Heidi Vine: Our Customer Is 100 Percent the Agent

Written by Acme Mag

Acme: Tell us a bit about your role at Harris and the journey that took you there. You were at Harcourts before, correct?

Heidi: I studied Journalism and PR at University when I initially left school, and during my degree I undertook some work experience at Harcourts South Australia with their corporate team. I thought real estate was an awesome way of understanding the marketing landscape, as you were exposed to so many different aspects. Graphic design, print, photography, templating, video, websites, and more. 

My first role within real estate marketing, post university, was working as the Marketing Manager at Harcourts South Australia, which gave me an incredible opportunity to understand how marketing is coordinated broadly across a franchise network, working with all of the individual offices on their marketing initiatives.

I then moved to Harris, who at the time didn’t have the same type of position I had at Harcourts, being a non-franchised organisation. Over the past nine years I have seen the department structure change from a couple of coordinators, to a full in-house offering across graphic design to social media to photography, and now a shift towards working with key external suppliers who are experts in their fields to provide marketing solutions to our internal team.

Acme: So how has marketing at Harris changed over the years?

Heidi: It’s primarily been a constant shift in what the agent wants over the years. Our brand ethos is agent first, agency second. Our marketing offering and all of the offerings we give to our agents is about supporting them. Back when I first started, we didn’t have a team of sales managers and coaches because they didn’t need that, whereas now that is such a huge part of our company. Now we’ve shifted to not doing photography internally anymore – it’s all handled externally. It’s really the structure that’s changed.

But keeping the brand secondary to agents and customers has always been constant. We’ve only just this year moved the Harris logo back to the top of the signboard. Before that, our angle was “we’re at the bottom because your property comes first.” We’re also only just now about to add the option for agents to have their faces on sideboards again. We know that some agents would like their face on a board, some don’t. They’re still about the property, but it’s really just about what they want.

More recently, we’ve hired a Senior Marketing Officer. Their role is focused on creating high-quality print and digital tools for our new online ‘shopping cart’: HarrisGo. The platform is based around helping our agents grow their personal brands in their individual marketplaces. On the platform, agents can see all available marketing collateral, associated costs, and even search for key items to help their specific goals. It’s something we’ve been working on for a while and we’re really excited to see it roll out. 

Acme: I guess you could say the 2024 marketing focus for Harris is agent range, then?

Heidi: Exactly. We’re creating new ways we can get the agent’s names out there while still giving the customer something that’s actually relevant to them. It’s about leveraging testimonials and really honing in on each agent’s point of difference. So they’re group stylists. They’re pros. A lot of them do project management for the customer. They’ve all got a really unique selling point.

For our corporate services team, our customer is 100 percent the agent. Everything that we do is geared towards considering if this is going to make an agent’s life easier or more successful. That’s why we have our HR team, our marketing team, our IT team, sales management, all those people to really help them out with that.

Acme: As a side note then, what’s one thing someone in a position like yours should be prioritising this year?

Heidi: I think in marketing, we can get so caught up in what we think is the best way of doing things. “I’ve done it this way, so I think you should do it this way.” But in the end, especially in a real estate marketing role, we’re actually not out there. We’re not the ones in the lounge room selling to the customer. It’s about actually sitting down with your top teams or people who are influencers in your company. That’s one thing that we have done when we’re going to roll out a big change or work on something new, it’s been to the agent. They see what they would like from it rather than us thinking, “Oh, this is what they want from it.”

Interested in more articles with real estate marketing pros? Check out our interview with Cheyne Toomey of Spacecraft Media.