STRATEGY SUMMIT FOR BROKERS IN THE COVID-19 CLIMATE
Dylan Webber specialises in helping Mortgage Brokers save time and save money through helping them really nail social media. Dylan will help you build a strategy for your social channels that will not help you generate new leads, but also lift your brand recognition and identity. If you could magically put 50 people in a room who need a Mortgage Broker in your town, how many would be able to say they’ve heard of you? If your answer is under 50%, you’ve got a branding problem. That is where Dylan is able to come in, create some marketing goals with you. and help you create strategically crafted content designed to achieve these goals. We’ll segment your audience and put some strategies in place to talk them on a much deeper level.
Video Domain is a strategy-first video agency helping businesses to create beautiful content that is underpinned by one goal – personalisation. Creating amazing content is easy, but creating content that will speak to your target audience in a way that generates bottom line results is the trick. From planning to publishing, Video Domain will help you smash your marketing goals with innovative and constantly renewed approaches to social and digital platforms. With creators all over the country, we can help bring your next campaign idea to life.
Nadine: Hello and welcome, everyone. We’re here running a short summit with the aim to provide brokers with the general and industry-specific strategies, hacks, and information to assist with the continuation of business through the current COVID crisis. We’ll cover four important topics delivered by industry experts in their respective fields.
Social Media, Branding & Video will be covered by Dylan from Video Domain. Hi, Dylan. Dylan, why is it important to continue to grow your brand socially and what are some strategies to help brokers achieve this in the current environment?
Dylan: That’s a great question thanks, Nadine. Thanks for having me on. First off, I want to start just by encouraging everybody with social media, it’s become, everyone calls it a new medium but being around since 2008, now twelve years, I’m almost considering it a traditional platform because we’re starting to learn and then it’s become such a powerful tool with what people are able to do and the numbers of people using it in Australia just keeps on growing and growing and growing so some of the crazy statistics I’ve got here in front of me: Facebook, 15 million active users which means people are checking their accounts at least every 30 days every month. LinkedIn’s up past 5 million for the first time in 2020 which is incredible and 15 million across YouTube as well.
So there’s three platforms there where you’ve just got a large audience available for you to talk to. Couple that with currently during where we’re sitting in the market at the moment, you’ve got people working from home and we’ve seen a massive spike in the statistics of phone usage, how long people are spending on devices at the moment just being from home which is another motivating factor for a lot of businesses to start creating content now because I love what Leah said before about creating content directed at a really personal target audience right now because when the dust settles from all of this you’ll be top of mind and you’ll also be an authority in your space, a leader in the industry.
So I want to talk at the moment about content marketing and organic content marketing which means the creation of videos and pictures and blogs and how-tos and educational material that brokers can post across their platforms because content marketing in 2017 became the number one form of social media marketing and that’s because it’s a great way to build trust with an audience, build brand awareness, generate new interests with people that aren’t currently in your community, drive traffic to a website, create a community around your business, and create engagement with people that really matter to you whether that’s first-home buyers or people looking to invest in property.
The first step for any person who’s looking to build their audience around their brand needs to be what Leah mentioned before which is identifying their target audiences, brokers can have more than one target audience but for each specific campaign, I think the first step before they start anything, before they hit record on their camera and record themselves speaking, they need to really have a clear understanding of who they’re talking to for that particular message and then the biggest gift of our generation to advertisers at the moment is the ability to personalize messages and then target that same person in the back end of Facebook or LinkedIn or YouTube or all platforms allow you to target people.
So basically identifying your audience, talking to that particular audience, and then being able to target them again is we’ve never been able to do that in marketing previously, we’re using television or radio or billboard so it is such a powerful tool for personalization. I’ve got a couple of tips here for how people can build their audience at the moment being in the situation we’re in and here’s just a couple of things brokers can start doing right now.
So like I said, first step, identify their target audiences and get really specific, how old are they, where do they live, how much money do they make, how many kids do they have, the more specific you get, the more personal you can be and all those options are available to you to target them again. Once you know your target audience it makes it easier to choose the right social media platforms.
