With Adrian D'Amico
Adrian D'Amico, the well-known former owner of Harcourts Wollongong, has recently transitioned to become an entrepreneur, coach and social media expert.
It’s been a life-changing journey full of intense peaks and troughs but along the way Adrian has learned a fundamental truth about selling - it’s all about psychology and anyone working in sales must provide value to the consumer.
Adrian believes that in general, many sales people approach marketing by more or less demanding that a customer choose them because they are the biggest or the best. This strategy however doesn’t win customers over because, by simply saying how great you are, you are not explaining how you can add value. Adrian says that clients have a perception of you and unless you're providing value and adding value to their lives, they won’t understand the value that you bring to the table.
He explains, “I think the common mistake that I see particularly from a real estate point of view is that agents keep going on about ‘this sale’. They keep going on about how well they're doing in the industry, but they're not really imparting any sort of insight, any common knowledge, anything that can help the seller or the buyer or the investor go from A to B.”
A consumer, Adrian argues, “hasn’t gone through the process of learning what it takes to sell a property or what it takes to put a property on the market for rent or what it takes to buy an investment property. They don't know the process.” To be successful, Adrian believes agents must be information agents, not the ego agent, and social media can help.
Adrian knows that social media platforms such as Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram and YouTube provide many e-marketing opportunities to show who you are and how you can add value to potential clients. There’s a large audience out there who are willing and wanting to engage.
Change your mindset
One of the most important things agents need to realise when they are engaging in social media however, is that the wall between private/personal selves and their professional self disappears to a degree. Adrian says that if you are posting to Facebook - as an agent - it’s not just about work. If anything, if you want engagement, it’s actually the opposite - it’s all about you, the best and most genuine parts of you.
Adrian says that many people in real estate, “Don't have their own personal fan page or a business page. It's just their profile - that's an everyday profile account on Facebook. What they do is make that purely just their work focus.” Adrian believes that approaching social media in this way, “is a sure way for disengagement straight away because social is ‘social’. “
Adrian says that, “People don't get on there to go, ‘Wow, I'm going to buy a home today. Let's get on Facebook’. They don't do that. They will be there for social reasons and to communicate and to look and to watch and to like and to comment and share other people's posts and things like that. The reality is that most people aren't one dimensional. They're fathers, they're mothers. They've had past lives and bands and sport and things like that. There's so many facets to their life, they're so interesting to other people. The problem is that we discount whether they would be interesting to someone else. If you're just going down the road to ‘business only’, people don't want to see that. They don't want to read that all the time. The likes that you'll get over a period of time will just be your mum and your brother and the people that love you. There's sort of a ‘sympathy like’ really that you're going to be getting.”
Adrian is not suggesting that you share everything. He explains, “If you do show something of a sport you used to be involved in, or are in, or a hobby that you have or a music instrument that you play or something like that, now that's interesting because you could strike a chord with someone else who has a similar interest. For me, I have interest in social media. I have interest in videos that I do. I've got a community show that I run in Wollongong. I interview local business owners, so that's something else that I do. Then I've got three beautiful boys and my beautiful wife, so we're doing soccer and we're going to the skate parks. I'm reliving my youth. That's another part of me so for me that family aspect was somewhat of a draw card. It wasn't intentional, but it was definitely relatable.”
Adrian believes that Facebook pages, ”should be mostly about you, so 80% about you and the general things that you do in life and about 20% business. I find that a lot of companies and individuals go down this road.”
Have a weekly schedule for social media engagement
Drawing people into your world takes a lot of work. It’s part of the reason why a whole new set of jobs have been created in social media marketing. Adrian advises that you need to have a weekly social media marketing schedule. He has what he calls a weekly success formula. He says, “I teach my clients that on Monday put up a blog post. Then on Tuesday it should be an article. On Wednesday it could be an image and on Thursday it could be something funny. Then on Friday it could be something personal about yourself, then it could be off the run Saturday. Then maybe a popular video or something like that on Sunday.”
For people in the real estate industry, Adrian says, “It could be there's a current news article that you put up on the Monday and then it could be some new listings that are coming on board on the Tuesday. Then it could be something that's happening in the market on the Wednesday. It could be just a myriad of things that you could put online, but having that plan saves the stuffing around trying to think about ‘What type of content should I put up?’.”
Don’t miss the opportunity that social media presents. For more information on Adrian, visit: www.socialmediabreakthrough.com.au