Enjoying Brokerage Insider? Please Subscribe Using Your Favorite Podcast Player.
TRANSCRIPT:
Hi everyone. And welcome to another episode of brokerage insider. This is the podcast where we interview the leaders in real estate and real estate technology. My name is Britt Chester. I’m the host of today’s episode. I’m also the director of client success here at TRIBUS.
We’re one of the largest independent prop tech companies in real estate and provider of custom brokerage technology to small, medium, and large brokerages all over the world today on the show, we’re going to be talking about marketing and specifically digital marketing, and we’re joined by Nick Markman.
Principal product strategists at vocalize. Nick, welcome to the show. Hey, Britt. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me. I think digital marketing is a really exciting topic right now, as we enter this kind of like, I don’t want to say post COVID, but this, this next phase. But before we get into it, Nick, tell us a little bit about a vocalize as well as a little bit about your.
Yeah, absolutely. So a vocalize we’re collaborative marketing platform. So we basically enable local, small and medium businesses to easily execute sophisticated digital marketing. And we do that by partnering with their, either their national brand, like their. Where we partner with technology platforms, you know, like try this or other CRM website providers.
And through that collaboration of partnering with the what we call the sponsoring partner and the data that they have and, you know, getting a marketing platform, that’s integrated with the tools that those agents and brokers are using. We’re able to accomplish marketing outcomes on behalf of the, those users that they wouldn’t be able to achieve with.
That collaboration and also saved them a lot of time. You know, we’ll talk about this, you know, I think throughout the conversation, but the reality is that, you know, local and small businesses some of them may be great marketers, certainly. But to be an expert in, in digital marketing, certainly requires a lot of time and resources to truly be an expert at.
And a lot of those businesses that they just don’t have that, right? If you’re an agent or a broker, you’re going to be spending most of your time selling houses and managing your relationships. So our ideas that we want to be that digital marketing easy button that allows them to still get all the performance that they want from digital marketing leads, revenue.
But by spending a lot less time doing so. And doing so in a, in a really seamless way where they don’t really need to set anything not bright. So by doing that, we’ve seen, for example, in real estate agents and brokers go from spending nine hours a week, marketing their business to nine minutes. And we’ve seen dramatic performance results as well, seeing 400% stronger performance than when they’re doing it on.
Yeah. I mean, I, I know real estate agents are there’s, there’s so much of an ask on a real estate agent today, right? Like there’s so much expectation as to the service that they’re, that they’re meant to provide. And, and whenever I’m, you know, working one-on-one with either agents or brokerages, it’s always a matter of looking at, you know, how much time do we have in the week and how.
Can we really allocate to not just learning and understanding digital marketing, but also deploying that and seeing a solid return there. So I think, you know, tools, you know, I know at Tribus we’ve, we’ve partnered with a vocalize and I think that this partnership has been, you know, just in its infancy right now.
One of our, one of our more exciting ones, just because it provides new opportunities for us. To, to put their face out there to put their name out there, to put their properties out there. So we’ll, let’s, we’ll get into that here in a little bit. But before we do, I’d love to kind of jump back to the, the the, the benchmark, right?
Like the mile marker in all of history right now that everyone talks about and looking at the trends pre. Right. Like what did digital marketing, what did that landscape kind of look like inside of real estate before? You know, the, the, the great, the great flattener. So Nick, from your view, and then from that of a vocalize, what were some of the trends that y’all were seeing and that y’all were kind of focusing on prior to this, this big change.
Yeah, absolutely. I’d say, you know, there’s certainly a thread there that is the same when you compare pre and post. And I totally hear you. It’s safe to say we’re post COVID. It’s not, not accurate right beforehand. I think there was a lot less variety of. Marketing touch points, ways of communication. Honestly, I, you know, as I think about certainly real estate, that landscape pre COVID, it’s really commoditize, you know, a lot of listing ads, which we still see, that’s what, you know, bread and butter stuff, very important in the listing ads.
