WITH over 39,000 real estate agents and companies in Australia, it’s important you’re doing all you can to stand out from the crowd and be seen when customers are deciding they want to sell their property.

But beyond the traditional approach (billboards at train stations and flyers through the door), how can you use online advertising to get the best return on your marketing investment?

One of the great things about new technology is the wealth of data and information that it gives you access to. Using this information you can target your advertising to particular users, reducing cost on ad-wastage and ‘lasering in’ on those who are most relevant.

Finding Customers Who Know They Want To Sell

In the first instance, it’s wise to setup a traditional Search Engine Marketing campaign to capture those customers who are already in the mindset to sell. You need to make your campaign as specific as possible and ensure that you have a landing page created just for it. The messaging in the campaign should link all the way through.

For example, say you are a real estate agent in Surry Hills in Sydney, your campaign may look like:
Target Keyword: “Sell My Property”
Location: “Surry Hills, Sydney, NSW”
Target Details: People In My Location
Ad Unit Messaging: Sell Your Property In Surry Hills Download Your Free Surry Hills Price Guide
Landing Page: Download Your Free Surry Hills Price Guide -> Enter Your Email Address To Download

In the instance above your campaign is very specific and the messaging is consistent throughout. Rather than running a campaign that ends at your website homepage (which is very generic), this instead will get you a good AdWords Ad Quality Score – which is what Google uses to determine in which position to show your ad.

Finding Customers Who Don’t Know They Want To Sell

The trickier part is finding those customers who are not yet in the mindset to sell. This is best done by using demographic and behavioural data and interests to target customers.

A Facebook Example:
Setup your Facebook advertising campaign with a Brand Awareness objective that targets those customers who have recently updated their relationship status to “Engaged” or “Married” – there’s a high chance those customers are looking to move house and sell their existing house.

Alternatively you could setup an ad that targets a lookalike audience to existing pool of vendors by uploading your existing customer list and then creating a Lookalike Audience based on it. Facebook will match the details and information it knows of your existing audience and find people who are similar to it.

An AdWords Example:
Similar to Facebook you can create a Lookalike Audience to your existing audience and target ads to it. We would also recommend that you use the Demographics and Interests targeting to find those customers who have an expressed interest in real estate or home decor.

Remembering That Selling A House Is A Big Decision

Unlike buying a new pair of shoes, selling a house is a huge decision and isn’t something most people enter into lightly. For those who were not already in the mindset of wanting to sell, you should ensure that you have Remarketing campaigns setup and ready to keep your brand front of mind with those customers who saw your initial ads and came to your website.

Use content to bring people along the purchase journey rather than expecting one ad unit is all that is required! There are a tonne of campaigns you can run using the data that is available to you, making it the most targeted campaign possible – resulting in finding you more vendors who want to sell their properties.

Emerging Technology in Advertising, Product Management

How To Match Offline Purchases To Online Marketing

By Anne-Marina on

January 31, 2017

- Emerging Technology in Advertising, Product Management

One of the questions we get asked a lot is how it is possible to measure digital marketing efforts when your purchase is offline, either in your own store, or through another retailer. We admit, it’s not the easiest of tasks, but there are ways and means to track back your digital marketing spend to your actual sales.

1. Go Old School – Use Coupons or Voucher Codes
Provide a unique coupon code for each advertisement (whether it’s on your Facebook account or via Google AdWords). Then after the time of sale when the customer presents the coupon, you can later match the number of coupon codes back to the original advert they came from. This provides you with information on the number of people who clicked on your ad, the number of people who reached your landing page and the number of people who actually purchased. A great way to get conversion results. Additionally if you add a retargeting pixel to this page, you can later retarget to these same customers online.

2. Ask Your Customer At Point of Sale
There’s nothing like the traditional method of actually talking to your customers. Ask them when they purchase where they found you and what made them buy that particular item. Not only does it help with you tracking your marketing effectiveness, but it also gets you product feedback.

3. Run Targeted Ads Locally
If your product is being sold through a different retailer and you don’t have the opportunity to ask your customers how they found you then another option that is open to you is to run targeted local advertising that allows you to match upward turns in sales back to your local campaign. This will give you trend data but it’s important that you only are running that one campaign in that area at that time, otherwise your upward turn in sales may be due to some other factor.

