Digital vs Print Advertising In Real Estate *A Case Study With Kevin Hartley

So welcome to Personal Brand Breakthrough. I'm Cheryl Plouffe, and today I have a special guest with me, someone who I've come to know over the last 8 months to a year or so, Kevin Hartley. Kevin, I am so glad you're here. We're going to talk about all things business and marketing, and I know that you've got some insights to share. So welcome to the show.

Thanks, Cheryl. Thanks to be here.

So Kevin, you know, I know that you've been in real estate for a long time. You had actually prior marketing experience experience in your prior life. Tell me a little bit about where things— when you started doing real estate, what were some related specifically to marketing? What did you learn about marketing? What was sort of the lay of the land in real estate and marketing when you kind of got started?

Sure. Well, I'll give you a little bit of backstory about why I even got into real estate. Certainly, I've gone through a number of careers, and the sunset of hopeful retirement is not too far off in the future. And I was just tired of working for the Borg. And I felt I had done sort of the marketing challenges. I had reached the pinnacle of marketing executive-level status that I could without going through a whole lot of retraining or re— you know, just looking at new things. And I've always had a passion for real estate, but I've always had a big frustration with real estate. So coming into real estate as a marketer, I wanted to make sure that I could raise the bar either in value or service, particularly in value and service, because I'd had a lot of frustrating experiences as a buyer and seller. So the biggest challenge for me outside of, you know, learning to be a real estate agent, which was actually quite easy, was the rules and regulations and the policy that prohibits agents from doing certain things. So I'm used to being an out-of-the-box thinker with very few limitations, definitely no government rules or regulations in the industries that I was in, which was mostly hospitality, telling me what I can or can't do, what I have to say or not say. So that was the biggest challenge for me, was how to brand myself creatively and differentiate myself but still follow the rules.

It's interesting you say that. I just had a conversation with someone this morning over coffee about exactly that, not in real estate but in the financial services. Sure. And I can see that being a problem in a lot of different industries. What were some of the specific limitations from a brand and marketing standpoint that you weren't allowed to go down?

So specifically, depending which brokerage you belong with, In addition to the government rules and regulations, each brokerage or brand will have their own policies and rules and regulations that they want. So they want your logo on the card, or their logo on the card. They want it to be a certain size. They want it to be a certain color. They want it to be a certain font. There's other pieces of information that have to be on there. So the rules and regulations from a government point of view are you have to identify your brokerage. In text and usually with a logo. And you have to adhere to, you know, brand colors and that sort of thing. If not an exact template, you have no leeway outside of the templates that are provided to do your own thing. So having been a marketer in other industries, having had a lot of creative flexibility, having managed design studios, that was just too much of a box for me. So I found a brokerage. I moved from a name brand brokerage I moved from Sutton to a company called IPro, which is a little bit more forward-thinking. So they don't— they would like their logo there, but they don't demand that their logo's there. So I can put it there in text and meet the government regulations, but I can come up with my own branding that is more reflective of myself. Now, when I joined IPro, because I was still a young realtor as far as my career, not so much with age, I joined a team. So very much again, the team had its own brand, its own standards and things that it wanted. And even in the way that it serviced clients, although there were excellent realtors on the team, there was in my mind a traditional philosophy about how real estate transactions are to take place and the kind of service and value that you can or cannot provide to your clients. And so while that was a great learning ground to be on the team and I learned tons of information, each of our meetings was like a masterclass in real estate. I just felt limited on a branding point of view. So I recently left the team and I've gone out on my own so that I can start to modify not just the brand imagery that I want to portray, but the actual service that I want to provide and the things that I want to do differently to differentiate myself in this huge marketplace of 80,000 realtors in Ontario, 40,000 in Toronto, but to really give the clients something different, something new, something that benefits them.

I love that. I think that, you know, if I had to describe you, you are progressive, you know what I mean? And I think that— well, I don't think, I know that you take action when you know that your heart is pulling you in a certain direction. You like to, you like to follow that. And I love that you go down an unbeaten path because really most realtors are in the situations that you just described. So I love the direction that you're going in with your brand. I love the fact that you take action and that you invest in yourself to learn and fast-track yourself to certain— in certain things. You know, you and I have worked together on the video front, and I know you saw some really great results with that. Maybe we can talk a little bit about that because from a real estate standpoint, I mean, marketing is a really big thing, but obviously it's an investment. So tell me a little bit about the lay of the land and up to this point and what you've done in terms of effectively marketing yourself, even within the constraints of what you've just described. What were some things that you did that worked and maybe didn't work?