But COVID, and you know, the shift from high. In-person touch points to primarily digital or online ways of communication really was a, I think, a forcing function and innovation in terms of how agents and how the industry was using digital marketing and just digital channels in general. So I, I think you, I think that was one big change is that, that lack of variety.
Whereas now you see a lot more seller leads, home valuation you know, video ads, 3d tours. It was a little more stagnated is probably too severe, but it is a little more standardized, I think. So, so there was some good, certainly that, that, that came out just in terms of. But innovation of using some of these tools and services.
Another thing that I, I would add there, you know, in this as both a kind of COVID theme, as well as just what we have seen in the. Real estate market. You, you know, when you take a look at things like the low inventory levels, that was starting to happen, certainly pre COVID, but was not where it is at certainly now.
So it was a lot stronger focus. I think, you know, pre COVID on, on that buyer lead generation, we saw more of that. Whereas now it’s a lot more blended or even a heavier focus or interest in seller leads. Yeah. Yeah. And I remember I was sitting I was at an IMiD connect event in January of. 2020. And I was interviewing all these agents and you know, marketing executives and admins, and I was attending all these you know, these sessions and listening to everybody make their predictions for 2020.
And you know, I, I go back and I look at some of that footage and I look at some of those interviews and I think about those sessions and it was like, wow, we were all entirely blindsided. Right. I think like a real obvious comparison, like you said, that that humans touchpoint, right? Open houses you know, before we’re a staple and now they’re, they’re almost like a, and I don’t want to, I would never call an open house, like a novelty, but it’s like, we’ve got a virtual tour, a port, a drone video.
Everything had to get migrated very quickly to the internet, right? Like suddenly like everyone, is there, all of your, your internet traffic started spiking. I mean, I think we saw. So much just traffic there. So, so I guess kind of that, that leads perfectly into the next question. Like, you know, what did, what did COVID do to real estate marketing and like digital branding and how are we like, kind of like shifting with that because it’s changing every single day.
Right. And, and I, I love the innovation in this industry and I love the opportunities for interview innovation as well, but I guess, how are we kind of like shifting with that, with the agent marketing like that one-to-one. You know, what does, what does that transition kind of look like from, from your standard?
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I think overall certainly from the marketing perspective whether it’s digital or other channels, you know, COVID and some of the changes that came out of that I think were, were largely positive. I’ll caveat that by saying this has been an incredibly tough time. So as I talk about that the upside or the positive that we results, we’re saying by no means, are we saying it’s been easy for agents right on the ground.
Obviously this has been hard for everyone, but, but truly in terms of the innovation of ways to communicate with your customers that we’ve already talked about, and I’ll go in a little deeper, but also just on the performance side it was unprecedented times in, in a positive way. I actually think as we reflect on the past, What year and a half to two years.
So I’m just doubling down on, on again, what we mentioned, you know, it was real estate and especially agent interactions with clients has been such a heavy in-person form of communication. So that was immediately stripped away. So we saw these digital channels, especially things, you know, like Facebook, Instagram, Which are so visual and can be great channels for assets like videos via adoption and usage of those platforms really increased in innovative way.
So we’ve already talked about, you know, 3d tools obviously was huge and you see that both from the platform side and the Zillows and the realtor dot coms of the world, and that reports all making a heavier focus on that kind of content. But we saw the best performing agents also. Pulling that through to how they market, even if it’s just them recording a video of themselves, walking through a house, and then sending that out over email, posting that on, on Facebook, running a video ad or even doing, you know, market updates in that format.
You know, we think of a lot of these channels that you can still have. Personal touch in terms of how your broadcasting you’re communicating your brand, but also who you can target. Right. I can get in front of my customers pretty easily. I can target my local area with this message or this, this listing.
So again, that, that forcing function of, of being innovative in how agents and brokers, they’re talking to their customers. As one thing. And then on the performance side, you know from a vocalizes perspective we’re, we’re in a, you know, a lot of industries, real estate is, is, is certainly a key one for us.
