Branding in Real Estate Will Separate the Winners from the Pack in 2017
Originally published as Branding in Real Estate Will Separate the Winners from the Pack in 2017 on CraftWrites.com.
Your brand is your God-given identity and you should not be ashamed of it. Successful branding in real estate will involve being comfortable and confident with promoting well-defined personal and business brands. There are many benefits to accepting the challenge of intentional branding. The big picture is that your unique brand will help you stand out from the other agents in your area.
While this article focuses on online strategies for branding, the classic branding tactics are still useful and relevant. Agent and broker yard signs aren’t going anywhere. And yes, a good logo matters, but a logo is just a tool and not a branding endpoint by any means. Open houses, which might be a last resort marketing tactic for some agents, present a great way to promote your brand and form new relationships with people in a neighborhood.
Who Do You Serve?
If you don’t have a niche defined, you should find and define it as soon as possible. A good place to start is with your interests. If you enjoy health and fitness, you might consider serving people with those same interests in your community. People are into details and value specialists these days. Carve out your own segment in your community that only you can serve excellently.
Do Awesome Real Estate Marketing in 2017
Content, Content, Content
After you know whom to serve, produce and distribute specifically for them. Scatter shot content that doesn’t focus on serving a specific persona or niche won’t be effective in 2017. You content should have a hyper focus and should be as hyper local (about specific neighborhoods or areas of town) as possible. Also, quantity won’t be as important as quality in 2017. When you write, record, or film your new content, make sure it’s good stuff! You might only have one chance to impress a reader. Eventually, that impressed reader, after some nurturing, could become a new client. And don’t think of your content as a one-and-done process. One piece of content can be used in many ways. With email being such a big part of branding in 2017, re-purposing a blog post or article as content for an email message will be necessary for efficiently giving your brand the most reach.
Email, Email, Email
If you haven’t started building an email list yet, get going now. Start with family and friends and then use every event and activity as an opportunity to collect more email addresses. Don’t publish a blog post without a call-to-action that offers the reader an opportunity to join your list. Of course you should have a content upgrade (a helpful report or resource) to give in exchange for the reader’s contact information. Use paid social media to drive traffic to a landing page (which could be a landing page for a top listing) to increase the frequency of email signups.
Email is the most reliable channel for communicating with top, middle, and bottom of the funnel leads. But remember leads are people too, so email communication that reads and appears like real emails will be the most effective in 2017. Please put the template email newsletters with all the frills to bed. Good branding in real estate in 2017 will be about authenticity at all times, included when doing email marketing. Lastly, just like scatter shot blogging won’t work in 2017, neither will lazy scatter shot email marketing. Use segmentation and only send email messages to people who will learn something from it. People are hungry for information and they want to make informed home buying and selling decisions. You should be the person to email them the content they desire. Check out ConvertKit for a cool email marketing and an automated email nurturing platform.
Automation to Save The Day
You don’t have time do everything. Free yourself of certain online branding tasks so that you can focus on engaging clients, networking, continuing education, and more. Automation, which should also help you get your work done more quickly, will help you get back home sooner to spend more quality time with your family.
Social media automation allows you to share your blog content all throughout the day on different channels. Email automation, which I covered above, allows you to email people with specific messages at specific intervals. The beauty of marketing and branding automation is that it helps your brand to be present in many different places online (likely at the same time); and all the work is done on the front end! You can’t automate everything though. In-person meetings and networking can’t be automated (unless you have some sort of hologram action going).
2017 is practically here, y’all. Do the work now that will have the biggest impact for your brand in 2017 and beyond because branding in real estate will separate the winners from the pack.
