Start With A Win - Communicating Empathy in Marketing with RE/MAX Senior Vice President of Marketing and Communications, Abby Lee

Episode Date: August 26, 2020

This episode of the Start With A Win podcast might as well be a masterclass taught by RE/MAX Senior Vice President of Marketing and Communications, Abby Lee. Abby is an industry leader not only due to her experience and vast knowledge but also because she is not insulated from what other companies are doing. She is constantly learning by watching others and shifting RE/MAX’s approach to fit the market. Reports have shown that 75% of businesses stopped marketing altogether after the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Meanwhile, a large portion of organizations that continued to market delivered tone-deaf messaging to its audience. Both of these are the wrong responses. RE/MAX’s consumer research early in the pandemic found that people want to hear comforting messages from the brands they support during this time. The goals of marketing have never changed — to differentiate your company and communicate with empathy to your customers. This empathetic communication requires a feedback loop with your customers, finding out how they are doing, what they need from you, and how you can provide them with more value. When looking at marketing campaigns during the summer of 2020, some businesses are not making use of their feedback loops. They are putting out very tone-deaf messages, focusing solely on sales or getting people into their stores. They say things like “don’t worry,” or do not mention any precautions they are taking to keep customers safe. People want to know, first and foremost, that you are there for them and that we are all going to get through this together, and a great platform to convey this message is video content in the digital space. Everyone is craving a personal connection rather than social distancing, and video is the next best thing to face-to-face interactions.Connect with Abby:https://www.linkedin.com/in/abby-lee-2a530428 https://news.remax.com/bio/abby-lee Connect with Adam:https://www.startwithawin.com/ https://www.facebook.com/REMAXAdamContoshttps://twitter.com/REMAXAdamContos https://www.instagram.com/REMAXadamcontos/ Leave us a voicemail:888-581-4430

Every day is filled with choices. You're here because you're choosing to start with a win. Get ready to be inspired, learn something new, and connect with the win nation. And coming to you from Start With A Win headquarters, It's Adam Kantos, Remax CEO, and I got in studio with me here virtually. Producer Mark, how are you doing, buddy? Fantastic. Whoa. With a little bit of a song behind it today. That's right. The fantastic tune. There you go. And we have an amazing guest, a long, long, long, long time friend, somebody I've

toured the world with, and I'm honored to have on the show today, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Communications at Remax. Abby Lee, how you doing? I am fantastic today. It's a gorgeous day here in Colorado, and we had snow yesterday, and now it's 80 degrees outside, so I can't complain. You had snow at your house? We had a little bit, like a little dusting. Well, you guys are a little higher in altitude than we are here. Yeah, exactly.

So it's just, you know, but everyone thinks we're crazy. You post on social media and everyone's like, oh my gosh, it snowed. What's going on? It's the end of the world. I know. That's awesome. Cool. So, Abby, you have been like the, let's just call you kind of the voice

of Remax. Okay. I mean, you're behind so much of the messaging, so much of the marketing, things like that, of this great organization and of people around the world that do business with our business. So let's dive into that a little bit today. Okay. Sure. Awesome. We've been, obviously, during the COVID period, things like that, we're talking about this is not business as usual. And I know upwards of three quarters of businesses stopped marketing during this time. I think some of that had to do obviously with the fact that that's one of the easiest budgets to start cutting when you're running a large-scale operation or really when you're looking for cash in order to handle other things.