And so as soon as you know, COVID really started rewinding back to March, 2020, We wanted to start really looking at the data. Right. We have an interesting purview where we have, you know, millions of ads we can analyze and, and a lot of spend behind that. And so starting in March, we did monthly and quarterly updates, just looking at the performance going on in the industry and just some interesting things that, that all share that came out of that.
I think the overall theme, as I mentioned, right. It was an unprecedented time in terms of strong performance in these channels. So just a few things, things that I’ll share real quick here. So one thing that we noticed when you looked at 2019 to 2020 CPMs which that means cost per a thousand impressions, basically a metric of how much your need to pay for your Media.
You can almost think of it as like a gasp. Or some degree for your food for your ads gets used so often. So thank you Pedics for that explanation. Yeah. Yeah, totally. It’s definitely one of those, you know, maybe lesser known metrics, but basically just the call, you know, how expensive are your ads basically that decrease every 20% year over year 2019 to 2020.
So just the ability for agents brokers to. In front of people, more affordably, get more eyes on their ads and their messages for, you know, fewer dollars. We saw a dramatic change there but then also on the intent and performance side, when we look at things like lead generation I think the most shocking thing that we saw and we saw this just to continue to increase month over month throughout COVID, but lead conversion rates.
So if you think of someone that clicks on your. And then someone that submits a lead, what percentage of the people that click on your ad actually go to submit a lead that’s the lead conversion rate that increased 658% from March, 2020 to March, 2021. So people that were interacting with these ads and digital formats.
More than we’d ever seen in any of our data. We’re submitting leads at an increasingly higher rate. So just was a sign of really strong consumer intent in terms of not just seeing an ad and clicking on it. But I actually, you know, I’m interested in this. I want to submit my information. I want to start this conversation.
I’m in a relationship with. Yeah. And I think that’s definitely reflected across the industry as well. Right? I mean, I think people who might’ve been shopping for homes you know, one year in advance in March, April and may of last year, they bought in June and July. And I think that’s a direct result.
Of of those ads and have that, like, you know, that, that increase in marketing and, and agents and brokerages kind of, you know, realizing like how quickly we have to shift. And we have to adapt this model. If we’re not able to get in front of our agents face to face, we have to meet them where they are. And so I think that that was like, that’s a very that’s a pretty exciting metric because it, you know, it speaks exactly to what we’re talking about, right?
Like the, the value of marketing is to get in front of where your audiences and. That that is reflected in the stats. So it’s the lead conversion rate increase 600, I think he said 658%. No, I think we can look at last year’s sales. And you know, I think everyone was a little scared in March and April, but we saw a spike in real estate.
You know, we saw more listings, home values increased across the country and, you know, everyone was selling it more people were buying. And so I think that’s, you know a direct reflection of that. It also kind of makes me think about like, what is, and when we, when we, I say post COVID and I hate to say that because.
It’s more just like COVID acceptance at this point. And like, you know, like from there and then moving forward, but I wonder what is going to be like, what, what is the backside of this look like if we were at the top of that curve you know, what is the backside look like in the sense of like the next 3, 6, 9 months?
Right. And, and how can we. And how can agents and how can brokerages really start to kind of prepare for, for what that’s going to be? Because there are people that might’ve been in their pipeline that were looking one and two years down the road that bought last year, and now they’re no longer in that pipeline.
And so how can we or how can agents really start. You know, prepare for that. And what should their marketing plans kind of look like? Because, you know, we’re seeing, I’m getting a lot of questions about, you know, SEO and you know, I want more, more traffic on the site and, you know, we, we could talk all day about SEO and SEO strategies.
Really, I want to know, like, what can we do? You know, how can we prepare for this and how can we kind of get that strong foundation? Both with marketing, with our, and with our digital presence. So I guess, you know, Nick, from your view, and then from that of a vocalize, what, what are your kind of like best practices that we can kind of start to implement now?
