5 Ways to Create and Enhance Your Real Estate Brand Identity
What Is Brand Identity?
There are many strategies to employ to grow your real estate business. Still, brand identity is the king among these strategies. This means giving your business an identity that sets it apart from other brands. The perception of your business, the services you provide, and the face you give to your business are all that is known as brand identity.
Also, real estate brand identity -or brand awareness as called by other people- makes your business unique and stand out from the competition. If done well, it will transform your business from a trying one to a blooming one in the shortest possible time.
Why The Need For Brand Identity?
Over 1.5 million licensed real estate professional agents are scattered across the USA. This gives prospects and clients an ocean of choices to choose from. If so, how do you stand out from your competition? This is where personal brand identity helps you grow. Whether a newbie or a seasoned agent, curating an impeccable brand identity cannot be overemphasized.
Brand Identity invokes the feeling of trust and a strong bond between your real estate business and your customers. Prospects will be well keen to do business with you when they have clear-cut information about your company’s what, who, how, where, and why. Without all these, your company will indeed lag behind your competition.
Read also: The top 10 best apps for real estate agents to boost efficiency in 2022
Benefits Of Brand Identity
Having established what brand identity is, it’s also very paramount to discuss some benefits of branding your real estate business. What advantages will your business have over your competition when your business is branded? Below are some of the benefits of branding your business.
Trust
The one thing that would really expose your business, either positively or negatively, is trust. Brand identity helps cement a formidable trust between you and your prospects or customers. Considering real estate is an integral part of customers’ lives because it deals with their livelihood and gives more credence to trust. For customers, it’s hard for people to trust any agent with their homes except a trustworthy one. And only brand identity can build such trust.
Recognition
Here, there are two kinds of recognition: good and bad recognition. Both are subject to how you structure your brand identity. If done well, your company will attract reputable investors. A real estate brand identity will not only help investors build a consistent and distinct message which is essential for reaching and keeping consumers, but also give them a face to go with it. If done correctly, clients will recognize and trust your brand just by seeing or hearing its name, which can positively affect financial outcomes down the road.
Credibility
When starting, the one benefit all new agents lack is credibility. Homeowners are always wary of trusting their homes to new agents; they’d instead go for more established agents. The solution to this is building your real estate brand identity. This move will accelerate your improvement in gaining the honorable recognition your brand is missing. Your brand identity will be critical in building and sustaining,1 and enhancing your reputation through time.
5 Ways To Create And Enhance Your Real Estate Brand Identity
Having established what brand identity is and the benefits of creating one, the next is to show you how to create your real estate brand identity.
Read also: The first year of real estate agents: What you should expect
Choose a Niche
The first task you need to tick off your brand identity requirements is to choose a real estate niche. If you’ve done that before, you need to ascertain that chosen niche to be sure that you are on the right track. Doing that will enable you to streamline your wants and help you focus on how to draft an irresistible offer.
If you’re not sure of what niche to pitch your tent, I have listed some lucrative niches amongst the plethora of niches for agents:
- Property-type niche: This type deals with agents representing either the buyers’ or sellers’ property-type homes. Examples of such properties are single-family homes, multi-family homes, condos, commercial estates, historic homes, co-ops, and other property-type homes.
- Specific Buyers Niche: This niche only focuses on agents who only specialize in helping buyers who are keen on specific properties. These buyers range from luxury buyers, first-time home buyers, investors, retail/commercial buyers, and rent-to-own.
- Specific Sellers Niche: On the flip side, instead of being an agent to the buyers mentioned above, you can decide to partner with sellers who only deal with specific properties. Some of them are single-family investors, home flippers, Multi-family building owners, for sale by owner (FSBO), sideline sellers, and live event sellers.
- Situational Niche: This type of niche is outside the traditional niches we are well acquainted with. They may include sub-niches like short sales, short term, relocation, green/eco-friendly, and others.
Niche creation will set you apart from agents who only jump at all offers that come their way. This will enable you to focus and garner more experience faster than agents who go against this stage.
Conduct a Thorough Market Research
After choosing your niche, the next item you need to mark off your to-do list is by conducting thorough market research. This will help you survey who your competition is, your suitable audience, and their behavioral impacts on your brand. Below are some tasks you need to take up when conducting thorough market research.
Analyze Your Competition
Whether as a rookie or a veteran, analyzing your competition should be one of the first steps for successfully curating an engaging brand identity. You won’t succeed with your brand if you can’t have a sniff of the things going on with other real estate brands, particularly within your niche. Have a list of all your competition, sturdy what sets them apart from each other, look into how they treat their customers, then draft a more balanced and cordial agent-customer relationship without forgetting their marketing strategy.
