You could be working to establish yourself in any type of business these days and the need to be building a brand for yourself will be something that’s going to be directly conducive to having success. This is something that wasn’t as important for previous generations, but with the way media and marketing approaches exist today – along with the way people are predisposed to make choices about where they’ll take their business – it’s an entirely different ballgame when it comes being visible and making a name for yourself.
There’s no debate that branding is huge in all of this, and in this business real estate agent branding is equally huge nowadays. Perhaps even more so given how competitive this business is, and the fact that in nearly every city and town there are way too many realtors in comparison to how much business there is to go around. That’s going to be true even when the market is hot, and it’s a reality that’s not going to change.
Real estate marketing is so much more of a challenge because people have so much more in the way of choices. Ones for the properties they’ll be submitting offers on, and ones for which real estate agent they start to work with long before that happens. The same will go for clients wishing to sell their home, and quite often you need to have a unique selling proposition for real estate if you’re going to convince them that you’re the agent they should be listing with.
Making those more unique approaches clear to prospective clients can also be a part of your branding, and so as realtors become more convinced of the need to put effort into this the question becomes which real estate branding strategies are best for proven success with all of this? That’s what we’re going to look at here with this blog entry and hopefully provide valuable insight for new realtors who are keen to find every way possible to start standing out from the crowd.
Crowded Room
Let’s start with all of this by telling you to keep in mind that there are well over a million licensed real estate agents in Canada. And at the same time, housing inventory is down to around half its normal levels and even though interest rates have moved down a bit the market hasn’t picked up recently in the way many thought it would. When there is no shortage of agents but a shortage of housing inventory then this is the equation for a very competitive business for real estate agents.
So now is the time to put real effort into personal branding for agents and do everything you can to make sure your brand is more noticeable and more appealing so you can generate real estate leads and close more deals, and do so even if housing market conditions aren’t ideal. The term branding may be entirely foreign to some of you, and to be fair for a lot of people it will be associated with cattle ranching practices. That’s of course not what we’re talking about here, and so let’s give a definition for branding first.
A brand in real estate is how the agent’s company, brokerage, or the individual agent themselves are viewed in the minds of their community, prospects, leads, and clients. It will always be a combination of tangible and intangible elements that make up the identity of the business, and identity, values, and reputation are always going to be tied into it too. The aim for every agent should be to be creating a positive brand ‘experience’ – a particular set of emotions, perceptions, and associations that a consumer will have for you and your team based on their interactions with you across various touchpoints.
All of this will matter a lot more than many agents will think, and that’s because of what can be gained from consistently positive brand experiences. There are huge gains to be made with establishing trust, generating real estate leads, turn more of them into clients, and – perhaps most importantly – encouraging brand loyalty. Repeat clients in real estate is always something agents will want to have for themselves, and there is a real connection between that and brand loyalty.
This is always going to be crowded field with lots of competitors, so it’s your brand that makes your real estate business unique in the eyes of your community, and sets you apart from your competition. Agents and brokerages that don’t put effort into building a brand for themselves are quite likely to suffer for it. Real estate agent branding needs to be a priority for any and all who want to enjoy growth and growing income from working as a real estate agent in Canada.
Time To Rebrand?
Any marketing expert will tell you than rebranding is required when a company is not meeting its sales goals or has stopped growing. It is at this point where they have stopped standing out from the crowd, and potential clients will begin to see that agent or their brokerage as just another one of many that can likely provide services equally well. Changing your established brand can certainly be a challenge and require a lot of you, but the payoff usually tends to be well worth it.
Creating a new brand identity keeps you fresh and relevant in the ever-changing marketplace. Consumers are always going to be inclined to connect with those that are up-to-date and understand the new way of doing business. Aligning yourself with those new ways and making it very clear that you are aligned that way needs to be very central in your Real estate marketing efforts. The process of reconsidering how you brand yourself as a real estate agent gives you a chance to refine your mission and vision and to recreate your business from the ground up.
Not only that, but it can also be a way to generate more realtor leads and allow for greater levels of growth in the coming future. Rebranding will always start with brainstorming and it’s better to have something of a conventional roadmap when you’re ready to start doing that. You’re not obligated to stay within these lanes, but these are fairly standard considerations that agents or brokerages will have when deciding on how to rebrand themselves.
Brand Personality
Think of how a would-be client would spend a day with your real estate brand. Then how would an acquaintance of that client ask him or her to describe their experience with the brand. How would you hope to have that person responding? If you are looking at this from the individual agent perspective it’s here that you want to come to a consensus on what are your strongest character traits, and where do you excel in providing service to clients and likely outperforming other agents in the same regard?
