Marketing Technology Ecosystems | Todd Alexander (Ray White)

Rob: And welcome to another episode of the Property Edge podcast. My name’s Rob Turnbull, and today we’re going to go a little bit different. We are going to look at marketing technology for real estate agencies, and there’s no one better to talk about that with than the head of marketing for Ray White, corporate based in Sydney. Mr. Todd Alexander, welcome Todd.

Todd: Thank you, Rob. Thank you very much for having me. Excited to be here.

Rob: To start with, I think the listeners would like to know how an Adelaide boy who went to Brighton High ends up in Sydney running marketing for one of the largest agencies in the country.

Todd: Yeah, good question. The simplest answer is I chased a girl. A girl is now my wife and we’ve got a beautiful little girl together. And so yeah, one of those sort of sliding door moments where I could have stayed home in Adelaide or try and do something, which is pretty cool and pretty unique and moved to Sydney and it’s now been 13 years and yeah, Sydney’s been really good to us. And to be honest, Rob, I genuinely would’ve never thought I’d be in the fortunate position I am where I’m the head of marketing for Australaisa’s largest real estate group. So I get to pinch myself every day. So it’s been, yeah, it’s been pretty cool.

Rob: But you started out at an agency, correct? You learned the ropes, running the marketing for an agency, and then progressed up to corporate.

Todd: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. So eight years ago I was with our Double Bay office and certainly a baptism of fire within the real estate industry. Some of the biggest names, I think within Sydney Real Estate, but also Australia’s real estate. Yeah, Gavin Rubinstein, obviously from Luxe Listings was someone that I got to work with. Got to see the way that he goes about his craft and just his relentless pursuit of perfection is probably a simple way of describing the way that he goes about it. But there’s some pretty other incredible people that work within that business from, you know, Elliot Placks to Ashley Bierman and Warren Ginsburg, these guys that were so good to me and got to learn the craft. And without them I wouldn’t be here where I’m today.

Rob: Yeah, that’s beautiful when you can get that sort of experience under such experts, isn’t it? So perhaps we’ll jump into marketing technology now and from a, if we start with Ray White, what you’re comfortable to share with Ray White. Can you explain the Ray White One System? What’s the purpose of that and how does it help the individual agent on the ground?

Todd: So the Ray White One System is a consolidation of around 30 different pieces of tech, which all talk to each other, which ultimately drives efficiency and profitability for our agents. And you know, profitability can be bottom line because we’re able to negotiate deals with an economy of scale being so big that we can get a bigger discount for a lot of different pieces of technology versus I’m just going to create Todd Alexander Real Estate Group, and then I’ve gotta go find email provider, then find an internet provider, and so on and so forth. So one, we’re able to negotiate a really good deal so ultimately it leads to a better profit line because we’re not, our guys don’t need to invest as much in tech. But two, that the key here, and this is probably the most important, is all of our systems talk to each other. And so, if we can drive efficiency of use, because our CRM talks to an email provider, which then talks to another piece of technology that we own, then everyone’s talking to each other, which then ultimately leads to more efficiencies in the business. Which hopefully means our people can then focus on prospecting and listing and selling.

Rob: Gotcha. And so from a marketing technology perspective, I know you’ve got Canva involved now, and I think Canva will be part of that One System platform. It seems to me, and this is a bit of a gimme question for you, but obviously giving your agencies access to Canva means that you can create consistency across all your marketing assets that they’re creating. You can shoot things out and they can use these things that are consistent with the brand, but equally it’s a brilliant tool. I mean, we use it ourselves. I know a lot of businesses use it, particularly for the non design minded. It’s a really simple tool. What has been the effect at agent level of that partnership?

