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

Brand recognition is everything for an estate agent – it’s why we see your faces and area specialties on street pole ads, billboards and even dustbins. Visibility equates to credibility – you’re trying to influence people that yours is the number 1, trusted brand in the area and you are best-placed to attend to their property needs.

This is particularly important when it comes to selling a property. Buyers care that the agent they’re doing business with is legitimate, but they’re more interested in the property, than the person it is purchased via. Sellers, on the other hand, want a trusted partner to do business with, who will inspire confidence in a fraught process and help them effectively sell their property, at the price they’re asking for.

Building Brand Recognition

That means that brand recognition is key, as studies show that 50% of sellers end up signing a mandate with the first agent they turn to, with much of the balance diluted by those who sign multiple mandates. This makes it vital to be top-of-mind when it comes to securing mandates from sellers. But the world is changing and the visibility afforded by a face on a street pole ad is diminished by the cost, inflexibility, lower reach as a result of smaller traffic volumes - and it's also fundamentally harder to measure its impact.

That impact is referred to as 'Brand Recall' in the media space. Brand Recall is best cultivated when you show a product or brand to someone, an average of three times per month, and do that at scale so that it makes an impact and they remember it. If, for example, your target market is Norwood and you want to reach 10 000 people in a month, at scale, this means you need to get at least 60% of people in the area to see your ad. But how do you measure that visibility, or the quality of recall?

True Measurability

That's where platforms like Flow Living are taking the property space into the digital world and can deliver measurable results. We can create Brand Recall on Facebook much more accurately and measurably than you can do on a billboard, where you have no control over who sees it, how often, or which creative treatment works best.

With a billboard or street pole ad, you buy a space, put up a print and get to change it maybe three months later. On Facebook, you can focus your advertising to predictably reach 60% of the available audience - in the right demographic - who live in that preferred suburb and who are looking to buy, sell or rent a home.

Best of all, you can accurately measure the Brand Recall and make daily tweaks to your creative, to refine its effectiveness. Performance Marketing is an extremely powerful tool, making use of the targeting and measuring mechanisms afforded by the power of Facebook and related platforms. And comparatively, property listing platforms don't brand, or measure.

All of these metrics are indicators of ROI - and since you're now in control of your ad spend in terms of targeting exactly and exclusively who you need to see your ads, you're now in control of your own budget.