(gentle music)
- Hi, my name's Leanne Pilkington,
and I'm the Managing Director at Laing+Simmons.
Laing+Simmons started in 1967,
started by, would you believe it?
Doug Laing and Spencer Simmons, what a coincidence.
And they started franchising in the 80s.
It was bought by the current owners, the Dexar Group,
in 2012, and we've got 43 offices in and around Sydney,
one in Port Macquarie, and one in Taree.
- Marketing today has changed, because everything's
so much more visual, and it's instant, and people
want to be looking at things that are fresh, and
moveable, and that they can change all the time.
- People want a speed of response,
they want everything done very quickly.
People can automate a lot of what they're doing.
- Back in the old days, when I first started in real estate,
everything was on print, and you had your old deals,
and the flyers, and the websites were so boring.
There was a website when I first started in real estate,
but they were really basic, and they didn't do much at all,
and I remember, one of the biggest changes, I think,
is that the websites were so little,
whereas now, you've got the full screen,
and it's so much more visual now.
- We wanted to build a new website that was more
sophisticated, and was a lead-generating mechanism,
not just a static brochure, if you like.
- I think, these days, when you look at something
on the web, you want it to be bright and fresh,
and you want it to have that vibrancy.
So when we were looking for what we wanted
in our new website, it was looking for that vibrancy,
something that everybody could be proud of
within Laing+Simmons.
- We chose Stepps because there really wasn't
any other choice, they are
far and away doing more interesting things
than anybody else that we interviewed in the market, so
we've been so happy with the work that
Josh and his team have
delivered to us through the investigation period,
and then every single week during the development
of the website, we've been getting updates.
We don't have to ask for them, we get them delivered to,
via email, with links, every single week.
So the whole process has been seamless.
- When we were looking and investigating what was out there
in the digital space for websites,
Stepps seemed to be doing the latest and greatest.
They were at the forefront of everything,
and when you looked at different websites,
it was always the Stepps website that we came back to,
that we went, wow, we really like this one.
So it was a no-brainer for us, really.
- One of the reasons we chose Stepps was because
we believed in Josh's ability to sell our vision
for the website.
When you're running a franchise organisation like we are,
everybody's got their own point of view,
and they want their own
URLs, they want everything about them.
- Partnering with Stepps in this exercise,
it's been more than just about building a website.
So, so far, we've have Josh in to do training sessions
with our sales team, with our marketing teams,
we've had him in for our leaders' conference,
to talk about our vision for what we wanted to do,
because we were going down a different path
with the new website.
The experience, overall, has, I have to say,
it's been phenomenal.
Josh has a huge amount of patience,
and the whole team behind Josh, within Stepps,
have been brilliant.
And it didn't matter what time of the day or night
I emailed them, what sort of problems that I envisaged
I was going to have.
- One of the great things about working with Stepps
is that they are not just going to
launch the website and walk away.
So they are going to be an ongoing part
of our digital marketing team, if you like,
and we're very, very excited about that.
(gentle music)