All marketing leaders aspire for it: That big play that delivers concretely impactful brand and business gain. For REA Group’s Sarah Myers, that decision came last year when she opted to make a strategic bet on the Paris Olympics.

As GM audience & marketing, Myers’ remit includes brand and performance marketing, audience and personalisation, marketing automation enablement, and lifecycle marketing for consumer and customer, insights and analytics across marketing and product. This extends across REA Group brands including realestate.com.au, realcommercial.com.au, property.com.au, Flatmates, and Mortgage Choice.

“Going for gold by unlocking significant incremental investment to launch a new brand campaign during the Paris Olympics was high stakes and it delivered an even higher reward,” she says.  

Instead of allocating additional resources to key projects or other brands in the portfolio, sustaining growth for an established brand like realestate.com.au required a transformative approach in Myers’ opinion.

“To grow audience and trust, we needed to show up at scale in trusted environments with authentic and engaging creative,” says Myers. “Launching during the Olympics was a big bet, strategic decision that involved calculated risk. It would trade off the efficiency of our reach in favour of enhancing the effectiveness of our impact.”

The high-profile event investment delivered. Realestate.com.au’s monthly average audience went up 1 million incrementally year-on-year, as the Olympics integration delivered 95m screens impressions with a 9+ frequency, along with 20m audio impressions with a 9+ frequency. Myers positions it as unrivalled impact.

“Validating our strategic decision, we have grown the category, strengthened our leadership, and unlocked record audience numbers month-after-month,” she says.

Effective marketing strategy

Effective marketing isn’t just about crafting net new things, however. It’s also about evolving successful strategies to find new gains. For Myers, that’s required the team to build out more authentic storytelling which better reflects the stressful journey prospective property owners take when buying and selling.

“Our brand and audience strategy is centred on deeply understanding what matters to consumers in their long and complicated property journey. We have been executing this successful strategy for several years but accelerated effectiveness in FY25 with our shift to connect with audiences emotionally,” continues Myers. “We are differentiating realestate.com.au with authentic and compelling storytelling in a category that often favours function.”

Recognising the property journey is an emotional rollercoaster, full of overwhelming auction days and packed inspections that can discourage buyers, sellers and renters, REA leaned in and developed the ‘Keep Moving’ brand and creative platform, which launched in July 2024. Creative targeted different audiences by tapping into their different emotions. For example, in one narrative, the story empathetically follows the realities of finding a new home, showing how realestate.com.au can help navigate a way forward with a personalised property experience. In all, 250 assets with executions for all audiences and platforms were created.

“I am passionate about showcasing Australian music to enhance storytelling, especially for a leading Australian brand. We featured the 1980's classic Heaven by Eurogliders and were thrilled to be a finalist for an Aria Award,” comments Myers. “System1 testing revealed the creative was in the top 6 per cent of ads tracked. It received a strong rating for impact, due to an exceptional result on ‘emotional intensity’.”

The creative was paired with highly optimised media planning, built on rich data-driven insights into the role of each channel. “I’m proud of the new level of creativity the team delivered across proven channels to drive high-impact, high-engagement brand moments, including special build interactive street furniture across Sydney and Melbourne,” she says.  

Notably, the work also reflects Myers’s commitment to consistency and optimisation with space for experimentation.

Other headline results included extending realestate.com.au’s unique audience by a record 12.42 million in January 2025, up 12 per cent year-on-year, rounding to an average of 11.9m in H1 FY25. Exclusive audience extended as well by 14 per cent year-on-year to 6.5m in January, and REA hit a record 68 per cent preference score and 57 per cent top-of-mind awareness.

“We are delivering record results, sustained category growth and share, and exceeding all objectives,” Myers says.

Discerning decision making

Another one of Myers’ wins over the past 12 months has been generating more valuable Mortgage Choice broker leads via realestate.com.au. REA acquired Mortgage Choice in 2021.

“Using audience segmentation and behavioural insights, we sought to understand the key moments property seekers on realestate.com.au need financial support. We established key indicators of lead quality and the right message, time and channel to nurture audiences,” Myers explains. “We leveraged these insights to more deeply integrate Mortgage Choice into realestate.com.au web and app experiences, giving Mortgage Choice customers an advantage when searching for property on realestate.com.au.”

This strategy has helped to drive a 47 per cent year-on-year increase in Mortgage Choice broker leads generated through realestate.com.au in H1FY25. Myers also cites significant savings by delivering broker leads using realestate.com.au’s audience and lifecycle marketing rather than acquiring them off platform.

“At the same time, we developed a market-leading off platform acquisition approach by enhancing the quality of Mortgage Choice leads by leveraging online and offline data,” she says. “Our innovative and successful off platform acquisition has been recognised by Google, which said our approach of offline conversion imports alongside value-based bidding is not just effective, but market-leading.”

Business influence

According to Myers, REA’s principle of 'build once and use many, many times’ is testament to the scalability of its data approach in marketing.

“It has allowed us to quickly adapt the same underlying data from personalised communications to products driving new revenue opportunities,” she says.