4. Track Store Visits Using AdWords
Google very cleverly allows you to link your store with your AdWords account. Essentially what you are doing here is linking your Google My Business Account & AdWords accounts. Google will then use mobile users location details (for those who have switched their location on) to aggregate an estimate of the number of people who came in store after seeing your AdWords campaign. To access this information, you can look under “Distance” in the Dimensions report. Note, you will have to have a minimum amount of customer data so that Google can aggregate this information and make it anonymous, and you’ll also have to have location extensions enabled already.

5. Add Affiliate Location Extensions
This is a reasonably new Google rollout, which allows you to add the locations that your product is sold as a location extension. For example, say you sell mobile phone covers and they retail through JB Hi-Fi. You’d be able to add ‘JB Hi-Fi’ as a location extension. It’s live in the USA and is being rolled out to other territories too! Try implementing some of these techniques to track your digital marketing back to your offline sales, then measure the performance, and adapt your advertising accordingly. Don’t just throw money out there, make sure you’re tracking its effectiveness and putting the right money behind the right initiatives.

Emerging Technology in Advertising, Product Management

Why your digital marketing reports need to look beyond last click attribution

By Anne-Marina on

December 13, 2016

- Emerging Technology in Advertising, Product Management

There are lots of different means of marketing your product, and most companies are using a combination of different strategies and tactics to find their customers and then sell to them. But what happens when you only recognise the efforts of the final piece that actually led to the sale?

Imagine a hockey team that only ever rewarded its forwards – the final player who kicks the goal. All the other players on the field: the defence who stop competitor goals going in, midfield who help to set the goal up, the goalie who is the final layer of defence against the competition – they’d all be quite upset. That’s exactly what you’re doing to your other marketing activities every time you reward that last click with the credit for your sale.

What are the types of marketing activities that you should be tracking?

The simple answer here, is all of them – everything from your outdoor billboard to your website landing page, to the Google Remarketing that brought the customer back to the site 3 months after they first saw your billboard. Create a template up front to track all of these activities and work out how they work together to combine into a customer conversion. Make sure you have all the various aspects that work together online hooked up to talk to one another – Google Analytics sync’d to Google AdWords; Facebook Conversion Tracking enabled on your website; your CRM linked to your Google Analytics. This will give you the most
complete picture of how all your marketing efforts are working together.

What is an Attribution Model?

At its simplest Attribution is the term the digital industry uses to refer to credit being given for a sale to a particular customer touchpoint (your marketing efforts). There are many different models, four of the most commonly used below: – Last Click Attribution – gives credit to the final touchpoint that leads to a customer conversion – Linear Attribution – which gives equal credit to all customer touch-points – Time Decay Attribution – which gives credit to the customer touchpoint the closer they are to a customer conversion – Last AdWords Click Attribution – gives credit to the final click on a paid media campaign (for example, through AdWords)

Linear Attribution & E-Commerce

When it comes to e-commerce, 96% of shoppers don’t make a purchase on their first visit to a site. Which means you’re getting inaccurate conversion results if you consider only the last click that led to that customer sale. They may already have been to the site a few times, seen some remarketing ads and then decided to come back and make a purchase. Personally, I’m a huge fan of Linear Attribution because it gives equal credit to all players on the field. If they don’t all exist and play in harmony together, then you’re at risk of never getting the opportunity to score the final goal.

What’s an easy way to get an idea of your customer conversion path?

Helpfully Google provides easy access to this data for beginners. You can start by heading to Google Analytics and clicking on Conversions, then Attribution and this will give you a report that initially will default to Last Click Attribution but gives you the option to choose between and compare different attribution models. The only caveat here is that you need to have Goals and Conversions enabled for your Analytics. Once you’ve done that and it has collected your data, you’re well on your way to understanding how multiple different marketing touchpoint impact your sales funnel.

It’s true what the man said, knowledge is power and once you understand more about how all these marketing efforts contribute to your sales, you know more about where to spend your budget.

Product Management

What is Digital Strategy?! We’re glad you asked…

By Anne-Marina on

October 24, 2016

- Product Management

Read our post below on What Digital Strategy is, or just watch our 90 second explainer video at bottom!

