This week Telum caught up with Race Wong, CPO and Co-founder at Ohmyhome as she shares how marketing and communications in the property sector has changed drastically due to COVID-19. 

Share with us how has COVID-19 impacted the operations at Ohmyhome?  
The pandemic lockdowns around Southeast Asia were certainly a catalyst of change for Ohmyhome that disrupted certain operations and accelerated digitalisation in others that created certain transformation in the way we run our teams and the prioritising of projects.  

We had to get creative and quickly adapt to the situation. Fortunately, the tech capabilities that we’d built over the years helped make the changes quick and seamless: we quickly built the virtual viewing feature and shifted toward digital documentation where possible. Our in-house agents sprang into action to create video tours listings and virtual viewing opportunities. Since the start of circuit breaker, we observed a threefold increase in users on our property portal.  

Do you think that social media is an ideal marketing and communications tool for the property sector as compared other traditional mediums?  
Social media embodies a unique combination of performance marketing and community building which makes it a potent apparatus in our marcomms toolkit for engaging with quality potential buyers and sellers.  
What we like about social media platforms is the flexibility to create informative content in different mediums, easily share useful blogs and conduct live webinars. When compared to traditional mediums, social media platforms are certainly a more flexible platform for us to share and communicate directly with our audiences. Thus far, it is the most effective and sustainable channel for customer conversions and progressing down the sales funnel. Its casual and personal tone, coupled with the interactivity of the platform, have proven effective in converting customers.  

The pandemic has seen more firms speeding up its digital transformation. How is Ohmyhome boosting its digital presence to remain visible amongst the competition?  
Without a doubt the future is going to be digital; the pandemic has merely sped up the changes. For us it just means to continue with the product plan we had in place for 2020 for becoming the new way of property transactions.  

Ohmyhome is all about being the new way forward in buying and selling homes through its one-stop platform for all property-related services. From search, sell and lease, to home financial advisory services to major and minor home services, the platform provides a wide-ranging suite of services all easily accessible on its app. This put us in a unique position over our competitors who offer limited services.   

The digital-first approach which we undertook to target digital-savvy property owners and seekers has enabled us to stand out from the crowd. The prioritisation of social media ads, SEO, SEM was crucial in helping us establish our strong digital presence.   

Has Ohmyhome adopted any special new strategies to strengthen its customer engagement?  
The lockdown was challenging for many, and our goal is to help tide them through this difficult period. We created digital care packages filled with COVID-19  elated resources from ways to stay focused while working from home, to how to boost your immune system and self-entertainment during lockdown.   

During the circuit breaker period, property transactions dropped to historic low levels and it was the best time for people to research and to make informed decisions on their next property move. We hosted Facebook live interactive webinar sessions, ohtalks!, with our team of experienced real estate professionals, marketing experts, mortgage advisors, and our in-house interior designer were a mainstay in our social media marketing strategy during the pandemic. These Facebook live sessions cover a diverse range of in-depth property and home-related topics that’s free for the public, including customers or even other real estate agents, to tune in and get the helpful guidance they need on their property journey during this trying period.  

To cater to our Chinese-speaking customers, we also conducted a bulk of the webinars in Chinese which was an uncommon in the property industry. We knew that we had to engage this group of customers too who were underserved during COVID-19.