Todd: Yeah, it’s more time back in the diaries, probably the biggest measurement of success. The best thing for me about Canva outside of all those things that you’ve mentioned is their APIs gives us the ability to create a really unique platform within Canva. And so what I mean by that is, there’s two APIs in particular that we’re able to tap into. One’s the auto fill and the other one is the Connect API. And so through software that we’ve created ourselves, we can create a workflow where the agent doesn’t necessarily leave our ecosystem for them to get marketing assets, which are housed in Canva. So really loosely speaking, we’ve created EARS, “Express Auction Reporting System.” So on a Saturday being game day for our industry. We’ll do one in four auctions around Australia in a week. So on Saturday was when we do the majority of the auctions, and so as an agent, we can actually send them a text message. They tell us how well the auction went, how many registered bidders, how many active bidders, and then what was the final price. Those details then go into Canva, then through the API Canva spits back a social asset right on their phone, which then they can download and then they can share across their social media channels. And so that’s one example of many different workflows that we’ve been able to create using their APIs. But Canva powering the design asset. And so from a marketing perspective, to be able to use Canva as the one source of like truth for all those marketing assets, but then have all these different little workflows, which our agents don’t really need to go to Canva to get a marketing asset is really efficient. And as I said earlier, puts time back in our people’s diaries to look after our customers.

Rob: That is a brilliant use of technology attached to marketing to create an outcome that actually makes life easier and better for your end user, the agent. I know there’ll be agents and agencies listening, going, we are never going to be able to set that up, right? But anyone can set up brand templates in Canva, right? So you can get your designer, or if you’ve got an in-house designer, they can set that up and then no one can mess with your brand design, right? And so it can be super easy to create stuff, even if you’re not using APIs to auto populate and sending text messages.

Todd: Yeah, correct. I’m super lucky. I’ve got five designers in my team here in Sydney and we’re always just adding and refreshing the templates that we’ve got in there. And we’ve probably got a thousand in Canva alone, let alone other brand platforms that we’ve got to create signboards and press ads and deals and brochures. But within Canva, the one click distribution to our entire network is such a benefit to us. So you can imagine like we’re rolling out a new campaign, or we need to make an adjustment to an existing template instead of having to go to individual service accounts or go to individual suppliers, whatever it is, it’s just one centralised location, then it’s one click full distribution. So again, very efficient from my perspective to be able to distribute any evolutions to some of our marketing templates.

Rob: Yeah. And that’s something that, you know, if there’s a group of three agencies, they can do the same thing, right? They all get onto the same account and then one person creates it once everyone can use it. I love that.

Todd: Yeah, like it’s, I know it might seem like a bit of a no brainer, but there’s no point being part of a network when you are inconsistent in your delivery of marketing material. It just shows a disconnect. There’s a level of unprofessionalism as well about it. I’m not saying we’re perfect, we’ve got opportunities to be better, but for the most part, we are pretty good when we execute the Ray White yellow with the Ray White logo. You see it and you know that it’s part of our group. And yeah, the way that we do brand management platforms is a really important part to that.

Rob: Yeah. Well, let’s go one step deeper then and get a bit more granular. So your agents created something using whatever. How do you help them understand the customer experience at that end? How do you train them up to understand the effect of what they’re doing at the on the ground?

Todd: Yeah, that’s a ripping question. So we survey every buyer and seller that transacts with us. It’s all automated. As part of our CRM, we believe in surveying every customer because the needs and wants of the customer is always evolving. So unless you’re actually surveying everybody in real time, you’re never going to keep abreast of those needs and wants as they evolve. And so with this platform, it actually gives insights into where our customers are coming from and like very loosely speaking in the last report that we pulled I think it was over like a three month period, there was 20,000 response from our survey. So 20,000 vendors and just under 55% of them was either a previous experience or a referral or recommendation. So like, why is that really important for me is, yeah, it’s cool, like we can create all this amazing material, but 50% of the time, based on this, the customer is already in your world and so the emphasis on customer experience and making sure you understand and exceed the expectation of the customer. That should be first and foremost, like there’s no point in having the most sexiest looking marketing if you actually don’t have a really great nurturing ecosystem. And so, we’ve invested heavily in providing technology, which supports that. And there’s a bit of a buzzword within our world at the moment, which is something called Nurture Cloud, which is a piece of technology which we’ve bought and we’ve evolved, and which is going to be our future moving forward. But the idea is that, it supports our agents in nurturing our customers, and marketing plays a role, but for me, the fundamental needs to be like, let’s make sure we look after our own backyard and look after our customers, first and foremost.

Rob: All right. So I’m going to put something to you here. Imagine a couple of gun agents come and say, we are going to set up our own agency. We want you to run marketing for us. You agree. And, what is on your shopping list? What marketing technology is right at the top there? What are you subscribing to from day one?

