as I said greetings to all of you and welcome to the the first webinar that prop date is going to be putting on as part of a series for those of you who are not familiar with prop data I just wanted to give you a bit of background about our company we're a very specialist online marketing and software development company specializing in the real estate market and sector we've actually been in operation now since 1999 and we've assisted hundreds of brands leading real estate brands launch and maintain a successful presence on the worldwide web we'd love you to visit our website if you're not familiar with our company and our service offering just to understand a bit more about what we are but looking from the attendees list which I viewed just before the webinar it would seem that a lot of your current clients and are very familiar with what we do and the service offering that we present up the real estate market just to give you a bit of background to the reasoning behind these webinars the core focus here is we want to empower you the real estate professional we want you to enhance your operations make better business decisions and reach your goals prop data has always been about building the real estate professional community and specifically around digital marketing and the software ecosystem so we're going to continue that dream through the the course of the year many of you will be familiar with the online course that we presented last year and developed and that was a really great course with great content around all facets of online marketing and how to promote yourself as a real estate professional and brand and again these webinars are going to continue that theme with the the purpose of identifying some really key topics that we believe are going to move the dial in the real estate sector and the next sort of 12 to 18 months I'll just reiterate our core emphasis here is around upscaling and educating the industry that has always been our goal is a sort of marketing based firm and we want to share all of our knowledge with you in the hopes that you can leverage it to promote yourselves and and grow your businesses over time I'm mark buttress the the CEO of the company I've been involved with the company for many years now and taken over so the leadership of the company around four years ago now I'm introduced by some colonists from prop data of creative director Nick Warrington Nick has been the creative director for for propagator now for over 15 years and he's helped develop real estate brands and online experiences for much of that time with prop data his eye for design can help you build a brand that stands out in the crowd in the industry and connects you with with clients so we welcome Nick hi Nick are you on the line with us thanks mark morning everyone we're also joined today by our client liaison manager Wendy Ornette and she joined the team a couple of years back now she's worked with many real estate agencies for the example just property and the broad property group through her career and she brings a wealth of experience into our account management and project management team she works with many of our leading clients and has been involved with quite a number of quite prolific projects that we did we've sort of outputted for our various clients so her experience in terms of commentary on the various topics we're going to cover today is a great asset so welcome Wendy she's also on the line today just some other formalities we have sort of gone with a hashtag concept which we're trying to sort of promote these webinars by the various social media platforms so if you're able to comment on these webinar series whether it be via that the content that you see online or just by posts that you want to share with the industry at large if you could perhaps use the hashtag data webinars whenever you mention or you know relate the information to to others in the industry would be very grateful we're wanting to spread the word of these these webinars as much as possible and by using that hashtag you'll be able to to success with that you can also follow us on Facebook viral facebook business page at prop data and again we're going to be releasing a lot of information via that that social medium in terms of the webinars the content and the various topics that we're going to be covering just some other formalities if you have a question that you would like to raise the zoom platform that we use has a Q&A facility it's a tool in the bottom of your zoom video window and you're able to post questions there at will we will be reviewing those questions at the end of the webinar and we we're going to pick ten of the most up voted questions that are raised and I do live answers or conduct live answers of those particular questions so you will notice when you you post a question there you'll be able to up vote it and we will be selecting from the most popular there in addition to that there will also be a poll that will be running so that's another tool set in the zoom video interface and there's a question there that you'll see that we've posted and it will be great if you can give us some feedback on the poll we'll be discussing that a bit later and you know it really is a medium to try and highlight to you where the the obvious gaps lie in terms of you as an agent being able to to promote yourself as a brand so without further ado we're gonna we're gonna carry on with the the presentation I'd like to start off the presentation just by introducing what we were looking to cover today so here are some high-level topics the the obviously the general topic that we've picked for today is building your brand as an agent and we've looked to break that down into various subsections to contextualize it as much as possible so the first topic we want to cover is what is a brand and we're going to give particular reference this from you as an agent perspective or standpoint well then look at why the brand matters to you as an agent how you can look to create a brand strategy from an agent perspective and then we're going to spend quite a bit of detail time looking at the various elements particularly digital elements that you need to be aware of for building your brand on and at the end of all of those sort of features or suggestions will then look at a bit of a promo that we're running at prop data you many of you might have seen this communication come out recently earnest around an agent profile page custom agent profile page solution which we're offering to the market and we'll talk about how that can sort of assist you in your in your brand profiling in your brand exposure so moving on the next few slides are talking about brands specifically so I'm going to be handing over to my colleague Nick who's our brand creative director and he obviously has a lot of insight into this just a reminder about the poll we'd really like your feedback as much as possible so yeah this kid kicked into to the the webinar and Nick I like to hand over to you just to to cover these branding aspects thanks mark okay so let's just talk about what is a brand so obviously a lot of you guys will work for for real estate companies and your businesses will have their own brands this is let's just define what it what a brand is is first it's it's a bit of a cheesy picture here so it's definitely not you know Bob on your end haircut and a colorful pocket-handkerchief and a very nice watch you know it's um it's but it but this picture does kind of speak to what a brand means from an agent perspective because although although your company here as a brand and it may have a set of guidelines that define what that brand is in terms of visuals and how to how to implement the brand from a company perspective you you use self or brands as well and that's what we're going to talk about a lot today so a brand you know when you think of a brand you've got to think of it as as kind of like a puzzle and all the pieces of that puzzle are the things that a lot of people you know think of as a brand like your logo and your business cards and your boards and that but really a brand isn't much it's a much bigger piece it's really the whole puzzle and it can be made up of you know your logo the the copy the the way you the copy in your marketing the way you answer the phone