Building your real estate brand is key for long-term success. Most agents begin their career by investing in their broker’s brand, but as time goes on and they consider switching brokerages, it can be difficult to start over and build a new brand.We suggest investing in a strategy to build a personal brand as a realtor so you aren’t reliant on your brokerage.
So, where do you begin? Use these 6 steps to start building your real estate brand today.
Step 1: Define Your Brand.
What makes a great personal brand?
The first step is identifying what makes you unique and your personal strengths. What sets you apart from a competitor? Maybe you have years of experience, work exclusively with buyers or sellers, are proficient with first-time home buyers, know how to navigate specific types of lending programs, or perhaps you just love the local sports team. All of these things create buckets of opportunities for people to identify and select you as the person they want to work with when branding your real estate business. People want to work with other people they relate to so show off who you are!
Step 2: Analyze Your Audience.
When you start branding yourself in real estate you should first understand your audience. Does your content and marketing strategy align with the type of audience you want to reach? For example, what are some of your clients’ pain points? What type of content do they enjoy? What social channels do they spend their time on? How do you communicate with these clients? For most groups of people, text messaging is the most effective type of communication whereas for others, they may value a traditional conversation over the phone.Understanding what makes your audience tick is important in defining your personal brand.
Step 3: Differentiate Yourself From Your Competition
The real estate industry is very competitive so knowing what your competition is doing and being able to do it better or completely different than them is critical in creating your own personal brand.
Oftentimes, you can look at how your competition is targeting the audience that you are also trying to reach and draw some lines that will help you be more visible and influential in your real estate marketplace. For example, if your competition is not doing a great job on YouTube or Instagram Reels, get into creating video content!
Step 4: Embrace the Process.
When you look at creating a personal brand, you should need to realize it takes time and you should take small actionable steps that lead you to your larger goals within your real estate business plan.
Here are a few steps that you can take to get started in building your real estate brand.
- Create a logo that is descriptive of your brand. It can be inclusive of the area or of the messaging that you were trying to put out to reach your audience. We suggest working with a freelance designer on a site like Fiverr or UpWork.
- Create your own website. This site should be unique in branding yourself as a realtor rather than an extension of your broker. For the same reason previously outlined above, you won’t be able to take your broker’s website with you if you decide to leave that office. Symba is happy to help on this front!
- Invest in marketing campaigns. Understand where your audience spends their time and run campaigns targeted at them. Video is the top performing content right now so focus on being authentic with video!
Step 5. Create a Ton of Content.
When determining how to create a real estate brand, understand that pictures and videos are essential to storytelling. When selling a home, you need to tell a story that potential buyers picture themselves living. You want them to look at the backyard and envision barbecues with their friends and family. You want them to picture a Christmas tree with their family gathered around it for the holidays. You want them to see their children growing up there.
To accomplish this vision, the videos and pictures you choose should be entertaining enough that anyone can look at it and picture them with their family living there.
It's also important to let your personality and interests stand out! Create a video series about your hobbies, favorite sports teams, or home cleaning tips. Your audience wants to learn and be entertained so give them content that accomplishes that!
Step 6. Create Experiences for your Audience and Clients.
Real estate is a people business. That means that it is all about building relationships and growing them over time so that when someone is ready to buy or sell in the real estate market they think of you first. One of the best ways to deepen relationships is to throw events. Host tailgates at football games, rent event venues for fun special events your audience will participate in. They don’t have to be physical events though. Try hosting digital webinars and Q/A sessions on Instagram Live.
If you take these six steps, you will be well on your way to standing out in the competitive world of real estate!