When people ask what we do (and what is digital strategy) we typically get a lot of blank stares, nodding heads with glazed looks or outright looks of confusion followed by the tentative question – “So what does that mean exactly?”. Well it means a lot of things to different people but it boils down to this…

Digital Strategy is a plan which you can follow that will help you to reach your business goals through use of technology. This plan will maximise the use of all of your online assets (your website, social accounts and advertising) to give you the biggest benefits in the shortest possible time (the best bang for your buck so to speak).

The Analogy

We have a lot of experience in real estate, and that’s particularly useful for giving us this analogy: Don’t confuse strategy with tactical campaigns, think of it like this, if you were building a house, before you start you need to survey the land and create a floorplan (that’s your strategy) and when you get going you’ll begin to decide what you want in each room (those are your tactical campaigns).

Digital Strategy is similar to digital product management in that it is all about prioritising changes based on business value – making sure that you are working on the highest priority improvements at any given time. In organisations who truly adopt digital product management, this means reviewing all of that products suggested improvements – not just the ones that touch the website.

Knowing What To Focus On

The core idea with looking at this plan as a holistic piece is that what you need most may differ depending on your business goals. For example, at a high level: if you are a consumer facing retail brand, with no e-commerce, your goal may be brand awareness, to get people informed of your product so that they go in store looking for it. In this instance, your targeted behavioural and demographic advertising is more important than your website user journey.

Look at it another way, imagine your online assets are like football players on a field: SEO is midfield, UX is defence, and Paid Media is a forward etc. In isolation, these players are not much use, they require elements of the others in order to score goals. When you are playing, you need to know the opposition team’s strengths and weaknesses, and which players to target – which may use different elements of your team to achieve your goal.

Digital Marketing Strategy is exactly the same, let all the players work together, but know which ones to focus your effort on for a particular game. If you’re new to this concept, you should start by establishing what your business goals are – you need to know where you are going before you leave to get there.

Creating Your Map

Once you have this down, you then look at all elements of online marketing to establish what will work best. Then you map it out the same way you would any journey. If you know how to drive then you’re ready to set off. If you don’t know the ins and outs of how to go about reaching your goals we can help – we can teach you how to drive there, so that in future you know the mechanics of how it all works.

Lots of agencies these days offer SEO, UX, Social and Paid Media services in isolation but we believe you’re best to take the holistic approach to ensure you’re focussing on the changes that will effectively bring you to your business goals. Work with a company who actually cares about the result and will continue to give you ongoing support after the initial strategy has been developed. After all, you need to ensure your strategy is performing and adapts to changes in technology and marketing.

What Is Digital Strategy Explainer Video:

[md_call_to_action call_to_action_title=”Why Is It Important?” call_to_action_heading=”h2″ call_to_action_description=”Now you understand what Digital Strategy is, read our white paper that explores WHY it’s important for your business revenue and what the risks are of not adapting.” call_to_action_button_url=”www.g67.com.au/why-digital-strategy-will-improve-your-business-revenue/”]

Emerging Technology in Advertising, Product Management, SEO

Marketing Beyond The Major Portals in Real Estate

By Anne-Marina on

September 28, 2016

- Emerging Technology in Advertising, Product Management, SEO

Many people love to flick through property images online – they’re well shot, usually highly aspirational and give you an insight into your neighbours lives – but these images are more than just property-porn, and should be used to their fullest beyond just on the property listing on major portals like realestate.com.au and domain.com.au.

Real Estate companies are a bit of a special case when it comes to digital marketing because their primary customer is not the one you immediately think of – the buyer. Even though real estate companies spend a lot of money advertising to the buyer, their primary source of income is the seller but some do not optimise their homepage for that user.

Speaking to all your customers

One of the first things we always begin a conversation with is establishing who your most important user is, and then optimising your website to speak to that person in the first instance – or we review your website user experience in other words. In the case of real estate that person is the vendor. So, rather than having the ability to search for a property as the top item in the content hierarchy – you should first have the ability to search for an agent or office. Champion your office location contact details and think through the content of the agent profile – always with the vendor in mind.

Targeting customers who know they want to sell

If you are spending money on Search Engine Marketing (SEM) make sure that you’re getting a good return from it by designing a landing page that is specific to your campaign. Keep it simple, on brand and with one clear call to action. SEM is a great way to put yourself in front of customers who already know that they want to sell their house but what if you want to reach customers who haven’t yet made that decision?

