Dawn Perry, a seasoned marketing leader, has moved into an executive role as Senior Vice President of Marketing for ERA Real Estate (PRNewsfoto/ERA Real Estate)
“We are hyper-focused on helping agents improve their productivity,” said Dawn Perry, the new Senior Vice President of Marketing at ERA Real Estate who chatted with Inman about her priorities and goals for her new role.
Perry has been working for ERA since 2010. “I was brought on to do new business development,” she explained. “I worked on building the recruiting platform that ERA currently uses and that provides resources and tools for brokers so they understand recruiting best practices and can really strengthen that in their local market.” The tool included an agent front-end with a back-end CRM platform.
Perry also had her hand in franchise sales — “I worked on leads management, we ran seminars and video series for best practices; I worked on hands-on recruiting, working one-on-one with brokers and agents to help them figure out recruiting; and I worked in education for a period of time.”
Then, when there was an opening in ERA’s marketing department, Perry took it. This was just before ERA reimaged the brand, so she was part of that effort and remembers watching the reimaging effort unfold over 18 months both nationally and internationally.
Now, she’s taking the reins of the marketing department and plans to use the skills built over an impressive career to engage agents with the brand and help them meet their goals.
“We have some existing products that we’re enhancing to try to meet changing consumer demands as well as agent demands, as well as new ways of working,” Perry said.
One big focus right now is helping agents engage with ERA’s Zap platform, a proprietary technology owned by franchise operator Realogy. “Right now it’s really focusing on agent engagement with that platform, how to engage their productivity and tips and tools on how to do that,” she said. “It’s also getting back to basics, getting them to build relationships with their clients.”
She also alludes to some new initiatives in the mix, including the second revamp of ERA’s “Seller Security Plan.”
“The basic premise is if we don’t sell your house, we’ll buy it,” Perry said, “and what that allows an agent to do is help a seller understand how they can position their home to sell quickly — and if it doesn’t sell quickly, there’s an opportunity for ERA to buy it.”
There’s also a new agent education program called “Pro Performance.” “The best way for people to actually drive meaningful results is when they hold themselves and others accountable,” Perry explained. Pro Performance will set very specific quotas for activities each agent should finish each week, and the participants hold each other accountable. There are regular webinar calls for participants, who can fail out of the program if they don’t meet their goals.
As far as marketing to consumers, Perry explained that “ERA’s strategy is hyper-focused on driving leads directly to our agents; we are solely focused on agent productivity — and what that means for us is we’re completely online.”
The company has a strategic partnership involving online custom video content and digital display ads with HGTV that will run through most of the summer, and she adds that they advertise on aggregators and invest in SEM nationally and locally.
“The brand-new campaign we launched this year is called ‘You + ERA = A Real Match’; it’s about finding the right connection in real estate,” she noted. “So the basic premise is whatever you’re looking for — a custom kitchen, a backyard with a vineyard, a garden in the city … there’s a match for that.”
And the campaign is “completely customizable,” she added. “Agents can put in their pictures and fine-tune their local market expertise. We have quite a few brokers and agents already using it.”
Perry also notes that ERA’s new chief operating officer, Simon Chen, “is actively looking for new products that we can launch at ERA — those are things yet to be.”