Digital Marketing - How to use it to sell more

Real estate agents and brokers have been some of the earliest adopters of social media, which isn’t surprising that they’re entrepreneurs whose success is built on being well connected in their communities. But for every agent engaged with Twitter and Foursquare, there are many more that have yet to take the plunge.

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Matt Gentile, Director of P.R. and Social Media for Century 21 Real Estate (@mattgentile) about how brokers and agents are using social media, what they’ve been learning, and what he sees for the future. With over 121,000 agents and more than 8,000 independent offices, Century 21 has a big challenge.

Phil Buehler: Can you tell us about the evolution of social media at Century 21?

Matt Gentile: I didn’t grow up with social media in the 80’s, I grew up working in more of a traditional public relations environment I was trained to look at everything as a channel or way to disseminate messages. Initially, I saw social media as another means to send a corporate message, which I must admit, was probably a fairly cynical way to look at social media in the beginning.

In 2005, I  developed, what was at the time probably one of the first training manuals for utilizing social media for real estate marketing and recruiting with the Director of Training for the company I worked for at the time.  It’s amazing to think about just how new social media was at the time and how influential it would become as a component of marketing.  The guide leveraged LinkedIn for recruiting purposes for our brokers. We encouraged our brokers and agents to create short videos that told a story about a home they had listed and how to post a video on YouTube.  To provide details about their communities that consumers would be interested in. It was basic, but innovative for the time.

What about using social media for marketing?

In terms of true customer outreach, through social media channels or developing an audience, that wasn’t something that had been optimized when I came on board in 2008 as Director of PR and Social Media. In 2009, I began to focus on the question, “Who is the audience that we should be targeting, instead of what channel are we using to push messages.”

Today, the audience that we target specifically with social media is 25-35 year old women. It makes sense for a number of reasons – they’re the fastest growing demographic in terms of home ownership, and there’s a significant amount of influence that this demographic has on the homeownership decision. I can tell you that because the statistics back it up and because I’ve had the “real-life” experience to know that it is true. We really felt like it was the right target.

Facebook is becoming the hub of many marketers’ social media efforts – what has Century 21 been up to there?

In 2009, we mainly encouraged our brokers and agents to open a Facebook account and reach back to their old sphere of influence. It’s an outstanding way to get in touch with folks you haven’t been in touch with, for good or bad (laughing).

In 2010, we felt like this was a platform where we could really make a difference for our franchisees and their agents.  We’re now enabling brokers and agents to thrive in this space.  We developed and deployed a Facebook Home Buyer/Seller tab. It enables our brokers in essence to create an environment within their own company Facebook fan pages, where home buyers and sellers can access the same information through Facebook that they can get by visiting a Century 21 brokers’ Web sites.

So you’re creating some kind of infrastructure or support for your agents and brokers…

It’s a branded, customized tab that brokers and agents can add to their own Facebook company pages. First, we developed the buyer/seller tab for the Century 21 corporate Facebook fan page, which is facebook.com/century21.

After we rolled this out, we started hearing from a lot of brokers, “that’s really great, I’d like to have something like that on our Facebook”. So we developed the mechanics and assets for our brokers to easily serve it up on their own Facebook pages. The first adopter was a gentleman named Mike Bowman in Fort Worth, Texas, and you can see his buyer/seller tab up and it links back to his company’s dot com.

We’ve been seeing that in many companies, the sales people are way ahead of the system, getting out there with Facebook or Twitter on their own. Do you have other people, brokers and agents that are innovators, way out ahead of the rest?

We have a lot of brokers and agents out there blogging and attempting to drive business through social media. The one broker that comes to mind is a gentleman in Tallahassee. He was one of the early adopters with blogging. He developed a relationship with the major newspaper in Florida, and they asked him if he would blog for them online. In essence he became the real estate blogger for the newspaper. He now has over 100,000 followers on Twitter and drives a third of his business via social media marketing.

There are countless examples of Century 21 brokers and agents utilizing social media in unique and innovative ways to market and sell homes. We’re currently working with our business consultants and learning team to identify those brokers and agents so we may highlight their best practices to the Century 21 System.

There are probably some agents and brokers that feel they have social media under control, and then others that probably feel lost …

I often hear, “Can I hire someone to do my social media?” There are companies and service providers out there cropping up that are taking it in that direction. They’ll say, “Yeah, I’ll post for you and I’ll tweet for you, I’ll do whatever it is that’s necessary to fill that content void.”  We feel this is another area where Century 21 has an opportunity to create a differentiation point for our brand.  We are able to provide our brokers with a constant feed of content , so they can take what we’re doing in Twitter and Facebook, and easily apply it to their own social networks.  Just like the old adage, location, location, location in real estate, its content, content, content in social.

How are you getting the larger Century 21 community into this? For example, at a convention where all your brokers and agents are together?