And what tools do we start using? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that the word, you know, foundation that you just threw out is, is super appropriate because we’ve been talking a lot about marketing and the marketing aspect of agent or real estate business successful agents and successful tools have that company.
Deeply integrated with everything else that the agent or business is using to run their day to day. It’s not on, on an island, right? So having your marketing and advertising, that’s integrated with your CRM, that’s connected to your website. That’s set up in a way that you have that foundation, that infrastructure for driving your business so that marketing can actually.
Help drive real business results in a way that is valuable to you, but also in a way that you’re not spending tons of time, you know, downloading leads from Facebook or Google and manually uploading those to your CRM. You don’t want to worry about that. Hassle as agents, we’re already doing this, the best tools do this today.
And that’s what gets us so excited about. You know, our partnership with Tribus and the engage platform in particular is it does exactly that, right? Try this engage is integrated with, with your core products, there’s CRM, is there, it has all your listings. It’s easy to, to, to pop in there. And run your listing, automate your ads, have everything updated in real time, in a way that you know, saves you a ton of time and hassle, and you don’t have to set up Facebook ad accounts and Google accounts and worry about that.
Everything is, is deeply, deeply integrated. And we see that trajectory in the industry is increasing there’s. There’s already tools that do it today, but agents are going to start demanding that if they aren’t. You know, no one likes meeting to use five different log-ins, you know, multiple different tools just to run their day to day.
They want a one-stop shop. How can I manage my leads, manage my listings, advertise and promote my business. And, and we think of Tribus as being an awesome example of a tool that can. Yeah. I mean, and I think you, again, kind of jumping back to that word foundation and I liked what you said about like being deeply integrated.
Because I, something I run into sometimes is that, you know, like you know, agents will be talking about marketing and we’ll think like, You buy an ad and we’re done, like, I washed my hands. I I’ve put the ad out there, but it’s important that all of those things are working together. And so it’s almost like, you know, the ad is, is a component of not just your, you know, not just your, your marketing or, or, you know, if we’re pushing a past sale or if we’re trying to find buyers, whatever the ad, whatever our goal of that ad is.
But it has to be working with your CRM, with your website and all of that messaging kind of has to be cohesive. That’s something that I, that I always encourage them. I’m a big proponent, you know, my background’s in journalism. So I’m a big proponent for content creation whether it’s blogging or social media organic and paid, you know, all of those things because to me those are, those are that’s killing 2, 3, 4 birds with one stone.
If you, if you write a blog or if you’re, you know doing that content and you are putting it out organically and you’re buying an ad like that, that just pays dividends so much down the road because. You can use it, your, your, your lift is the content creation, and then you’re deploying it across your entire network.
So you’re sending it out to your CRM, you know, via email marketing. You’re sending it out to your social networks organically you’re paying and, and targeting audiences with those ads. And that kind of, you know, again brings us to that next point about like the value of, of an importance of those audiences.
I think. A lot of, a lot of times we run into like, you know, we’re, we’re boosting these and promoting these on Facebook, but there’s a difference between a boosting and promoting an ads. Can you kind of talk about, you know, what the difference is there? The value of like making sure those ads are being served to the people we want to see them.
Yeah, absolutely. You know, it’s funny because this is even a platform or podium that you flip will stand on in terms of the messaging of don’t boost here, posts run ads. There’s this interesting cause the boosted post is a Facebook product, but it really comes down to the results that you’re looking for from your marketing.
And if you ask, you know, an agent or broker, what do you want your, your marketing, your advertising to do for you? They’re probably not going to say I want to generate a lot of impressions. You know, I want a lot of people to just see this ad. They’re likely looking for more tangible results. I want leads.
I want to be able to target people specifically in this, in this area. I want. Back and re-engage with, with my customers kind of sphere of influence stuff. And the reality is that the boosted posts an easy way to get some extra reach from something you, you know, organically posted to your page, but it’s not going to drive.