even the way you dress is which is Wireless this images is applicable in this case you know to your websites your your social media presence all of these little pieces you know they make up that big picture which is your brand and your your company obviously that you work for will have a brand and then and could have a strategy in place but it's important as an agent that you start to think of yourself as a brand because the best the best agents in the world they're not relying wholly on on you know their agencies to market them now they're at the top of their game because you know they have clients wanting to work with them because they're promoting themselves as a as a brand specifically and yes that's something we're going to talk about a little bit more in detail today so mark if you wanna let's go to the next slide so why does a brand matter well in term from an agent point of view it matters because you want to stand out you know the most important thing in terms of marking yourself as a as a brand from an agent perspective is you you know there's a CEO of agents out there a lot of them will be in your own agency and you're war competing for leads competing for mandates and you want to stand out of the crowd so like I said the best end agents in the world are promoting themselves as brands another thing is consistency you know it's it's it's really important that your brand is consistent across all media so when someone goes from a board to what you know a website or an agent profile page and they see your business cards when they see the way you engage with them on social media you wanted it be a consistency you know it's gotta be because there's consistency in terms of the tone your personality the artwork all of those little pieces of that puzzle and spoke about one of those pieces need to put together to to make a unified front yeah I think I think those are the most important things they're mark in terms of the white matters from an Asian perspective great great inside clinic so talk about this now how to create create this brand and strategy behind it yeah so in terms of strategy I mean you know organizations and companies spend huge amounts of money was you know agencies that specialize in in strategizing brands but from an agent perspective from for you guys I think the most important thing is just to sit down and stop thinking about this stuff you know I think just but in the process of sitting down and and you know asking how you want to put yourself out there and what are those steps needed to get there you really are going to start putting together a strategy you know that's that's really what we're talking about in terms of a strategy for for agent branding and there's a few steps we can go through you know the important thing is to to know who you're talking to because that gonna define a lot of a lot of them how you structure your messaging and you know what your tone of voice is and your imagery that you use in that so let's go to the next slide mark and I think I think this is this is this is very important because there are there are there are other questions to ask but I think that the most important thing is what is the journey you want your clients to take with you you know the answers to this question will guide a lot of the elements in your branding like the messaging the tone of voice and imagery and it's something you can you you can answer but I think it's more important to get to answer to this question and from your actual clients or prospective clients you know you don't want to you don't want to have the answer to this question would be something you assuming you really want to get answer to this question from the people that you're actually gonna be dealing with and to do this what we what we recommend you guys do is is define what we call user personas or target for science so you go to the next slide there yeah so what is a persona this is something that's come up and it's become very popular and in this design software and services over the last 10 years you might not be familiar with the term but it's basically a fictional person based on a set of shared characteristics by your clients so it just makes it easier when you when you're trying to talk to someone in terms of your marketing or the blog posts that you write or your you know your online social media content you know when you produce team all this stuff it makes it a lot easier to define who's that person is that you're talking to or the the the set of people because you might have couple personas it makes a lot easier to define that person then just be okay I'm talking to a generic everyone so we definitely recommend defining your personas and theirs for example the following personas could be created for sales agency in Cape Town kept under the name six seaboard young professional buyers between 25 and 35 year old 35 years serious investors looking to build a portfolio rental apartments or overseas buyers looking for a holiday homes that's this three distinct groups you know there are very different individuals but they might be the people that you're trying to talk to you and you can really you know [Music] structure your content stuff you're producing as a brand around pour into those three groups but it's good to define them and have them written out somewhere that you can refer to you know so that you always go back and say okay am i I'm actually talking to this person you know instead of just focusing you know having content that isn't related to the people I'm actually trying to engage with so how do you get this information you know how do you find out what the people that your potential clients what they look like well you need to gather as much information as you can from analytics you know Google Analytics on any existing websites or through Facebook get a questionnaire out there and start asking some questions polls you know polls are a good thing to do speak to experienced agent yes you know you have a lot of history you know relate relating to clients and then you can you can just get a lot of information from them but the best thing to do is actually just talk to your clients you know find out what what the needs and fears and goals are and you know what they what type of persona they fit into and there's a there's a very good free tool available on HubSpot which we've used a bit quite a final process to go through and you can go build build your personas there yeah we'll let you do that in your own time we're gonna open it up and in this webinar but it takes you through the steps of the questions you need to ask to get to build a persona Nik there's a comment I'd like to just make at this point and all of this stuff around personas and fully understanding who the people that you're talking to from a prospective client basis is great but I think what's also important to just reiterate and you mentioned it earlier in the discussion is being able to then bring out your personality and related to to that sort of understanding and I think the great agents that I've seen in the marketplace really exude their own personality and talk with their personality in terms of the personas that they're there they're engaging with from a prospective client perspect yeah that's another good point it you know it puts a face to who you're talking to you know so it makes it a lot more human allows you to stand out from the crowd at the end of the day because you know it's a hyper competitive market there are a lot of agents out there operating the same hyper local environment that you are and your personality and the way you talk to people in approach people is definitely something that can make you stand out from from the crowd yeah okay great Nik those were some tremendous insights so thank you very much for that just a reminder that the poll is running would love your feedback there because we want to share it with everyone I think there'll be some very valuable insights we can glean from looking at those results at the end of the webinar okay so now we want to get into the the nuts and bolts of this and actually talk about some of the key elements that you're needing to be aware of and start adopting for for the reason of building this brand and and sort of marketing this brand of yours as an agent you know to your prospective