In a world that is so noisy, the best way to be heard is not to shout – but to whisper. As the old saying goes, if you zig when they zag, you’ll get noticed.
Why do real estate agents need to concern themselves with ‘noise’?
Well, in 1970 the average person was exposed to around 500 marketing messages per day. In 2018, this number is in excess of 5,000 – so that is what we mean by noise.
Two main factors are contributing to the noise:
- Firstly, the increase in the number of channels or ways that we are exposed to these messages. Before 1970 there were only a few ways to reach your consumers, and this has obviously exploded with the creation of new media.
- Secondly, the increase in the amount of content that is being produced and distributed via these channels. Forbes estimates that there are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data in the world, with 90% having been created in the last two years.
With so much information available on how to yell louder, or even yell better – few industries have stopped to ask themselves a critical question: “What impact is that having on customers?”
According to a major ethnographic study performed by Canada Post suggests that the attention span in the Western World has compressed from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2015.
That is a 33.3% reduction of cognitive load processing in half a generation.
So how do you advertise your professional services to a customer with a rapidly deteriorating ability to pay attention?
Simple. You stop talking at them and you start talking to them, about them. Again.
Personalisation of Professional Services
In a survey of over 1,300 professional service buyers and sellers, CRM giant Infusionsoft found that the number one thing that they wanted from their professional service providers (68%) was their specialised skills and expertise.
Your customers want access to YOU – and they want to tap into your professional skills and insights, in a way that feels personal to their needs.
Personalisation is the ability to optimise the timing, content, and strategic intent of your communication with each of your customers.
But how to do it at scale?
The building blocks required to be able to provide personal service to a large number of people in your community is data.
Specifically, the data that shows the history of service between the agent and the customer.
This contextual information allows an agent to know who to connect with and what to say, at the right time. The agent to pick up the relationship in a way that has context and meaning for the customer.
At Aire, we have analysed the data sets of over 600 real estate agents and we also monitor the market to see where opportunities are lost. The strongest factor we have found in the propensity to ‘list’ with a particular agent is the strength of engagement – being a history of personal service over time. The strongest insulating factor to protect an agent from ‘lost opportunity’ which occurs when a competitor lists a contact’s property? You guessed it – a history of personal service over time.
The volume of data and the individual agent’s capacity makes it difficult to ‘farm’ in the traditional sense. Knowing who to call and what to say from any number of contacts in a CRM takes a lot of mental labour – energy that is better channelled into work at the customer interface.
We’re not sure anyone began a career in real estate to spend their day on software working out the next best right thing to do.
Can AI help?
The truth is that Ai is actually much better at working out the next best right thing to do than humans. They can analyse data and synthesise information from various data sources in a process that we can only describe as human super-thinking.
Our Ai platform for real estate agents, Rita, can analyse data in the CRM as well as monitor the local market and then predict which individuals from the sea of contacts would be the best to connect with, on a daily basis.
By prioritising these suggestions, agents can confidently maintain relationships knowing that their precious time is applied where it will be most valuable.
That is how we personalise at scale.