But is that the right move to stop the voice of a company during this time? You know, it was really interesting, Adam. Interestingly enough, right during the beginning of the pandemic, when things started shutting down, we were actually running a lot of research with consumers for our 2021 campaign. Kind of funny that is almost as soon as we launch our 2020 campaign, we're into the next one. And so we got to ask consumers a lot of questions about that. And one thing that they were saying was they were really turned off by brands who just stopped, who stopped communicating. They wanted to hear from brands. They wanted brands to understand what was happening and the uncertainty and how truthfully scared people were. And so that was one of the

things that I kept seeing reported was that the brands that weren't communicating at all were worse almost than brands who hadn't switched their messaging. Okay. So we got two different things here that we're talking about then. So we have not communicating and we have not switching messaging, both kind of bad moves with respect to that, because I know we cranked up our communication and we changed our messaging at Remax as the pandemic started. I mean, it hasn't changed because people's mindsets in their heart and their soul and their emotions and things like that have not changed since the pandemic. I mean, they didn't throw a switch and go back to January and how I look at marketing and things like that, because there was a ton of advertising

and marketing going out early on in the year. So let's talk about the first part, the stop marketing, the not marketing thing. Take me through, why do we market to begin with? Why do we get in front of people and look for that, you call it share of voice and scope and reach, and you have all sorts of different technical marketing terms, but why should we be reaching out to our clients out there in the community? And then we'll talk about how, what we say after this. So tell me why. You need to differentiate yourself.

And I think if anything throughout this pandemic, we've seen just in this industry, right? How people are differentiating themselves in terms of adjustment. Real estate has had to adjust much like many, many, I mean, restaurants have had to adjust, but what differentiates you? How are you, how are you differentiating yourself in this climate? Um, and also how are you

understanding people and understanding their emotions and their needs? Because the emotional landscape is some people are so scared about what this, what this pandemic means. Others are kind of right or wrong. It doesn't, or wrong. Everyone has a different view of it. But I think that the differentiation of what value you're bringing and how you're helping people through this is really the key of why people market in general anyway. So you said something that was really, really important there, and that was what you're hearing back. So a lot of people think that marketing or advertising is just like a one-way statement. It's far from it. How do you view that? Because I know you always come to me

and say, here's what the feedback is we're getting on our messaging. And it's never, oh, I just placed a bunch of advertising. It's here's how that conversation is going. Tell me about that conversation because I think a lot of people are a little bit blind to the fact that it's a two-way conversation. Yeah. It's not just a push out. It's a pull in too, right? Because you want consumers to engage with your brand and have the brand be part of your life. That's the sweet spot, right? And I think that's whether that's a corporate brand like Remax or whether you're a Remax agent and that's your brand. I did an Inman podcast a couple of weeks ago. And one thing that I was talking about was

getting back to Marketing 101, pick up the phone, find out how your customer is feeling. Your client, because if you're sending out a message saying, Hey, I'm back in real estate. And if you're ready to list your home, and maybe this person is scared to death in there sitting at their house, and they don't want to go out and they don't know what to do, that is a tone deaf message right there. So if you don't have that feedback, and gosh, real estate itself is so emotional, that if you're not having that right emotional connection with your client right now, and understanding what they're feeling and how they want to be communicated with, do they want a text message? Do they want you to check in with them? Hey,

check in with me next week. Let me see how I'm feeling. You're just being tone deaf to the entire situation that's going on. The biggest thing I can say right now, what you just went through is boom. That is a total value bomb there. That was incredibly important. I hope everybody listened to it. If they didn't, go back and rewind it and listen to. That was incredibly important. I hope everybody listened to it. If they didn't, go back and rewind it and listen to what Abby was talking about. And that was, what does the customer care about? What are you talking about? You're not beating them over the head with a value pitch right now. You're finding out how they're doing. I know that's the first thing that your team went through is you said, we're getting rid of

all sales pitches and we're going to the position that we care about the community because we do. And we want everybody to know that because together as a community, we're more comfortable with each other. So tell me about that switch in messaging. You talked about making that switch. Let's talk about that now. Well, again, I go back back we were right in the middle of consumer research so we learned a couple things from that and one was that the people just wanted to have the comfort knowing that that at some point in time we will come out the other side right and if we do our part together we got a lot of feedback that you know and again this was at

the beginning of the pandemic that people just just weren't taking the stay at home seriously because people weren't understanding what can happen if we don't. So that's kind of, you know, as we worked with Camp and King, our great creative agency, of making sure that that messaging was not taking advantage of the situation, but just being, you know, we're so integral part of the community in all the communities that we live. But how are we going to help each other get through this together and get out of this on the other side? That was the messaging that we switched to.

