.

Think about it – a nice image is great, but how well does it sell your overall message? Including a large photo at the top of your email pushes down the rest of your content and that’s where the real hook is going to be. Remember – your words drive actions from your readers, so make sure that they can be seen easily.

Make the most of the preview text

It’s sad to see an email in my inbox with neglected or ignored preview text, because it’s such a waste. What was a potential business opportunity is going to be lost on so many people, as it’ll come across that you haven’t put in much effort.

The preview section of an email gives you such huge potential to get a little creative and spark intrigue from your audience – why wouldn’t you make the most of it?

It’s not all about you

Contrary to what you might think, you shouldn’t be selling your product’s features. Readers don’t really care so much about what your product does – more how they’ll benefit from it. Instead of using the name of your company, instead place the focus on the recipient of the email.

If you really want to drive your results, couple selling your product/service’s benefits with the use of the word ‘you’. By doing this, you’ll be approaching the recipient on a personal level, making them that much more likely to engage with you.

Decide who you are

Are you a brand, or are you a person? Depending on which one you choose, stick with it and maintain consistency throughout your publications. After all, this is direct response – by cultivating a personal relationship with your audience, you’ll boost the chances of actually hearing from them.

Work on your call to action

Regardless of what you say in the rest of your email, your call to action is key. You can include as many links as your heart sees fit, but stick with one call to action that drives your audience to do something.

Although you might think it’s simpler to have only one button, A/B split test it and see how using more affects your results. After all, testing is the path to email marketing success.

Be relevant

Many people think that the biggest factor for success with email marketing is the quality of the list. It is, however, equally important to get high-quality content.

Writing email copy isn’t as easy as it sounds, so you’re going to need to test what works and what doesn’t. If you’ve found a piece that generates results, don’t stop there. Results can always be better. To cover your bases and reduce risk, run a 90/10 split. Send your highest performing copy (the control) to the larger segment and send your test copy to the other half. You’ll be surprised by how you can improve by using this method.

The Dos And Don’ts Of Email Signatures

Key Changes That Agents Should Look Out For In 2017

Congratulations – it’s 2017 and you’ve made it through another year of real estate. Whether it’s been a lucrative one for your or not, there are several points that you should look out for in 2017 to ensure that the year is as successful for you as possible.

Rate increases

There’s been such a level of conversation about this that’s it’s almost a dead certainty – at some point in 2017, it’s highly likely that the banks will hike their interest rates. If your clients are looking to buy a property now, you should advise them to go with a fixed rate loan. As sad as it may seem, interest rates most likely won’t stay at record lows for much longer.

An increased need for reasonably-priced detached properties

For the first time on record, 2016 saw more apartments built than houses, which is likely to be a trend that continues well into 2017.

As a result of this, however, there’s now an overabundance of apartments available, without the demand to cater for them. In 2017, agents should expect local councils to make adjustments to ensure that this balance is restored. Although you’d expect rental rates to fall as a result of this, the constantly increasing population should supplement the sheer number of apartments available.

Fewer listings and more renovations

With another strong year under its belt, Sydney continues to outperform its sister cities across Australia. When you look into it, this trend comes down to basic economics – the demand for property heavily outweighs the supply. The average value of properties within Sydney has increased by 13.1%, compared to 15.6% for the previous year.

With this in mind, the number of new properties listed on the market is down by 17% compared to the same period last year. The demand, however, shows no signs of waning. For this reason, you should anticipate 2017 to see an increase in the number of property renovations taking place, as well as councils changing the required policies to make this possible.

Off-the-plan property purchases being sold for a profit

Those who shrewdly invested in off-the-plan developments might now be looking to sell since the properties have been constructed. This could be especially prominent in Sydney’s eastern suburbs and CBD, as those who’ve put deposits down see that their properties have already increased in value by up to 30%. This makes now a great time to sell those properties for an attractive profit.

An increase in renting through choice

Common thinking is that people rent properties because they can’t afford to buy them, but 2017 could well beckon more renting by choice, even if these people already own properties.

Flexibility and freedom are both incredibly valuable to people and many don’t actually need to own a property where they live. Although people may own a home, they could in fact choose to rent somewhere closer to the city in order to afford themselves a better lifestyle, or to make commuting easier.