Todd: Yeah. Nurture Cloud first and foremost by a long way. I know that’s a very selfish sort of answer because Nurture Cloud is a Ray White owned piece of technology. But yeah, first and foremost it would be Nurture Cloud because it’s designed to be able to be a one stop agent operating system from prospecting to looking after the customer, live vendor reporting, so on and so forth. So for me, Nurture Cloud would be the top. Second would be Canva really, because, yeah, I just think Canva is just a great tool and as you alluded to earlier, like anybody can use it and it’s just so efficient, but the intuitiveness of it is just really great. And also gives you the ability to personalize it with the API, so that’s really great. A digital listing presentation I think is also really important. There’s a couple of good ones out there, third parties and the fourth one probably would be, a reporting tool, which really understands like how we’re going in the marketplace and if it’s a market share report or just understanding how our competitors are going, just to give us clear sight of where opportunities are and where we’re getting beaten in some of our core areas would be really a really good tool to have.

Rob: So you’ve got all that set up. How many personas, roughly are you creating off the bat?

Todd: Oh, that’s a great question. How many personas.

Rob: While you think about it and just explain for the people out there, it’s a bit of a marketing term persona. So persona is essentially a picture of a generic type of customer that you might treat differently to other types of customers. So a persona might be single, first home buyer under 30. Or newly retired couple looking to downsize in the city, something like that. So you can create loads and loads of personas, but off the bat, what are the most important ones for you?

Todd: Yeah, I might take a different track if that’s okay, Rob and choose, a recruitment persona. You know, to quite Brian White if you are not recruiting, you’re not growing and we are just starting out in our own little real estate journey of team of three. And a big part of our growth ambition is how are we’re going to recruit. And so I’d probably create a persona of what sort of agents that are existing in the industry that we want to target to be able to bring them over what is our value proposition to be able to bring them over. So persona number one. Persona number two. Again, I think this is probably market dependent, but let’s say I’m working in the southwest suburbs of Adelaide, so my home area of Brighton, Somerton park and Glenelg. I would probably say I would be targeting upsizers and also downsizers as probably my second and third personas.

Rob: Brilliant. And when you’re running that agency. Is everything you do based around personas how important are they to your operation?

Todd: Yeah, I’ll be honest. I’d probably say we don’t go into the granular level of breaking down each personas like we have here. I think we need to be quite broad. And so there’s always the recruitment lens because again, to my point from Brian White, if we’re not recruiting, we’re not growing. So we’ve always gotta have a lens around what does recruitment look like and what is our value proposition connected to that. The second one is more broad, where it’s probably buyers, sellers, landlords, and tenants. So they’re probably our four main sort of transactional customers that we would have lenses on, but outside of that, my team and I probably don’t go any deeper than that.

Rob: Yeah, that’s fair. And also, I mean, I guess your direct customer base are franchisees, right?

Todd: Yeah, correct. Yeah. Well, it’s a good debate. It’s quite easy to say that our primary customer is our members. But, the good debate that we have internally is, well, our vendors pay our franchisees. Our franchisees pay us. So should we be looking after our vendors or should we be looking after our franchisees. So it is always a really good debate and to quote Jason Andrew, our CEO up in Queensland, like he’ll always say our primary customer is our future. And I sort of like the context that gives because at any given time it could be our vendors, which are our primary customer, but then it could be our franchisees, which are our primary customers. So just understanding that balance given the time of year.

Rob: Yep. Fair enough. All right, let’s shift pace a little bit and we’ll talk about paid and rented. Paid, paid, rented ecosystem. So, domains realestate.com, even Facebook and all the socials where you sort of pay to play and then your owned ecosystem, that’s your CRM, that’s your website, that’s your channels, controled channels. What’s your perspective about how marketing and the tools that you have and can get people from those paid channels into your own ecosystem?