clients so we want to we run around spend some time going through each one of these elements this will be the meat of the the webinar and we'll focus through and move through these as quickly as possible we do just have an hour so we do need to move quite quickly I mean we could spend all day talking about these things but we're going to try and cover the core sort of elements of each of each element so the first thing we want to talk about is probably one of the most critical pieces and that's a conversion area or conversion space that you can lead your customers to once you've managed to engage them on whatever whatever channel it is we refer to these as either web sites or agent profile pages and the important thing to realize here is that these this is this page this the space is the destination of all your marketing efforts so if you're going to go to the extent of producing lots of content and reaching out via social media platforms to engage clients with this this brand message that we've been discussing about it's important that you can lead them back to a place where where only your information is exposed to them because we the last thing we want to do is bring them to a place where where they're confused as to what to do next or there's no clear call to actions or just your specific exposure pointers not clearly defined more specifically to them so prop dad has done a lot of work around this in terms of agent microsites and agent profile pages and and these are great pieces to to be able to function as core landing pages or core spaces where you can look to to engage with your prospective clients further generate leads at the end of the day just to talk more specifically about these an agent microsite so that's a fully functional website where you can expose not only your profile and all your contact information and bio information but obviously all the stock that you have available and potentially all the stock that you might have sold or rented in the past just to you know obviously convey your your experience in the relative market that you're dealing with so it's not something prolifically used in South Africa although we do promote it quite extensively some agents have taken the leap and and and you know decided to to set up their own microsite which sits aside from their main brand or agency website but if you think about the nuts and bolts of that it's a great place to lead people where only your information is contained and the main reason we're trying to do that as I said is - the ability for you to generate the lead that you've you know you spent all the energy trying to drag an eye ball back to your vacuum your space a slightly different approach is an agent profile page as we've coined it so this is a curated page which might exist on your your current brand website okay so if you're working for a national franchise group or you're working for for a fairly boutique agency in a particular area they may have their own website already but what we wanting to do here is create a unique page on that website where we can showcase you the real estate professional in the best possible light so if you can see on the right-hand side yeah we're showing you an example of what we've done here for for an agent I think this is part of the jar words Property Group and you'll notice the key things there a great bio write-up really cool testimonials that we've that we can include there obviously all your contact information things like links easy links to all your your listings and sold and rented property and it's just a great package to to really showcase your experience and obviously strong cost actions to generate leads once you've managed to once you've managed to lead people to these spaces I want to bring Wendy and if that's alright wins I know you've worked on a lot of these types of sort of projects over the the past while for various brands and agents and maybe you can just give us a better insight to to some of the feedback that you've had from agents just around the value of these things you know in terms of their marketing arsenal I don't know if there's any thoughts you can give us there our agency page agent microsites or engine profile pages have had great success for them especially from a mobile point of view that also referred to them as econ to ease business carts so from the mobile devices they can now see these profiles directly to their clients either by a website or email or straight to any social media platforms that they have and so that way they are targeting the clients that they want with very specific information and listings and they're converting leads a lot quicker that way so instead of clients going to a generic website and the agent is lost in a sea of other agents and you're not targeting them all clients directly with your service offerings and your mandates the other point I just like to make you know speaking towards you know a lot of what you just said there with these curated spaces now available focusing just on the agent brand and profile what we've had prop that have been able to start to introduce at an agent level is the ability to then start to leverage things like paid advertising online agents can now start to utilize Facebook advertising Google Adwords and Google display advertising even LinkedIn advertising because they know that the money they're going to spend on those platforms to secure an inquiry or or an eyeball they can convert those people back to a very localized page which is obviously just their information so we've seen a lot of uptake for agents spending their own dollars around paid advertising campaigns now that they've got this unique conversion space just something to mention from a prop data perspective I mean specifically with the agent profile page that we've spoken about in order to get that from a prop data as a prop data service you would need to have an existing prop data website package with us so unfortunately don't offer those profile pages independently and they need to be part of a website solution that you know we would have signed a client up on so just be aware of that one of the things we're going to mention when we discuss the promo at the end of the webinars that we're actually doing a massive promo on on our starter website package offering at the moment and we've reduced that down to two 500 Rand per month which does make really making it palatable to even agents on an ongoing basis to set up their own micro sites so they can start to leverage a lot of these capabilities so thanks Wen's that's some great insight there yeah just to reiterate what Wendy was saying about the EE business card I know there's a lot of this concept floating around at the moment and we designed these profile pages so that they function as an e business card on the mobi movie version of the page and like I said there's loads of really cool functionality packaged there easy share options it presents really well on a smartphone and it's easy to disseminate via social media and mobile mediums from from the page interface itself cool so that hopefully gives everyone some insight into what we're referring to in terms of microsites and agent profile pages the next topic we want to talk about is email marketing so many of you obviously might use this currently we've taken the the concept of newsletters and promotional mailers to the next level I would suggest our platform currently provides the ability to to do agent focus newsletters so I'm sure many of you have your your agency or brand sending up monthly newsletters which is really talking about your your branch or the area or your your holistic company brand but what we feel is very important is the ability to send out news there a communication on an ongoing basis which is very much hyper locally focused about you as the agent in the area and the community that you serve the key here is that you're obviously building a one-to-one relationship with a protected prospective client based on an ongoing basis and you're just touching with them with your brand message ongoing they may not be in the market now for property to to buy or rent but just by touching them with useful informative information on an ongoing basis you're able to to remain tane that relationship with them over time Nick I don't know if you know