2019

10 New Year’s Resolutions for Real Estate Agents in 2019

Not sure what you should be including in your New Year’s resolutions this year? Don’t sweat – we’ve got you.

From setting a great work-life balance to scratching up on your marketing skills, there are heaps of things you can improve on to give your professional and personal lives that welcome boost. Read on to find out more.

1) Don’t Work Harder – Work Smarter 

It’s a topic that’s been hotly discussed in psychology circles, and for good reason. By working smarter, not harder, you’ll get more done. Try and prioritise impact over urgency. Build out your working week around your biggest priorities and fill your spare time with less urgent tasks.

2) Set up a Consistent Social Media Schedule

Social media can be a real estate agent’s greatest friend, but only if you use it well. How can you do that? By making sure you post regularly. Not all of us have the time to login during the working day, so if you find yourself struggling, consider checking out a social scheduling app like Buffer.

3) Create More Video Content

Video content is the future of the online marketing game, but right now, it’s still a great way of standing out from your competition. Fortunately, with the evolution of technology, you don’t need to rely on expensive videography equipment or costly agencies. In fact, most real estate agents are able to shoot high-quality videos using simple-to-use apps.

4) Get in Touch with Local Businesses

By doing this, you’ll be able to form partnerships that could well work in your favour. As an example, you could host your company events at a well-known local café, and they could give you a discount or help to promote future events.

5) Stop Worrying About the Future of Real Estate

Sure – robots might take over all of our jobs at some point, but that time isn’t anywhere soon. Focus your efforts on upskilling and providing more value to your clients. The less predictable and repetitive your role is, the harder it will be to automate.

6) Take Time for Yourself

Remember – you’re only human. If you’ve found yourself swamped with work this year, remember to take time out to do the things you love in 2019.

7) Broaden Your Tech Horizons

Every day, there’s new tech hitting the market that could make your job easier. By taking the time to research apps, plugins and software related to your day-to-day, you could create more time for business development or other areas you need to focus on.

8) Take a New Headshot

People change. Whether it’s a new haircut or something else, you probably look a little different than you did last year. It’s important to give your clients an accurate representation of who you are, so if your headshot is outdated, find the time to take a new one.

 

Xmas Social Media

Should You Keep up Social Media Appearances Over the Christmas Break?

The festive period has arrived quickly, leaving many real estate agents looking forward to a much-needed break. However, should their businesses be taking a break too?

When over 60% of Australians use the internet 5 times a day, it’s absolutely essential that a real estate business continues to maintain a presence over the holidays with content set up in the pipeline. This way, you won’t see a dip in your reach and will be ready to jump head-on into your 2019 marketing plans.

Facebook Doesn’t Stop Over the Christmas Break

People don’t stop using their social accounts when the holiday season hits home, and that means the opportunities for businesses to drive their marketing strategies forward don’t, either.

By having a presence on social media post-Christmas, you’ll get an opportunity to capitalise on real estate leads who are looking for festive season sales or offers.

Christmas and the New Year are great times to introduce people to your brand, as buyers and sellers are often more optimistic and open to new ideas.

During Australia’s hotter months, smartphones are never far from their owners’ hands, so you should make the most of it.

Why You Should Stay Active Over Christmas

Cash in on the Festivities

Don’t be a scrooge – get involved with the Christmas spirit and use the festivities to stand out from your competition. This doesn’t mean you have to go over the top – it can be as simple as changing your Facebook cover image for a festive alternative.

Keeping up a Visual Presence

The last thing you want is for your audience to forget about your brand. The holiday period is no exception to this. If your business is shutting down for the season, there are a number of tools, such as Buffer, that can help you keep up appearances whilst your “out of office” auto-responder is turned on.

Your Customers Aren’t Working, Either

No 9-5 means no restraints on when they can be online digesting social content. With the majority of Australians off work and taking it easy, you’ve got a serious opportunity to drive some impressive engagement levels.

Whether this is through sharing relevant blog posts and articles or with a holiday promotion, if you keep up your social media presence over the holidays, you’ll see the benefits ready for you to jump straight back into it in 2019.

Christmas Social Media

How to Prepare Your Social Media for the Holiday Season

Christmas is nearly here! And if you haven’t started planning your social media for the office break, now is definitely the time to get started.

