You may be a big social media sensation with your own gifs and hashtags, but does your local newspaper ring you for local market commentary or to profile your latest listings?
Chances are you may be perceived to be a big deal online but most of your buyers still read the old fashioned paper. So what to do?
Every Ray White real estate agent in Australia and New Zealand can take heart in the fact that they work under the oldest and most respected brand who collectively gets the lion’s share of media attention in our category.
In 2018-19 we received some 20,000 media mentions worth $75 million in advertising space rate to our network. Think of that as free publicity.
I had worked in the media for some 20 years but even I am still learning from our chairman Brian White and our managing director Dan White about working with journos. The Whites have every single national newspaper real estate section editor in their phones and often on their favourites’ speed dial. If we get a mention in a national paper, Dan will often ring them and say thanks. It’s simply nice manners.
So if your name is written down in a beat-up notebook by a working journo somewhere then chances are I know you are one of our best star sales performers. I get the media clips for our group so I can tell who is talking to their local media. But I think many of you could take a leaf out of Brian White’s book and call your local media more often.
As a brand we measure our ‘share of voice’ and it sits at 60 per cent compared to main agency rivals, according to media intelligence iSentia. That is pretty huge considering our sales market share has just hit an all-time high of 11.45 per cent.
There’s three key ways to get publicity for your business: you can pay for it, distribute it yourself or earn it. Earned media is the most valuable because it’s the coverage money can’t buy. It’s also the hardest to obtain.
Paying for publicity is paid media. This includes pay-per-click, Google AdWords, banner ads, sponsorships, direct mail, billboards plus print, radio and television ads.
Delivering publicity yourself is owned media. Anything you directly control including your publications or reports, your website, blogs and your social media accounts.
But publicity you receive from independent sources is earned media. This is the sweet spot where our brand dominates. This includes newspaper, TV, radio and online articles, even customer reviews, social media mentions, shares or retweets.
So if you want to really become an attraction agent then you need to revisit the basics of how Ray White as a brand got to be as big as it did.
We are a marketing machine at our core. Given our size and scale - we have a footprint in almost every city in Australia - and we cemented our place through local papers.
I have said it before but I urge all of you to revisit print marketing and to get to know your local newspaper real estate editor. These people are busier than they have ever been since the endless rounds of redundancies, but the fact is news is still news.
So you may have a cracker sales result or an epic story to tell but if you don’t have a relationship with your local paper, you might as well just tell your Insta fans and hope for a few likes.
Even if you’ve found the perfect journalist for your story and you blindly reach out to them - they may just ignore you as they don’t know you! Or they may ignore you for commercial reasons as you are not an advertiser.
The worst that can happen is you revert back to a social media post. But the best that can happen is you achieve earned media, talk directly to your core audience, and in doing so you build your profile and start a relationship with a journalist that will serve you well down the track!
Alex Tilbury - Media Manager