Your 2017 Real Estate Marketing New Year’s Resolutions

Using Digital Marketing To Extend Your Real Estate Reach

It’s the question of the decade – how can you reach more customers when there’s so much competition online? If you’re relying on traditional marketing methods alone, the answer is with great difficulty.

Whether it’s because of lack of understanding or fear of change, many real estate agents are still sticking to their guns with mail-outs and print advertising. These tactics, however, should only form the warmup act of your full real estate marketing ensemble. In today’s digital age, online content marketing should be the headline attraction.

Understanding traditional marketing’s limitations

Despite their many benefits, offline marketing techniques also come with their fair share of limitations and they’re growing by the day. Traditionally, real estate agents market their properties by farming a database of around 500 to 2,000 contacts. Speaking with each of these people 4 times a year, however, works out at around 160 extra calls – on top of your existing workload.

Australian Census statistics have shown that larger suburbs can be home to more than 30,000 people. If you consider that 20% of them could join your database during a marketing campaign, the possibility of keeping in touch with your contacts becomes even less likely.

Benefit from the world of business blogging

In contrast to traditional advertising methods, business blogging continues to demonstrate value long after it’s posted. If you can create a blog post that your target audience finds useful or interesting, it’ll be driving leads for you for months – even years – after you’ve posted it.

When compared to agencies that don’t market their businesses online, those that do reap an astonishing 88% more leads each and every month.

The reasoning behind this is largely because content marketing gives audiences what they’re after. You can spend as much money as you want on outbound advertising, but a free blog posts that provides potential clients with useful information is a great way of gaining leads.

In addition to simply driving leads, blogging also benefits your business in two other key areas. By providing your target audience with the answers to their questions, you’re able to demonstrate your authority on the topic. This, in turn, builds their trust in your brand. The next time they’re in the market for your services, they’ll be that much more likely to contact you over your competitors.

Harness the power of digital marketing in 2017 and ultimately see your revenue increase and your cost-per-lead decrease.

Do You Really Have to Blog? Let’s Talk About Blogging and the Effect it has on Your Business

Discussing advertising payment with clients

The Tough Sell – Getting Your Clients To Agree To A Marketing Plan

One of the core elements of any advertising or marketing niche is this – you can’t sell a secret. If your target audience don’t hear about what you’re trying to sell, it’s unlikely that they’ll ever become part of your sales funnel.

Many agents, however, argue that VPA is a difficult and somewhat convoluted subject to try and sell to their clients, who are already trying to protect their profit margins. They are, therefore, reluctant to part with any more cash when listing their home.

In this article, we’re going to take you through the key objections that clients have in regards to purchasing VPA, as well as how you can manoeuvre around them.

The 2 key objections

Many real estate agents with years of experience under their belts agree on these two facts – financial difficulties and confusion over responsibilities cloud a client’s need for VPA.

Although most buyers have an understanding of the importance of a marketing plan, they simply don’t think that they should be the ones paying for it. Although some agents might be prepared to weather the costs themselves, this doesn’t lay the foundations for a healthy relationship between agent and client.

If an agent is staring down the barrel of $15k in commission, they’re going to be more likely to work in their best interests to get the property sold. If they think that a strong marketing plan is the best way forward, that’s probably what they’re going to do.

Additionally, changes in buyer behaviour are ever more rapid, which has left marketing at its highest demand in history. 20 years ago, a successful marketing plan revolved around ads in the local newspaper and signs up in some shop windows, whereas now, it’s all about digital marketing. For many buyers, online comparison sites are among the first places they’ll check when starting their property hunt.

If it comes down to financial difficulties, most agents will have a tougher time in demonstrating the value of a marketing plan. If it comes down to the vendor not seeing the value in marketing, however, it’s up to the agent to change their opinion.

Explain the options to your client

One of the key elements of any agent-client relationship is sitting down and discussing the importance of advertising and marketing. If they’re looking to sell a medium-sized 2-3 bed home, their audience is likely to be young professionals. In this case, the best channel for them to advertise through will be online, as this is where they’ll spend the most time when looking for properties themselves.

If the client is looking to sell a multi-million dollar family home, the target audience for this will likely be sourcing their properties through print media. Explaining these two distinctions to your client is crucial, as it’ll help them to understand the importance of a targeted marketing and advertising plan.

Be clear about the results

If you’re requesting that your client submits to hefty up-front marketing costs, it’s down to you to demonstrate the benefits and anticipated results.