I think yeah I think in terms of much jump in this in terms of promotional email you know and usually as you know a lot of a lot of these things we automate through our platform like you know alerts for reduced properties or property email alerts for new properties that matter peoples correct you bios or support ends criteria but I think in terms of promotional email the thing to really think about here is is you know what is gonna add value to your potential clients all your existing clients you know so you know we'll talk just now about blogging and becoming a commentator not just for you you know real estate in the in the local area that you operate in before anything that's um hyper local I think that's the sort of content that you want to drive towards your your your audience through email because that's gonna add value you know so it's the kind of thing you must just think a good way to look at is what is the kind of things I would like to get it's not just about bombarding them with properties and it's about giving them information that they can find valuing yeah so I mean Nick just to speak to that some of the some of the things we can we can highlight as ideas as community and neighborhood news for example very relevant and hyper local to to the audience that you're talking to a specific expert advice if you're a very skilled agent and you up to speed with with all the the legal and industry sort of trends that that's sort of some of the information you can start to disseminate find newsletters obviously more generalistic industry and market news and things like home improvement ideas are obviously quite useful client testimonials your own client testimonials giving you know reassurance to to the audience that you're speaking to that you're you know the professional they want to deal with and then also success stories and and other promotional stuff that you you might just want to generally communicate to your client base so these are just all ideas that you can start to to encapsulate in terms of what the the content is that you can start to to integrate into to a successful newsletter or email marketing sort of campaign the last thing their email signatures this tends to be very much forgotten in many in many respects most most real estate agents will have a professionally designed email signature and it's important to stress the concept of that obviously you want to be able to display essential contact information in your signature but it's it's obviously way more than that if you think about how much transactional mail you on a month-to-month or weekly basis engage with with prospective clients it's an inordinate amount of potential space where where you can market to these people so clever things like links to your agent profile page that we've spoken about or dynamic content links to your listings links to your social media platforms just ways and means of allowing your prospective client to further engage with with your exposure points I think an email signature of offers a lot of value Nick I don't know if you've got any comment just around the design of that and the importance of the way that needs to be structured emails for email signature I would just you know just keep it for anything like this yeah keep it as uncluttered as possible you know I would steer away from you know trying to jam as much content in there as possible you know a lot of like your physical address and things like that they can get from the website you know you don't need to put your fax number in there and just keep it as clean as simple as possible because a lot of these email platforms now they stack emails and they you know you're gonna you're gonna have these signatures repeated in a stream and you just want them as simple as possible but you can't have things you know links to get directions to your office for example or view my listings things like that but just try keep the actual design as clean and cut as possible just something worth mentioning about email signature and just gene general email branding prop data now offer an automated email branding solution which is which is grateful for for offices and and brands because now you don't need to battle with actually saving an email signature in your mail client I'm sure many in attendance today have battled with that at one point in another so this platform of ours just once the design and the signature has been developed we we automate the attachment of that signature so you don't need to save that at your local mail client level the other beauty of that is that we can also attach other promotional type branding content so for example if you're promoting a new development that you've launched or in a state that you're working in you know we can you can bring in really cool banner type advertising into your into your email communication as well which just gives you another way again to convert people back to your brand spaces that we've been talking about so yeah hopefully that's giving you a bit of insight around the use of email marketing so if we move on we now want to talk about a very important aspect or topic and something prop that has always sort of been banging the drum on and that revolves around content so unfortunately from from a South African real estate perspective this is generally something not done very well particularly at a at an agent level and if we took more high level I mean content is just a great way for you to showcase your expertise what a lot of real estate agents don't realize is that the world is weaved on your your prospective client is very educated they have a smart device in their hand and they know how to find information when they want and how they want so it's vitally important that you're able to put content out there that resonates with what people actually searching for so from from a real estate perspective you know when a prospective buyer or tenant is looking at a transaction they're looking to buy a house or enter house in a specific area they will be educating themselves and finding out as much information as they can before they make an inquiry or a purchase decision and it's vital that you're able to have exposure points around content that you know that answers some of these things that they're searching for so we've given some examples there you know you know types of content that you as an agent can start to blog about I've great restaurants around your area you've interviewed a local Head Master and he's giving you a whole lot of information about what's happening at that school and some trends in there you know in the education space which might be very relevant to to parents in that area you know up and coming prop developments in your area that might be very useful for someone looking to invest aid fun winter activities in your area people search for this type of information wanting to understand more about their community and what's happening and did you know about this you know in terms of year five fun facts so I mean these are all very resonant you know in terms of you as the area expert and some of the things you may know and have the IP on that you need to just expose by writing blog articles and exposing them via why are microsite or an agent microsite like we've discussed and the great thing about this sort of content guys is that it it's it's what we call evergreen content it's not you know it will people will continue to search for the source that continually so you can go update these blog articles over time but it's gonna it's gonna provide value in terms of attracting people to your website or your agent profile page we are microsite for a long time you know because they're not people are going to continually search for this kind of information yeah we've coined the term content as king and you know like Nick says if you want to bring streams of traffic and our boys on balls and potential clients to to your conversion spaces having this type of content in place is is almost a forever solution you know you're all grappling with increasing advertising costs I see our friends property 24 increases their prices by almost eighteen percent this quarter so these are the types of alternative things you need to be focusing on and starting to understand in terms of trying to bring more traffic and apples and