Todd: They’re so important. You’ve gotta get a balance of all possible channels made invaluable. So I always break it down, especially when I’m having meetings with franchisees around owned, earned, and paid. So to your point, what earned channels can we really maximize, which have zero cost to it? What earned channels can we get? And that’s a probably a PR and a media place. And you know, we’re very fortunate with our media team. We’ve got a 50% share of voice when it comes to all real estate related content being distributed cost Australia. And that’s pretty powerful, like when you think about it. So, why is that important for us? Well, two is good profiling for our agents and for us as a franchisor. But more importantly, our people can sit in front of Mr. And Mrs. Vendor and say, hand on heart. If you work with Ray White, you’ve got a 50% chance of us getting free advertising for your property. That’s all by driving acquisition to our environment. And then the third is probably a two layered approach to the paid. You’ve got VPA and then you’ve got your own investment into your own business. So I think finding the balance of all three is really important. Focusing all on one is probably remiss of the other two. And you can quite easily just get seduced by the easy wins of just doing a bunch of paid. But the juice is really when you’ve got the balance of all three, especially within in your own environment. And just going back to that metric around 20,000 vendors with over 55% of them coming from either previous experience or a referral that just shows the importance of just looking after your own nurturing ecosystem.

Rob: Yeah. And I guess one of the benefits of your own system. One of the powerful bit is the data that you have and you ongoingly collect particularly about behaviors whether it be website visits, clicks on listings returns, all that sort of thing. Analytics is something that you’d look at a lot, I’d suggest, and particularly your franchisees. How do you get your franchisees into that game though? Because I mean, I look at it a lot, but am I not my job as marketing? The rest of my team don’t look at it at all. How do you get an agent or a principle or someone in that business interested and up to scratch on that side of things?

Todd: Again, like another really good question we were talking about this the other week actually. It’s like the art of influence and understanding, what is, what is like if we got. So if we’ve got two people that we need to influence our business owners and our agents, so understanding what is the main driver of those two customers in franchisee world? So as a franchisee or a principle, it’s profitability. So showing insights into data to help get more profitable businesses outcomes. That’s probably a big way of influencing them. One is agents themselves and the agents, they get inspired, they get influenced by leads. So if you think about those two really key drivers, then using data to support those two sort of drivers driving forces is really important. And so if I can say to Mr. And Mrs. Or Mr. Or Mrs. Business owner, by using data and using benchmarking against other businesses in our network of your size, are overindexing in desk costs or you are overindexing in marketing, or you’re not spending enough in marketing and in tow, you’re not getting enough leads to your agents. And then that means that you’re having a less profitable business. And so we can use data in a way which supports business decisions and yeah, we’ve got a whole network finance team and profit team, which roles is to go into our businesses and make sure that they’re using data to make better business decisions about where they invest into their own respective parts of the business.

Rob: Yeah, that’s a very powerful support system that you provide. But let’s go one level down, one more level, more granular. You’ve set up your agency with your two gun mates. What data are you looking at? What marketing data are you looking at?

Todd: Calls made and appraisals conducted. They’re probably the two. Not very marketing specific, very sales performance, but, yeah, I like to quote Mark McLeod, our chief strategy officer. You know, if you’re not making calls, you’re not making appraisals. If you’re not making appraisals, then you’ve got no future business.

Rob: Yeah. Yep. That’s fair.

Todd: I think if you’re a business owner and you’re looking at two metrics to be able to have really good, robust conversations with your people, then yeah, it would be calls and then appraisals. If you’ve got a marketing lens, I’d probably be thinking, don’t get so seduced by novelty metrics like impressions in social media world because impressions and eyeballs are great, but sometimes those big numbers don’t necessarily lead to something tangible like leads. So you’ve got an acquisition strategy for using paid social media, search engine marketing or Google Display Network or whatever it is, then I’d be looking at something like actual leads generated leads, which then leads into phone calls, which then leads into appraisals and so on.

Rob: Mm-hmm.

Todd: So I know it’s a bit more than two probably we’ve given you three there, but yeah, they’re probably my top three.

Rob: Yeah. And it’s a full journey, right? It’s just marketing starts before you get to the lead perspective, before you get to the closed deal and all that sort of thing.

Todd: Yeah. It’s an interesting debate, isn’t it? Like don’t mind me like sort of going off piste here, but we always had this debate around when does the actual customer experience start? Is it 12, six months before they’re even ready to come to market? Is it two years before? We always talk about, especially here internally, we’re in this game of building authentic relationships with our customers and they’re building a trust profile of you as an agent. And so how do they build trust? They sort of see you in social media world. They see the results, they see the DLs in their letterbox, they see your billboards and bus stops all around the place, and they’re just sort of slowly piecing this trust profile of yourself. And at times it can be years before they even interact with you. So be pretty critical on what you’re putting out there because it could be the difference in the next listing or not.