Also give thought to what are your most relevant and effective strengths and skills as a real estate agent, and if there are any specialties to the service you provide. Do you have a niche market as realtor that you are better suited to be serving? You might specialize in a specific type of property or are particularly good at connecting with a certain type of buyer.
The bigger picture here is what do you want your leads and clients to think of when they think of your brand? What qualities do you want them to be associating with you, and what are the most direct and effective ways of fostering that way of thinking in those clients? What may be very helpful here is to have a unique selling proposition for real estate. This is a statement that makes it clear to prospective clients about what sets your brand apart from other agents based on what you can do differently / more effectively in finding them the right home or getting their home sold faster and for more money.
You can conceptualize this as an elevator pitch, but a written one. Done right it will convey that you’re not a dime-a-dozen agent, and you have the means of applying your expertise differently for better results. This pitch should be concise, short, and punchy so it resonates more with these potential clients. Most unique value propositions (UVPs) are only a sentence or two in length.
If you have numbers or statistics that will back up your assertion that you’re the better choice as a real estate agent here then by all means put them int there. Stats and figures give go a long way in boosting perceived credibility.
Here is an example one:
‘I have helped more clients sell their GTA area homes in the last five years than any other agent. I would like to point out that my clients’ homes sell in an average of just 20 days, and that is about 25% faster than the average for my area. Client care, communication, and closing are always the foundations of my focus when I am serving people like you who want the best outcomes when they are looking to buy or sell a home in this area. An area that I know explicitly well after working as an agent here for ___ years.’
Define Target Market(s)
It’s never going to be beneficial if a realtor take the position that everyone is their target audience. Not only is it unrealistic, but it’s also never true and often it takes experience and time working with clients to really define what an agent should be focusing on as their target market. Coming to that definition is integral to personal branding for agents and it’s something every realtor needs to do if they’re going to be allocating their time and resources wisely.
Once you have your ideal client’s profile, you can more easily fine-tune your branding and marketing to cater to the specific needs, challenges, and interests of a particular client pool. Focuses will be different based on certain parts of a town, a set of specific neighborhoods, or a niched type of consumer. Examples could be veterans or home investors.
Also try to be as specific as possible, and creating profiles or ‘personas’ based on your top few ideal clients is right in line with that. You should be leaning heavily on data as you do this. What we mean by that is this; if you’re interested in a particular neighborhood, get all of the information you can find about the demographics in that area, and one idea is to get a customizable real estate agent website that allows you to collect and analyze data about your users and how they are active on the site.
Have a Mission Statement
Continuing with our look at real estate branding strategies, we also want to stress how having a solid mission statements is an important part of real estate agent branding. It shows how your UVP relates to your vision statement, plus explains who you do and this reinforces the way you define yourself, who you serve, how you’re different, and why you do what you do. Have a solid one and you’ll quickly see how it manifests in your marketing collateral as well as with any content you publish on your website or social media.
A solid mission statement for a realtor serves two very important functions:
- keeps you focused on your priorities, your overarching purpose, and amplifies the way you find your work meaningful based on the way it provides value to others.
- It gives your prospects and clients a firm idea of what they can expect when they work with you, along with an implied assurance that they will be fully satisfied with both the service provided and the outcome of the buying or selling a home.
Your real estate agent mission statement will be meant to serve you and your business, and there’s no definitive right way to come up with one. Just approach it naturally and go with what comes to you freely and instinctually. It doesn’t need to be comprehensive, overly specific and detailed, or even a complete sentence.
If you want to boost your real estate business then you’ll also want to revisiting your brand voice from time to time and honing it to the best of your ability. We’ve explained what a brand is, but what is a brand voice? It refers to the distinct and consistent way a brand communicates with its audience through language and tone and also reflect the personality, values, and identity of the brand.
This is established through content, and we touched on how content posted on your real estate website is important just above here. Your content needs to be aligned with your brand, and it needs to be reinforcing the identity of it. In order for that to happen you very much need to have your brand voice incorporated into it. This is paired with the need to have content geared to the target market you’ve identified for yourself.
It’s quite possible that agents who don’t understand how important their content is to their brand are going to miss the mark. Writing a blog post haphazardly or hiring sub-par content writers to create drivel for your website can detract from a brand’s value the same way well-written and objective content can add to it. The question agents should be asking themselves here is how do my ideal clients communicate, and what type of messaging is most likely to resonate with them? Would facts, figures, and charts be more appealing to them, or would they prefer more of a narrative approach that breaks it all down in plain English?
Real Estate Agent Branding Best Practices
Let’s now proceed to five strategies, tips, and guidelines that are primed for boosting your brand’s effectiveness with prospective clients
Be Consistent
We’ve established how the goal with real estate branding ideas is to make your brand both recognizable and memorable. Being consistent with it is the best way to do that. Every interaction your potential clients have with your brand should look, feel, and sound cohesive, with the entirety of your marketing pointing toward your core messages. Including UVP, mission statement, brand values, and more.
