Outline the foundation of your luxury real estate brand in six steps.
Quality luxury real estate brands aren’t developed overnight. You should expect that growing a brand is an inherently iterative process, with each revision improving upon the last.
But working through the initial steps detailed below will help you quickly lay the foundation for a strong identity that will captivate a luxury client base and convert your audience into a real business.
This process will help you clarify your goals, the information you’ll be conveying, and how you’ll be delivering this information to communicate your expertise in the luxury space.
Define luxury.
The first element of the brand discovery process is to write out a few top adjectives describing what “luxury” means to you and what you think luxury means to your clients. It might sound silly, but luxury can mean a variety of things to different people, and how you choose to anchor your perception can make or break whether your brand comes off as authentically elevated or a mere attempt at elegance.
For example, for some, luxury means excess. For others, luxury means safety, security, and relaxation. Your luxury audience might value their ability to travel, certain public markers of status, or the security they feel in being able to provide a legacy for their family and donate to charities about which they’re passionate.
Try to define what you think the type of people you are targeting are hoping to get out of any luxury product or experience and their upper-crust lifestyle overall.
By getting clear about what luxury means in this context, you will be able to more easily generate meaningful content that resonates with your potential clients. It will also help you avoid any pitfalls that could come off as cheesy or false.
Detail your identity.
Think about what you bring to the table that’s unique to you. Don’t try to turn yourself into a luxury real estate robot. There’s nothing less luxurious than a cookie-cutter brand. Are there topics that you can connect with potential clients about that are tangential to real estate? When you talk about these additional topics, your audience can get to know you better and buy into the overall lifestyle you’re promoting rather than just the transactional elements of real estate.
Maybe you’re interested in travel, cooking, or vintage cars. Maybe you’re great at entertaining and always help people envision what it will feel like to host in different types of environments they tour. Maybe you’d enjoy posting about interior design or different restaurants in a specific area.
Only realtors want to talk about the nitty-gritty aspects of real estate. If you’re going to keep your audience engaged, you want to start a dialogue that’s richer and more unique to you than just constantly talking about listings. When you’re passionate about what you’re discussing, you’ll naturally be more engaging, and it will give people an excuse to keep following and interacting with you even when they’re not actively looking to undertake a real estate transaction at that moment.
Describe your audience.
With whom do you easily find connections? Who have your favorite clients been to date? Start fleshing out a more thorough description of your target audience to whatever degree you think is reasonable and helpful. In this description, reiterate what you think those people are interested in and driven by, especially as it relates to a luxury lifestyle. Think of words and phrases they’d be drawn to, activities they enjoy, and ways they’d want people to describe them.
Whenever you have a question about a brand or content choice that needs to be made, refer back to this audience summary. You may have many interesting marketing and brand ideas as time goes on, but any ideas that don’t seem like they’ll resonate with this group of people whom you’re specifically trying to work with are probably less useful than those ideas that do.
By creating a more accurate picture of your potential client and considering their perspective, you’ll more easily generate content ideas. As things come up in conversation that you realize are common themes or problems you can help this group solve, you’ll be developing content that encourages people to see you and your brand as a value add.
Determine your aesthetic.
Using whatever modality comes most naturally to you—a Pinterest board, PowerPoint slides, or a physical corkboard are a few examples—start collecting key images, colors, and fonts that reflect your unique voice and a portrait of an elegant lifestyle.
In addition to visual elements, include examples of words, tone, and phrases. Commit to being instinctive and decisive, and you’ll find you are intrinsically drawn to specific things. Don’t overthink it. A persona will quickly come to the surface and continue to evolve as you add more elements to this brand inspiration template.
As you start developing specific tangible forms of marketing collateral, you’ll want to consistently refer back to this brand overview to make sure that you’re not getting off track. You’ll want to infuse enough variation to keep your materials interesting while maintaining enough consistency to remain clear in communicating your brand’s vision of a luxury lifestyle. You’ll discover that a lack of variation in aesthetic elements will ultimately feel stale and static. On the flip side, when you’re using too many different elements, things start to look less polished.
Detail your goals.
Write out what you’re trying to accomplish with your business. Additionally, detail the specific intermediary steps you need various parties to take along the way.
Next, write out generally what you think you can commit to in terms of developing any sort of content and marketing collateral under the umbrella of your brand identity.
Compare the two lists and optimize the second list to make sure the modalities you’re planning on using and the frequency with which you are planning on using them seem like a good fit to accomplish the goals you outlined on the first list.
Some examples of modalities for marketing could include blogs and different types of social media posts, including those on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. You can also commit to email campaigns and sending out printed materials. Decide where you think you’ll get the most traction, and give yourself permission to not have to do everything. Once you’ve determined your luxury real estate brand in detail, it’s more important to be active where your target audience will be engaged with you. There’s no need to try to do every single type of marketing—this will ultimately deliver less potency in your efforts by spreading your time and resources too thin.
Drive engagement.
So now you know whom you’re trying to reach, what you want to talk to them about, what you’re trying to get them to do, and how you’d like for it to look and sound when you do.
You also know what methods of marketing you’ll be using to distribute this information.
The next step is to finalize your content goals and outline a calendar with topics. By doing this, you’ll be able to see the frequency and how the photos and information will paint a bigger picture over the course of weeks and months—not just in the immediate day to day.
Use the calendar as a rule of thumb, but follow your instincts if you think you need to change up the program to be more appropriate to what you think people will respond to that day as current events unfold. To drive engagement most effectively, you’ll want to stay loyal to your brand identity while still keeping things fresh and not getting too formulaic and static. And remember that this marketing process is a dialogue, so to maintain optimal interactions, put at least as much effort into thinking about whom you’ll follow, what you’ll comment on other people’s content, and how you’ll respond to comments on your content as you do on what you will say in your original posts.
As time goes on, you can also monitor which types of content are performing best on various channels and which ones seem to be delivering the business conversions you’re hoping to see. Setting specific times to reflect on the relative success of different types of posts over time and evaluate what is and isn’t landing with your audience can help you optimize your brand’s effectiveness in helping you reach your goals.
After following these initial steps, you’ll have a plan for moving forward with your luxury real estate brand.
Here are a few additional resources that will help you get started:
- Pinterest is tremendously helpful for organizing branding ideas.
- Apps like Preview help you organize your Instagram content effectively.
- Find graphic designers for logo and branding projects on Dribble.
We can also help support you in developing your luxury real estate brand’s presence online.
For example, learn more about our Instagram management service and real estate copywriting services.