So choosing the right platforms where you can spend a lot of your time whether that’s LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube or it could be all three, curating their content is a super important tip. So curating your content means using the same logo, using the same color palette, the same fonts, having a really unison sort of brand identity across all of your platforms. So doesn’t matter whether someone sees you on TV, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, you’ve got the same brand identity across all the platforms, so if they’ve seen a flyer of yours in the mail or they’ve watched a television ad, when they come to your Facebook channel, it’s all right in unison with how they’ve seen you previously and they can relate to you within milliseconds.
Creating a voice and a culture for your channels so if you’re going to be funny, educational, professional, family orientated, I think it’s important to choose what you’re going to be whether if you’re a funny person, then I highly recommend being authentic to yourself and being funny or if you’re a professional sort of person, it’s sticking to what you know best and going swimming in the lane that you already know. But be real, be open, be empathetic with your audience and the major thing is being relevant to your audience.
Number one way to grow any audience on Facebook or LinkedIn or wherever it may be is post consistently relevant videos to your audience so what they want to hear, things that are actually going to solve their problem. So knowing your target audiences so well that you can identify maybe for first home buyers what are the last 30 conversations you’ve had with your last thirty first home buyers and is there a pretty consistent problem that they’re all facing that you can start talking about on Facebook and that they’re going to relate to.
I’ve got tips for you with posting on Facebook, specifically Facebook. And the first tip is making videos and posting them natively to Facebook. So what I mean by natively is uploading the video directly to Facebook not putting it on YouTube and then sharing a link back to Facebook. YouTube and Facebook are in a big war, so the best way to do it is upload the video to each platform natively so if you’re going to put it on LinkedIn, upload it to LinkedIn, if it’s on Facebook upload it to Facebook, and the same for YouTube. Don’t share links back and forth between the platforms. Share your posts from your business pages to your personal pages. This is a great way to quickly grow your audience. You can ask it of your staff. I don’t think you can force anyone to personally share anything to their Facebook but it’s a great question to pose to everybody ‘hey, can you share my latest video’.
Use subtitles on all your videos. 85% of people are watching videos without any sound so it’s very, very crucial to use subtitles. And if a video organically is getting a lot of likes and comments and engagement and you really get the nail from a relevant point of view, it’s definitely a good idea to go and spend some money on that video and promote that out to a further bigger and more specifically targeted network.
And then my last tip is retargeting people who engage with your previous content so that’s getting right into the backend of Facebooking can be difficult to do if you don’t know Facebook very well but that’s where people like myself are happy to help.
And then the final thing that I wanted to talk about was a great way to stay on top of your Facebook without spending any money with anyone is creating a content calendar for your social media channels which can be as simple as having a simple google calendar with when you’re going to post and what you’re going to post and sticking to the same patterns, the same sort of consistency. If you’re going to post Monday, Wednesday, Friday, choosing a topic for the Monday, choosing a topic for the Wednesday, and choosing a topic for the Friday, and just being super consistent with that so every week you’ve got the same post and people know what they can expect. And the beauty of this is that algorithms are going to reward you for being consistent and organically you’re going to start to reach more people just from the fact that you’re starting to post more.
Nadine: That sounds fantastic, Dylan. So basically people really need to first off make sure they identify the right audience that they’re targeting and then you know, use like a calendar or something where they can actually plan out their content so they’re not kind of flying by the seat of their pants and delivering content that may not be relevant to the audience they’re targeting. Then you know, if they start to see that a particular post or topic is giving them some success, then you put some more resource to boosting that post or you know, making it get a little bit of a further reach and then it helps to refine the audience from there.
Dylan: And also, like my very first tip after target audience is creating video, so we’re in a really fantastic situation at the moment where everyone’s working from home everyone’s using Microsoft Teams or Zoom or whatever the case may be, so you’ve got a perfect recording platform for you right here to start recording your frequently asked questions, your tips, your advice, you can interview your customers and the beauty of it is it’s all, you can do it all via Zoom and just hit record on the chat, you’ve got content to post.
Nadine: Fantastic. And then if they want to take it a little bit further they could use a video expert to maybe help them turn that content into something that’s a bit more professionally-produced with branding and whatnot for their company.
Dylan: Absolutely. We’re doing a lot of Zoom editing at the moment and turning really basic Zoom recordings into really engaging professional videos which has been a lot of fun.
Nadine: Fantastic. Okay. Awesome. Thank you so much, Dylan.