If you look at iconic brands like Apple, Google, Starbucks, Zildjian, Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Disney, etc. they have all done so well with the art and science of creating consistent, cohesive brand experiences. Aim to do that for with your real estate branding strategies too, and make choices on:
- Design : colors, fonts, look and feel, layouts
- Visuals : images, photos, logo, headshot
- Messaging : bio, tagline, brand voice, specific communication aims
This will extend to marketing collateral too, and put the same focus on
- Print pieces : business cards, postcards, flyers, brochures
- Your real estate agent website
- Your email signature
- Social media profiles and pages
- Online ads
Make sure you stay on track with the focus that you are branding yourself and the real estate brokerage you’re working for / representing. See your personal brand as just as important as your company’s brand, and understand the importance of how to brand yourself as a real estate agent and a business / service professional.
Those researching your services online are likely to find your personal pages as well, including your Facebook business page for a real estate agent. Give thought to how this journey will go for your would-be client and use that to be keeping your banding consistent too
Stay on Message
Get deep into real estate market and you may find that you’re being pulled in all sorts of different directions, and even thought the focus is for any agent is going to be to boost your real estate business you want to avoid being carried away too much with any one approach or consideration. One of the best ways to ensure you’re not doing that is to be staying on message with you communications, and including your UVP (unique value proposition).
We know that successful branding is the result of continuous promotion of the same unique theme or selling proposition, and there needs to be a consistency in brand voice and other aspects right across all the tools the agent is using to make that happen. Repeating yourself isn’t a problem, as long as you don’t come across as being redundant or harping on one particular aspect of what makes you different from other real estate agents.
Aim to make it so that when your potential clients know what to expect when they see one of your marketing pieces or have any other type of interaction with your brand. This should also extend to them working with you directly, and what they can foresee with that too. The more your message resonates, the more likely it is your brand will build credibility and keep you top of mind when they are ready to make a decision on which realtor they’re going to work with.
Don’t Miss the Point
Agents who are new to working in real estate are definitely excused if they aren’t up to speed with real estate agent branding right away. But here is one thing that will be hugely beneficial for them to know; it’s easy to get so focused on the details of building a brand that you forget the basics. Don’t be crazy focuses on having your branding be perfect right off the hop, as this unrealistic expectation can actually be detrimental for you.
Continue spending the bulk of your time prospecting, meeting with potential sellers and buyers, showing homes, asking for the sale, and closing deals. Branding is crucial, but it shouldn’t be an all-encompassing focus at all. We’ve seen how a lot of people in this business will obsess over logos and websites, and it’s not helpful. Don’t let branding distract you from the activities that are higher priority and even more directly related to generating sales.
Get Feedback and Monitor Performance
To some extent you can gauge the effectiveness of your real estate branding strategies by seeing the quality of your customer base and the number of listings you have gained from your real estate lead generation efforts. When clients, competitors, and community express respect for your brand, it’s an equally good indicator that you’re building a solid brand identity. If it’s possible you should also have a less circumstantial and anecdotal means of measuring this too.
One idea is to create a basic table in your favorite word processor or spreadsheet software. Place all of your goals in the left column, and using the rest of the columns to document your monthly or weekly performance with new client generation. Including lead conversion into clients.
Consider these metrics too :
- Number of transactions per month
- Commission income
- Website traffic
- Response rates for direct mail marketing pieces
All of this information about real estate agent branding can be overwhelming. So if you’re wondering what to do now, here are five options to consider.
Get Creative
The last part of our 5 tips here can be considered as the enjoyable part of personal branding for agents, and that’s because it allow for some creativity from the agent. Start with writing a real estate bio. It’s super valuable and will be responsible for making the first impression you have with clients. In fact these bios often go a long way in determining whether or not a potential client will work with you. Learn how to write a real estate bio that attracts leads.
You can also create your own logo, and if you’re not good with that you can hire someone to create a good looking real estate logo for you. Well-designed logos help businesses stand out among their competition by establishing a strong identity and creating a lasting impression, and again for some clients who are very visually-oriented they may be helpful in swaying them towards you.
The same goes for coming up with an effective slogan for real estate agents. This will be the single-sentence messaging that will be seen with ads and different pieces of marketing collateral, and some people will refer to this a realtor tagline. Try to be unique with yours, and it’s good if you can also be witty while still being fairly conventional at the same time.
Too many realtors have similar taglines, and it’s something you should try to avoid. Remember that aim is to boost your real estate business, and having a good real estate agent tagline that stands out from all the other ones being used can go a long way in making you memorable. And realtors who are memorable – for whatever reason – are more likely to receive contact from people who can then be introduced to realtor’s sales funnel.
