Building your real estate brand is an essential practice in making sure that you have long-term success. While most agents begin their career by investing in their broker’s brand, they find that as time goes on and they look at moving on to a different broker, things are much more difficult and it is almost like starting over.
By investing in branding yourself as a realtor you are making your business transitional, so if you choose to go to a new office, you won’t have to start from the ground up. So, where do you begin? Use these seven steps to start building your real estate brand today.
Step 1: Define Your Real Estate Brand.
What defines a strong personal brand?
The first step is identifying your own personal strengths. What sets you apart from a competitor? Perhaps you have years of experience, work exclusively with buyers or sellers, are proficient with first-time home buyers, know how to navigate specific types of lending programs, or perhaps you just love pets. All of these things create buckets of opportunities for people to identify and select you as the person they want to work with when branding your real estate business.
Step 2: Analyze Your Audience.
When you start branding yourself in real estate you should first take a look at your audience. Does your marketing stand in line with the type of audience you were trying to reach? For example, what are some of your clients’ pain points? How do you reach out to these clients? For certain groups of people, text messaging is the most effective type of communication whereas for others, they may value a traditional conversation over the phone.
Understanding what makes your audience tick is important in defining your personal brand.
Step 3: Differentiate Yourself From Your Competition
The real estate industry is booming with endless competition. Though intimidating, knowing what your competition is doing and being able to do it better than them is critical in creating your own personal brand.
Oftentimes, you can look at how your competition is targeting the audience that you are also trying to reach and draw some lines that will help you be more visible and influential in your real estate marketplace.
Step 4: Take Small Actionable Steps.
When you look at creating a personal brand, you should take small actionable steps that lead you to your larger goals within your real estate business plan. Having a brand that stays top of mind means that you’re the first person they contact when they are ready to buy or list a home for sale.
Here are a few small steps that you can take to get started in building your real estate brand.
- Create a logo that is descriptive of your brand. It can be inclusive of the area or of the messaging that you were trying to put out to reach your audience.
- Create your own website. This site should be unique in branding yourself as a realtor rather than an extension of your broker. For the same reason previously outlined above, you won’t be able to take your broker’s website with you if you decide to leave that office.
- Invest in marketing campaigns. Having campaigns that are digital, print, and that invest in your community are essential in reaching your audience.
Step 5. Use Photos and Videos in Collaboration With Your Real Estate Branding
When determining how to create a real estate brand, understand that photography and videos are essential to storytelling. When selling a home, you need to tell a story that potential buyers picture themselves living. You want them to look at the backyard and envision barbecues with their friends and family. You want them to picture a Christmas tree with their family gathered around it for the holidays. You want them to see their children growing up there.
To accomplish this vision, the photos you choose should be flattering and adaptive enough that anyone can look at it and picture them with their family living there.
Step 6. Don’t Isolate Clients by Becoming Too Specialized
The same is true of branding your real estate business. You want to make sure that what you put out for your personal brand does not prohibit you from working with specific clients. Avoid the possibility of attracting a potential client, and then having them walk away because they think you can’t help them due to your ultra-specific branding.
A great example of this is if you say you are an expert as a listing agent. Do you want to put out so much real estate branding that someone buying a home believes they cannot come to you for assistance in the market because you work exclusively with sellers?
Step 7. Make Your Real Estate Branding Memorable
Real estate is a people business. That means that it is all about building relationships and growing them over time so that when someone is ready to buy or sell in the real estate market they think of you first. To make it in a competitive market, your branding needs to be memorable.
If your real estate branding looks like someone else’s or is just so elementary that it’s easily forgotten, you are going to have a difficult time staying top of mind. Ultimately, this means that you are going to lose out on opportunities because people will forget you work in real estate at all. Of course, the opposite is true as well — you don’t want your real estate branding to be so outlandish that people believe they cannot take you seriously.
Get Started Building a Real Estate Brand Today
If you’re new to the real estate business and are not quite sure where to start on creating your own personal brand then something you should consider is talking to an experienced real estate coach.
We offer a free consultation where we will learn about your vision and goals and match you with an appropriate coach who can help guide you to the success that enticed you to get into the real estate field in the first place. They will offer you step-by-step actionable items that can help you structure a business built for long-term success with a great return on your personal investments of time and money.