Building a brand is hard work. However, it’s essential to have a clear understanding of who you are and the message you want to provide to clients and prospects at the outset in order to build trust and authority within your industry and ongoing loyalty moving forward.
Branding does not just relate to the company as a whole either, but each individual realtor needs to create their own brand within the business in order to create personalized experiences and maintain their own clientele. This is especially important if you’re working as a realtor in a larger company with fierce competition among employees and get rewarded for success.
Local branding is also essential to consider with online branding, as 69% of home buyers begin their online search with local intent, such as ‘Miami houses for sale’.
Getting Started with a Branding Strategy
When it comes to the actual branding strategy of your company or individual brand, as an expert within the industry, it’s imperative to stand out. The real estate market is a highly competitive one and, depending on your geographical area, is extremely saturated.
Identify your niche in the market
It can be hugely tempting to want to cover everything in the industry. Surely the more you offer, the more sales you will get, right? However, this can actually set you back in the game when clients are going to specialists in the area of property they are interested in and not generalists. There are many specialisms you can gain valuable experience in within real estate and selecting one to build upon will make sure you make a name for yourself as an expert in each area before adding to the list. Rental property, selling or buying, commercial property, investment or holiday homes, new properties and property developments are just a few categories you can explore individually, before increasing your span of services.
Know who you are and why you do what you do
If you don’t understand who you are as a company or figure in the industry, how will your clients? Your brand is based on a clear understanding of who you are, what you do, why you do it and what your mission is overall. Once you can answer these questions, you have the foundation to begin building a brand.
Identify your audience
If you don’t know who your audience is, find out. You cannot create a brand if you do not have a target, so create your buyer personas. You need to know who they are, what they do, what they earn, marital status, typical home style and size they are interested in and can afford, geographical areas they cover, local pastimes and any other relevant interests or related information, such as interest in commercial property or land and rental properties they may hold.
Building Your Brand
Once you know why you’re building your brand, it’s time to start taking action.
Name Your Brand
This is probably the most crucial part of your brand. This is the thing that will be present on every piece of communication to clients, partners, vendors and staff. It will most likely form a part of your logo, your website and be plastered all over your social media platforms. It needs to be something that makes it easy for prospects to know what you do and something you love, that you won’t get bored of saying. Watch out for tongue twisters, difficult to spell or too long names as these can all make it difficult to share by word of mouth and for potential clients to find you online.
Create a Slogan
Not a necessary step in the branding process, but with the right selection of catchy words, you could have yourself a memorable phrase to compliment your name and further inform your audience about your brand.
Create a Logo
Creating a visual element to assist your brand is the next step in your strategy. Because your logo will be present on all marketing materials and communications, It would be best to hire a professional designer for this part of the process as you will need a variety of versions for use across online platforms and use offline.
Exude Quality in Your Brand Image
Everything from color palette to font choice are relevant in your overall brand image. Make sure that everything matches and presents the high-quality you are hoping to portray in everything you do. When it comes to each of these elements, less is definitely more and so you want to select just a couple of fonts, with a small selection of colors to complement your neutrals – black and white. Understanding how colors can affect emotions is an excellent starting point when selecting these finishing touches for your overall look.
Implementing Your Real Estate Brand Strategy
By this point, you’ve built your brand and developed a logo that represents it. Now onto the final step in implementing your strategy: building it out.
Consistency is Key
When using your brand image, you need to make sure that it’s consistent across all platforms, online and offline. If you have a space or a capital letter in your brand name, it needs to be decided how the name will be written and always written like this in every form of communication. If this is unclear at any point internally, then you can be sure that it will be unclear to your audience and you then lose credibility as a brand.
Dynamic Media is Your Friend
In the real estate industry, you have the perfect opportunity to utilize all still and video media to its full potential. Earlier this year, we established that video is king when it comes to marketing a business in real estate and we stand by that. The home buying, selling and rental process is a very visual experience and visual aids help to add value and authority to your brand.
Keep Up With Social Media Trends
If Twitter is your online platform of choice, Periscope and Meerkat are great video tools to explore, allowing you to post videos directly onto your feed professionally.
If Instagram is more your thing, you have a wealth of tools at your fingertips, literally. Images and videos are a great way to show off your brand, products and services. With a range of filters and effects, you can always be sure that you’re putting out high quality content.
Another big contender in social media is, of course, Facebook. Image and video posts tend to outperform text-only posts, but this is the platform for building communities and starting discussions with your customers. Don’t be invisible here. Presence is key.
We hope this guide has provided you with the foundations to build a full brand strategy for your real estate business. However, there is a lot more depth to explore in each area and it’s important to take your time and research each element thoroughly before finalizing decisions. This can be very time-consuming, but once everything is in place, it’s something that is going to stick around for a long time (unless you want to go through an expensive rebranding process), so we recommend trying to get it as close to right as possible the first time around.
Is there anything you’re still debating about while creating, or recreating, your brand image? Join the discussion below and share some ideas.
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