Sure. There was a lot of things that didn't work. A lot of the things that, again, so, and again, I'll also preface and say, in, in the learning environment that we have for real estate, they don't teach you how to market yourself. So I come with a big advantage having had a marketing background about things I could think I could do. And thank you for, for pointing out sort of being a trailblazer and confidence. I come with that. A lot of people don't. And a lot of people, that's where they flounder. They don't know what to do. They don't know where to begin. So they do what they see other people do. Doing. They do the typical—

it makes sense.

Yeah, they do the postcards, they invest in billboards, or they sort of do those things. And realtors really haven't done much else for many, many years that's newer, that's different. So I also have an acting background. And so to me, it just seemed that I'd gotten into real estate I ought to try and leverage these on-camera skills that I have in a different way. I'm used to working with a script. So taking your course and working with you was to try to get me out of my head and used to speaking my own words instead of having to work with somebody else's written words. I'm still working on that, but it was an excellent start. And also getting used to the technical aspect of self-producing video. Because the videos that I had seen— so I decided that video was absolutely the next way to go with communicating, because I had tried some of those traditional marketing methods, the postcards, the newsletters, and it looked great and I liked them. And sure, there were some people who recognized my name. The phone wasn't ringing and I just wasn't getting results. And I know, and people watching will totally relate to this, those real estate agents and their darn postcards, you know, their mailbox to blue box. 99.9% of the time. When you need us, they're really useful because it happens, you know, "Oh, mother, it's time to sell the house." Well, we better start keeping the postcards. So they keep the postcards for a while.

So you need— or they dig through the recycling bin to see which postcards are in there.

Yeah, exactly. If they've got them, or they keep them for a 2-week period. So that's why, you know, I can see why it's important to be in the mailbox so that you're there when you are needed. But it's really not until people sort of start to make that decision that they want to go to start to work with a realtor. So then they keep them. So again, it became about money, the cost of those postcards. So I was doing 2 postcard drops a month, and it was costing me $1,080 for each drop. So about $2,160 per month to deliver 6,000 postcards to my farm area. Now, if there's any realtors watching, they may say, wow, that's a great number. They may say that's high. They may say that's low. Again, I have a marketing print production background. So my feeling is that that number for me is about half of what I know some other realtors are paying because they don't have marketing skills or they don't have print production skills. Wow. So even at half, at $2,100 a month to go from mailbox to blue box and have no idea if any of them made it to the fridge or made it to the counter for that time when somebody might be coming along. And I just thought, I can't keep doing this. I just can't. And I stumbled across your workshops and it exactly coincided with my thoughts about, I gotta work on video. And I had tried to do some video and I had bought a and I had, you know, bought cameras and lights, and it was in my basement for a year. But it was set up, it was this big scary thing. But at the same time, I'd made an investment. Now my investment was about the cost of one drop for postcards.

Right.

So I thought, okay, this already makes sense, 'cause this is now owned, and this is repeatable and duplicatable, and I can do this over and over. But after I worked with you, I then started to test a few videos. And again, being a marketer, and I think anybody, any business person wants to see some ROI, some return on that investment. And it's hard with postcards or mailers or a lot of things. But with Facebook advertising, you can see the number of clicks, you can see the number of conversions. Now with Facebook Messenger, somebody likes one of your ads or something, you can start an instant dialogue with them that just sends them a little bounce note that says, hey, thanks for liking that article. If I can be of any further assistance, here's my contact information. And you can start that right away. So for me to go from $2,160 a month to initially testing at spending $10 a day on Facebook. So $300, $310 a month. I cut my marketing by 87%.

Crazy, crazy, crazy.

But started to get tangible results and results that, you know, the demographics and you can target the demographics.