potential customers to your conversion spaces so content is definitely something that you need to be very aware of if you're not a great copywriter that doesn't matter there many many freelance copywriters out there will happily be what you know work with you understand your requirements and put out very valuable and useful information you know giving someone like a copywriter exposure to your persona makeup that we talked about earlier will also allow them to to come up with useful and interesting topics that they can start to write about to help you expose yourself a bit more and I think the key there I think Nick mentioned it earlier is that yes we want to make this content very relevant to real estate where we can but it doesn't necessarily have to be 100 hundred percent about real estate it can be more generalistic topics that you know are very search friendly or relevant to the community that you're involved with and the more content pieces like this you put out the more likelihood you're able to reach and engage people when they're searching for this type of information by the search engines so yeah that that's a great piece about content obviously prop data have their own content writers in house we've got numerous expertise in this field and we write a lot of these types of articles for all sorts of real estate companies from individual agents right through to to national franchise groups so speak to us 50 of you you're at a loss in terms of how to produce this copy okay another big one just looking at the poll we'll talk about those results a bit later but a lot of you are saying you use social media which is great well just on the poll sorry just to interject it it looks like it's it's not multiple-choice the poll it looks like it's a single choice yeah so yeah I think it has people have just been selecting a single single option they generate is a multiple choice so we just have to okay so yeah social media obviously many platforms out there we've got some of the most important ones listed particularly from a South African real estate context perspective we want to talk just very briefly I mean I think the important point about this is that as an agent I don't think you can be as prolific on all of these as you would like to so I think it's important that you pick the platforms that you know are more relevant to the potential consumer base that you are talking to so what I'm referring to there is for example Facebook might be more inclined or lean towards a residential type consumer base given its you know it's very community based sort of orientation whereas something like a LinkedIn might be more focused towards a more commercial sort of part of the sector you know a more professional space where where you've got working professionals reading information engaging with information and obviously showcasing their their profiles as experts so I mean a great thing about social media now is although you need to keep it very professional it is a platform where you can really bring out your personality and that's that's you know something we've spoken about a little bit today and we'll cover a little bit more is really that's what we want we feel you guys should be doing in terms of your brand as you want to stand out and you're not going to do that if you don't bring out your personality a little bit so marketers see the presentations going off your screen there oh geez don't know what's happened there just bear with me bring it back there we go sorry so this is a great space to bring out your personality you know as long as it's done professionally you know people want to see that you're unique they want to see that you're talking to them as individuals and this is a great space to do that yeah and just if we talk a bit of a bit of detail about each of these and I'm gonna pick out a couple that are more relevant so so Facebook I'm sure most of you are on it in your private capacity many of you might have your own business pages many millions of users that you can potentially target as an audience just some of the things that you should be focusing on is obviously posts on an ongoing basis I think the thing to really emphasize about Facebook is consistency you can't expect to post and release information by a facebook channel once a week or once a month and expect you to you know attain a following and and leverage the kind of conversion and and information sharing as you would want you know potentially hopeful so Facebook is really about consistency ideally you need to be posting once a day because that consistency will build a following and that thing that following then grows the viral effect that that facebook offers you as a platform so I think that's very important to to emphasize just some of the bits of information that you can start to to post and expose on Facebook obviously just general posts about about your area property posts for example the one that we've got in the slide there in terms of featuring on shows or newly released listings you can obviously boost posts so if you've got a really cool article that you've written about a community activity or something like that you know will be very informative and you to to a user base you can obviously pay to have that exposed to to a greater audience but then just very general stuff like imagery and video one of the examples we're going to show you in the next screen just shows you a really innovative way around how an agent has used the the video medium to to really bring out his personality and grow that viral effect in terms of consumers wanting to to engage with that content so you know there's an array of different types of media and content you can release on Facebook but consistency I think is the key and as a Nick mentioned bringing out your your personality as part of that is also important you don't just want a stream of properties on your facebook business timeline you want to bring in your personality and some unique is there am twitter obviously another massive platform globally not as big from a from a South African context but we you know there are many many users on Twitter on a daily basis within the South African space or context so we haven't played too much with that in terms of usage with our client examples but obviously a great way to disseminate information more obviously text-based although they're dual our imagery and video now as well Instagram obviously owned by Facebook many of you will have your own personal Instagram accounts what's quite nice about Instagram is that if you do start to release or post more visual content and promoted via sort of paid mediums or paid options in facebook you can obviously look to to have that syndicated mouth father the Instagram channel so there's there's a great opportunity there especially if you if you're getting into the content space of you know creating what's the word I'm looking for like a community and you know great images of the area you work in aspirational type images properties you know great viewable properties with great interiors that people aspire to so so there's a lot of useful stuff you can start to to leveraging Instagram for as well YouTube obviously our video hosting of us owned by Google what many of you won't realize is that YouTube is actually probably the bigger the second biggest search engine in the world so obviously Google the native Google search engine is is by far the most utilized but youtube is the second most utilized so that's where people are searching for video content as opposed to contextual text content and the manila 'ls of this of this world they will want to search for video type content as a first choice so videos of properties you'll see a video that we're about to show you in the next slide of interviews and and useful contextual information about the communities that you operate and all of these types of things can be exposed by YouTube and be found and be used to obviously convert people back to your or your personal spaces Nick I don't if you've got any insights on Pinterest or just on YouTube just to reiterate I mean yeah I mean that's really where you know if you look at the growth of online content videos where it's at guys images worth a thousand words of video is worth thousand images that's really where things are going so you know I would