The Staged Marketing Approach

How do you explain staged marketing to a vendor? In this episode of We Are Selling, Lee Woodward walks you through the Staged Marketing Approach – a structured and progressive method for presenting marketing plans to property owners.

Rather than running a single campaign, Lee explains how four carefully designed campaigns can protect the seller’s asset, generate excitement, and ensure the best possible result. This episode features a full role-play of how to explain the process to a client during a listing presentation, providing practical dialogue and structure agents can apply immediately.

💡 In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How to present a step-by-step staged marketing strategy in under 15 minutes
• Why protecting the asset is just as important as selling it
• How off-portal campaigns can create urgency and exclusivity
• The value of social media engagement in reaching warm, local audiences
• Why international visibility and neighbourhood mail drops can lead to premium results

Lee demonstrates how to keep momentum across four campaign stages – from early buyer engagement, to social and portal exposure, to local outreach – ensuring that no opportunity is missed and no property is undersold.

Hosted by Lee Woodward Training Systems

Brought to you by The Complete Salesperson Course & Super Coaching Program

🎓 The Complete Salesperson Course – Australia’s premier real estate training, delivered nationally throughout the year. Build the skills, systems, and mindset to perform at the highest level. Learn more →

📚 The Super Coaching Program – An exclusive membership providing ongoing coaching, resources, and strategies to support sustained growth in real estate. Join today →

Discover more:

• Next Events
• Lee's New Book – Claiming Doors
• Explore Lee Woodward Short Courses
• The Mat Steinwede Real Estate Success Program