And that's, and that's, and that's the beauty of Facebook advertising. Right? Is the ability, like you said, you have like a farm market with advertising on Facebook because they know way too much about us and they, and their advertising platform is based around all of our behaviors and there are 2 billion people now on Facebook that you can actually target geographically or based on any number of criteria, demographics, that kind of thing. It's truly incredible and remarkable. So I'm so happy to hear you say that.

Yeah, well, and the ability then to sort of take that budget. So I was comfortable spending that $2,160. Really happy to only be spending $300. But now with that difference, what I couldn't do with postcards is like, well, let's try another market over in a different pocket of Toronto that I haven't tried before and see how I perform over there. Or let's try— I've started working. I'm originally from London, and I had some people that wanted to work with me down there. So I've started— I've joined the London board, and I've started instantly from my desk without having to deal with a designer, a printer, a distributor. I'm advertising. You duplicate what you do on Facebook in your farm market in Toronto, and you duplicate it somewhere else, and you can turn it on and off. And if it's not working, in the timeframe that you think is comfortable, even though you've scheduled it for maybe 7 days or 10 days, you don't like what you see in the first 2, shut it off. Stop spending the money, tweak it, fix it, and put something else out there. So—

And that's the thing with— I'm sorry, I was gonna say with Facebook advertising is looking at the results and just tweaking, like you said, for as little as $10 a day, you can get into it. And that's what's remarkable about what you're doing You're creating the videos and you're taking that content and you're using the digital platform. You're using this amazing Facebook advertising platform to really narrow in on specific markets. And not only that, but expanding the markets. So you're, you're kind of, you're kind of looking like you're everywhere, which is remarkable.

Yeah. Which is, is starting to help build that new brand. So I'll be honest. Most of the— since the summer, really. And since I sort of got the notion in my head that I was going to depart from my team, I spent a lot of time just working on, so what is my personal brand going to be? So your Personal Brand Breakthrough workshop was not only about seeding in my mind as a business person how to use video effectively, but just what is my personal brand going to be? So I started exercising my thoughts around that based on some of the learning that you shared with us. And I took a pause from video. But even with static ads that I was sharing, articles that I had written from my blog and just posting those articles for a small community newspaper that I write and sharing those— wait, it's still way better than postcard results. But for sure, 100%, when I was testing with the video ads, skyrocketing numbers of views and hits and likes and shares and organic reach that you're not even paying for. So that tells me that— and I'm still sort of workshopping in my head before I dive right back into video about just what my video voice is going to be, what my video character is going to be. It's not that I'm going to be a character as I was when I was an actor, but just the persona that I want to be in video. That's coming together, and I'm totally confident and inspired that once I start launching those actual videos, that those numbers are gonna go way up. So it's a very exciting time.

Yeah, I'm so excited for you because, like you said, even though you may be right now looking at the rebrand and like the, you know, the independence or emancipation, I guess, if you will, that you're gonna get back into video and really look at What is my voice? What is my brand? And I know that some of the things that we shared over the summer are going to help you with that. What would be sort of your number one piece of advice to a real estate agent who may be watching right now, or a broker like yourself who, you know, is looking at this and saying, okay, I know my marketing is not as effective now as it used to be. What can I do? What would be your number one piece of advice?

Even though I said I've taken a pause from video, Start now. Start after listening to us today. Start taping yourself using only your iPhone. We're talking on iPhone now. I use my iPhone 6S for all of my videos. It's the easiest, best quality. I might buy a X just 'cause, but for now—

You're an early adopter?

Yeah, 'cause I'm an early adopter. I like to have things. Just get started. If you're of a certain age, you might remember the first time you heard your recorded voice on an old cassette tape recorder, and you probably cringed just like I did. Or VHS, the first time somebody took a VHS movie and you thought, "Oh," and then you saw yourself. There's a little bit of that to get over if you're not used to being in front of the camera. And also just speaking and speaking your thoughts, just as we're doing now. Again, for me, is working without a script, but just having that confidence and being able to wrap your thoughts around your words, even though you're, as a business person, whether it's real estate or not, you're talking to people all the time. But there's just something about when there's not a person there that goes a little funny in your head when you're talking to a camera. I don't know if it's that you're second-guessing the technology or second-guessing yourself, yourself, See, I just tripped over my words there, but so what? We're human. And that's part of what makes video real is just get used to those flubs. Get used to what you look like. Get used to how you sound and just start today.