A case in point is Luxe listings, a marketing powered product for luxury property. Marketing worked closely with the product teams to shape a new solution to drive more valuable leads to real estate customers. Luxe offers high impact, premium ad placements that reach highly personalised audiences, leveraging unique data segmentation to ensure maximum visibility and engagement.

“Exclusive to Luxe, we have also unlocked new channels for customers, including rich push notifications, and valuable information that leverages our powerful audience insights. We provide our customers with information that gives them a competitive edge in market,” says Myers, adding Luxe listings receive double the views.

“By constantly innovating and building market-leading products and consumer experiences, we can tap into new revenue streams and drive growth across our business.”

Data-driven decision making

Further touting the power of data-driven member experiences driving consumer engagement and seller leads is the work Myers and the team did as the Australian property market slowed dramatically during a period of 13 consecutive interest rate rises. Coupled with inflation and cost-of-living uncertainty, these challenging market conditions fuelled a decline in seller confidence.

“We conducted comprehensive qualitative and quantitative research to identify ways to inspire confidence in property owners. In response, we adapted our marketing strategy, which was focused on property buyers, and instead split investment across a dual 'buyers and sellers' strategy,” explains Myers.  

To do this, the team, relaunched an existing product and named it realEstimate. Over half (51 per cent) of consumers associated realEstimate with realestate.com.au unpromoted, demonstrating the name was distinctive, ownable, and a great brand fit.

“Uptake in realEstimate is central to our membership acquisition strategy – members are three times more likely to take a high value action,” comments Myers.

Since rebranding and relaunching, REA has seen double the number of logged-in members on realestate.com.au, with 4.3 million homeowners now monitoring the value of their property with a realEstimate. One in three properties are now tracked on realestate.com.au. More than 80 per cent of consumers also now link realEstimate to realestate.com.au, and in H1FY25, seller leads to customers increased 88 per cent YoY.

Customer-first thinking

Elsewhere, the team has been working to improve the B2B customer journey further through its Ignite real estate agent customer platform. This self-service platform allows real estate agents view and manage property listings, access daily listing performance reports, and view and respond to enquiries. Customers can also securely manage and process rental applications.

“We wanted to simplify the onboarding process to help customers unlock the full value of Ignite and REA products. Supporting customers to get the most out of Ignite,” Myer says of this CX-first initiative. “By guiding our customers, we aimed to increase platform adoption and new product adoption.”

To help, REA introduced a new Centre of Excellence operating model within lifecycle marketing to foster better collaboration with product teams. “The ability to collectively align on user pain points, leverage the marketing technology stack to gather actionable insights in real-time, share experimentation outcomes and campaign performance, has been invaluable to driving a better understanding of our users,” says Myers.

Leveraging its martech stack, marketing developed multichannel campaigns for customers who had not yet onboarded to Ignite to showcase the value of the platform. It then helped customers navigate through the onboarding process by sharing the right information at the right time and allowing users to go at their own pace with frictionless prompts.

Since launch, Myers cites achieved record results with a significant increase in monthly active members in Ignite year-on-year.

Commercial delivery

Personalisation and membership are at the heart of REA’s consumer and audience strategy. With an emphasis on leveraging first-party data, the company has Braze and Tealium platforms in play to provide highly personalised communications and in-product experiences to consumers. There are now 60+ audience segments and tailor communications to buyers, sellers, renters, and property owners across the key segments.

Through the power of personalisation at scale and using audiences effectively, Myers says her team has created efficiencies, allowing for investment in other channels and areas.

“We scaled our 60+audience segments off platform across Google, Meta, and TikTok to drive more effective marketing campaigns. We have also scaled our audience segments into the product experience, providing end-to-end personalisation and fuelling membership,” she notes.

“After prioritising audience engagement via mar tech and delivering value for our consumers and real estate agent customers, we applied the learnings to our adtech strategy. More recently, we launched data clean rooms allowing media partners to access these audiences, which we expect will drive significant opportunities for our media business.”

People leadership

Even with all the data and tech, Myers knows it’s nothing without a strong team culture, something that can be challenging to foster when you’re spread across multiple geographies and offices. With concerted effort on culture, she cites high performance and high engagement (92 per cent).

“Our regular team days – both in person and virtual – are key moments that matter, bringing everyone together to form our future thinking and understand technological changes and new challenges. We bring in guests from across the business and our external partners to help shape new thinking and inspire excellence,” Myers says.

She highlights two key initiatives at REA: A high-performance leadership series and a new marketing graduate program. The high-performance leadership series has been instrumental in the evolution to a cohesive leadership team for Myers.

“The program has accelerated a culture of continuous improvement, encouraging courage over comfort, leadership through trust, and the development of feedback-hungry teams,” she says.

The graduates program, meanwhile, sees new recruits gaining hands-on experience across REA’s digital ecosystem while developing a broad range of marketing skills across brand, performance, go-to-market, mar tech, and personalisation.

“We have had great success with our first two marketing cohorts across B2C and B2B. We are also thrilled with the development opportunities for our team members to take on people leadership and mentoring roles. This program has been key to attracting talent across strategic areas, especially martech,” Myers adds.