look into bringing that into your brand's in some way you know and we look at a good example and they extract master image but yeah definitely look at it into video I mean Pinterest is very much like Instagram it's you know it's it's very very heavily image based very much around you know promoting lifestyle and themed you know you can you can really theme things in Pinterest so if you wanted to start sharing you know themed visual content that's a good place to do that yeah just briefly the the LinkedIn was obviously a more professional platform for for showcasing individuals and in their in their professional working career space we've seen a lot of sort of uptake around using that platform particularly in the commercial industrial space they offer obviously advertising mediums as well and different packages there so yeah LinkedIn can is also definitely a growing space in in the South African real estate context as well the last one I want to talk about is Google my business so there's another slide which we're going to talk about here specifically about Google my business I'm sure many of you have heard about this it's it's Google's global business directory it is by far the largest global business directory in the world many of you will have your own agency and branch profile pages or business listing pages already configured but the emphasis point we want a place here is for the ability you the agent to set up your own business listing page so I think was last year towards the middle of last year Google made a change to this platform which allowed for service professionals to set up their own instances of these business listings and that you know just looking at the example here of an agent from Remax you and chrome brink in the Helderberg area here down in the Cape he set up his own profile page he's given a bit of a bio about himself and anyone searching we've given you the Google search interface there as part of it just to illustrate what we're talking about anyone searching for genomes information which by the way consumers will do if you're looking to canvass a property owner and you're sending them communication the first thing they probably like to need to do is Google you to find out more information about who you are and watch what you do and by you know showcasing your business profile page here your business listing page you're able to give a bio put in some imagery some great other things they are or reviews which people can client South Pass clients can do and provide you know commentary and testimonials you're able to engage directly with customers from from this interface you can post content very much like you post content on Facebook and get comments and feedback off of that so there really allows you to start a two-way conversation with with clients without necessarily being on Facebook or one of these other social media platforms the other big benefit and what probably the most important benefit is that by having a validated Google my business listing like this you can get visibility and the search engines without what we call ranking and then organic search results so because it's validated and all the information is there and people are searching for estate agents or real estate professionals in a particular area Google likes to surface these hyper local business listing results and you stand the chance to be showcased like this in a very prominent format in the results pages of the the Google search engine so if you haven't done this yourself as an agent go and register your own Google my business listing profile there are some links at the bottom of this webinar deck which we're going to be disseminating which are links to Google's sort of help guide information about how to do this and the right things to do to set it up so yeah hopefully that's a lot of information for you to get going on that front this is a really good brand effort on Facebook we were talking about this this agent Jared Jeffery promoting he's put a post on his on his facebook business page he's contextualized his his own brand image with obviously the brand that he works for the company brand but then just a really strong call to action and a great showcase for himself on the Facebook platform and we just wanted to play a very quick video for you about how he's taken that to the next level it looks like he showcases each one of his his new listings viral video that he does and we just want to show you this because it's a great way of how he's trying to exuberant his personality and bring that into the fold in terms of the way it communicates with clients so just take a listen and watch here welcome to number three Beverly drop my legs are missing a kitchen hang on offering four big all bosses just wait I mean sorry about that it's rotted okay so I think you get the idea but that's just a great example of how Jared's managed to bring across his personality and obviously he's very much going with the theme of comedian and that's part of his personality and that's not necessarily what all of you need to do as an agent but I think it's important for you to find you know that part of your personality that can really resonate with what you're trying to achieve in terms of resonating with your your brand as an agent okay let's move on and the next thing we want to talk about is actual paid online advertising so as I mentioned earlier we're now talking more and more to agents around looking at ways to do their own advertising campaigns now that we've given you spaces to convert leads and eyeballs to previously you would have to have converted this to your your brand agency website and you know you might not necessarily read the correct rewards because you know a client visiting a general brand website or an agency website might get very lost in the sea of other agents and stock that are there are available on that particular website so now that we've got these agent profile pages and agent microsites you now have the ability to leverage paid advertising mediums both on Facebook and Instagram as well as on the Google platforms to to really target an audience a much greater audience with your particular value add although your particular value offering so we've got examples there of two agents using Facebook where they obviously are promoting their listings as part of a carousel ad which is a type of Facebook ad on Facebook and as part of that carousel ad that they've got strong call-to-actions bold graphics visuals of who they are as agents and they contact information and obviously very strong call to actions and any clicks off of these ads within you know redirect those users to their specifics personal spaces which obviously gives you great ability to convert leads on an ongoing basis the the one on the left-hand side is obviously a google adword so that's when users are searching in google for specific keywords or phrases we can then target those specific subset of phrases and keywords and deliver consumers your particular ad which exists right at the top of the Google search results Nick I don't know if you've got any comment that you might want to have just in terms of how these can be best used from an agent perspective yeah I think you can be everything the important thing is again consistency in whatever you deem with your brand and tone just remember who you're talking to you know word these things as if you're trying to appeal to the personas that you've worked out and be consistent you know visually and in the copy you use yeah and then like you said you know try direct it to a page it is set up specifically for you so that they don't get lost yeah I think the other key thing here is that you know we're always thinking about targeting these things for buyers and tenants but for you as an agent you can very much target and design these ads talking to prospective homeowners or landlords that you might be looking to engage with so they're great ways for securing new mandates and valuations that you may be looking to do for for homeowners in your area so prop Ted has got a lot of skill we've got our own marketing team internally which has an array of experience in terms of setting up these ad campaigns and we can definitely guide you around the do's and don'ts of other leverage and these platforms for whatever the campaign