At the conclusion of the video, the two experts shared some deeper insights into these industry trends and best practices.
“There’s been so much emphasis on what the technology can do, what its features are, and different products. There’s just been an explosion, especially around automation, big data, machine learning, cryptocurrencies, and ICOs, but what hasn’t kept up with that rate of change of technology is the skills of the individuals,” Marcus said.
“Organisations are not ready for this change due to the rapid growth in technology. It’s not necessarily about bringing new skillsets in; it’s about upskilling existing staff. There’s been a massive increase in the demand for organisations to ‘digitally transform’,” Will said.
Failure of digital transformation projects
Research suggests that 81 per cent of digital transformation projects fail – for a variety of reasons.
“When we talk about skillsets versus technology, there are a couple of different aspects to that. There’s knowing how to use an email marketing tool or a CRM, but then not having the skillset to work out why you’re using it,” Marcus explained.
Will added: “Why are you sending this email? Why are you developing this landing page? What’s the purpose of this campaign? It’s one of the key areas that often gets overlooked and is a massive contributing factor to the failure of digital transformation projects.”
How can real estate organisations leverage the available technology?
“Anyone who goes to Realestate.com.au hits the website as an anonymous visitor. They don’t know who I am, but as soon as I give them my email address they immediately connect all of my web activity to my email address. That’s what allows them to have much more dynamic, trigger-based email marketing messages and website personalisation,” Will explained.
The ‘Secret Sauce’ for digital transformation
- Strategy: develop ‘customer first’ vision aligned to objectives
- Campaigns: develop ‘customer first’ campaigns that support your vision
- Operations: develop ‘employee first’ culture with the skills needed to execute campaigns
- Technology: develop technology roadmap to enable your campaign execution
“When you’re developing a strategy, the first gate you need to pass through is this: ‘Does the majority of the benefits of what I’m doing accrue to the customer or to the agency?” Marcus said.
“When we ask agencies about their customer experience vision, it’s very rare that they’ve actually transitioned their thinking to delivering a ‘customer first’ experience,” Will said.
Revenue funnel
Will: “When we talk about the revenue funnel, we’re talking about combining what is traditionally a marketing funnel and a sales funnel together, for a principal or owner of a real estate agency to be able to predict what the business is going to do from a revenue perspective.”
Lead generation and capture
Objectives
• Make the sales function happy with more qualified leads
• Design lead capture to maximise validation
Implementation ideas
• Live chat
• Anonymous website pop-up form
• Social listening and social web forms
• SMS opt-in
• Preference centre opt-in
Lead nurturing
Objectives
•
Move leads to the next stage in the revenue funnel
•
Identify sales ready leads
Implementation ideas
•
Early stage: budget and location
•
Mid stage: build vs move in vs renovate
•
Late stage: specific properties
“Tailoring the messaging and the way you communicate to leads in that process is really important,” Marcus said.
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