Any of those, those real business results. Or the targeting that, that, that you might be interested in. And so 100% of the products and best practices that we adopt and make available and, and partnerships like Tribus engage are using best practice, Facebook ad and other channel Products that are aligned with those results.
So we’re using lead advocate, generate leads right in the channel, drop those right to your CRM. And so it’s really that, that depth of objective difference when you think about boosting versus paid. Yeah. But the boosting and the promotion stuff, I’m like that, those are great when you want, when you want your friends to see what you had for breakfast.
But put, when it comes to like ads, it’s like, let’s figure out what the goal is. Cause it’s not. I think we get to see a lot of like silver bullet options inside of real estate. I think there are a lot of again, this industry is rife with innovation. There’s always, you know, there’s new technologies and new growth and various markets, and there’s, there’s always, we’re being bombarded with all the exciting things happening, but there’s also some VR.
You know, core, fundamental elements here and some very core, fundamental elements that apply specifically to advertising. And so I think, you know, Facebook and social media are really valuable, but there’s also, there’s also Google. Can you talk a little bit about like a vocalizes? And, and I know I’ll use the term blueprints for right now, so maybe we can explain like what those are, but you know, how vocalize is using Google as well to help real estate agents grow their business.
Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, we can talk about Facebook and Google in particular, but yeah. Talking about digital advertising more broadly. There are certainly a few key players like Facebook and Google that currently, you know, dominate a lot of that market, but that landscape’s changing too. So from a channel perspective, you have folks like Amazon tick talk, these other channels that are rapidly growing and from what we’re seeing, that’s going to continue to proliferate.
And the reality is that your customers are going to be using multiple of those. They’re not going to be. In just one place. Sure. Some might use, you know, Facebook or tick doc more than the other, but our philosophy is that we should have programs. And I’ll talk about blueprints more in a second here that are aligned with a marketing goal.
What do you want? You want to generate leads? You want to get a seller listing? What does that goal? And then our blueprints can tap into multiple channels. To to access Google access Facebook without the agent, the user needing to set any of that up. They just pick their goal and their budget, how long they, they want the ad to run.
So that’s really the direction where we’re moving at a vocalize and what will also be, you know, available and, and try to engage over time. And then just going back to that, that time savings component, right? Like if all of that is true, if channels continue to proliferate, if you can get real business results out of multiple channels, when you think about someone needing manually set up and manage all of that and also manage the changes right.
Within all of those channels, Facebook, Google, et cetera, things are changing all the time. New ad products. They changed how their whole interface uses. So it’s just unrealistic to assume that someone’s going to keep up with all of that. So don’t use a tool in technology that does that for you and then just align your marketing and your, your budgets with the results that you want and let the technology take care of the rest in terms of what’s being spent where and on what channel and how much.
So that’s really how we think about the, the land. You brought up a good point too, about like, about budgets. Cause again, I think when we look at the news and we look at the headlines over the past, you know, 18 months we see you know you know, the rocket ship of real estate, right. And, and, and there are agents out there and this is to not downplay anything.
And we feel like we keep using those disclaimers, but it’s like, there are some agents out there who had record breaking years and there were brokerages and offices that had amazing year. But this is where I feel. It’s like, this is the most important time to be looking one and two years down the road with your marketing budgets.
Right? Like let’s, let’s take, let’s take some of that money that you weren’t expecting and really kind of get a solid plan and, and a solid understanding of like how to market, because now I look at marketing, like you know, like, like hydration, right? You, you drink water so that you don’t get thirsty.
In the same way that, you know, with marketing, you, you don’t, you don’t Mar marketing is not a foxhole. Prayer is not something you’re like, all right. Like I have no leads. I have no contacts. It’s time to buy an ad. Those ads, you know, you’re, you’re, you’re using them constantly to whether it’s on Facebook or WhatsApp or messenger or Instagram or Tik TOK or Google, you know, those are out there.