Rob: Yeah. And that’s where brand and awareness marketing is so important. Or just brand full stop, right? And either way, that your personal brand or it’s your agency brand, because that’s what people remember. Just quickly, you got a wishlist for any marketing tech that doesn’t exist out there or data that doesn’t exist and your goodness me, you’d wish you had that cause that would make your life easier.

Todd: I would love to have one thing that does everything, the MarTech space, PropTech space, it is very disjointed. Like we mentioned, you asked about our one system and that’s 30 pieces of technology like Utopia would be if there was one thing that did them all. You know, from CRM to Canva to an email bulk SMS platform to a market share analysis tool. Do paid social media. Like one thing to do them all would be really awesome.

Rob: It’s funny, number of other guests on this podcast have said exactly the same thing when it came to PropTech as well. Yeah. And just, we might finish on AI, your perspective on AI right now, is it providing leads that are solid leads? Is it closing deals? And where you think it’s going to end up in the next 12 to 24 months?

Todd: Yeah, it’s moving pretty quick, isn’t it? It only feels like yesterday that chat GPT and Claude AI really sort of hit our worlds and now you just see it in everything. Canva just bought or I think they bought Leonardo AI about six months ago, and so they’re going to try to plug that in I assume, into their tech stack. I guess to answer the question, it plays a significant role in our day to day. There is a difference between machine learning and AI, and we’re certainly playing in the machine learning space where it’s going to make our agents world more efficient. So instead of making a hundred cold calls, they may make 10 warm calls and they may be the only 10 calls they need to do a day to get the same outcomes as doing a hundred cold calls. So I think from an efficiency perspective, it’s going to be good for our industry. I think AI, we still dunno what it means for the consumer, so for vendors and buyers and landlords and tenants. I think that space is super interesting and yeah, I guess let’s be open-minded when that sort of hits the consumer world. I guess side of that, it’s, I don’t know, Rob. It’s an exciting time. It’s a scary time. It’s happening so quick. Are consumers ready for it? I don’t know. I don’t even know if I’m ready for it. But yeah, I think it’s something you need to be early adopters of. Otherwise your competitors will be across it and then they’ll be the ones that are ahead of it. So, yeah, I guess tread with caution, but also be understanding of if you’re not doing it, your competitors will be, and they’ll be ahead of you when it comes time for you to finally get on it.

Rob: A lot of both marketing and property appraisals and looking for customers is about data, right? And one thing that machine learning does really well, is sifting through that data and finding trends or finding connections that manually you wouldn’t find. You know, it’s really hard to dig out and that’s where I’m excited from an intent perspective on customers. You know, where are people, what are people doing, who have intent when it comes to a purchase or a specific type of research. And I can see in the next 12 months a lot of the tools that people are using right now in their own platforms, they’ll get tweaked to start putting that sort of capability in using something behind the scenes that you just, you’ll start ending up paying an extra five bucks a month for, or something like that.

Todd: Yeah. It’s, I got asked a question maybe a month or so ago about just consumer and how they, how are we going to be marketing to them? And it sort of just instinctively just went down the AI route. And I sort of took it another term, which was the way that we digest media has evolved so quickly because of the smartphone. And so by 2030, what does smartphones look like and what does it look like when we try to talk to the consumer about branding, positioning, tactical messages around, I don’t know, we sell one in four homes, or whatever it is. I think that’s probably for me, like the most interesting of where are we going to be in five years? Because like the iPhone came around like 2008, like in the great scheme of things, like it’s only been around. Like not even 25 years. And so in another five years, like how do we digest media? How do we absorb different content styles and how are we personalizing the content we deliver to the device? That’s a really interesting proposition, which I’m excited to see where we land because yeah, that landscape is evolving just as quickly as the AI landscape is changing.

Rob: Yeah. You’re bang on there. And I think, I think that’s a good spot to end. I think us two marketers, we could probably yabber on about this for a long, long time, but I think we’ll spare a lot of our listeners for that. So let’s not do that. Thank you for joining the podcast today. I really do appreciate it.

Todd: My pleasure. Really appreciate the opportunity, Rob. Thank you.

Note: This transcript has been edited for clarity.