If anyone recalls, our campaign this year was, prior to this, very successful, but very lighthearted, a bit of humor in it, a bit poking the bear a little bit at some of our competition. That, to me, was tone deaf. That, in no way, shape, or form was what consumers were feeling. So making that shift to, let's do this, let's do this together, and let's come out of this the other side. That's fantastic. So you're talking about a lot of the good things, but you mentioned poking the bear. What's an example of the wrong tone that people are using? I think that anything that is too salesy, I mean, I get it 100%. These businesses who've been out of business so long, they want to get back. They want to get people in. But I think that if you are just having a salesy type of thing like, hey, we're open for business, come shop with us, and you're not addressing what you're doing to keep people safe,

that is off. That is wrong messaging. I think at the beginning of this, there were some unfortunate launches of campaigns. One that comes to mind is Geico had one that was a high five. They were talking about the high five. And my gosh, there was also a mask company, a chain mail mask company that just launched it. Obviously, that was an off message too. I think there were some unfortunate launches at the beginning of this that I think hurt brands, depending on how quickly they could get them off. But I do think, as I think about retailers and things like that, anything that just addresses, come buy with us or come spend your money and doesn't address how they're going to keep you safe is the wrong

message. So are you seeing companies roll out there? So obviously a lot of them pushed pause when they stopped marketing, three quarters of them roughly. And then those that continue to marketing updated the messaging for the most part. I mean, you can say the vast majority did update messaging. Are you seeing anybody roll out their pre-COVID messaging again and giving that a try? Is that the wrong thing to do? I haven't quite seen a lot of that yet. I think as we get later in the summer, and again, I think it's going to depend if we see any flare ups this summer and things like that. But my expectation is getting into third quarter, we're going to see some of that return, you know, getting into July, August.

I think we'll start seeing the return to some free. We're talking about it ourselves. The other thing that we're changing up out of the research was our tagline. Our tagline had been prior to COVID, don't worry, we've done this a million times. The other thing we found in research was don't worry is not a good, people are worried. So that does not hit a note. So we've also adjusted on that just to make sure that, you are worried. So that does not hit a note. So we've also adjusted on that just to make sure that we're being sensitive to how people feel.

There were some great, I wanted to mention a few great companies that I think did a fantastic job of switching their messaging. Did you see the Reebok Twitter campaign that they did? Oh, no. Remind me. Yeah. So it was genius. So on, they, on Twitter, they posted out a question to consumers saying, what equipment do you have at home? Workout equipment. And then they would respond with customizable workouts, customized workouts based on what people had at home. I thought that was genius. You know, like, how am I going to keep in shape when I can't go outside? The other one that I just loved was Progressive Insurance. They kind of did a

spoof on Zoom meetings. I don't know if you saw that one. It was timely. It was humorous. So we got to laugh a little bit, but there was nothing offensive or it was just, this is our new reality of Zoom meetings 24 hours a day. And it was just brilliant, I thought. Brilliant done and gave me a little bit in time of uncertainty, a good laugh. Awesome. So there are a lot of ways to get messaging out there. Let's say I'm a real estate agent or I'm a small business owner or something like that. I'm marketing to my community. What are you seeing that's working right now? What do you recommend? I know that Remax has some great tools that you have really personally been involved in developing, and those help with this process. Take us through a little bit of,

give me localized marketing 101. Yeah, sure. I mean, I think there's so much data. Obviously, the local business down the street probably doesn't have enough dollars to do broadcast or video on a large scale, national or on your local ABC, CBS, NBC affiliate. So I mean, digital and social is huge. There is so much analytics that you can get behind. So when you do it, you can find out where people are. I always tell my team, you have to make sure that you've got the right message at the right time to the right person. So with digital specifically, you can find out what behaviors they have online. What are they searching for? If you're looking to sell a home,