Firstly, you need to explain to them that swapping out a standard marketing plan for a comprehensive one can yield as much as 15% on the end sale price. From this perspective, your client doesn’t necessarily have to understand the marketing process as much as the end results that they can expect to see.

If your client isn’t willing to expose their property to a wider target audience, they’ll never know if the final offer that they accept is the best one possible. Your job as an agent is to remove this doubt from their mind by delivering them satisfaction in the form of a robust marketing strategy.

The Top 6 Reasons You Should Be Using Video On Listings

Your 2017 Real Estate Marketing New Year’s Resolutions

Despite the real estate industry being in a constant state of change, there are some old habits that die hard. For those without substantial marketing experience too, knowing which habits are good and which habits are bad isn’t always easy.

How often should you be blogging? Do you actually need a Facebook page? How much is too much when you’re outlining your agency’s annual marketing budget?

The questions are seemingly endless and the answers aren’t always as forthcoming as you’d like them to be. So, with 2017 now here, it’s a great time for you to look back at the habits you’ve developed and find out which ones work and which ones don’t. In this article, we’re going to give you a heads-up on which ones are worth getting rid of sooner rather than later.

1. Put your website to good use

Think about it – what’s the first thing you do when someone shares a link to their website with you? You take a look at it. For this reason, buying a catchy domain and setting up a basic theme probably isn’t enough – your website can do so much more for you.

Remove your outdated listings and spruce up any of the half-written, poorly constructed blog posts you might have. Clients use your website to get an idea of your level of service – if it’s outdated, they’re going to be more likely to take their money elsewhere.

How to Provide Value On Your Real Estate Blog

2. Focusing too heavily on your ‘brand’

Don’t get us wrong – your brand is important. Ultimately, however, real estate is about sales. This should be your number one priority. If you spend too much time on tactics and not enough time winning clients and making listings, you’re looking at disaster.

Firstly, you should focus on boosting those sales stats, then promote them later. Once you’ve got a great sales record, half of your marketing is done for you already. For many clients, a solid track history speaks for itself.

Managing Your Own Personal Brand

3. Slacking on the yard signs

The yard sign is a timeless classic for real estate agents and it’s used to this day for one reason – it still works. Many agents, however, forget the most important element of the sign – its call to action.

Remember, the idea of the sign is to communicate information clearly and concisely to passers-by. If the sign is cluttered, they might realise that the property is for sale, but they’re not going to pick up much more than that.

For this reason, it’s best to keep the messaging on the sign to ‘for sale’, with your name and contact number clearly displayed underneath.

4. Neglecting social media

If there’s one thing that you shouldn’t leave out of your modern marketing plan, it’s social media. After a business website, a social media profile is going to show potential clients that you care about them and want to have an online presence to give them information and answer any of their questions.

If you’re unsure of where to start, Facebook is a safe bet. It’s got the highest userbase of any social network, so you can pretty much guarantee that your audience are spending time there.

8 Crucial Ways That Social Media Can Help Your Real Estate Business

6 Tips For Boosting Your Agency’s Digital Security

Taking your business online is one of the most lucrative decisions you can make in real estate as chances are it’s where your audience are spending the majority of their time.

Maintaining safe levels of security online, however, is easier said than done. 2016 saw some of the biggest hacks in the history of the internet, with well-known providers haemorrhaging as many as 500 million records of customer phone numbers, email addresses and bank details. As a result, various Australian cyber security groups have been pushing the following 6 tips for ensuring that you’re digitally secure.

1. Use a strong password

This one might seem obvious, but you’d be astounded by the number of people still using the name of their pet with their house number as their password.

The ATO suggests that users create passwords based on a collection of upper/lower case letters, numbers and symbols, as these are harder to crack. If you’re extra-keen on security, it could even be worth exploring a multi-factor authentication process, which acts as another door between the outside world and your online business.

2. Get rid of unnecessary access

For one, ex-employees shouldn’t be able to access anything to do with your business, unless previously agreed upon. For this reason, steps should be taken to ensure that access is revoked once employees leave their positions.

This should also be thought about when employees change positions within your agency, as their new role might not require them to have the same level of access they had before. Bottom line – keep it watertight.

3. Keep all devices updated

When working online, malware and ransomware are two things that you don’t want to come across. Malware is malicious software that infects your computer and can render it unusable. Ransomware is slightly more cruel – it takes your files and holds them hostage, only releasing them once you’ve paid a fee.

