Johlyn da Prato, Director of Marketing and Communications

In this edition of the IQ we catch up with a familiar face at INREV, Johlyn da Prato who joined the organisation almost 15 years ago during a time when the industry and INREV itself looked very different. ‘What a different world it was then’, begins Johlyn, ‘not just for the industry but for the way in which we do our marketing and communication – there has been a huge transformation.’ 

‘We make it our business to keep up to speed with what’s going on in the market, to listen to our members and adapt our communications around what they need. We recently heard about customer centricity in real estate at the INREV Annual Conference and this is something we also emphasise within INREV – it’s about our members, listening to what they need and when they need it, continually creating value through increased engagement and better experiences.’ She tells. 

We make it our business to keep up to speed with what’s going on in the market

Over the last 20 years, INREV has naturally developed with its members  a vast repository of content - data , research, guidelines,  tools, and insights about the industry which helps our members paint a very detailed picture of the market and to understand the current landscape., butbut, it is our job to ensure that it reaches those who need it in a way that suits them. Members can access this in many more ways than before – from the website, INREV News, events, briefings, the quarterly IQ magazine, recordings, press and social media’ explains Johlyn. 

One of INREV’s focus’ is to create more tailored and timely content, driven by the development of personas of its membership to understand the individual needs of its broad member types spanning from investors to service providers – really understanding the challenges they face and what can be useful for them. Through this, we develop our role as a thought leader in the non-listed real estate industry and the central point of insight for our members and the wider non-listed real estate community. From the start of 2020, INREV has been working to ensure better tailored information reaches its members, improving the overall experience while collecting an abundance of data points to understand if the experience is as effective as hoped, and using the data to further improve the next campaign. We’ve also just hired a dedicated Marketing Manager, Chris Lam, to help us on this journey. 

We live in a hyper-connected world of information overload, so we need to be engaging, useful, and to the point to stand out in the crowd. People don’t have the time to sit down and read a detailed research report, they want the relevant insights pulled out and presented in an engaging, creative and visual manner, that allows them to quickly absorb the headlines and decide if it’s interesting and relevant for them to dig deeper. It’s a great way to bring people to the information they are looking for at INREV, especially when there are so many insights to share. We’re spending a lot of time coming up with creative ways to present and simplify information such as infographic style summaries, and we recently launched a monthly market highlight - a GIF (an animated image) post across Twitter and LinkedIn, giving the key highlights of a latest research report or index publication and these have been really well received so far. 

We live in a hyper-connected world of information overload, so we need to be engaging

Social media has been a growing focus for us, we post more content than ever before and we have a following on LinkedIn of over 6000 – an increase of over 40% in 2020. Social media has become a core channel for sharing the latest insights and news for INREV COVID-19 has meant that more of our members and the wider industry have increasingly turned to online channels to connect and collaborate and to stay part of the non-listed real estate community. This is something we do not expect to see disappear, even when the pandemic is long gone, and we are meeting in person again. 

Social media has been a growing focus for us, we post more content than ever before and we have a following on LinkedIn of over 6000

Ultimately, we want to ensure that our members receive the best experience possible of INREV. Is information found easily enough? is it quick to find information? is the information grouped in such a way that makes sense and of course is it useful? All of these questions lead us to our next big project – enhancing the usability, experience and architecture of inrev.org. Stay tuned for more info. 

You can contact Johlyn at Johlyn.daprato@inrev.org