sort of whatever the call to action for the campaign is is actually you know they have to do the one of the things we haven't displayed here as google display which is very much like Facebook you know visual representation of the ads and I'm sure you've seen these via the various classified websites if you're on gumtree or some of the news classified sites you see various ads which are displayed on those mediums which we you know you can also start to leverage so a paid advertising great way obviously it does cost extra money you will need to pay these platforms per click normally the beauty of it though is that everything is tracked and monitored which means that for every Rand you spend on a click we know exactly who those people are whether they've converted to your your personal space whether they've generated a lead and we call that ROI report reporting return on investment reporting and you know that's where online paid advertising very much differentiates itself from from all the traditional sort of print media advertising and obviously been able to assess and monitor campaigns over time allow you to then manipulate them to get better results the other thing about paid advertising campaigns you're able to very much hyper locally target an audience so Google and Facebook no way people live they know where they exist they know what their interests are they know what in the same group they come from whether they male or female so there's a lot of targeting tools that these platforms allows access to or allow you access to to specifically target your ads and that's that's very important because you don't want to just send blanket messages out there and engage people who are not you know part of that persona makeup that you're trying to identify and target with your information okay cool um I'm gonna move a bit quickly now we were running out of time I know we suggested an hour but there are a couple more slides Nick I don't know if you want to talk just generally about print I know it's not our sort of core focus but we have helped agencies in the design particularly with design elements around print yeah I think yeah you know I was just going to touch on this but we are running out of time it's really the important thing here is is consistency I think I mentioned it right in the beginning you know you want as someone travels through your different media that you have out there you want them to see a consistent three that just you know portrays you as a professional you consider these things you know at a minimum that's that's what you want to bring across you know your boards are the same as there's a thread from your boards to your business cards to your to your social media to your website that's that's the important thing I think and just keep it simple you know just press the designers that you work with try not to over clutter these things or complicate them this really is more with a lot of a lot of the stuff okay cool so if we have a look at the poll results I'm going to end the poll now so you can all see the results and yeah maybe if we can just discuss that now I know we it wasn't a multiple choice so you could only select sort of one option there but it very much much looks like social medias that go to current sort of medium for for disseminating your brand your brand message which is great to hear because it is obviously a very strong platform with a with a lot of reach I suppose the main thing I would like to just emphasize there's again the consistency part so from my experience with engaging with real estate professionals a lot of them will post very infrequently and only when they get a new listing for example or when they remember on a Sunday evening once a month and to be honest with you that that's not that's simply not good enough if you want to build a following and expose and and leverage the viral effect of of Facebook make I don't know if there's any insights you can gain from just looking at the poll results there as well I can't see the poll results mark let me just make sure you can see them there we go okay yeah yeah I just I mean unfortunately guys sorry we couldn't get it wasn't a multiple choice just an error on our side but it's interesting to see that no one picked blog post which is something I think is really important you know if you want to be deemed an expert or whatever you do you know wouldn't matter if you were in another industry if you want to be seen as an expert you really have to start writing about what you do but if terms are from an agency level like we said it's so important to position yourself as area experts you know people want to deal with someone who they know knows the area and if you writing about things that are happening you know you're a local commentator think of it in that in those terms you know you and you know what events are coming up you know you know when a big piece of land is going to be turned into a development you know you know what's happening you're on that you've got the pulse or the area you operate in it's really gonna differentiate you help differentiate you at least from other agents who you're competing with in a localized area I think the other important point there Nick is if you're going to go to this effort of producing this blog content it can be repurposed for multiple platforms more exposure points that same content could then be included in the newsletters that we've talked about they can be routed in the social media posts that you're going to start posting about they can be put on your website just as general landing page pieces of information obviously they're going to be exposed on the Google search results because Google's going to index that content so it's not just you're writing to hopefully get found and in the search engines you can repurpose that content so that people can start being exposed to it via multiple channels and I think that's an absolute key for everyone to understand this is a lot of benefit by going through the effort of actually collating and producing that information yeah okay we've got a couple more slides we just want to run through and the first thing we want to just cover here is just agent profile page promo that we're running so we're offering a significant discount on the setup of this profile page template solution remember all the benefits that we discussed earlier the key thing to understand about this is that you will need to have an existing website solution with prop data for us to be able to set up and integrate these profile pages the other big thing to just realize if you working with a brand already we don't charge for for each one of these pages per agent it's a single template which is then dynamic so if you've got multiple agents working within the same office then the same template can apply and morph and obviously render a page per agent to put a fairly simply so it's not a fee per agent it's a fee per per unique template and that then applies for all agents working in the same office or agency as you so I would really encourage those of you who don't have your your own agent conversion space get one of these in place and then all these are the elements that we're starting to talk about and then start to make sense in terms of converting people to this particular environment let's recap Nik I don't know if you want to run through this just just what we've learned today and some of the important things that are key takeaways yeah so just very quickly you know we touched on what a brand is I won't go into too much of that now but I mean just in terms of thinking of yourself as agents as brands every little touch point you have with the client or that they engage with it's part of your brand you know it's it's not just your logo or your company's logo you've got to see yourself as the part of that big picture and really start marketing yourself and then that's that's really why it matters is to differentiate yourself from all other agents out there and become a top agent you have to start marketing yourself as a brand you know you've got to start thinking and that's why I say that's important just in terms of strategy just to actually go through the process of sitting down and starting to think about the stuff and that's where you know that's where that your strategy can really come