Top of mind awareness is what any business marketer wants when looking to get steady referrals from markets like residential and commercial real estate. But short of your business development people dropping by offices all the time, how would you do that?
Here's a thought - develop a digital presence on screens in real estate offices that remind staffers and their customers of your services, while also providing much-needed, much-welcomed functionality to that office or offices.
If your company bases its business prospects, for example, on providing mortgage advice and services to property buyers, you are likely doing a few things to generate leads and referrals. You're doing the work to get known by real estate professionals in the brokerage offices, and very likely investing a lot of time and money to place advertising in everything from local publications to bus benches and roadside billboards, so that consumers and business people know your name.
What if you allocated a relatively small percentage of a media and marketing budget to a marketing machine right in the offices of the agents who are, by necessity, in and out of there all the time?
Targeted digital signage technology is a low-cost, high-impact toolset to build and then steadily nurture top of mind awareness of your services on screens around an office - in customer areas and behind the scenes in the hallways and back office of a real estate brokerage.
Think about the power of your mortgage brand in the mix of real estate office critical communications.
Screens in the front office (public) areas can cycle through new and showcase listings, welcome new agents and promote company initiatives, such as community and charitable programs. In the mix include for example, your mortgage brand, rate information, market trends…all centred around your value.
(We will use mortgage brokers or agents seeking business from the real estate market as an example in this post. But principles outlined here are adaptable to any market.)
In the real estate back office communication points, screens can be showing things like office and agent performance metrics and rankings, providing HR information or flagging helpful market data. Here you could mix in our message to on lending options and tips to help agents start mortgage conversations AND offer your brand targeted to one or many office locations. Provide content on the digital screens via to help them speak to clients and mention you for referrals. All this content you share can be controlled by you from your desktop in your office or remotely.
Those same screens can also promote partner services, like your mortgage company, as part of a scheduled rotation of content. How great would it be if the people, features and attributes of your firm were regularly in front of just the right people, all day, every day?
Some real estate offices invest directly in digital signage technology, as it's been shown to be highly effective for both marketing and company communications. But real estate is incredibly busy and has a lot of moving parts, as well as countless vendors trying to sell different types of services into them. Screens in offices sound good and are often highly desired, but for the broker or admin there's maybe no time, urgency or budget to execute.
Be the news in the local real estate office. Be in control of your brand message and reach more agents.
The clever move here would be to offer to make that investment and put the technology in place at offices where your company believes there is high opportunity for new business through referrals, You can offer to work with ITESMEDIA for to supply screens, software, content templates and communication management for the real estate offices, and have that done by a third-party. Then you control that only your offer as a partner of the office is promoted!
It's a lot like advertising - you say what you need done, and other people execute. The difference here is advertising is by and large a broadcasted marketing tactic - where you might have 1,000s of people seeing your message, but one or none of them needing to know it. By putting your key messages on screens right in the offices used by agents and visited by clients, your messaging is reliably relevant and timely.
What you offer and how you share it can be automated, have real time data inputs, controlled remotely, and target one real estate office or many. Just think of the possibilities and speak with someone today to see it come alive.
By initiating and backing this technology, you are also likely to have exclusivity on messaging for your line of services. It's completely reasonable to assert that by putting this technology in place, your firm would be the only one marketing mortgage services on the screens.
However, the real estate company can support other key partners - like trades and designers/stagers - on those screens and make their own arrangements about how that support is recognized. It might even be a revenue stream for them.
This all may seem daunting, but there are companies that can execute and manage the entire program. ITESMEDIA has years of deep, direct experience providing digital signage and interactive kiosk services into the real estate industry, and product/service bundles that directly address agency and partner support needs.
It can do all the heavy lifting in planning, execution and ongoing maintenance, and ensure the right messaging is in the right places at the right time. With a reliable media player and software, the annual investment to drive your messaging might be less than $2,000.
There's a chance ITESMEDIA technology might already be in place in some offices (REMAX, Century 21, Royal Lepage and many more brands are long-time clients). In those cases, ITESMEDIA could mediate the process of having a mortgage company sponsor the screens in that office.
It comes down to impact. Will putting your message into the general media mix of your city genuinely drive results, or would a new approach that hyper-targets the audiences that really matter make more sense?
