Grow your real estate business by establishing your unique brand.
When working in real estate, your brand serves as one of the most important marketing assets you can leverage. In most areas, real estate agents are a dime a dozen. Clients spend painstaking hours scouring the web trying to find agents experienced and trustworthy enough to help them with their next real estate transaction.
By creating a strong brand for your luxury real estate practice, you’ll send a clear message to past and potential clients that you are skilled and ready to guide them in their journey to buy or sell a luxury home. You take the initial burden of research off their shoulders by curating your image and expertise in a way that’s easy for them to understand and internalize, allowing them to get a feel for your offerings, services, and style from the start.
Developing a strong brand puts you in front of the right people to help you grow your business. In order to establish a brand that will work hard for you, start by following these six steps
Define Your Niche
In order to accurately form a brand that will speak directly to the exact people you hope to work with, you first need to define your niche. Who do you want to work with?
A real estate niche is the section of the market you hope to work with most. For example, if you hope to help clients buy and sell luxury properties in the mountains, that’s your niche. Other niches include types of buyers like military families, property types like condos, and seller types like house flippers. One of the most common niche types for realtors is location, simply because the functions of the role require deep familiarity with the area or areas you serve.
Many agents worry that choosing a niche will end up excluding too many potential clients and will ultimately lose them business. However, establishing your expertise for a specific portion of the market simply helps you stand out better to the potential clients who align best with your specific services and background. It doesn’t mean you can’t serve clients who don’t fit into that bucket, but it does give you an upper hand in standing out for your ideal client. This way, it’s less likely that you’ll get lost in the crowd. You become the go-to expert for the people you want to work with most.
A well-defined and intentionally-chosen niche also gives you plenty of fodder for marketing and branding content. As you create messaging and visuals to help your brand feel more recognizable, your niche becomes the anchor from which everything else should be based. Your content marketing efforts will also have a natural area of focus as you create and share helpful materials that are applicable to the clients in your niche.
Listen to Your Audience
Once you have identified your niche and who your ideal client is, it’s time to identify their primary needs, questions, and preferences. Where do they spend their time online? What might they be confused about? What’s tricky about their particular real estate journey?
For example, if your niche revolves around helping military families purchase homes, your ideal clients might struggle to understand the implications of VA loans. Your luxury real estate website can then address that topic for them.
It is essential to tune into the conversations you hear and see from your ideal future clients as well. What’s most important to them? How can you address a common pain point or deliver on an aspect of the real estate experience that they prioritize? Considering your business’s answers to these questions will be critical for success within the next few steps.
Get Clear on Messaging
Once you’re familiar with who you most want to serve and what they care about, you can begin creating a targeted brand that will make you the go-to person for your ideal customer base.
Use your brainstorming material and knowledge from the first two steps to determine the overall tone and voice for your brand. Do you want to convey ease and simplicity? Determination to fight for struggling buyers? Enthusiasm about your city? Refinement and luxury?
After establishing your overarching tone and theme, spend time crafting taglines and core phrases to continually reference in your marketing. These content materials can work as an easy way for you to boil down your own brand statement for later referrals and meetings.
Choose Memorable Visuals and Branding
One of the most important aspects of branding is creating easily recognizable visuals like logos so that anytime you put your marketing materials out into the world, your audience will instantly know it’s you! Visual marketing will also extend to your website, social media channels, and any newsletters you send. Be sure that the visuals you choose match the tone and goals of your niche. If you’re marketing yourself as a luxury real estate agent but your logo looks cheap, you’ll chip away at your own credibility.
Invest in quality graphic design assistance upfront to help you build the basics of your visual brand, including specific colors, fonts, and logos that will be used throughout the lifetime of your business. These will come in handy for any printed materials as well as online and social media branding and marketing efforts.
Build Strong Online Foundations
Nowadays, it’s most likely that your future clients will get their first impression of you online. When someone gives you a referral for anyone providing a service, what’s the first thing you do? Search them online and check out their website and social channels to get a feel for their brand and services! Most of us do this, even if we’re not consciously wondering, “What is this person’s brand like?”
When someone searches for you (or, better yet, stumbles upon you) online, you want to put your best foot forward. The best thing you can do to develop a strong online brand is to invest in a professional realtor website, including lowering your website’s bounce rate and improving its SEO-friendliness so people can find your brand via Google search. Your website should include the messaging and visual branding that you’ve already carefully created in a simple and easy-to-follow format. Communicate your niche and expertise clearly here and all of your branding work will be much more likely to pay off!
You’ll also want to set up social media profiles with your logo and professional headshots. Which social platforms you choose to develop a presence on will depend on your niche, your brand, and your marketing style. If social media marketing feels overwhelming initially, choose one or two platforms to focus on and make a consistent effort on those instead of spreading yourself too thin.
Connect With Your Community
Of course, the most important aspect of your brand is you! The best way to strengthen your brand and grow your luxury real estate business is to get out and connect with your community. There are plenty of ways to do so, both online and in person.
Social media
Once you’ve chosen which social media platforms to use, start sharing helpful information on them and engage with people in your community! You can join local Facebook or LinkedIn “groups” to keep up with and share news about the latest events in your area, and you can use the platforms to connect with potential referral partners. Establishing your expertise using social media is a proven method for growing your audience in an authentic way!
Email marketing
Setting up an email list and sending out regular newsletters serves as a nice way to stay top-of-mind for those who might have connected with you in the past but weren’t quite ready to buy or sell yet. You can even attract new people to your email list by sharing freebies like first-time buyer guides that users can download in exchange for their email addresses. Win-win!
In-person
Engage with your community in person by hosting holiday-themed events, sponsoring local races or fundraising, or joining volunteering or networking groups. The more people you meet and connect with, the more opportunities you’ll have for growing and strengthening your brand.
Remember that branding is an ongoing conversation, not a “one and done” process. As you engage with your audience, as your clients share their feedback, and as the scope of the real estate world continues to shift, your brand should respond as well. Be ready for your brand to evolve, change, and adapt as your career progresses. Growth is a beautiful thing!
Work With Us
Luxury Presence is one of the fastest-growing digital platforms for real estate professionals. To learn more about how to build your brand, close more deals, and expand your network, get in touch with us today!