together and help to define how you want to communicate to people yeah then we talked about you know those steps asking the right questions and defining personas in terms of process to create a strategy and yeah then the different elements that really tie it together so now you've got a know you know you're talking to you know the type of message you want to bring across what are the vehicles to do that we've given you some good examples there I think in terms of bringing across your message as an agent to your t audience and an agent profile page or a microsite or whatever you have as a destination is critical because you want to be able to to take advantage of all these different media but you need to drive it to somewhere where you can you're not gonna get lost in the sea of other agents or you know competing information you want it to be really about you know your testimonials your accreditations your awards your bio your contact details your properties all about you Nick I think it's important to just re-emphasize I think that in terms of these brand elements that we spoke about and we gave numerous examples I think I think you'll agree with me that agents need to pick key ones that they think are going to move the dial in their space or their community I think leveraging all of them up front and at once might be a daunting exercise for most agents so I think with the conversion space button down this profile page or agent microsite I think the agents specifically our agents need to pick maybe maybe one or two of those and really drive those hard in terms of converting people back to their spaces now yeah yeah we just mentioned in the chat chair that just in terms of the social media post and that you can schedule these things which is a good point you know it's so we mentioned that you need to do it daily but you can you can spend time and get these things scheduled so that you don't you don't have to actually physically click the you know produce the content and click the button on a daily basis you can generate it and schedule it you know and if you're doing social media if you have a campaign to post daily on social media we recommend that you you you know if you if you're not working with someone like prop dada and doing it yourself that you do come up with the strategy and define what you're gonna post each day otherwise you it's it's very hard to post every day yeah okay um we will be disseminating the slide deck along with the webinar there'll be a post email that goes out to all the registrants and you'll be led to a landing page where the video will be hosted along with this deck and what we've decided to include with the deck is some very useful pages it's an array of reference points from our course from other pages and blog posts that we found on the internet that are very useful so please look at this they they they're relevant to each one of the sections that we've covered today and I'm sure you can glean a lot of a lot of usefulness from from these links as well so yeah just lastly we want to we want to just answer some of the questions we I noticed that they're they're not a lot of questions that are being posted so YUM it's Nick let's just go through these and answer them collectively there's one from Alan which is talking about email signatures and branding and asking do you use your own in-house development code or do you use software code from a third party so any email signatures that we Jews are definitely coded in house by Prop data and I think the important point to emphasize there is we cross mail client temp to test that code to all the met the major mail client interfaces so that you guaranteed that the signature you receive will render correctly on all the major mail clients so if we're talking about Microsoft Outlook and the various versions of a gmail Apple Mail we obviously tested against the mobi versions of those clients as well so you're almost guaranteed that that the signature will render perfectly as per the design that we develop moreover if we use our automated branding solution as well that same code is applied and attached to the email automatically and it's done and tested in a way that we know it's going to render correctly as well so there's a lot of time and effort some people tend to question the amount of money that we charge for these things but a lot of that time goes into not only designing and developing them but obviously testing them thoroughly as well you've got any comment on the one raised by Ted day it's an important ok just run through here can every kind you can see this question so I'm just read it out hey guys perhaps a good idea to explain how content can be disseminated so you mentioned types of content example evergreen hyperlocal but in terms of where this content is hosted can you discuss discuss micro sites blogs social media email I used it as can you explain where best hosts and distributors to create the ideal journey example would a user find content on Google search if so where would this be let's take them and what would the next be the next step sign up turn usually at it would the content be sent to existing database by email with a view to take into microcycle both I think I think we did kind of answer that you know there's when you generate content the the good thing is that you can use it in so many places it does it does depend but if you if you you know obviously there's there's copy that is very marketing driven but when we were talking about you know content specifically for newsletters and blogging really talking about content that you can use to post on your website so a user would you know potentially search for something and find your blog post in the results and go to your website that way and then you could encourage them to sign up for the newsletter to receive that sort of content if they find value in it on an ongoing basis but in the same way that content could go up to your existing users you know in a monthly newsletter or if you sent out a promo every time you posted a new piece of content that's something definitely that you would want to notify your existing kind of clients about I think the important point is the question yeah I think it yes and I think even more pertinent to that is I think what's worth explaining to to the audience is that if you've subscribed to a prop data website package and particularly our classic website package we house all of these pieces as part of the entire solution so to put that into more simplistic terms and we give you the ability to not only blog and release content onto that website but then we take that same content and we automatically mail it out for a newsletter facility housed in our management system to your mailers database and we allow you to post that same content as a post on Facebook for example and so I think the point there is that by putting your information in once to our management system our platform then looks to disseminate that information into multiple exposure points which then convert the consumer back to the right point on your website where they need to engage further with your information I think that's a critical point for everyone to understand for those of you who don't have our website solution or do and don't fundamentally understand that all these pieces actually joined by the ecosystem that we built out yeah I don't see any other questions there hopefully there'll be more in the next webinar because we'd love to answer any further questions that people do have so yeah I think I think we can end it off there Nick I think the last thing to say is that we will be sending out invites for the new webinar next month we're hosting them once a month so look out for that and register your spot you can also navigate to our website to our email newsletter page and sign up to our newsletter we ongoing send out very useful information outside of you know this webinar content pieces and you're able to sign up and receive that ongoing and obviously if you do that you'll be notified about the webinar topics that are coming through through the year so yeah Nick thanks very much Wendy thanks very much for joining in and hopefully that was of use to all of you who attended and thanks very much and we look forward to seeing you again in the next webinar thanks mark Tuesday