So that. So that, again, you kind of going back to the metaphor, we don’t get thirsty. We’re constantly staying in front of like a new audience. We’re constantly growing that it’s constantly evolving. And I, and I think those are, you know, that now is the time to be really be looking at what that looks like one to two, one and two years down the road.
One of the other things I wanted to talk about, and again, I kind of touched on this a little bit earlier is just about SEO and how, how can, how does advertising kind of speak to SEO and, and how does, how, how are those two things correlated? Because I think sometimes SEO is kind of thought of it’s almost an afterthought, right?
Like my name is on my website. Why am I. Why is Zillow beating me? Why, why, if I Google myself, do does 10 other websites come up before me? And you know, again, me being a background in journalism with, with content creation, always at the forefront of my thoughts, I always just want to say, like, we, you gotta, you gotta create in order to beat these guys out, we have to create, and the successful agents that I see that or the successful agents that I’m seeing, who, who do SEO really well.
They are so focused on their hyper-local markets. I mean, they are literally writing about the flowers in their front yard. And they’re writing about the restaurant down the street, the coffee shop that they go to every single morning. The, the, the, the hyper, the hyper hyperlocal. So how does, how can advertise and how can we kind of work that into SEO strategies and how do those two kind of speak to each other?
Yeah, I’d say that there’s a portion of that where advertising and SEO are complimentary. And then there’s the distinct advantages of, you know, advertising over SEO, especially for, for local businesses. So by no means, is it, you know, am I under a valuable. Valuing the importance of SEO. And if you have time to create all that robust content and really build out your side and focus on those keywords you know, or, you know, partnering with someone that can do that for you.
Absolutely. Because to your earlier point too, you can kill two birds with one stone, right? Maybe you can take that piece of content that’s on your website and it’s helping your SEO. But now you can, you know, run that in an add on try this, engage and target your local market. I think what’s, what’s challenging about SEO for the smaller businesses is twofold.
One. It’s a longer pole game of all that content takes time. And we’ve already spent a lot of time even today, talking about how time is the most valuable resources for just about anyone, certainly agents, right? They need to be off the ground. They might not be able to write eight articles a week. And even if you do that you know, The larger sites.
You know, I think you make an interesting point where there’s an opportunity in that hyper-local sphere to definitely boost your SEO, but you, you know, do these massive websites and portals, the realtors, the Zillow, or Redfin, and most cases, they’re going to continue to beat the largest. When it comes to the smaller sites when it comes to organic ranking.
So should you, you know, spend some time on content creation, think about your website, try and get on that first page. Absolutely. But just know it’s going to be, you know, a potentially longer term investment and it’s hard to you know dislodge some of those folks at the top, whereas advertising, right?
If you need leads today if you want results today, you know, Take 50 bucks, take a hundred bucks, get up and running with a listing or, you know, promote yourself through a easy, like, you know, platform like engage, get up and running in five minutes and circumvent all of that sort of some of those challenges with SEO.
So I’d say that there’s You know, definitely a place for se SEO, but it can be harder for smaller businesses. But to the complimentary point of how, how can they go hand in hand? Let’s say you, you know, when you are focusing on that content creation or you are focusing on SEO, you know, a lot of these programs and, and try to engage certainly has this we have blueprints or programs that can just send traffic back to your websites.
You know, the more visits, the more traffic that you have to your site, the more people that are going around, clicking links, getting onto your site, that’s going to help your help your SEO. So that is that’s probably the, the largest way to that you can be complimentary is how advertising or paid ads can help bolstered that website traffic to, to help everything else that.
Yeah. And I know we’ve talked a lot about engaged, so I’m going, I want to jump into that just a little bit and kind of talk about how tribal it has worked with vocalize to build out, you know, our, our latest product, which is, which is Tribus engage and we keep mentioning blueprints. And so, you know, let’s, let’s kind of talk about, let’s talk about Tribus engaged specifically.
When we, when we started this process, you know earlier this year, just kind of building this out, but building out what this product was going to look like. I think we had a lot of ideas about what kind of ads we thought you know, what, what kind of ads we thought our agents would want us to use?