you can get your database and find out who is actually looking to sell a home or looking to buy a home. They're doing research. And then you can serve up that appropriate message about, hey, here's some things you can do to get your home list ready, or here's some things for curb appeal. And that's relevant content to them given what they have shown their behavior to be online. I love it. All right. Pretend I want to sell my house and I want a REMAX agent to do it. What are some of the tools that REMAX agents have? Give me two or three of the tools that a REMAax agent has in order to do this marketing. Yeah. So we just launched a product called Megaphone, which gives all Remax agents access to Facebook advertising, Facebook, Google Ways, and Instagram. And then they also have access to

video advertising through Centro's DSP platform. So it's access there, a lot of, again, analytics behind it so that they can be sure that their dollars are being used effectively and they can make sure that their content is relevant. And then another one is Photify, which is kind of a Canva on steroids. So there's a lot of content in there that's already pre-loaded that you can just kind of add it and go and schedule it in there. But then there's a lot of stuff that can be customized. So again, making sure that you can get some pieces from the megaphone campaigns and your different access to analytics and make sure that through Photify, you're serving up the right content as well.

Awesome. Two of my favorites. We have some serious tools available there. We do. This is a lot. This is like a marketing 101 class or marketing 201 class or 501 for that matter. I mean, you've gone through some of the very specific pertinent information pieces right now that we need to be thinking about. I love this. Don't stop marketing, but say the right thing. Say the right thing and say it in the right places. What is your take on video? Obviously, you know I do a ton of video and we're

seeing a lot of our agents use video. Give me a quick once over. What is your marketing expertise opinion on that? You know how I feel about this. If you're not utilizing video, you're losing the game big time. It's as close of a personal connection as you can get as opposed to being face-to-face with somebody. So you challenged us. I mean, I think I went, what, 10 days straight of doing a video every day because you said, get out there, do it. Now, I've been not great about doing it since, but I need to. You pushed me to be better on that. But again, if you're not out there doing video, you, you really are losing, you're missing that human connection. You're missing out on people getting to know you better. You know, it's the next best thing to a phone.

I mean, I think it's better than a phone call because you're that face to face, but you're again, having that, having that conversation with somebody to find out what their emotions are, what their needs are, what their feelings are. I mean, can you imagine, Adam, if you don't, you're not using video to reach out to people to check in on them or picking up the phone and you're serving them up all this information on selling your home and everything like this. And during this, they lost their job. I mean, how irrelevant can you actually be? You've just turned that person off because you're not aware of their situation. So I think it's the best thing you can be doing right've just turned that person off because you're not aware of their situation.

So I think it's the best thing you can be doing right now. And it's uncomfortable, but as you say, bad video is better than no video. Thanks, Abby. You got that right. Abby, you've dropped a lot of value on us today. So much appreciated. It's, you know, your marketing expertise has done so much for this organization. So thank you for that. And we always ask all of our guests a specific question. And I know you have an awesome answer to this. So Abby Lee, how do you start your day with a win? Every day I write down one thing that I'm grateful for that day.

And it can be around family. It can be around my health. It can be someone in my life that I'm grateful for. And usually, if it's someone that I'm grateful for, then I reach out to that person that day and tell them that I'm thankful for them. And you can't imagine how far that goes. But it just starts my day off the right way. And I have a positive attitude for the rest of the day. I love it. Abby Lee, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Communications for Remax World Headquarters. You do some amazing things for our network of 130,000 plus agents worldwide. So thank you so much for that. And thank you for being on Start With A Win. Thanks for having me and thanks for all you do. Thank you so much for listening to Start With A Win. If you'd like to ask Adam a question or potentially be on our next episode, give us a call and leave us a

message at 888-581-4430. Don't forget to go onto iTunes and subscribe, write a review and rate the show. It helps us get the word out and reach more people. For more great content, head over to StartWithAWin.com. Follow Adam on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. And remember, start with a win.