Just because you’re not going to be in the office, it doesn’t mean your followers aren’t still going to be online, eager to digest content from their favourite brands. So, if you’re not posting whilst they’re online, you’re missing out on valuable leads.

Okay, so What Can I do to Prepare my Social Media for Christmas?

Great question. Read on to pick up a couple of quick tips to help you get your social presence under wraps this December.

1) Don’t Neglect Your Content Calendar

Note – if you don’t already have a content calendar, you need to create one. You’ll need to include the types of content you’ll post during the festive season, as well as which days you’ll be posting. Social media, by name, is a social platform, so as a rule of thumb, make sure 80% of your content adds value to your readers and 20% is promotional.

2) Leave Plenty of Time to Create Content

Christmas dinner in one hand. Laptop in the other. It’s not ideal, is it? If there’s one thing you need to do, it’s create all of your content in advance. It might seem like a chore to start with, but when posting day comes, you’ll be glad you got it out of the way.

3) Schedule Your Content

You don’t want to be logging onto your various social platforms at specific times each day to post your content. It might be easy to do whilst in the office, but when you’re on your break, you want it to be done for you.

Facebook have a built-in scheduling feature. Otherwise, tools like Buffer offer a free-forever content scheduling service guaranteed to save you hours.

How to Get Your Social Channels in the Festive Spirit

Don’t worry – it’s understandable for you to be stuck for ideas on how to make your content Christmassy and exciting. Here are some ideas:

1) Create a Festive Cover Photo

What better way to get your audience in the holiday spirit than by greeting your page visitors with a festive cover photo? You can use this as a place to promote any Christmas offers you have and to add a call to action.

2) Market a Special Seasonal offer

This can be pushed out on all of your social media channels (with content tailored to each, of course) and also via a specific email blast.

3) Send out Season’s Greetings!

It’s the season to be jolly – why not share a little festive cheer by sending out holiday wishes to your followers?

Christmas is one of the biggest times of the year for businesses around the world, and real estate doesn’t have to be any different. By posting content regularly during the holiday season, you’ll make sure you don’t miss out on any leads.

LinkedIn Video

All You Need to Know About LinkedIn Video in 2019

After launching native video in 2018, LinkedIn has proven to be more than just a platform for long-form B2B content. In just the first year, LinkedIn video posts increased the platform’s impressions by 300 million, and these videos earn three times more engagement than text posts. And early data suggests these videos are somewhere around five times more likely to generate a conversation among LinkedIn members.

And while these engagement numbers are impressive, these videos can also boost revenues, adding even more to their value.

So, are you ready to use LinkedIn video? If so, here’s everything you need to know to help you build a winning campaign.

Types of Video

Embedded Video

It’s still common to load a video onto YouTube and then embed the link on LinkedIn. But native videos tend to be more effective.

LinkedIn Native Video

This is video that is uploaded directly to LinkedIn or that was created on the platform.

It’s different from embedded videos in that it auto-plays in the feed, which makes it easier for you to grab people’s attention. On Facebook, native videos get 10 times more shares than linked videos, and there’s plenty of reason to believe this will happen on LinkedIn, too.

Video Ads

These are sponsored company ads that show up in the LinkedIn feed. Campaigns featuring these types of ads tend to increase brand awareness, brand consideration and lead generation. And unlike native videos, which are limited to ten minutes, video ads can last up to 30 minutes.

LinkedIn Native Video Best Practices

It’s no doubt these videos can help your brand, so here are some of the ways to make sure they work as well as they can.

Optimise Your Setup

Before filming, make sure your lighting is adequate, the camera is focused where you want it to focus, your background is clean and inviting, and your body language reflects the message you want to send. Of course, you’ll be able to do as many takes as you want, but spend some time preparing so that you can avoid having to spend too much time making the video.

Focus on Grabbing Attention

Like anything on the web, you only have a few seconds to snag someone’s attention, so make sure the first few seconds of the video are enticing enough to get people to stop and watch the rest of the video.

Plan for Sound to Be Off

Most people watch these videos without sound, so make sure you can convey your message without needing audio. This might mean using visuals, but it might also mean preparing subtitles to go along with your video.