Identify Your Audience
Another task you need to drive home to achieve robust market research quickly is by identifying your audience — that is, understanding your potential customers. The first step to take is to analyze your current customer base. They hold essential information to your business as they are well acquainted with your brand. So they can tell where your brand is striking and lacking at the same time.
- Discover their most pressing pain points
- Discover their interests and needs.
- Discover what your brand is missing from them
- Discover the overall experience they’d love to get from buying from you.
After you might have been fed with enough information, the next step is to create a buyer persona. This stems from discovering common traits or patterns you detect from your customers. Align these common traits and represent them with a persona. Ensure you include demographic, behavioral, psychographic, and geographical details of each potential customer.
Create a Brand Kit
After identifying your audience, the following action you need to take is to create a brand identity. Creating a brand kit will give your business some unique features peculiar to only your brand. Doing that will give your business a face representing your ideas, thoughts, and plans.
A strong personal brand will help boost your professional reputation and develop a steady stream of clients. Brand kits are easy-to-follow and straightforward visual identity guidelines for your company. It’s a quick reference for deciphering the concept and creative reasoning behind your brand’s logos, colors, typefaces, messages, and slogans representing your brand.
Also, having a distinctive brand kit makes your brand more recognizable and trustworthy. Think about Coca-Cola or Pepsi; that’s the effect your brand could have if built in a thought-provoking and more assured way. What you need to do to get this done is to hire a reputable graphics designer, let him in about your plans and vision, and see him make wonders with your brand.
Create a Formidable Online Presence
The age we find ourselves in today is the age of the internet. You don’t need to play God or reinvent the wheel; you just have to follow the trend: make your presence known in the internet world. Moreso, you risk losing substantial potential customers if you do not leverage the power of the internet.
However, creating a formidable online presence transcends just having a website with all your contact details therein. This involves building an online form of business, a whirlpool of existing and potential customers who can find you every day. Below are a few of the virtual platforms you can start with:
Website
Your website is the internet hub that houses what precedes and succeeds all the requirements of creating a brand identity. Optimize your website correctly for SEO, and include your niche content. Also, make use of the About Page to address who you are, your brand, and what you intend to contribute to the lives of your prospects and clients.
Social Media
Social media is the hub that will help you pivot your real estate brand to the moon. In fact, social media is the primary tool real estate agents use to get leads and make them eventual customers. You can utilize various social media such as Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Linkedin, Pinterest, and a host of others. Some recommended methods include posting regularly, tweeting numerous times each day, using eye-catching pictures, and providing relevant real estate information. To effectively engage your audience, remember to ask questions or start a dialogue. Check out the most effective social media networks for real estate agents
Email is an impeccable medium for contacting your website subscribers when you have important messages or tools to share with them. Below are some efficient tips on how to use email:
- Use catchy, clear, and concise headlines
- Write the expressive, engaging, and informative body
- Make the content more relevant to diverse audience segments.
- Use a clear and compelling call to action.
Video
Visuals in the real estate market have been the most utilized marketing medium in recent times. Aside from real estate, 86% of online marketers have taken video as their primary marketing means. Getting your share of this juicy opportunity should not be taken for granted. Though making videos comes at a cost, however, nothing comes close to it inefficiency. You can utilize platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. But chief among them is Youtube.
Read also: How to start a real estate Youtube channel.
Blog
One of the ways to attract prospects and customers to bid for your services is by educating them about the myths, facts, lies, and truth about what they don’t about their interest in real estate. And the surest way to implement this is by using your blog page to educate them in the form of blog posts and articles. You can make use of your website for this purpose. They will trust you completely as a real estate agent when you do this because of your impartial views.
Read also: How to use TikTok for real estate
Develop an Effective Content Strategy
The next step after branding your business is constructing an effective strategy for building your content. Without this step, everything you planned for would amount to nothing but shards.
Content planning aims to provide consistent, relevant, and engaging content that attracts your target audience’s attention. Implementing strategies and methods to address those all-important engagements is the best approach to achieve this. Your content should be easily identifiable as part of your brand. You may create a distinct visual style based on the type of post you’re producing using design trends like frames, unique backgrounds, and corner stamps.
Also, design a timetable for all your content on when best to post this content across your social media platforms. Pick a suitable time for your Facebook posts, find the best time to send emails to your subscribers, and choose the best time to post weekly videos on your Youtube channel.
Conclusion
Before now, many see real estate brand identity as just a mere creation of a logo, colorful content, brand slogan, and witty sayings. But now, it’s clear that creating a responsive and exciting real estate brand identity is not an easy task. Having a reputable brand identity will help you build trust among your clients, increase your overall recognition, and build strong bonds and credibility with your audience. Start by choosing a niche, then survey your market, identify your target audience, use social media networks to promote your brand, and get people interacting with your brand seamlessly.