One Entrepreneur on Marketing: Krisstina Wise of The GoodLife Team

This is part of a series called "The Entrepreneurs on Marketing," where I'm talking with entrepreneurs about their strategies for marketing and promoting their businesses.  In this interview, I caught up with Krisstina Wise, principal of Austin real estate brokerage The GoodLife Team.

Regarding your approach to marketing, push or pull?

We work to pull.  Where we work to craft our message and our identity is to attract.  We don't really push too much.

Our attention and how we buy is changing, and social media has been a big key to this.  For instance, when I go to Facebook, Facebook knows what my interests are, because I put them in there, so then Facebook can put on targeted ads that market to me as a runner, as being interested in yoga, as being a mother, as being in real estate.  The advertising is very targeted.  We're being trained, as consumers, especially with so much spam, that I don't want people to market to me with just the same broadcast, push-out message.

We're working to tag those in our database as to what their interests are.  What are your interests, for example?

I enjoy cooking and gardening, just say.

Yeah, so if we know that, we tag that that's what you're interested in, so "cooking" and "gardening."  Then if we find an article that's on new designs of kitchens for cooks and wrote something about that, you would be on our list, since we've noted that that's something you might be interested in.  It's more likely that you'll read it and maybe participate with us.

With gardening, if we send out the latest, greatest tips for gardening for putting your home on the market or for once you first move in.  Maybe that's something that would capture your interest, so we're working on the information that we do push out that it's more targeted to what our audience is interested in so that we can continue a two-way conversation and work to stay out of people's spam box.

When I have so much spam every single day, we all do, it's so annoying, but I really do love getting the West Elm ads.  I don't mind West Elm sending me marketing, but I'm so sick of the Viagra ads.  We don't mind being advertised and marketed to, if it's something we're interested in.  Now there's new ways to market in order to start increasing readership, the opens on our emails, and that sort of thing.

What do you think about branding?

We work to establish a brand.  Our brand is the good life, and lifestyle is intertwined in all of our marketing.

We see branding as vitally important.  Branding is identity, how people identify with us and what people think of that identity when they come in contact with it.  We think of our brand as our personal integrity, how we're viewed in the marketplace.

Social media has amplified my ability to expose my brand.  Before it limited to small geographic areas we sent direct mail to, to my database of email addresses, or advertising, which tends to be very expensive.  It takes a long time to have any ad build any sort of identity.  I can't speak to social media enough about how it's lowered the cost and amplified our ability to build our brand.

How important is your personality to your brand?

There's a certain personality to our GoodLife Team brand, but it's not to one person.  I've really worked for the GoodLife Team brand to not be Krisstina Wise personality, but to be something bigger than that.

What are your top three ways to promote your business?

We have different approaches, so we're not just in one vertical.

We have our database, which are people that we've met or that we know somehow.  One way we market is to people in that group, people that we know, with an online newsletter.  We write all the content.  We really think about what might be interesting to the reader that month.  It takes a lot of time to put together.  We don't buy any off-the-shelf product.  We use tools to help us send it out, but we don't just buy a newsletter that's already-written content.  Then we do a lot of note cards, things of that nature, to market to the group in our database.

Between 30-40% of my total business comes from the Web, so we do a lot of web marketing - search engine optimization, how we've optimized the website, our content, driving people to the website, Facebook ads, pay-per-clicks.  Then we market our events now, in order to gain exposure, through Facebook and Twitter and EventBrite.

There's all sorts of things in the background.  The way we market our sellers' homes, we use social media tools to expose their homes to much larger audiences, so that's a form of marketing.  We do a lot with video.  We're pushing those out with different social media platforms.  We're working a lot with reciprocal relationships, small businesses, where they post about us and vice versa.

There's a lot.  It can be overwhelming, as a small business, to design it all and be in the constant practice of keeping it going.  We think of it as a hub of spokes.  There are two pieces to our hub.  One piece is our website, and the other is our database.  The Web is kind of for new business, and our database is for current business and relationships, and so those are at the hub.  Then all the spokes are the verticals that we do that feed into either one of those.  Twitter would be one spoke.  Facebook would be another spoke.  SEO (search engine optimization) would be another spoke.  Direct mail that we send out to targeted geographic areas is another spoke.  We've identified all the different spokes, with the spokes feeding into the hub, and then with different things we do, gets the wheel turning.  It's always to be working to make sure we have forward momentum, and we're employing new tools and technologies that enable us to spin the wheel a little bit quicker, if need be.

What have been your keys to success when it comes to growing your online audience?

We're always working on driving traffic to the website with everything we do, because that is where we can start to continue the relationship.  When we feature events, there's reason for them to go to the website.  When we use the Facebook fan page, we drive them to the website.  When we send out our e-newsletters, we drive them to the website.

Some different things we're doing, just to be fun, is when we do our events, when we do our Tweetups, for example, we have a video camera.  We ask all our all our attendees, "What's a good life to you?"  Then we publish that.  It's fun.  It causes people to go to our fan page or our website.  We send out polls to our fans on Facebook saying, "Send us what you're most thankful for on Thanksgiving."  Then we produced a slide show and put that on our fan page.

What we're really trying to produce, and I think this is that push versus pull, is that we're kind of push-pull, versus push or pull.  We're working to push stuff out and then get people to communicate with us or respond to us or interact with us.  The great thing about social media and these new tools is that before we could just kind of push out our messages, but now our goal isn't to push, but to cause one to interact.