To reduce the chances of having this happen to you, you should ensure that your agency’s digital devices are kept as up to date as possible.

4. Be vigilant with external devices

As an agency, you should be careful with any external devices, specifically USBs. Make sure your employees are clear on the fact that they can’t use their own USB devices on company computers until they’ve been properly vetted.

The reasoning behind this is that your employees may not take the same level of care with data security at home as you do in the office. It could be much easier for them to pick up a virus, accidentally download it to their USB, then pass it onto you by something as seemingly innocuous as plugging it into their work PC.

5. Steer clear of spam emails

Although the majority of spam you’ll get through will be business offers and discounts on printer cartridges, some of it is of a more sinister nature. Although spam filters are getting more intelligent by the hour, it’s only a matter of time before a spam email makes it through to your inbox.

Keep a keen eye on the emails you’re receiving and take note of any that appear suspicious. By marking an email as junk, you’ll help your spam filter to keep it from appearing in front of you again.

6. Look out for suspicious account activity

If your accounts display transactions that no-one in your business can testify to, it could be a sign that your security has been breached.

Additionally, if you receive an email from any of your suppliers regarding unexplained changes, it’s important for your employees to know not to open the attachments, as it could be a scam attempt. It’s always best to contact the business via telephone to confirm these details.

Look To The Future With Your SEO Tactics

For at least the foreseeable future, the world of search engine optimisation is going to be governed by one ruler – Google. Looking back at the progress the search engine giant has made over the past 10 years, they’ve made some astonishing developments which have helped their algorithm to determine what is and isn’t good content. Through this, Google users have received an increasingly convenient and relevant service.

It’s developments like Penguin 4.0 that mean there’s no sense in looking at the present day for your real estate SEO efforts – you should be looking to the future of Google and general technological development. If you can do this, you’ll really get the jump on the competition.

Google’s competition are watching closely

Google have built their empire on being able to provide people with the best service possible, crushing other search engines like Bing and Yahoo. However, that doesn’t mean that they’re down and out forever.

In exchange for being offered simplicity and convenience by Google, a large percentage of people are willing to part with significant amounts of their personal data. Although many people are fine with this exchange, there are also blindly oblivious to the fact that their data is being sold on for a profit.

With the constantly increasing stringency of data privacy laws, if another company can find a way to finance a better search engine without mass-collecting user information, then we could see Google topple.

The following, however, can be assumed fairly safely:

The way Google works makes sense

If you look at the basic level of how Google works, such as not ranking a forum site with thousands of automated comments, then it’s pretty clear that the way Google works is logical.

When new search algorithm updates are released, SEO professionals worldwide break down the code, run tests, and generally try to figure out what exactly has changed. The basis of it, however, is that top ranking spots in search results shouldn’t be rewarded to people who know how to play the system. They should be awarded to those who put effort into creating content that their audiences find useful. For this reason, the algorithm also tries to focus on content that might be very well written, but isn’t necessarily the best optimised.

Tips for How to Rank High in Google Search Results

The future possibilities for content ranking are endless

Here’s where the looking to the future part comes in. There are several online metrics that could well be part of the search algorithm, but aren’t made clear by Google. Take ‘dwell time’ for example. Dwell time is defined by how long a person spends on a certain page of your website and, understandably, this could be a pretty good indicator of whether content is quality or not.

Google, however, haven’t actually released a formal statement acknowledging or denying the importance of dwell time in search rankings. The general rule of thumb regarding it, though, is that if it isn’t already a part of the algorithm, it could well be in the future.

How Google Search Results Work for Real Estate

If it could be a future ranking signal, prepare for it

Any forward-thinking SEO marketing professional will always put themselves in the situation of preparing for the future with regards to rankings. If you had’ve told a Google engineer 10 years ago that one day, they’d be able to teach a computer to determine the semantic relevance of certain words and phrases, they probably would have laughed at you and shown you the door.

Nowadays, that’s exactly what the Hummingbird update does – it looks at the meaning behind words in order to give great content the attention it deserves. All those who had already been providing thought-provoking and relevant content were rewarded and those who had been keyword stuffing were taken down a few notches.

Think about it this way – no matter how the Google search algorithm changes, the signals that indicate quality content won’t. They’re already out there, whether they’re being used or not. Whether it be blog posts or video, focus your agency’s efforts on creating high-quality content and search ranking will follow.

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