By Gil Sperling, Co-CEO and Co-Founder: Flow Living

23 million people in South Africa use Facebook for at least four hours every day, for research, connecting and making purchases online, so any business in any industry that isn’t on Facebook is losing out on a massive opportunity.

We’ve spoken before about how the property industry is one that is in danger of being left behind if it doesn’t adapt to a digital world, with proptech. The agencies who are coming around are finding new audiences, building their networks and finding the right buyers, with the right properties, at the right time.

While running ads on Facebook helps build an agency brand and showcase their listings, it also helps build an audience. Agents spend years building their network and their reputation by putting up billboards and shaking hands - think of social media advertising as taking that real-world interaction, online.

One of the country’s most well-respected agencies - Huizemark - was looking to increase brand exposure and obtain high quality buyer leads, so turned to Flow to take their marketing to social media.

To do this, they ran a social media awareness campaign using Facebook carousel ads featuring their unique offering. Flow pulled their content from their website and automatically generated, posted and targeted ads, giving them an instant campaign that they could roll out immediately. Harnessing the power of proptech, they reached 209 000 people - 68% of the potential audience in their target area, with an X% increase in engagement and lead volumes on social media for a number of agents.

Huizemark Group CEO Bryan Biehler believes that the company has been on a journey they could never have imagined. “It has enabled our franchises to build an online presence in an automated fashion, making a big difference in their business and elevating the Huizemark brand,” he says.

Agents thrive on networks and connections, so let’s make the comparison based on the scenario of an agent in a room full of people. With a website or a portal, an agent is one of a thousand agents touting for business to a crowded, noisy room full of people who are a mix of those looking for properties, looking to sell properties and others who were looking for a different function, but somehow found themselves in yours.

Proptech allows agents to form one-on-one connections with a room full of people who are there for a specific reason - and that reason is that they trust those agents they’ve seen online, to help them buy or sell a property.

Forward-thinking agency, Tyson Properties, were also looking to raise brand awareness and increase reach. Known as innovators, adopting proptech was an obvious solution. Their Fourways branch ran eye-catching ads in carousel format, featuring their top agents and impactful messaging and positioning themselves as the Fourways area experts. Their agent profiles were automatically pulled from their feed through Flow, allowing them to start reaching potential customers online, both instantly and effortlessly. People are far more likely to watch an engaging video or flip through images, than they are to work through a text-heavy post.

Aiming to grow their audience within a 5km radius of their office, they targeted the right audience, in the right place, with the right frequency, achieving 119% reach in their target areas, with ads shown to 106 600 people out of a potential audience size of 127 000. The ads were shown at an average frequency of 6x per month, reaching potential customers often enough to have an impact. A total of 13 200 people with brand recall was achieved. Brand recall is a metric which shows how many people would remember seeing your brand, if we asked them within two days. Brand recall is important because it means that people are more likely to think of you first when looking to buy or sell their property.

Having established greater brand recall, Tyson Properties Fourways then ran a campaign to generate leads, using Flow to automatically pull through their listings and create dynamic property ads, retargeted to the audiences they had built, which delivered 21 874 listing views and 161 quality buyer leads.

Tyson Properties Fourways Principal. Jonathan Davies, says its obvious that the targeting system increased their exposure across a number of the main line digital portals. “We have had enquiries via Flow which have resulted in sales and access to buyers who have contacted us as a result of seeing the Flow channel online,” he says.

The proptech revolution isn’t coming - it’s here. And it’s time to get on board.