What kind of ads we thought our brokers want to use? And we really were able to hammer it down to three blueprints. Right. And, and when I say blueprints and Nicki kinda correct me, I think you might be able to speak on this a little bit better, but there’s three kinds of like, you know, Templates with which agents can deploy an ad very, very simply.
And you know, our offerings have to do with, you know, sharing your properties, whether that’s your, your active properties on the market, or even sold properties. If we’re going to be looking for those, you know, the seller leads and then we’ve got those ones that are driving that web traffic. And so Nick, can you kinda talk about.
What we’ve seen with the success of these blueprints and, and what some of those best practices have been both with engage and other blueprints that y’all are using with your, with your clients. Yeah, absolutely. I think you know, we’ve talked about listings and listing ads, and those are obviously bread and butter step.
And then industry given that. You know Tribus customers are already using that platform as a space for doing some listings management. We definitely wanted to make sure that listing promotion w was president in the current blueprints of engaged. So there’s two that are available. One is meant to generate traffic.
So it will just send, you know, people click on those listing ads. We’ll send the traffic directly to your listing detail page. And then there is one. That is meant to generate leads. So it uses a product called Facebook lead ads. And when the user clicks on the ad, a little lead form shows up on their information is captured.
And once that’s submitted we’ve actually set that blueprint up in a way where that lead will automatically go to. The CRM portion of, of try this so that everything’s fully, fully integrated. So that just makes it really easy for folks to pop in and take a listing, be active or sold to your point and get up and running to either generate traffic or generate leads.
And since we’re getting all of that listing data from Tribus it means that, you know, let’s say you’re advertising. Seeing and you’re using maybe the price and the headline or something like that. Whenever the listings data changes, the price changes, a new image comes in that ad can just update automatically.
You know, the, the agent doesn’t need to change anything. So again, just another way of how we’re, w we’re able to save a lot of time and keep the content fresh. And then a lot of them that we have we call our our marketing. Or web traffic. It’s really meant to be kind of a more open blueprint where, you know, kind of type, type your copy, upload an image enter the website that you want to send it to.
So it’s really a flexible a blueprint. If you want to, you know, promote yourself and your agent brand or promoted event. That’s a great one to do. And, and I will say to you, you know, our how we work with partners like Tribus is to really have a roadmap of new programs that we do over time.
So I’ve talked about the three that are, you know, available and engaged. We will be working to deploy. You know, over times that that there’s more specific kind of tailored blueprints to, to help drive certain marketing goals. I think one of the things that really that I really latched onto with a vocalize was the simplicity.
And not, not in the sense of like you know, You know, one, two clicks, but it really kind of breaks down and allows you know, the, the maybe the rookie agent or the rookie digital marker to really understand what’s happening with their ad what’s happening with their spend and the big difference there, obviously being, you know, if you, if you log into Facebook, you create your business page, you go into your, your business account and your ads manager, and, you know, It can get really complicated, especially within the real estate industry, because there’s so much regulations about advertising and those are some of those, or even state by state with, you know, some ads require that you have to have your license.
I know in California, you have to have your DRD license, things like that, all within the. How’s it vocalized kind of like streamlining that process, right? I mean, I think whenever I look at, when I, whenever I dive into these blueprints and really kind of look at the ads that we’re deploying, it’s really kind of amazing to me how we can get from, I want to create an ad to that ad is served and deployed to a targeted audience.
So can you kind of talk about how y’all were able to really kind of innovate that ad, that ad model so that agents can do this? Not just easily, but they can. With competence and know that that ad is being served to, to that targeted audience that they want it. Yeah, absolutely. You know vocalize, we are first and foremost, the technology platform and, and company, but we are also digital marketing experts in certainly in, in real estate.
So when we’re designing these blueprints that we make available. Part of that process is what do we think is important to allow the agent or the broker to change and tweak and update versus what are maybe some of those decisions or settings at the, the ad, the campaign, et cetera level that we know what the best practice is.