Targeting customers who don’t know they want to sell

Using data and technology to find new customers (programmatic media advertising) is a great way to target potential vendors. Use digital platforms to find users according to their demographics and behaviour, meaning your brand is front of mind when they decide to sell their house.

Targeting customers who don’t know they want to buy

If you’re trying to sell a home that is high-end, which typically would have a long sale cycle because of its high value (and therefore lower number of customers who can actually afford to buy it), doing your own programmatic media campaigns is a brilliant way to reach those customers wherever they are browsing on the internet – not where you think they might be. It’s a low-cost, easily trackable means of advertising, which comes with the added advantage of then being able to understand in real-time who is interacting with your ad and from that create new lookalike audiences, thereby exposing your ad to more potential buyers.

Making sure you join the dots

When you make the decision to go down this pathway, make sure you join the dots between the various parts of this same campaign. Ensuring that your website can talk to your AdWords which can talk to the other buying platforms – the more complete data you have the more knowledge you have to feed back into future campaigns.

Championing your amazing content on social media

As we said at the start, your photography is your hero, so use it for everything it’s worth on social media platforms – Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook are your key platforms here. Don’t just post links to the property listing on your website, use the different types of tech available on the platforms to help sell property – Instagram Stories / Facebook Live videos of auctions and inspections. It’s great to market your properties through the major portals but remember they are only one of the channels open to you to find buyers.

There are lots of other ways you can do more online for you to find new vendors. We love a bit of property-porn so if you want some assistance with your digital marketing – shoot us an email.

Agile, Product Management, Professional Development

Product Management 101: things to consider if you’re a start-up

By Anne-Marina on

July 8, 2016

- Agile, Product Management, Professional Development

Being part of a start-up is exciting and oftentimes that means you’re moving so quickly that you might forget certain essential things. So keep yourself in check with this check-list.

1. Start with your Addressable Market
Even if you have the greatest idea in the world, if no one wants to purchase or engage with it then it’s a non-starter. Work out your addressable market and don’t be overly optimistic. It’s better to drill your addressable market down as small as you can to make sure your business case still stands up with less people using the product.

2. Take a holistic view
Before you begin looking at the business case, write down all the things that your product will need. Look at it laterally and investigate whether there are regulatory or legislation requirements. Establish whether you have any expertise in the areas concerned and if you don’t, build a team around you who can help figure it all out.

3. Review competitor products
What other companies are out there who have built similar products? How do they perform, what are the strengths and weaknesses of those products and what is the gap that your product will fill? If they have 2 million purchases per month how long did it take them to achieve that goal and how much marketing investment was required?

4. Build a business case with a long term view
Many small businesses fail within the first few years, up to 60% according to Huffington Post, so don’t just look at the numbers in the short term, look at your long term numbers. Extrapolate a business case that goes out to the 5 year mark. Yes it gets difficult when you’re launching and have no historical trends to rely on, but you can revisit and revise it as time goes on. The business case will serve as a guidance point on where you expected to be versus where you are. If you focus on the short-term, you might find you lose out on a viable long-term business that takes some time to get off the ground.

5. Test the market
Now that you’ve established you believe there’s enough people in market who want your product, that there’s a gap in competitor products which you fill, and that there’s a long-term commercially viable business, it’s time to test your assumptions. Build your minimum viable product (MVP) to establish if there is enough interest in market before you start building the real thing. Remember your MVP doesn’t have to be functioning – it could be a video that explains the product and gets interested people to sign up; or it could be a site that isn’t actually hooked up in the back end. Its core function is to determine if you should proceed to build your product, it doesn’t have to actually be your product.

Emerging Technology in Advertising, Product Management, Publishing

Ad-Viewability – A Quick Start Guide

By Anne-Marina on

May 14, 2016

- Emerging Technology in Advertising, Product Management, Publishing

Last year we wrote a post on ad-blocking, where we spoke about what it is and how you can take steps to protect your business model from it.

Next into the arena comes ad-viewability. Put simply it’s the move towards ads that are at least 80% viewable on publisher websites and it’s come about because of the proliferation of ad units being served at the bottom of pages where the impression fires off but the user may never scroll to the bottom of the page and actually view it.