Choose the Right Length

LinkedIn says the most successful video ads are less than 15 seconds long, but native videos are a bit different. Consider the following:

  • Brand awareness and brand consideration videos should be less than 30 seconds
  • Upper-funnel marketing videos should be 30-90 seconds long
  • Brand or product stories can be longer
  • Don’t exceed 10 minutes

Keep to these practices, and make sure to use a strong call to action as well as supporting copy, and you will find that LinkedIn video can be an effective way for you to promote your brand.

 

 

Open Home Buyers

How To Get More Buyers Through Your Listing

When a vendor comes to you who is interested in using social media, then you want to make sure you are maximising the return. This means making sure the leads generated are captured and converted into either buyers or future sellers.

Below is an outline for a listing campaign that can help you generate anywhere from 30-120 leads over 30 days, which you can use to help your business grow.

Build a Funnel

When you run a Facebook campaign, you need to be sure that the page you sending people to is a dedicated funnel, meaning that it’s built with a specific purpose in mind. Otherwise, you run the risk of people clicking away before you’ve had the chance to capture their attention.

A good way to do this is to set up a two-step funnel. This usually consists of asking people to put their information in before being able to access additional information about the property. You can also set this up so that you get a notification every time someone enters their information, which hand delivers a lead to you. It’s then up to you to contact that person to find out how you can help them.

Facebook Ads Manager

There are many different things you can do within the Facebook advertising platform. But one of the simplest is to do an “engagement” campaign. These are designed to help you build engagement around a particular post, and they are really easy to set up.

All you need to do is create a post with a short description and a link to your funnel page. Make sure to include a “Click Here” call to action. Then, when your ad is live, go into the Facebook ads manager and select, “engagement.” This will turn you to a series of prompts which you should fill out right away, and then you’re all set to go.

Some Tips:
  • Edit the ad to be “News Feed” only.
  • Spend at least $10 per day for 30 days
  • Be as specific as possible when targeting your audience, but try to keep your targeted audience to around 10,000
  • When you get to the last part, select the Facebook post you just created announcing the property. Then publish. Your campaign will now be live.

Track Results

The goal should be to get cost per engagement to be around 10 cents, and if you’re able to do this, it means that you have a relevant campaign that your target audience is responding to. But if this number is a lot higher, then it likely means you’re not targeting the right people. Consider updating the audience before turning away from the campaign. Small changes to your audience can produce major results.

Of course, Facebook marketing isn’t always this straightforward. But this is a good way to get things started so that you can see how this platform can support the growth of your business.

2 Agents Vlogging

7 Tips for Using A Suburb Video to Win More Listings

A quick video that summarises market activity in your suburb can be an excellent way to share your knowledge about the local area in an easy-to-understand way.

It helps position you as a market expert who is both approachable and helpful, which are essential traits that most real estate consumers these days want.

Here are five ways to help you make a suburb video that will really produce results:

1. Share on Facebook

Make sure to target your suburb video to audiences that reside within your suburb. Or, select a radius that surrounds your shopfront so that you can get as many people in your local area as possible.

More advanced users who have managed to upload their own databases to Facebook can create and target similar audiences to make sure the video is reaching people who have similar characteristics to your past clients.

2. Post on Your Website

Start turning your website into something more than just a place to put all the properties you currently have for sale. And putting your suburb video up onto your site is a great way to do this. It helps audiences understand how the prices on the properties they’re looking at stack up to the rest of the local market, giving them some important context in their property search.

3. Tweet It!

If you’re going to promote it on Facebook, make sure you’re also promoting your video on Twitter. Use hashtags related to your community or tag local personalities and encourage them to share some love about the local area. You never know when something will go viral, and this will give your business a huge boost.

4. Feature in an Email

Video captures people’s attention much more easily than traditional text, so including video into your emails can be a great way to increase open rates as well as conversions. In fact, it’s been found that video can improve open and click through rates by as much as 500 percent.

5. Build Up Your YouTube Channel

As soon as you’ve created your video, make sure to upload it to YouTube to create a library or channel for the suburbs in your territory.

6. Share on LinkedIn

Your business contacts also need houses and LinkedIn is the best way to reach these individuals. And let’s be honest, most of what we see on LinkedIn these days is self-promotional or congratulatory. A short video presenting relevant information about your suburb could end up being a nice change of pace.

7. Send an SMS Link

Since you’re already using all other channels to promote your video, why not send an SMS message. This puts the link right in front of people, making it easy to blow their minds.

 

Now that you know how to use a suburb video to boost listings, it’s time to make that video and get it out there.