As a creative agency, there is nothing we love more than helping our clients achieve their goals. Their success is our success, which is why we were over the moon when at the end of 2018, our innovative video campaign for OBrien Real Estate, ‘Real life, real stories. Real Estate Agents’, helped them get recognised in their industry.
The problem
Upon review of the Real Estate industry, we discovered a common trend in marketing communications: every agent was talking about him or herself. We wanted to flip that conversation and make it about the clients.
As an industry, we found Real Estate to be lacking in empathy and humility in the majority of communications and marketing. We wanted to make these elements front and centre. As we found, a lot of the time the reasons behind people selling their homes are fundamentality intertwined with human stories or hardships, i.e. divorce, death or family hardships. This is something agents and vendors don’t talk about, so we decided to in this social media campaign.
The solution
So, we put our agency’s brains and talent together and created the innovative campaign for OBrien Real Estate that put their clients at the forefront, ‘Real life, real stories. Real Estate Agents’. In this campaign, we featured a range of their past customers giving raw unscripted testimonials of their experience.
We selected customers from each office that had a unique reason for selling their home. Then, in a one-on-one candid conversation with each customer, we talked about their motivation to sell their home. This was all recorded on video.
What we found was that the stories behind selling homes or properties were engaging, heartbreaking and uplifting. For example, one customer’s reason for selling the family home was due to the death of a loved one. He was more concerned who was going to be stepping into their old family home and be making it their new one, then any dollar value.
~Business Game Changer Special Promotion~
The execution
Once the testimonial video content was captured, we edited into bite-sized videos, 30seconds to 1 minute long, which we posted across the social media platforms, Facebook, Instagram and most pointedly, YouTube. On YouTube, we created playlists of the videos so audiences could easily find other videos in the campaign and learn more about OBrien Real Estate as a brand.
The short length of the videos meant that the audiences attention was held for the duration of the clips and the message could be sufficiently communicated to them before they moved on to other content. This proved to be incredibly successful.
Results
The ‘Real life, real stories. Real Estate Agents’ campaign delivered solid results for OBrien Real Estate. The campaign positioned OBrien Real Estate in the market as a brand that genuinely cares about its clients and has a strong focus on the human experience of real estate.
How do you interact with emotive content online? Are you more likely to respond to storytelling over facts and figures?
By Sonia Majkic and Tamara Alaveras
About the authors
Sonia and Tamara are co-founders and Managing Directors of the digital marketing agency, 3 Phase Marketing. Sonia has 15 years’ experience in media, sales and marketing, and Tamara has more than a decade in marketing roles including experience in Victorian government agencies and corporate teams.
3 Phase Marketing: https://3phasemarketing.com.au/
Sonia LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sonia-majkic-787a1b60/?originalSubdomain=au
Tamara LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tamara-alaveras-40645534
3 Phase Marketing LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/3-phase-marketing
