Create a personal brand for yourself and your real estate business
As a real estate agent, there’s a tendency to focus primarily on selling homes when determining where to put your marketing efforts. However, it’s also important to sell yourself and your business. Since you are your business, you must carefully cultivate your own personal brand. Here’s how to do it.
Determine your brand
Before doing anything else, think about your brand. In other words, think about your own unique characteristics that cause you to stand out from other agents. Even if you work within a larger real estate agency, you can still market yourself in your own way.
Are you an animal lover who can help owners find or sell the perfect pet-friendly home? Do you have a quirky personality that certain demographics, like young professionals, gravitate toward? Think about those characteristics and then draw on that inspiration on your website, in any blogs you write, and in your other marketing materials.
Ask yourself some of these questions to begin figuring out what exactly your brand could be:
- What do you care about most?
- How would friends, colleagues, and family describe your strengths?
- Do you have any passions or hobbies that could influence your brand? For example, Boulder, Colorado-based agency Pedal to Properties combined biking with real estate.
- Do you have a target demographic or group that you’d like to work with?
- Do you have any past experiences in other industries that might be helpful in your real estate ventures?
Don’t be afraid to be unique
While you’re determining your brand, don’t try to fit in with the crowd. Sometimes, it’s okay to be unabashedly unique.
This will be especially important with the advent of generative AI like ChatGPT. A major downside to programs like ChatGPT is that they scour the internet for things that already exist and then use that information to spit out content. The implication here is that over time, branding will flatten and homogenize, which means everything will start to look and sound the same.
Whether you use generative AI or not, your uniqueness is what’s going to set you apart. However, part of harnessing your uniqueness is understanding your audience. For instance, if you’re into absurdist humor but your clients are more “just the facts” kind of people, you might deliver a dissonant message.
Become an expert
Once you’ve decided on the parts of yourself that you’re going to focus on, relentlessly become an expert in those areas. Are you great with first-time buyers, patiently walking them through the entire process with ease? Do you have a background in education, making you an excellent resource for families with school-age children? Or maybe you’re in the know about the newest design trends, and can help sellers stage their homes for the most impact?
Whatever your niche, establish it, own it, and always strive to become better at it. For example, if you want to market yourself to the Millennial market, learn more about what drives their buying and selling decisions. To demonstrate your expertise further you could even create a blog on your agent website, where you share some of your knowledge.
Always be consistent with your message
When you first begin marketing yourself it can be tempting to stray away from your brand, especially if it’s taking time to see results. However, don’t give up too easily. If you’re confident there’s a market for your personal brand then keep working at it. Consumers are more likely to respond favorably to messaging they’ve been repeatedly exposed to. If you keep working on establishing your brand, and living it, it will eventually gain traction.
If you’re running out of ways to stay on-brand, and need some fresh marketing ideas, there are plenty of tips and resources online, too.
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