In today’s market, the competition for listings is increasingly intense. When your competitors are making guest appearances on TV shows, scoring features in high-end magazines, and getting mentioned on widely-followed social accounts, it’s hard not to play the comparison game.
To keep up, maybe you’ve already tried updating your website, posting regularly on social media, and asking happy clients to post reviews—but you’re not sure what’s working, and you’ve realized something’s gotta change.
You know you’re the best agent to serve your target audience—so how do you get their attention and communicate all you have to offer?
It starts with a strong brand. Read on for an actionable guide designed to help you audit yours, understand where you have gaps, and create an action plan to cut through the noise, get recognized, and win more business.
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Understanding your brand
First things first: it’s time to take stock of your brand as it stands today. To perform a successful audit and get the most out of this guide, you’ll need to have several foundational elements already in place, which we’ll outline below.
Defining your brand
As an established agent, you likely already have the following:
- Mission, vision, and values
- Brand identity and visual identity
- A website
- Social media accounts
- Paid ads running
- A Google Business profile
These are table stakes as far as your real estate brand goes. If you’re still working on any of them, let’s take a step back. You’ll want to start with these six steps to outline the foundation of your luxury real estate brand and build your real estate marketing plan. Once you’ve done that, you can circle back to this guide (make sure to bookmark it now).
Identifying your target market
Similarly, you should already have a clear understanding of your target audience. If you don’t—or if you feel like your audience is evolving or you’d like it to change—you can identify your ideal client profile using the PFDD framework.
Assessing your unique value proposition
Before doing a brand audit, you’ve also got to know your unique value proposition, or UVP. This is what makes you memorable to your target market. If you don’t have one established or are considering reworking yours, start here to learn how to create your UVP.
How to assess the strength of your brand
Now that you’ve got that squared away, it’s time to assess how strong your brand is today.
There are several proven methods for measuring the strength of your brand to ensure it’s working as hard as possible for you.
Website analytics
First, you want to look at how your website is performing. To understand if your efforts and investments are paying off, make sure you’re tracking key performance indicators (KPIs), particularly web visits, conversion rate, and search traffic. This will tell you how effective your website is at attracting and engaging your target market.
Once you know how your site is performing, you can create an action plan, whether that’s testing different CTAs, undergoing a rebrand, or engaging an expert SEO team to help you rank higher and bring in more quality traffic.
Reputation management
In real estate, reputation is everything. Here’s how to have a good, hard look at yours.
Monitor your online reputation
Regularly check review websites, social media, and customer feedback to see how well your brand is perceived by potential clients. Collecting and analyzing this information helps you understand what people like and dislike about your brand and what can be improved.
Competitor analysis
Make sure you’re evaluating how your competitors are perceived online and how they’re branding themselves, including their websites, marketing materials, and online presence. This helps you learn from what they’re doing well, spot opportunities to do better, and differentiate yourself.
A few tools that will help you in this exploration:
- SEO tools like Semrush can tell you what keywords and content your competitors are taking advantage of that you aren’t.
- The Google Map Pack, aka location-based results, tells you how they show up compared to you. How many reviews do they have? How have they optimized their Google Business Profile?
Lead generation and conversion rates
To see how effective your brand and marketing efforts are at attracting business, you need to be tracking the cost per lead acquisition and lead conversion rates of your lead generation campaigns.
Then, compare them to these industry benchmarks:
- Cost per lead:
- Google, buyer campaign: under $30
- Google, seller campaign: under $60
- Facebook, buyer campaign: under $20
- Facebook, seller campaign: under $50
- Conversion rates:
- Google, buyer campaign:
- 2-4% for larger, competitive markets
- 4-6% for smaller, less competitive markets
- Google, seller campaign:
- 3-6% for larger, competitive markets
- 6-8% for smaller, less competitive markets
- FB, buyer campaign:
- 4-6% for larger, competitive markets
- 8-10% for smaller, less competitive markets
- FB, seller campaign:
- 3-6% for larger, competitive markets
- 6-8% for smaller, less competitive markets
- Google, buyer campaign:
If your lead gen and conversions aren’t as strong as they could be, there’s a lot you can do to drive higher-quality traffic and fill your pipeline with qualified buyers and sellers.
Social media engagement
Social media might seem easy—but it really isn’t. You’re likely already paying attention to your engagement, but it’s a good time to audit if and how people are engaging with your brand.
These are the most important social metrics you should be tracking:
- Engagement rate (likes + comments / followers)
- Effectiveness rate (likes + comments + saves + video views / reach)
- Growth rate (the rate at which your audience is growing)
- Weekly earned reach (the number of impressions you receive through user-generated content)
If your engagement is low, follow these tips to take your social strategy to the next level.
Referrals and repeat business
A good way to measure client loyalty is to look at how many referrals and how much repeat business you’re getting. You should also take the time to evaluate how your strategic partnerships with referral partners are performing, and if there’s room for improvement or expansion there.
Solidify your brand with Luxury Presence
Auditing your brand is a vital part of ensuring your success in real estate—and it’s a process you can and should repeat over time. Whether you need specific help filling gaps you found today or just want to partner with experts who will help you establish a rock-solid brand identity, take care of your marketing, and proactively address any brand awareness concerns, get started with a free strategy call.