And so we’ll just make that best practice available for everyone. And they don’t need to make a decision. They don’t need to decide what that is because there are literally hundreds of things that go into building an ad on any of these channels. And a good majority of those are going to be pretty foreign, pretty esoteric.
If you are not a marketer yourself. So things like the bidding goal, the optimization. Setting the campaign objective the size of the lookalike certain things around compliance and Facebook or Google’s housing and employment and credit regulations. Like those decisions can be really complicated.
And aren’t really important for an agent or broker to. To me to know, we know what that best practices, we know how to set it up for success. So we just kind of bake that in behind the scenes. Everyone gets that. And then we allow again, the, the, the agents to change what we think might be important to them, you know, customize your copy.
If you want, you know, type in some, some custom tax or upload a, you know, your own image of the listing. If you don’t like the one coming from the app MLS. So we’re really able to streamline the decisions. That the agent needs to make, and that allows them to also add their, you know, the expertise that we don’t necessarily have, and that’s that local expertise, right.
They’re going to know their market and their area area way better than we do. So when it comes to, how should we message this? How are we talking to the audience that we’re we’re we’re going after here, those are the things we really want the agents to be able to control because they’re going to be better at it.
Yeah. And I think, you know, one of the features that I really like is that you kind of touch on it, like w what are the, what does that audience, and then also like the, the geographic targeting, right? I’m a big fan of, of pushing you know, look, let’s make data. Decisions when it comes to our ad spins rather than just saying, all right, like I have, I put a hundred dollars behind an ad.
Let’s wait for these leads to start rolling in. It’s like, you know, we can look at, and again, bringing it all back to that. Everything’s integrated everything’s in one place. With your Tribus’ website, we’re able to look at where is all of the traffic coming from our website and what properties are they looking at more than other properties let’s advertise those properties to those models.
We know that people were relocating a lot last year, people were looking to get out of the city. And so where were they looking to go and where are they coming from? And let’s make sure that those ads are serving, like serving our audience. And we’re getting, like you said, kind of, kind of jumping back to some of those stats.
We’re getting a better return on our ad spend. And again, we’re speaking to that audience that really. You know, it is ready to buy or ready to relocate. And so we’re, again, we’re just getting more value from, from that ad, from that ad buy. Absolutely. Well, Nick, you know, we’re coming up on time here, but if there’s anything, you know, what kind of advice would you give for agents both with interested in to vocalize and engage.
And then if there was one piece of advice that you could give them, what would a, what would that be to, to, to plan their marketing strategy? Moving from. Yeah. I mean, I would say, you know, if you’re an agent or broker and you’re relatively new to, to marketing and advertising to just to really test it out, right.
It doesn’t take a lot of budget. You can, you know, throw $50 at a listing you know, over a couple of weeks and just see how it works for you. So really just encouraging to, to test it out. So it doesn’t take any time to set up your art it’s already available to you as a part of, of tribalists. And, and, and just to see, you know, how it can help your business.
I’m really encouraged to folks that you know, are looking for buyer seller leads to get that, that lead generation a blueprint and try, I think again, just going back to. How does marketing becomes, can otherwise live on an island, just something that’s core integrated in your business. Those are such an awesome example of that, right?
If you’re using Tribus already for managing all your leads, now think of, you know, snapping on a program, that’s really filling that funnel and really acting as a lead engine could continue to populate contacts. So that’s when we’re really excited about, so I just say. You, you know there’s really, really low hurdles to getting up and running with it, test it out if you haven’t used it before.
And then, yeah, just love any feedback from folks as they start using the products. Great. Well, thanks again, everyone for tuning in to another episode, episode of brokerage insider, my name is Britt Chester. I’m the director of client success here at Tribus. We are the producers of brokerage insider. Today we were joined by Nick mark, a Mo of a vocalized.
Nick, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you Britt.