What this means for the agency or client is that they’re paying for an unit that the customer doesn’t see. Agencies are now making moves to pay only for viewable ads, which the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) defines as 50% of the pixels in view for one second for a display ad and 50% in view for 2 seconds for a video.

Group M took a stance in 2015 stating the move towards at least 80% of their ads being viewable. So what does that mean for publishers? Well it means that you’re going to have to take a long hard look at all of the ad placements on your site, lazy load them, and bring them more in view.

Do some analysis on how people use your site, where do they typically scroll down to and what do they click on? There are tools like Hotjar available to help you dive into the detail before you begin changing all of your ad placements.

It also means you need to review the types of ads that you’re selling to ensure they’re appropriate for the placement and appropriate for the audience. Long gone are the days of filling remnant inventory with any old ad placement, which also means you need to investigate your business model and define a strategy to future-proof your revenue.

If you need some help thinking through the best way to go about it and what the options are that are open to you, contact us for more info.

Publishing, SEO

Updated – Top 5 tips for SEO Success

By Anne-Marina on

April 5, 2016

- Publishing, SEO

SEO can be a complicated beast to the uninitiated. There are no real rules published by Google so it really is a skill-set that is entirely based on experience and history. These are our top 5 tips for SEO success – whether you’re in real estate or e-commerce.

1. Checkout how your site is rated in terms of speed
With the launch of its Accelerated Mobile Pages program, Google and the rest of the world is increasingly rewarding the speed of delivery. Run a diagnostic on your site and then fix the related problems. Not only will your search ranking thank you but your users will too. Recent data shared by Google shows that the probably of a user bouncing from your website increases by 32% when the page load takes 1 – 3 seconds.

2. Use Unique Meta-Descriptions
Each of your products, or properties, should be set to include a unique meta-description that accurately describes your product or property thereby helping Google to find your page with more context.

3. Don’t keyword stuff
You know what they say, less is more. Google’s code (or googlebot as it’s commonly known) is pretty sophisticated and it can tell when you’re trying to pull the wool over its eyes. So don’t go crazy on the keywords, use the most relevant ones and don’t be overly repetitive on the page. It knows when you have relevant content, so trust in its expertise and make sure the content makes sense for a human too.

4. Review your site errors
If you’ve got lots of people coming to a page and not converting (either buying or contacting you) then it’s worthwhile reviewing your website errors and checking to see if there are pages not found or not loading properly. Good for the user, good for Google.

5. Add a sitemap, and markup your data
If it’s available to you, use google rich snippets to give more colour and context to your content. You can use them for products, events, recipes, news articles and video. They’ll then show your content at the top of the page with a bit more detail – images, review ratings and descriptions.

If you have questions on how to optimise your existing site without reinventing the wheel, hop on over to our SEO Strategy page.

Agile, Product Management, Professional Development

Agile product prioritisation: why business value is the only metric that matters

By Anne-Marina on

November 8, 2015

- Agile, Product Management, Professional Development

Now that we’ve established what a product manager does, just how does that product manager prioritise competing requests that come from all areas of the business? In our mind there’s only one way to do this: Business Value.

It’s important to note that business value doesn’t just refer to actual dollars brought in but to the long term value of the product and its users – all of which can easily be traced back to dollars, but it’s not just about sales!

There’s a common misconception that perhaps the way to make sure you get your requirement easily seen to is to be the best salesperson for that requirement. We reject that statement – strongly. It’s not about razzle dazzle, it’s about how valuable that feature is to the overall business.

How do you assess business value?
It’s not an exact science and it’s not expected to be, but it’s the best tool you have to gauge priorities in development. Take into consideration all angles:
– How does it tie back to the overall business and product vision?
– Is it a USP and something that will set you apart in market?
– What is the associated effort from the team to put it in place?
– Is it attached to a commercial campaign or will it drive user acquisition – how much of each is it worth?
– Are there other reasons you might consider doing it (to get an internal department on side for example)?

Once you have all the answers to these questions it’s time to do some maths in your head. Add up all the pieces and then weight them relative to all the other requirements in your backlog. The ones that come out on top (have the biggest “bang for buck” so to speak) are the ones you do first.