One idea we’re exploring is hosting a “Geek Squad” style tent area at our International Convention in Las Vegas, where we will literally take 6 – 10 brokers and agents at a time, get them set-up on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. We will provide them with some basic instruction on how to use these networks and what the best practices are for using each of these channels. In essence, getting the masses up to speed in the social environment.  For advanced users, our learning team will hold seminars and break-out sessions to enhance already existing skills in how to optimize social media for their business. We have seven (7) regional trainers that are out there providing similar guidance on a regular basis throughout the U.S.

Are you distributing any of that by video, online, other places?

For social media, we’re working hand in hand with Dr. Christina Murphy, who leads our award-winning Learning Team, to develop a series of short video vignettes that offer best practices for utilizing social media. These are 3-5 minute short video snippets that give Century 21 brokers and agents a significant amount of content in a very small window. For visual learners, I believe it’s ideal.

We feel it positions our brand as a more innovative company. Anything we can do to enhance the perception of our brand with consumers, and folks that are potentially interested in a career, is the direction we should be moving. We really feel that’s an area where we can hit some home runs… not only in marketing, but also learning.

Do the agents and brokers say, “I’ve got to get into social media,” or do they actually know the benefits and what they’ll get out of it?

I think it’s incumbent upon us as organization to unearth the true benefits of social media from a business perspective. That’s the kind of work we’re doing with our field teams to solicit from the field best-in-class examples of how agents and brokers are utilizing this media for actually developing and driving leads and ultimately contracting business.

What would the brokers and agents say are the big benefits for them?

The most fundamental benefit is expanding your sphere. You have a network of people that you’ve grown over the years, whether that be school, work or leisure activities, that you’re able to connect in one place, whether it’s LinkedIn or Facebook, and they have access to you. Instead of seeing them at the coffee shop or the hair salon, you’re seeing them online on a more regular basis. I think the follow-up activity and constant contact is where the fundamental advantage of social media lies for a sales organization.

We’ve found that some of  the most socially connected people are real estate agents. Are you seeing a steep learning curve for the rest?

As an industry, we were probably a little bit late to the game, but once the benefits were understood, I believe the industry jumped in with both feet. That’s where learning comes in, we’re constantly driving home the fact that you don’t want to be the guy or woman that walks into a party with a big sandwich board on your front and back screaming at people “I have a great 3/2 ranch for sale”, that’s essentially what you’re doing when you’re spamming people with your listings in a social network. The goal is to provide content of value and the relationships and customers will develop based on that value.  The “have to give a little, to get a little” mentality is very powerful in the social space.

In terms of metrics, when your management says, “what did you do for me lately?” what do you tell them?

We’ve kind of taken it a step further, this probably goes back to my traditional roots in PR and tracking, to make sure you’re providing value at all times. The way we’ve managed to do that is by using something called bit.ly Pro, which enables us to shorten and customize all of our links to all of the content we’re putting out there. It can then track a link from whatever distribution point we  disseminate, whether that is Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or even YouTube for that matter, and track it back, to not only our .com, but all the way through the process funnel to completing an online contact form. We also use Radian 6 to do all of our metrics. I know how many leads are generated through the content that we’re putting out there.

How are you trying to empower these franchises or the brokers and the agents? Does the organization know how that’s going?

We just deployed the first home buyer/seller tab on one of our broker’s facebook pages, and as far as I know, no other real estate franchise company is providing that degree of support in the social space. So, yes, we are definitely working to empower Century 21 System professionals to better understand and optimize the cost effective marketing power that social media offers.

Some sales organizations are starting to make use of YouTube, almost becoming their own content providers or journalists. Are any of your agents using video?

Some of them are using it on their own blogs and providing market updates. We’re not enabling that necessarily from the corporate side. The types of solutions we’re looking at for video have more to do with enabling the automated transition of still-frames of homes, and converting them into video and mobile platforms.  With broadband and mobile becoming so widely adopted, I believe video will become what online photos were in the earlier part of this decade.

Is Century 21 leading in this social media area? Who else is participating?

We are holding our own, and leading in several categories. If you look at some of the more “social savvy” real-estate brokerages, I think Better Homes and Gardens has made a big push into that area. They have made social media a significant part of their brand marketing. Coldwell Banker is doing some good things, they’ve recently rolled out a blog. I think they’re appealing to their own audiences, but I don’t see any one real estate brand building a significant audience in this space. I think that’s where Century 21 has taken a leadership role in identifying a very specific demographic and building that audience.

Where do you think this whole area will be in a few years? Will social media be baked into how real estate is sold, or just a minor part of selling?

Given the rapid development of the types of media that you can generate in social media today, I would anticipate significantly more complex and more robust social media solutions to hit the market. Things that we’re seeing are easy to do, like Animoto and Flip video cameras, and the editing that you can do now as an individual is remarkably easy.

I think it’s a wide open area. I would anticipate mobile playing a large part in the future of real estate marketing, with FourSquare and location-based services innovating in the space.

Please share your experiences with social selling – your concerns, challenges, successes, metrics, and other lessons. We’d love to hear from you.