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

Hello and welcome to the podcast We Are Selling. My name's Lee Woodward, Head of Education at the Realtare Academy, the home of Pitch, Sign and Sell, the one platform for real estate professionals. Today's programme is called Staged Marketing. And I'm actually going to do the whole thing as a role play, as it's been a request of how do you explain in a listing presentation today in less than 13-14 minutes everything about the marketing process. And stage marketing is that technique and that structure that we teach at the complete salesperson. So, what you are about to listen to was a one-to-one coaching session that I was doing via Zoom. The question came up about the listing conversation and stage marketing. I'm going to jump into role play into the Zoom. Let's get started. Stephanie, what I'd like to do now is discuss the marketing of your property with you. All agents will talk about marketing and realestate.com and what they do. We do that a little bit differently, and we run a program which is called a staged marketing program. Instead of one campaign, we actually run four campaigns. But the campaigns are progressive. Depending on what offer we receive from the marketplace, you can choose at each stage how far you want to go with that. I'll always give you my recommendation because I have certain views and reasons why we should do things. But you are the owner, you are the boss. We're just the expert in this space of getting results. So let me explain the stage marketing to you and the reason we do it. The first reason we do it is our number one job at LJ Hooker is to protect the asset, not just sell it. Anyone can drop the price low enough and it will sell. But then you find out you got 30 or 50 or 60,000 less than you should have got. And in a principal place of residence like that, uh like this, that's a cash opportunity. There's no tax. So this is a very serious thing that we are looking at. And a lot of people do sell their house fast, too fast, and money's left on the table. There was even situations in Sydney where people were selling six, seven weeks later because they didn't like the house, and they got a couple hundred thousand more than the original owner got. This is where we have to make sure we do not undersell the asset and take it through a process so that at the end of this time with us, when you've got that great result, you would feel confident that you released the property for the most amount of money versus it sold first day, first person, not everyone saw it, and then I found out I undersold the property. So there's four campaigns. Campaign one is for all our VIP registered purchasers that have actually been calling on homes in the last six months at your price range and above. And you can imagine not everyone buys the property they ring up about. The people that called up on other homes similar to yours and still haven't found something. That's what we call a seasoned purchaser. They're frustrated, they're sick of not finding anything, and they will actually pay a premium to take your property from the market and take them off the market themselves. Because when you haven't picked your schools and where the kids are going to be because you don't know where you're going to be living, there's a lot of people that pay a premium out of frustration, and we reach out to those people first, and we have a phone call, something like this. I'll ring someone up and I'll say, Hi Helena, it's Lee here from LJ Hooker. I've had a property come available that has not been on the portal yet. We haven't promoted it or advertised it at this point. It's just come available to us. We've just come out of the styling stage and photography. But I promised you I would reach out to you if something was a direct connection to the price range and area where you're looking. And I'd love you to come through before it goes on the portal to see if it matches your requirements for what you and the family are looking for. That phone call becomes a specialty phone call, and it's a very important phone call for those families that are missing out on properties all the time. But even though they come through, uh, we know what they can spend when they need it by, which is now, and we've let them know that they are seeing it off portal. And off-portal gives them a bit of excitement that they might be first. Now, I don't mind them getting excited. I love that they may put an offer in, but that offer's not important to me. What's important to me is I understand the buyer engagement level on the property. Because you and I might have thoughts of what we think it's worth, and today I'll be telling you what I think the property's worth based on mathematical and emotional pricing. If someone comes in and is seeing it and they'll pay way more than that, that's how that's how we get record sales. Every time we've ever got a record sale, we were wrong. So getting these people through when they don't know, as soon as you go on the portal, it's a bit of a ticking clock. And one of the golden rules of real estate is the longer your property's on the market, the less purchasers expect to pay. I do this work early, and I call it leakage marketing. I'm leaking out to the market that we've got one coming available, but it's not on the portal. And I'm trying to generate that energy and specialty around it so people feel they are the most important person to this one property. And it's how I've been able to get some incredible results off portal in the early stages. So that'll be campaign one. Campaign two, social. The social media marketplace is different to the portal marketplace. When people are looking on portal at realestate.com.au, they need a house right now because they've usually sold one or they're ready to move. The social market quite often wasn't thinking of moving, but they see a house like yours come available and they might have been walking past it because they live three streets away and they go, I'm not moving, but I'd buy that. I'd love that house. I've been walking past it for years and I'd sell mine tomorrow for that. And in the fast-paced marketplace we have right now, that is all possible that people can release and buy an asset in a very compressed time frame within settlements. It's not usually like that, but right now we do have that opportunity. What we'll do at LJ Hooker Cleveland, we're going to create a digital inspection of the property. And the digital inspection's got beautiful photos, floor plans, video of the home, great copy, reasons why the property's on the market. We do an incredible digital inspection. But what I'd like you to do, Stephanie, is I want you to post this. So campaign two is as our owner, I would like you to announce to all your family and friends that you've decided to put the property on the marketplace. It's not on the portal yet, but just letting all my family and friends know that the property's available and you've selected Lee Woodward of LJ Hooker. If you know of anyone looking for an incredible family home in Cleveland, click on the link below to the digital inspection, and all the information is there for you. Now, Steph, when you post, it's going to all the people that are what we call in the marketing world the same avatar. Your friends, your friends' daughters and family, cousins, your tribe of people on Facebook are different to mine and different to anybody else's. But someone who knows you, who knows about that home or has been there for a barbecue or something, may know the purchase of who's going to pay the premium. Releasing it on social, we will be releasing it as well. In my leak-based marketing, I'm going to take some photos of the photo shoot being done. I'm going to take some photos of the video guys there doing some video work saying, not available yet, but coming soon. Got a great four-bedroom, brick and tile home, double garage, in ground pool, watch this space. And I'm going to be leaking it that it's coming available. And the reason I'm using the word leaking it, if I go on portal, it's like, well, nobody else has bought it. How long is it going to be on there? I'm trying to reduce the time frame that people think no one's bought it. And I do that by working in this early stage to create excitement around great property coming available. But the fact it's not on the portal means my ticking clock hasn't started. So that's campaign two. Campaign three, we're going live to the portal. Now, regardless of what great and wonderful offers we receive, the investment in the portal is little compared to the international value we get. So, Stephanie, the way it works is people all over the world go onto realestate.com.au as the trusted portal. There's many portals, but nothing like realestate.com.au. And they look up Cleveland, they look up, and then they set a notification to be notified as soon as a property like this comes available. And that could be 15,000, 200,000, you never know. But the attraction to a home like yours is high. And we've got to make sure we leave no stone unturned. And if someone's in London right now, who grew up in Cleveland and they're on a notification, it would be crazy for us not to give that opportunity as someone who will pay a premium versus just another local price. And having an international approach to selling your house versus a local is a really a local approach is a really important part of this campaign. And then campaign four is we actually do direct mail, mailbox drops to all the surrounding streets and residents because whoever lives in your area loves your area. And they may get our just listed DL flyer with a QR code, which goes straight to your digital inspection. But they might be ringing their friend in Sydney saying, One's come up, one behind me. We could carpool the kids, we could share the responsibilities. You've got to get up here. And when a mum goes nuts over a house coming up behind them, again, it could be one of our best buyers where we get phone calls saying, You don't know me at all, but my sister-in-law lives in Duke Street and she just got a flyer and I want to buy it today. What can I do? We've had some amazing connections like that where someone in the street has a family member, or it could be a grandmother, or any family sibling that needs to be close for a reason. So that surrounding mailbox drop, people think, oh, do you really need that? I just can't tell you how important it is that we do everything we can. So when when the offers do come through, I can look you in the eyes and say, I've done everything I can to get you a result. Versus, you know, we get an offer and you think, oh, well, I don't want to invest in any of these marketing things, so that's pretty good, isn't it? I won't be able to look you in the eye and say, we reach London, France, New York, all the locals. It's such a small investment, the marketing spend compared to the asset. We've got situations at the moment where we're not just getting good results, we're getting$150,000 more was expected. Uh, no one can price property right now. You'd be crazy to say, oh, it's worth that, versus we've got to have a stage marketing campaign that allows the property to breathe, the purchasers to have a chance to see it, everyone has a chance to see it. Then we can decide what that top figure is, so you can feel comfortable that you've got the greatest result, and I can feel comfortable that I protected the asset and it was never undersold. Because there's a lot of sales out there now, and I think, you know what, I know someone who have paid more than that because they can't find one and it's sold fast, too fast. So that's our staged marketing. How does that feel to you?

SPEAKER_01: 12:05

Good, good. Like it's just the way that it's input as well.

SPEAKER_00: 12:08

Like these are all things that I know, but when you when you lay it out like that and structure it like that, like and that concludes another edition of We Are Selling. If you've got any requests, send them through to leew at RealTear.com and I will do those in the show. If you would like to attend one of our complimentary weekly webinars, reach out to the RealTare Academy on 1 300 367 412 or visit our site and follow the links. I'm Lee Woodward. Thank you for listening.