Now you continue to iterate on these calculations, always re-estimating and re-evaluating your bang for buck to make sure that your team is working on the items with the highest business value at any one time. By working in this way it may not always be obvious why you have chosen specific features (they may be hard to develop) or why you have said no to some features (when they are easy to develop but don’t tie back to the business vision) but you’ll always be working on the right thing.

If you’re after a bit more insight into the overall agile product owner process, watch this video on YouTube.

Image Credit: Photo by bonneval sebastien on Unsplash

Agile, Product Management

Just what is a vertical slice? A guide to #agile development.

By Anne-Marina on

June 9, 2015

- Agile, Product Management

A friend of ours used to joke that the name of this company should be Vertical Slice because of the number of times we’d say it in a given day and how we’re forever having to explain to new people just what it means. It’s an agile term and yes, I know it sounds like we’ve drunk the kool aid – because we have.

So, just what is a vertical slice? Well it’s one way of describing a software development practise that can be applied to pretty much anything in life and it boils down to this: rather than developing different pieces of the puzzle in isolation, instead, work on making the smallest possible bit of the puzzle all work together end-to-end first.

For example, if you were making a trifle you would start with a very thin mould (thin slice) where you layer all the ingredients in on top of one another, leave it to set in the fridge immediately (where it sets much quicker because it’s not the full cake), then take it out, test it out and see what it tastes like (the customer response).

mke-agile-032014-slicing-the-cake-user-story-decomposition-4-638

There are lots of advantages to developing this way. In the first instance, because you’re making all the layers of the cake work together at the start, you inherently reduce your risk of blowing your deadline by working with technologies that might be difficult to integrate. You identify problems much faster, thereby giving more time in the project for thinking of a solution (rather than the converse which would leave you at the end of the project rushing to make layers work together).

Secondly you get to demonstrate a version of the end feature to your customer much faster, meaning you can learn from their feedback about whether this was what they wanted in the first instance and what you can do to improve the feature based on their actual requirements (not just what you think their requirements are).

Thirdly, it gives you the option to launch the full product faster. You cut out wastage in developing features and functions that are not desired by the customer (no matter how logical they may seem to the feature team) and, if needed, you can launch a solution that makes a date requirement but doesn’t necessarily have all the bells and whistles that originally were envisaged. Meaning you get to market faster than your competitors.

We could go on but you get the idea. Take your requirement and boil it down to the simplest possible variation. For example, if your requirement is that customers can login to your site, and the full version has login across multiple different types of accounts, start by doing login just with Facebook. Don’t style it in your initial story. Boil it back to the basic requirements: – A customer can login from X device, using X browser, via their Facebook credentials This will give you immediate visibility of any technology problems and allow you to pivot your requirement much earlier without having wasted valuable resource on design.

*Vertical slice slide borrowed from Dave Neuman @ Slideshare

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Emerging Technology in Advertising

How To Find New Vendors Using AdWords and Facebook

Emerging Technology in Advertising, Product Management

How To Match Offline Purchases To Online Marketing

Emerging Technology in Advertising, Product Management

Why your digital marketing reports need to look beyond last click attribution

What are the types of marketing activities that you should be tracking?

What is an Attribution Model?

Linear Attribution & E-Commerce

What’s an easy way to get an idea of your customer conversion path?

Product Management

What is Digital Strategy?! We’re glad you asked…

The Analogy

Knowing What To Focus On

Creating Your Map

What Is Digital Strategy Explainer Video:

Emerging Technology in Advertising, Product Management, SEO

Marketing Beyond The Major Portals in Real Estate

Speaking to all your customers

Targeting customers who know they want to sell

Targeting customers who don’t know they want to sell

Targeting customers who don’t know they want to buy

Making sure you join the dots

Championing your amazing content on social media

Agile, Product Management, Professional Development

Product Management 101: things to consider if you’re a start-up

Emerging Technology in Advertising, Product Management, Publishing

Ad-Viewability – A Quick Start Guide

Publishing, SEO

Updated – Top 5 tips for SEO Success

Agile, Product Management, Professional Development

Agile product prioritisation: why business value is the only metric that matters

Agile, Product Management

Just what is a vertical slice? A guide to #agile development.

Digital Strategy

Music & Media Industry Expertise

Digital Marketing

Product Launches

Mobile Optimisation