I love that. That's great advice.

Do a video, do a video diary of just how your day went today and what you'd like to be better tomorrow. It doesn't even have to be about your business. Just almost like you were doing a little book report like you did back in school. But just do it. My day went this way. Tomorrow I'd like my day to go that way. And don't even share it. Just do it with yourself and watch that. And that'll be a foundation of something you can talk about. I think that's the first thing is, oh, well, what am I going to talk about? We'll just talk about that.

Yeah, that's a great starting point. And you know what? I mean, I think that Gary Vaynerchuk really talks a lot about this. I don't know if you know Gary Vaynerchuk, but he Talks about, you know, document versus create is one of his big things, and I believe wholeheartedly in that. I believe that, I believe we should be content creators, and that there's a way to, you know, create tangible digital assets we put out there into the world. But this document idea, I think, is kind of where you're going. It's like, just document something that happened to you. A lot of people in their minds are like, yeah, but who really cares? It's really not about that. It's about sharing, and it's about putting yourself out there, and I think that's the point you're trying to make, is just start putting yourself out there, and build from that. Because if you never start, you can never get to the finish line. So the starting part is really the hardest part, and it's the most, in many ways, rewarding because it sets you on a new path.

Absolutely. I think also one of the other— if I could add sort of another big struggle when I got into real estate as opposed to working in the hospitality industry— there's an old marketing adage That says let them try what you want them to buy. So that's why we get samples. That's why we do consultations. In real estate or financial services or a lot of other professional counseling type jobs, it's really hard. How do you sample the real estate transaction unless you're actually going through it? And I really think that, again, a lot of us, we all come out of the same real estate programming. We all have to function under the same box of rules and regulations. So really, if you read the glowing testimonials that a lot of realtors have or don't have, it's about them. It's about their personality. That is the secret sauce that you can really bring to real estate. And I, I feel that video and marketing sort of that value-add content, being a content generator, being a thought leader, It scares a lot of agents because they think they should be of service to anybody and everybody that, that wants to work with them. But I think if you can build your personality and get people to want to work with you and give them value in advance of any time that they have a transaction— again, a real estate transaction or a financial transaction or mortgage broker— then they will be there when they are ready to transact with you, and you will have already built a rapport. You will have already identified that, hey, you're somebody I trust, you're somebody I like, you're somebody who makes me giggle or smile a little bit every now and then. Because even though it's a business transaction, it doesn't have to be so serious every day, all the time. There can be some lightness to it. And real estate is very much about how well you communicate with somebody and how much you trust them to protect you. And I really think the video is a way to start to establish that with potential clients long before they might ever have the need for your service. And I, I'm hoping that's my target, is that if I put that out there, then the business will come because that's amazing. Already be established.

That's fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing that, Kevin. I think that anyone in real estate or otherwise, any business really, but any business, any, you know, but particularly real estate, we're listening to this conversation. What they'll get from this is knowing that, hey, I'm not alone. I struggle with my marketing. Kevin struggled with his marketing. He made something happen and he did, made some changes. So that he can go on a different path, so that people can identify that there may be a better way. And so I really appreciate your time and your insights. And can you tell everybody if they're interested to get ahold of you how they would get ahold of you?

Absolutely. Thanks for that, Cheryl. The easiest way is to go to my website, kevinhartley.ca, and all my contact information is there. My blog is there. And I really enjoy talking about real estate again. That's the value I want to give. If you just want to reach out and have a conversation without the need for a transaction about buying, selling, investing in Toronto or even in southwestern Ontario, I'd be happy to hear from people. So again, kevinhartley.ca.

Awesome, thank you so much. And I know you personally, and that is an absolute fact, right? You just like to talk about it. And so there's no obligation. Please reach out to Kevin if you have any thoughts about real estate or just kind of want to chat about it. He is your guy. Thank you so much, Kevin, for being here today, and thank you so much for watching. We really appreciate your time and your energy, and, you know, taking the time— I don't take that lightly. You've taken some time out of your busy day to watch this interview, and I really appreciate it. If you want to check me out, please do so at CherylPlouffe.com. Otherwise, I'll see you in the next episode of Personal Brand Breakthrough. Thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.